St. Denis

St. Denis (born, Rome?—died 258?, Paris; feast day: Western church, October 9; Eastern church, October 3) was allegedly the first bishop of Paris and an early Christian martyr. He is a patron saint of France and Paris and is also invoked by people suffering from headache. St. Denis is also venerated as one of the 14 Holy Helpers, an assemblage of saints who were especially popular in the Middle Ages for their powers of intercession.

According to St. Gregory of Tours’s 6th-century Historia Francorum, Denis was one of seven bishops sent to Gaul to convert the people during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius. Little is known of his life; it is believed that he was martyred during the persecution of Christians by Decius in 251 or the emperor Valerian in 258.

In the 7th century his relics were moved to the abbey of Saint Denis, which had been founded shortly before by the Merovingian king Dagobert I, near Paris. In the 9th century Hilduin, abbot of Saint Denis, translated the mystical works of Pseudo-Dionysius, which had been sent to the emperor Louis I the Pious by the Byzantine emperor Michael II. Hilduin identified the Parisian Denis with Pseudo-Dionysius, who was believed to have been the Athenian disciple of St. Paul the Apostle but was most likely a Syrian monk of the 5th or 6th century. In the 12th century Peter Abelard was forced to flee the monastery and France when he sought to demonstrate that the Parisian Denis and the Athenian Denis were not the same person.

A legend recorded in the 9th century recounts that St. Denis was beheaded on Montmartre and that his decapitated corpse carried his head to the area northeast of Paris where the Benedictine abbey of Saint Denis was founded. Thus, Denis is often portrayed in art as a decapitated (though evidently living) figure.