Walls That Talk: A Guide to Carcassonne’s Ancient Basilica

(9 reviews)

Carcassonne audio tour: Walls That Talk: A Guide to Carcassonne’s Ancient Basilica

This is an indoor tour

Carcassonne

France

$19.99

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About the Tour

If you thought ancient churches were just boring old buildings, this walking tour will surprise you. And, depending on how much you know about Christianity, it might positively shock you. On this self-guided tour of the Basilica of Saints Nazairius and Celsus, you’ll discover the truth behind the development of Western Christianity, and learn how one faction imposed its own version of orthodoxy on people by forcibly converting them and exterminating rival sects.

Our tour starts outside the spectacular must-see basilica known as Basilique Saint Nazaire et Saint Celse, located in the ancient Cité de Carcassonne. I’ll guide you around the church’s interior and you’ll find out how it was re-categorised from cathedral to basilica, and learn the difference between the two.

Along the way, you’ll have a chance to:

Uncover the mystery of what really happened to Joan of Arc
Share a moment with a painting of a Veronica
Learn why, for centuries, it was not possible to be baptised in a church
Hear about the death, burial and exhumation of Simon de Montfort here
Admire some of the oldest and most beautiful stained glass and rose windows in Southern France, as well as a depiction of The Tree of Jesse
Learn how to identify statues of Catholic Saints and Martyrs
Understand the differences between Romanesque and Gothic architecture, and learn to identify Southern French Gothic style
Ponder the origin of early Christianities, and the evolution of their doctrines
Find out what happened during the Crusade against the Cathars, why there is a memorial here to a known Cathar sympathiser, and how Cathar beliefs influenced medieval Catholicism
Learn about the Occitan culture in this area, before it became French
Appreciate spectacular architecture, while adding some exotic architectural terms to your vocabulary
Understand why Pope Urban II came here in 1096, when he blessed the stones of the Romanesque cathedral
Search for the owls sitting on the branches of the Tree of Life in the Chapel of the Holy Cross

On this 120-minute tour of Cité de Carcassonne’s basilica, I’ll share the secrets hidden in the cracks of this ancient building, which echo far beyond its walls. This is decidedly not the Sunday School version of history. By the end of our walk, I hope you’ll feel enlightened by tis entertaining yet academically rigorous telling of the Christian doctrine’s fascinating history.

Tour Producer

James McDonald

4 tours

James is a British historian specialising in church history and warfare in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

His special talent lies in presenting history in an easily digestible. He is able to make rigorous history entertaining, whatever your existing level of knowledge.

James is an expert in Catharism, a popular so-called heresy that flourished in the Languedoc during the High Middle Ages. He has been researching Catharism and its relationship with early Christianity for over twenty years.

He writes on a range of topics including Gnostic Dualism, the Cathars of the Languedoc, the Counts of Toulouse, Occitania, Medieval Warfare and the Inquisition.

His work is characterised by serious scholarship combined with an entertaining style. A polymath, he has also written on subjects as diverse as computer simulation, mathematical problems, early Christianity, English etymology, castle architecture, philosophy, and comparative philology. He is the webmaster of www.cathar.info and www.catharcastles.info

James has travelled extensively in Central Asia and Southern Asia, researching Zoroastrianism and other Dualist religions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1990.

Preview Location

Location 6

Chapel of "Our Lady of Good News"

Stop for a minute to look at the font and the life-sized statue of a woman wearing armour.

If you're wondering what a chapel is, it's a building or a room used for Christian worship, typically found in institutions such as schools, colleges, prisons, hospitals, or in large ... Stop for a minute to look at the font and the life-sized statue of a woman wearing armour.

If you're wondering what a chapel is, it's a building or a room used for Christian worship, typically found in institutions such as schools, colleges, prisons, hospitals, or in large private houses - but also, oddly inside churches. Chapels generally have their own dedication, to a saint or a holy object, an altar, and often a specific purpose. We'll take a look at the items in this chapel one by one.

We'll start with the baptismal font. It dates from 1430, well into the French period. Today we are used to small baptismal fonts, made especially for babies, like this one, but the earliest Christian fonts were made before infant baptism became the norm, so they are made for adults, and would not be found inside a church. Indeed the earliest Christian fonts are identical to Jewish ritual baths known as Mikvahs, which is of course not a coincidence. This is exactly what they were. John the Baptist and Jesus were two of many charismatic Jewish leaders of the Second Temple period who led baptising sects among local Jews.

We turn now to the statue. This is a statue of Joan of Arc. Almost every French church has one because Joan is the patron saint of France. She is slightly less recognisable than usual because she is unpainted here. More usually, she is painted in realistic colours, so her silver armour stands out. Joan and the font belong specifically in this chapel. You will recall that the chapel is called Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle, the Chapel of "Our Lady of Good News" or "Our Lady of Glad Tidings". Well the glad tidings in question were the defeat of an English army, by forces led by Joan of Arc, at Orléans (what anglophones call Orleans) in 1429. This also explains the date of the font. It was made the following year to commemorate Joan's victory.

You might have heard that Joan was burned alive by the English as a witch. Well, that is not true - and a clue that it cannot be true is that the English did not burn witches, they hanged them. We won't go into all the detail here, but Joan's trial is one of the best-documented events of the later Middle Ages. We have a full transcript of the cases brought against her - you can buy it as a book in France! In summary, Joan was captured by the Burgundians, who were allies of the English; the French king refused to pay a ransom for her (as was the routine practice for captured military commanders at the time), so the Burgundians passed her over to the Church for trial. The Church, always suspicious of lay folk who claimed to be in communication with God, tried her for heresy in an ecclesiastical court, on the grounds that her visions were demonic. Of the 131 Catholic clergy involved in her trial, 123 of them, well over 90%, were French. Joan put up a valiant defence, and the prosecutor could not obtain any statement from her that unambiguously confirmed her guilt - something of a rarity in itself. They required her to deny her visions were real and to stop wearing men's clothes, and that should have been the end of the matter. But, frustrated by their failure, the Church combined a new charge of heresy with the charge of transvestism and retried her. They removed her clothes and left only men's clothes in her cell. When she put them on, she sealed her fate, since the Church then regarded transvestism as a blasphemous breach of God's Law. She was retried and convicted of transvestism and heresy and suffered the fate decreed by Cannon Law - burning alive, in Rouen in 1431. In the ensuing centuries, the Church and the French both sought to exculpate themselves and both rewrote the story to pin responsibility on the perfidious English, especially after the English abandoned the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation. Step by step, Joan was rehabilitated in France. She became ever more popular over the centuries as a new, much more wholesome, story became the received version. Now she was a French holy martyr, and her visions had been genuine. This new version of the story became so well established that the French managed in 1920 to have Joan declared a saint. So, she completed quite a posthumous journey, from blasphemous transvestite heretic in 1431 to Saint Joan less than five hundred years later. So here she is in her transvestite armour again, now the patron Saint of France. A reminder perhaps that false news is not a recent invention, and that moral fashions are as changeable as any other fashion.

Let's turn now to look at the painting. Read More

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Major Landmarks

Basilique Saint Nazaire
La Cité Médiévale
Basilica of Saints Nazarius and Celsus
Carcassonne
La Basilique Saint-Nazaire-et-Saint-Celse de Carcassonne
Gothic Apse
Gothic Transepts
Gothic vaulting
Apse Windows
Rose Windows
Radulphe chapel
de Rochefort chapel
Simon de Montfort memorial tablet
Veronica
Tree of Jesse
Chapel of "Our Lady of Good News"
Chapel of the Sacred Heart
Chapel Notre Dame de la Santé
Chapel of Saint Roch
Chapel of the Holy Cross
Chapel Sainte Croix
Chapel Notre Dame
Chapel of Saint Anne
Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Mary
Romanesque Nave
Chapel of Saint Peter and Saint John

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Getting There

Route Overview

VoiceMap tours follow a route from a set starting point. It’s how we give turn-by-turn directions and tell a story greater than the sum of its parts.

Start location
1 Rue Viollet le Duc, 11000 Carcassonne, France
Total distance

241m
Final location
1 Rue Viollet le Duc, 11000 Carcassonne, France
Distance back to start location

18.63m

Directions to Starting Point

The tour begins just outside the main doors of the Basilica, within the Cité of Carcassonne, at Latitude 43.205459, Longitude 2.3627250, in a small square, just outside the Hôtel de la Cité.

(Google will show you where it is on Google Maps if you enter 43.205459, 2.3627250 and press search).

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Tips

Places to stop along the way

This tour is entirely within the Basilica. You will visit and hear about the nave, apse, crossing and transepts, 10 chapels, statues of various saints, baptismal fonts, vestiges of Simon de Montfort's tomb, altars, funerary monuments, corbels - and even an iron ring for hitching horses inside the church.

A separate companion tour also by James McDonald concentrates on the city walls and their history.

Best time of day

The Basilica is open to the public during the day on most days - but avoid the services held here at 11am on Sundays.
There is no entry fee.

Precautions

No precautions are necessary - though of course you should not make too much noise inside the basilica.

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4.9 / 5

9 Ratings

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Walls That Talk: A Guide to Carcassonne’s Ancient Basilica

About the Tour

Tour Producer

James McDonald

Preview Location

Location 6

Chapel of "Our Lady of Good News"

How VoiceMap Works

Major Landmarks

La Cité Médiévale

Basilica of Saints Nazarius and Celsus

Carcassonne

La Basilique Saint-Nazaire-et-Saint-Celse de Carcassonne

Gothic Apse

Gothic Transepts

Gothic vaulting

Apse Windows

Rose Windows

Radulphe chapel

de Rochefort chapel

Simon de Montfort memorial tablet

Veronica

Tree of Jesse

Chapel of "Our Lady of Good News"

Chapel of the Sacred Heart

Chapel Notre Dame de la Santé

Chapel of Saint Roch

Chapel of the Holy Cross

Chapel Sainte Croix

Chapel Notre Dame

Chapel of Saint Anne

Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Mary

Romanesque Nave

Chapel of Saint Peter and Saint John

Getting There

Route Overview

Directions to Starting Point

Tips

Places to stop along the way

Best time of day

Precautions

Get The App

Questions and Reviews