Dynastic History | Reims Cathedral — The Vial That Made Kings, Broken in a Public Square

On 7 October 1793 a deputy of the National Convention, Philippe Rühl, sent into the Marne on mission, broke a small glass vial on a pedestal in Reims's Place Royale and had the act minuted. The vial was the Sainte Ampoule, and the ceremony it served had been performed in the cathedral a few hundred metres away since the eleventh century.

The claim attached to it was that a dove had brought balm from heaven for the baptism of Clovis. No account contemporary with Clovis says so. The story was written down by Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, in the 860s — roughly three and a half centuries later — in his life of Saint Remigius, and it did precise work for the church that produced it: it made the anointing at Reims, and nowhere else, the act that turned a claimant into a king. Between 1027 and 1825 the cathedral crowned close to thirty French kings; counts differ by one or two depending on who is included.

Rühl's target was the doctrine, not the building. The cathedral survived; the monopoly did not. Fragments were said to have been gathered by clergy and townspeople, and a replacement reliquary, commissioned by Archbishop Jean-Charles de Coucy from the goldsmith Jean-Charles Cahier, was used at the coronation of Charles X in 1825, the last French coronation. Whether the fragments are what they are said to be remains a claim rather than a finding.

The cathedral is a working parish church and a UNESCO site. The reliquary sits next door in the Palais du Tau, in a case.

📸 Cover: The west front of Notre-Dame de Reims seen from the parvis, Ludovic Péron, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons — the cathedral, not the Place Royale where the vial was broken.