Christ Church (Paris)
The Christ Church is the church of the German Evangelical Congregation in Paris (25 rue Blanche, 9th arrondissement ). It was built in 1894.
local community
In 2006 the parish had 329 households among its registered members and 120 friends from all over the Île-de-France region , some of whom had to walk long distances to attend the Sunday service or other events. Correspondingly long and arduous are the journeys of the pastors or the visiting services to the often necessary house calls .
The financing of the community is fundamentally different than in Germany, as there is no church tax in France . According to the French law separating church and state , the churches in France are voluntary churches and have to finance themselves. This also applies to the Christ Church; however, it receives grants from the Evangelical Church in Germany , which cover a small part of the expenses.
Self-financing essentially consists of contributions and donations from members and sympathizers . The latter, the friends of the Christ Church, receive the regularly published parish gazette and other information from the church for a small fee. The church and the parish halls are also rented out for music recordings, concerts and choir rehearsals. The annual Christmas bazaar also brings important additional income. The expenses consist, among other things, of the salaries for the pastor and secretariat, the maintenance of the buildings and the diakonia as well as the production of the parish letter .
history
The beginnings of the German-speaking Protestant parishes in Paris (1626–1798)
The beginnings of the German-speaking Protestant congregations in Paris go back to the Swedish embassy in Paris. In France, according to the Edict of Tolerance of Nantes by Henry IV in 1598 , Protestant worship was only possible in certain places, but was prohibited in Paris. Protestant diplomats , nobles , merchants and students therefore met on the extra-territorial grounds of the Swedish legation to celebrate services in Luther's language , in German. The first pastor , Jonas Hambraeus, also looked after the numerous Germans, especially the refugees from the Thirty Years' War .
In 1679 it became an official congregation, still under the protection of the Swedish embassy, especially after the Edict of Tolerance of Henry IV was revoked in 1685 by Louis XIV in Fontainebleau . With the planting of the church one tried to solve three problems of the evangelical emigrants : through a poor fund one helped the needy, who had nothing to expect from Catholic institutions; Nursing was organized for those who were not admitted to hospital because of their religion; the burial of the deceased who had no place in the (Catholic) cemeteries was regulated .
With the expulsion of the Huguenots (the French Reformed) from France, the social structure of the German-speaking community changed. After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, many Protestant craftsmen and skilled workers came to Paris to replace the expelled or murdered Huguenots. In 1711, the Swedish king granted the parish the status of an ordinary parish and from then on paid the - mostly German - pastor. The Alsatian theologian and historian Baer stands for the rise of the community: despite the legal situation, a Lutheran hospital was built in 1743; the dead could be officially buried in the "Protestant cemetery for foreigners"; From 1743, a service in French was held once a month as a sign of integration into society. Baer was by Louis XV. even ennobled.
In addition to the congregation in the Swedish embassy, a second German-speaking congregation soon appeared in the Danish embassy, to which the Protestant workers and service staff in Paris adhered. The Swedish branch of the Church got caught up in the turmoil of the French Revolution in 1789 as a supposed supporter of the royalists ; the Danish chapel remained unaffected. The revolution made it easier for foreigners to be naturalized and legalized Protestantism .
A German-French-Lutheran church in the 19th century
The annexation of the Württemberg- Evangelical Mömpelgard ( Montbéliard ) by Napoleon increased the Protestant portion of the Protestant population otherwise only present in Alsace-Lorraine . With the " articles organiques " of 1802 Napoleon guaranteed religious freedom . The Lutheran church became a recognized state church and the pastor an official . The community received the former monastery church Les Billettes in the Marais district in Paris; this church with Paris' oldest existing cloister is still a Lutheran church today. The church administration and a theological faculty were established in Strasbourg . From 1821 the number of German immigrants became so large that a German church service was celebrated every Sunday. Nevertheless, the 19th century is a century of slow separation of the German from the French in this Lutheran church.
Under the citizen king Louis-Philippe , whose daughter-in-law (and thus potentially future queen) Helene zu Mecklenburg-Schwerin was a Lutheran princess, the church experienced its heyday. In 1843 the representative church of Rédemption (Church of the Redeemer) in rue Chauchat in the 9th district was consecrated; today it is the seat of the Lutheran Church in France. Even Baron Haussmann , who as prefect gave the Seine Paris region through a radical transformation of its current appearance, was a member of this community. This bloom ended with the revolution of 1848 .
Thousands of Germans moved to Paris for political and economic reasons. In 1848 around 67,000 Germans lived in the capital. The street sweepers, for example, were almost exclusively recruited from Hesse . The social need was great; the industrialization attracted workers and day laborers who lived in slums. The revival movement tried to meet the emotional and social need. Pastor Meyer founded the " Mission évangélique parmi les Allemands ", the first diaconal organization that Germany supported.
From 1858 to 1864 the great organizer of the Diakonie , Friedrich von Bodelschwingh , worked as a pastor in Paris. He collected the impoverished workers and, above all, their children, built schools, facilities and, for the impoverished German immigrants in the northeast, the hilltop church, which is now an Orthodox church, and the Ascenscion (Assumption) church in Batignolles, which was inaugurated in 1866.
With the Franco-German War of 1870/71, the separation of the German branch of the Lutheran Church from the French increased. The reasons go back well into the 19th century:
- The integration of the German immigrants remained difficult, especially linguistically.
- The German pastors could not become civil servants and thus always remained auxiliary pastors.
- The question of the language of the worship service remained open: it was celebrated in French with a delay, then in German. The Germans feared that too much French would alienate young people culturally and religiously from their roots.
- Organizationally, the " Mission allemande " stood next to the consistory ( church administration ) and increasingly became an instrument of German interests.
The defeat of France in the war in 1871 brought the final break:
- As a result of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the Lutheran Church in France lost 90 percent of its members, theological faculty and senior consistory (church leadership) in Strasbourg, which have since formed the independent Church AB of Alsace and Lorraine ; many Francophone Lutherans fled Alsace to Paris.
- Most Germans had to leave Paris as early as 1870, and many did not return in 1871.
- The diaconal work had split into a “ Mission intérieure ” ( inner mission ) for the French and a “German Aid Association” organized and financed from Germany.
- The ownership structure was unclear: Which part of the community did the churches founded by Bodelschwingh belong to? A compromise was reached in 1879, but it was only provisional.
From 1888 the new German Kaiser Wilhelm II pursued an aggressive foreign policy . The German community should be nationally oriented, self-confident and independent. His followers therefore worked to build an organizationally independent community in the heart of Paris. Because of the dispute over the times of worship in the Rédemption and Les Billettes churches, the construction of a separate church, the Christ Church on Rue Blanche, was inaugurated in 1894 - almost entirely without French participation.
The German Church in the interplay of 20th century history
Until a strict separation of church and state (“ laïcité ”) came about in 1905 through the law separating church and state , the congregation remained formally part of the Lutheran French consistorial church. From 1905 it was - like all churches in France - its own cult association (" association cultuelle "). Internally, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Christ Church was a purely German church, which saw itself as a denominational but also a national home abroad and independently organized all social and diaconal tasks. In 1911 the parish hall, which still exists today, was built in front of the church with halls, office and parsonage. The hill church in La Villette and the Billettes church continued to belong to the German parish, which comprised three parishes.
According to the law of 1905, the life of the German Protestant community was largely organized in associations. There was a home for young women and girls, an apprentice club, a support association for the German School and the like. a. m. Congregational life expanded until 1914. Since 1900, the Old Prussian Evangelical Upper Church Council (EOK) has been responsible for all German regional churches for Protestant parishes of Germans abroad .
The unity of “throne and altar” - as King of Prussia, the emperor was also the supreme bishop of the Prussian Evangelical Church - and following the patriotism of the time, the community of this era was more German than Evangelical Lutheran. Accordingly, the outbreak of war in 1914 meant the end of the community: the churches were confiscated, most of the community members returned to Germany, and all institutions and associations were closed. It was not until 1927 that Pastor Dahlgrün was able to resume parish work under difficult conditions, after tough, difficult negotiations by the embassy, with the intercession of French Protestants and under the conditions of the Versailles Treaty and the separation of church and state that had meanwhile also taken place in Germany. In Germany, too, after the end of the sovereign church regiment in the Weimar Republic in 1918, the churches had to organize themselves without the sovereigns as supreme bishops. From 1929, contrary to the political trend, contacts with the French Protestant churches grew, especially among young people. But the global economic crisis also hit the German community hard. Community life was now limited to the Rue Blanche; the other churches were sold.
The period from 1933 to 1945 was an extremely ambivalent, difficult phase for the Christ Church: On the one hand, the congregation was financially and personally dependent on the German Evangelical Church Committee , which was dominated from 1934 by the German Christians , a movement in the Evangelical Church that was close to the NSDAP . From 1940 the community was also a military community. On the other hand, it accommodated refugees and those persecuted by the Nazi regime. The desirable clarity of the Confessing Church was impossible in Paris.
In 1945 there was another collapse: the Germans left the city, the buildings were requisitioned again, and the community dissolved. Fortunately, three church institutions moved into the building on Rue Blanche: the French Protestant refugee aid organization CIMADE , the Swedish Israel Mission and the French “Pastoral Care for Protestant Foreigners”. The bilingual Bremen pastor Franz de Beaulieu (1913–2007) took care of the religious services, social and pastoral care . From 1948 onwards, the " Comité luthérien d'Aide aux Réfugiés " (CLAIR), the Lutheran aid committee for refugees, bundled the work on the remaining Germans with the help of the Lutheran World Federation.
It was not until September 1, 1954 that parish work was officially resumed with Pastor Dahlkötter. The congregation was contractually associated with the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), but no longer with a (Lutheran) regional church . It became home to all German-speaking Christians of Protestant denominations.
With the improvement of Franco-German relations, work also became easier; the church developed into a bridge between the Germans and the French and became an affiliated member of the Federation of Protestant Churches in France , the “ Fédération Protestante de France ” (FPF). The municipality has only owned the buildings again since 1984.
The two parish offices in Paris West and Paris Center have now become one and a half, and since 1987 a pastor couple, directly elected by the parish assembly of (voluntary and paying) members, has been serving in the Christ Church. The organist at the Christ Church is Helga Schauerte-Maubouet .
organ
The organ was built in 1964 by the German organ builder Kleuker (Brackwede). The instrument has 19 stops on two manuals and a pedal . The playing and stop actions are mechanical.
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
- Pairing : II / PED, I / PED, I / II
literature
- Wilhelm von der Recke (Ed.): "Fluctuat nec mergitur ..." German Evangelical Christ Church Paris 1894–1994. Contributions to the history of the Lutheran congregations of the German language in Paris and France. Sigmaringen 1994, ISBN 3-7995-0412-5 .
- Ludger Tewes : Wehrmacht and Evangelical Church in Paris during the German occupation. In: Jürgen Bärsch, Hermann-Josef Scheidgen (ed.): Historia magistra vitae (= theology and university, 5). Gustav Siewerth Academy, Cologne 2019, ISBN 978-3-945777-00-8 , pp. 557–610.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helga Schauerte on the website of the German Church, Paris (Christ Church)
- ↑ Information on the organ
Coordinates: 48 ° 52 ′ 46 ″ N , 2 ° 19 ′ 52 ″ E