Église Saint-Vincent-de-Paul

Église Saint-Vincent-de-Paul rises above Place Franz Liszt in Paris’s tenth arrondissement, reached by a long stairway. Its Neo-classical façade presents twelve Ionic columns beneath a pediment showing the glorification of Saint Vincent de Paul.

Jean-Baptiste Lepère began construction in 1824, and his son-in-law Jacques-Ignace Hittorff completed it in 1844 with two bell towers. Saint Vincent de Paul had established the Congregation of the Priests of the Mission here, on the site of a former Saint-Lazare priory. The church’s nave has Ionic and Corinthian columns, a frieze painted by Hippolyte Flandrin, stained glass by Charles-Laurent Maréchal, and a canopy above the main altar.

A bronze Crucifixion by François Rude stands beneath that canopy, while Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s restored and enlarged organ adds another distinctive detail. Before the church, the grounds held a twelfth-century leper colony and later Saint-Lazare Prison, where André Chénier and the Marquis de Sade were confined.