Saint-Bénigne

The full story

According to tradition, Benignus was a Greek sent to Gaul in the 2nd century by the bishop of Smyrna, present-day Izmir in Turkey. After passing through Autun and Langres, he settled in Dijon, where he died a martyr around 179. His tomb, outside the castrum, drew the faithful: a first building was put up around it in the early 6th century. Around 850, under Charles the Bald, the church was enlarged for ever more numerous pilgrims, and a lively village grew up around the abbey. Excavations there have found houses, workshops, streets and grain silos from around the year 1000.

A monk of Cluny from a leading Piedmontese family, William of Volpiano reformed the abbey from 989 onwards. In his rotunda, two spiral staircases linked the three levels, and pilgrims made their way to the saint’s tomb, set in a crypt beneath the transept. The capitals of its 132 columns are among the first in Romanesque art to show human figures and animals, while marble and mosaic recalled the Pantheon in Rome, a round temple that became a church. To the east, a rectangular building held three chapels stacked one above the other.

Begun under Abbot Hugues d’Arc, the Gothic church kept the rotunda against its east end, and its portal was built on the exact spot of the old one. The work lasted a century. Its spire, recorded by the early 15th century, had to be rebuilt several times after lightning or fires. From Philip the Bold onwards, each new duke was blessed here and received a ruby ring from the abbot. From 1740 to 1745, Karl-Joseph Riepp built an organ here with 47 stops on 4 keyboards, probably the largest in France in its day.

In 1792, the two upper storeys of the rotunda were pulled down and the lower level was filled in. The Côte-d’Or Antiquities Commission found parts of it again in the 1840s, then the sacristy built from 1859 by the architect Jean-Philippe Suisse led to it being cleared and restored, or rather reinterpreted. In the mid-1890s, Charles Suisse rebuilt the spire, which carries statues including Philip the Good and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal. Meanwhile, the cathedral had also taken in the remains of the dukes buried at the Charterhouse of Champmol.

Restored from 2020 to 2023, the lower level of the rotunda has been open again since 2024, on guided tours, at the east end of the cathedral. Close by, the monks’ former dormitory, a 13th-century building, has housed the archaeological museum since 1934; the Square des Bénédictins roughly occupies the site of the cloister. Of the abbot’s palace designed by Charles Saint-Père, only one of the three planned wings was built, from 1767 to 1772; an art school has occupied it since 1920.