Sainte Chapelle

Baldwin II, the Latin emperor at Constantinople, had pawned the Crown of Thorns to Venetian creditors to pay for the defence of his city. Louis IX of France bought it from him for 135,000 livres, the money going to the Venetians who held it, and the relic reached Paris in August 1239, carried from Venice by two Dominican friars. Louis carried it himself on the last stage of the journey, barefoot and dressed as a penitent, a scene later set into the Relics of the Passion window. In 1241 he bought a large fragment of the True Cross and further Passion relics, building a collection of some thirty other items. Pope Innocent IV declared that possession of the crown meant Christ had symbolically crowned Louis with his own.

The exact start of work is not recorded: building began between the autumn of 1241, when the relics reached Paris, and May 1244, when a papal bull first mentions the site. The chapel went up inside the Palais de la Cité, replacing the older palace chapel of Saint-Nicolas, and was consecrated on 26 April 1248, the papal legate Eudes de Châteauroux dedicating the upper chapel to the Holy Cross. The two levels served different worlds: the upper, where the relics were kept, was reserved for the royal family and their guests; the lower was used by the courtiers, servants and soldiers of the palace. Building and glazing cost 40,000 livres, the silver Grand-Chasse made to display the relics 100,000.

No designer is named in the archives of the works. A tradition reaching back to the sixteenth century gave the chapel to the master mason Pierre de Montreuil; modern scholarship rejects that in favour of Jean de Chelles or Thomas de Cormont. Louis endowed a college of five master-chaplains in January 1246 to guard the relics and sing the offices; the bishop of Paris had no authority over them, and in 1273 the pope attached the clergy directly to the Holy See.

Charles VIII had a flamboyant rose window set into the west front between 1485 and 1498, and Louis XII began a monumental stairway to the upper chapel from the south, later demolished. The flood of the winter of 1689–90 wrecked the painted walls of the lower chapel, whose original glass was taken out and its floor raised. A two-storey annexe, the Treasury of Chartres, stood against the north side until 1783, when it was pulled down for the new Palace of Justice.

A college of canons served the chapel until 1787; it was closed to worship around 1790 and emptied of its contents. In 1793 revolutionaries smashed the portal sculpture and the royal emblems outside and brought down the spire, and the building was turned to civil use as a grain store. The Grand-Chasse and the other reliquaries were taken apart and melted down for their metal and jewels, and the relics were dispersed, though some survive as the "relics of Sainte-Chapelle" in the treasury of Notre-Dame de Paris, where the Passion relics were deposited in 1805. The upper chapel became a store for the law courts' archives until 1837, and the lowest two metres of glass were removed to give working light.

From the mid-1830s scholars, archaeologists and writers pressed for the chapel to be preserved and returned to its medieval state, and the decision to save it was taken in 1836. The restoration ran for more than a quarter of a century, first under Félix Duban, then Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Émile Boeswillwald with the young Eugène Viollet-le-Duc as an assistant. The glass was worked on from 1846 to 1855: about a third of it, added in later centuries, was removed and replaced with medieval glass from other sources or new work in the Gothic style. Lassus built the present cedar spire from 1852, and the chapel was classified a historical monument in 1862.

The windows were taken down and stored during the Second World War, and the varnish applied in 1945 to protect them from bomb dust gradually darkened. A seven-year programme begun in 2008, costing some €10 million, cleaned and conserved the whole glazing; the west rose was finished in 2015 for the 800th anniversary of Louis IX's birth. Nearly two-thirds of the glass is original thirteenth-century work. The chapel is run as a museum by the Centre des monuments nationaux, which also holds the neighbouring Conciergerie, and has been part of the UNESCO listing for the banks of the Seine since 1991; it drew more than 1,375,000 visitors in 2019. The crown of thorns survived the Notre-Dame fire of 15 April 2019 and returned to the cathedral in December 2024.