History of the Chapelle Corneille « Le Poème Harmonique

History of the Chapelle Corneille

Marie de Médicis laid the foundation stone of the Collège de Rouen, a Jesuit institution, in 1615. From the end of the 16^th century, the order took on an increasing number of students, and the new church was built to cater both for them and local parishioners. After the Revolution, the church was used as a fodder store, then in 1799, an engineer called Le Masson turned it into Rouen’s first museum, where works confiscated from the clergy and nobility were displayed. In 1895, the expansion of the Lycée Corneille (opened in 1873) threatened the church with destruction, but thanks to the Société des antiquaires de Normandie and the Société française d’archéologie it was listed as an historic monument in 1910. Damaged in a bombing raid in 1942, the chapel was gradually restored in stages until the 1990s, when it was only opened for concerts on exceptional occasions. A multi-million euro restoration programme was launched by the region in 2004. The chapel has now reopened as an auditorium and a venue for exceptional musical seasons.

When the Jesuits were given the land on which to build the chapel, this district of north-eastern Rouen was already very crowded. The number of Catholic churches had increased steadily over the 16^th century in reaction to the Protestant Reformation, and the architect François Derand had to make do with a very small plot of land. Despite the limits placed on him, he still managed to build the third largest church in Rouen, after the cathedral and the abbey church of Saint-Ouen. The Jesuits retained certain elements of Gothic architecture, such as the building’s high vaulting and external buttresses, and combined them with architectural features typical of the Counter Reformation. To help people access and understand the religion, for example, the divisions between the different sections of the building were removed. The side doors give onto the college and the street, indicating that the chapel was used by students and citizens in equal measure. The almost transparent windows fill the church with light. Christ and the Virgin dominate the design as do angels, which were the subject of a 16^th century cult. You can tell the difference between them by counting their wings: two for angels, four for cherubs and six for seraphs.