Église Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles

The Church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles is a Catholic church located in Chennevières-lès-Louvres, in the Val-d'Oise department of France. It replaced an earlier church dedicated to Saint Medard, which stood to the south of the village and was demolished at the beginning of the 18th century at the latest. The present church was founded in the 14th century by the lord of Chennevières, Gilles Choisel, from whom it takes its principal patron, Saint Giles the Hermit. The second patron, Saint Loup, is not attested until the mid-16th century. It was at this time that a spacious Renaissance choir was built to the east of the small Gothic nave. It is flanked by two chapels, the northern one of which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and houses a statue of the Virgin and Child from the early 14th century. The decoration of the apse is particularly elaborate, and statue niches, two of them with richly worked canopies, adorn the piers. According to an inscription, the completion of the present choir can be dated to 1577. At that time, a tower attached to the nearby château still served as the bell tower. It collapsed in 1718, and the lord, M. Nouveau, then gave the parish a new bell tower, which is low but topped with a slender spire. It serves at the same time as a porch and precedes the nave. The side aisles of the nave were built at the same time as the bell tower, in 1719. Restorations took place in the 19th century; the nave may have been revaulted at that time. The Church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles is therefore a composite building, in which the difference in height between the nave (7.10 m) and the choir (11.75 m) is striking, as is the difference in the quality of the architecture. The choir alone is of genuine artistic interest; it is sober and elegant in style and, with its apse surrounded by statue niches, it is one of the finest 16th-century liturgical spaces in the Pays de France. The church has nevertheless been listed as a monument historique in its entirety since 1980.