History Time

So the mom told me about L’eglise americaine. I was skeptical at first but decided to try it out today.  Yes, I went to church…one of their services fit into my schedule of 11am and even though I was about 15 minutes late, I got some God in me.  The 2 best things though were – 1. every Sunday they have coffee hour after the service – niiiice and 2. I took a tour of the Church afterwards and learned about it’s history.

The church is international and non-denominational, but has Protestant roots.  It was founded by Americans, hence the name, in 1814 and was the 1st church to be built overseas.  The church was originally built near the Champs-Elysees, but they sold it to the Herald Tribune in the 1920s for a lot of money because they needed to expand. 

The church is 15th century Gothic architecture with many stained glass windows, 2 of which are originals made by Louis Tiffany – a famous glassmaker at the turn of the century.  The organ was crafted by the Beckerath factory in Germany and has more than 3,000 pipes.  This organ is only 22 years old, but the original organ is on display to the left of the alter. 

An interesting story: Apparently during the German occupation many Americans fled Paris; however, the musical director stayed and kept the services going.  So the Germans came after him and he took refuge in the organ.  There doesn’t look like there was any possible way for a person to fit in the organs from looking straight at it. But the director was safe, then fled to the South of France, but later returned.

The 2 Tiffany windows are really cool.  They were different from standard ones because Tiffany used non-traditional colors, multi-textural (is that a word?), superimposed glass with the faces, hands, and feet hand-painted in various thickness.

These windows are classified as national monuments by the French government and they are the only Tiffany windows outside the US.  Right now, there is a Tiffany exhibition going on at the Musee du Luxembourg which would be cool to check out.

Cool Fact: So there are about 10 steel bars going across the windows which I thought were just structural…Well to some extent they are, but I learned that over time glass starts to seep and so with the windows hanging vertically for 100+ years, the top ends up being thinner while the bottom collects thickness…so they put the bars in place to prevent the glass from oozing…

The other windows are normal, but the interesting thing is that they were designed in the US, imported the glass from the UK, and assembled in France – this reminds me of a book I read by Sarah Murray, Moveable Feasts, which explains the globalization of certain foods and the extraordinary distances they travel before reaching our groceries.

Now the good stuff! There were originally catacombs built to be used to keep the dead, obviously…well they never got used for that.  So in the 60s, when the whole boho vibe was happening, the catacombs turned into a coffeehouse (I wish so badly to have witnessed that) where they offered live music – with one of the artists playing guitar being Robert Zimmerman a.k.a BOB DYLAN…..aweeeesome.  The catacombs are now used as the youth groups meeting area.

And my other favorite tidbit of history which has nothing to do with religion entails the 3 previous uses of the land on which the Church was erected:

1. The last thing before the Church was a trashy carnival.  Apparently it was crappy and unsafe, so the city was happy that ACP was taking over.

2. The church is built on an old tobacco warehouse foundation.  The warehouse was owned by a man named Jean Nicot de Villemain who brought over tobacco from Portugal to use it for medicinal purposes, especially thwarting migraines. The word nicotine comes from this dude’s name….cooool

3. There used to also be a Protestant cemetery at some point where the Church is – actually the church used to be on a little island.  And apparently during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (you know from 10th grade AP European history – worst class of my life – when Catherine de Medici, a Catholic, secretly ordered her men to go in the night and slaughter all the Protestants during the Reformation) all the bodies were dumped into the Seine and floated downstream stopping right at the tip of the island where the Church is now.

Wellll that's all the extremely fascinating and completely non-dull information for today.  I thought it was interesting but that’s also because I have a secret affinity for history and almost wish I had double majored in History & Art History….maybe in another life I say to Bruce the Buddha :)