Shell hits the church of Saint-Gervais

On Good Friday, 29 March 1918, at about 4.30 p.m., a shell from the German Paris Gun hit the roof of the church of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais, which stands behind the Paris town hall, a few dozen metres from the Seine. The church was full of worshippers who were just finishing the Good Friday afternoon service. The explosion brought down one of the pillars, and the part of the stone vault resting on it crashed down on the kneeling people. About ninety people were killed and several dozen wounded. It was the deadliest single shot of the entire shelling of Paris.

Silence before Good Friday

The shelling of the city had begun on 23 March, and for three days shells fell on Paris roughly every quarter of an hour. From Monday 25 March, however, the guns were silent. The Paris newspapers wrote that they had been silenced by the French artillery, which since 24 March had been shelling their positions near Crépy, outside Laon. The real cause was different. According to Henry W. Miller, an American artillery officer who after the war described the shelling on the basis of French and German documents, on the morning of 25 March one of the guns blew up as it fired, killing five of its crew and wounding more than a dozen. The Germans ceased fire to investigate the cause of the accident and to replace a worn barrel. Parisians welcomed the three quiet days with relief, and the authorities merely advised them to walk on the north and east sides of the streets during shelling and not to gather in crowds.

On 29 March fire resumed in the afternoon, from a new barrel. At about 3.30 p.m. two shells fell in the suburbs of Montrouge and Châtillon without injuring anyone, and in most of the city they were not even heard. Many thought that this day, too, would pass quietly.

The collapsed vault

In the church of Saint-Gervais the worshippers, most of them women, had completed the three-hour Good Friday service and were praying on their knees. The shell pierced the roof and exploded above the nave. A stone pillar gave way, and after it the vault began to crack and fall. Blocks of stone, some weighing several hundred kilograms, buried the worshippers, in places under a layer almost two metres deep. Survivors rushed for the doors while stones kept falling from above. Rescue came from French and American soldiers, ambulance men, the Red Cross, clergy and passers-by. The wounded and the dead were pulled from the rubble and blessed by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Léon-Adolphe Amette. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and President Raymond Poincaré quickly arrived at the scene. The church’s stained-glass windows had been taken down and hidden at the start of the war, so the losses to its historic furnishings were smaller than they might have been.

The casualty figures differ between sources. Miller wrote of 88 dead, among them 67 women and two children, and 68 wounded. The most commonly given figures are 91 dead and 68 wounded, and according to some accounts 92 were killed. Among the victims were the French general Francfort, Henri Stroehlin of the Swiss legation and the daughter of the Belgian consul general, as well as French, British and American civilians. One more shell fell near Paris that day, at about 5.45 p.m. in Montrouge, injuring no one.

The echo

The news spread through the French and foreign press, including the American papers. Deputy Grousseau spoke in the Chamber of Deputies of the “barbarous enemy” that had shelled a church during prayer. The Paris Gun fired blind, from more than a hundred kilometres away, and could not aim at a particular building. The gun crew learnt only the next day that a church had been hit in Paris. For Parisians and for the Allied press, however, the killing of worshippers on Good Friday became a symbol of what the shelling was for: terrorising the civilian population. More shells fell on the city the very next morning, and the shelling continued intermittently until August. Traces of the impact can still be seen on the church’s pillars, and one of its chapels commemorates the victims.