Notre Dame Church

In the year 633, at Boulogne-sur-Mer, a boat washed ashore on the sands of the port; it had neither sails nor crew. Legend has it that at the same moment, the Virgin Mary appeared in a chapel in the upper town. She revealed to the faithful the presence on the skiff of a statue in her image and asked that it be brought to this place where a new church would be erected in her honor. The people of Boulogne discovered a wooden statue in the boat depicting the Virgin and Child. Thus, a pilgrimage to Boulogne was born, as important in the Middle Ages as the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

In January 1308, Philip IV the Fair, accompanied by his three sons, went to Boulogne-sur-Mer for the wedding of his daughter, Isabella of France, with Edward II of England. The ceremony was celebrated in the sanctuary housing the miraculous statue, at the location of the current Basilica of Notre-Dame de l'Immaculée Conception. Back in Paris, the king ordered the search for land near the capital suitable for the construction of a church dedicated to the Virgin, modeled after the one in Boulogne-sur-Mer, to encourage a shorter pilgrimage. The king commanded Gérard de la Croix, the sealer of the Châtelet, to search for land to build a church dedicated to the Virgin and modeled after the one in Boulogne-sur-Mer.

The village of Menus-les-Saint-Cloud was chosen: the Seine spread there like a sea arm. Philip IV died before he could build the church, so it was Philip V who realized his father's wish. The church of Notre-Dame des Menus in Boulogne became a pilgrimage site that ensured the rapid expansion of the village. Its architecture was meant to recall that of its elder sister by the sea. The latter, destroyed, was replaced by the contemporary basilica, a larger building constructed between 1827 and 1866.

The first foundations of this church date back to 1319, under the reign and by the orders of Philip the Tall. The king laid the first stone of the church and endowed it with a gilded silver statue, in the image of the Virgin of Notre-Dame de Boulogne-sur-Mer.

At the king's request, Pope John XXII ordered Hugues II de Besançon, Bishop of Paris, to establish Notre-Dame des Menus as a separate parish from Auteuil, to bless the new church under the name of Notre-Dame-de-Boulogne-la-Petite, and to establish baptismal fonts and a cemetery there.

After being highly protected under the Ancien Régime, the building was sacked during the Revolution, its riches plundered, dispersed or melted down, and its architecture and decorations considerably degraded.

Emperor Napoleon III, keen to rehabilitate the monarchy's heritage, decided to restore the small church. Its restoration was entrusted in 1860 to the architect Eugène Millet, a disciple of Viollet-le-Duc and Labrouste, who favored 14th-century religious architecture, the international Gothic style.

The Virgin of Boulogne, the Nautical Virgin, Our Lady of Boulogne, and Our Lady of the Great Return are the names given to the Virgin Mary, whose apparition near Boulogne-sur-Mer in the early Middle Ages led to a Catholic pilgrimage that still exists today.

From March 28, 1943, to August 29, 1948, four statues of Our Lady of Boulogne, created for the 4th Marian Congress held in Boulogne in 1938 and housed in Lourdes at the start of World War II, were transported across France, each following a different route, passing through many parishes. This "great return", according to Yann Celton, was "undoubtedly one of the last manifestations of a collective popular religion, half-procession, half-crusade, where an ancient pastoral of fear and the hope for renewal are intertwined".