French King, Catholic Saint, American Icon: Provoking Religion, Race, and Public Memory in an American City
by Rachel McBride Lindsey
Apotheosis of St. Louis, 1906. Bronze cast from sculpture by Charles Henry Niehaus. Image from Forest Park Forever.
Across a narrow street from the Saint Louis Art Museum, a medieval king sits atop a battle-ready steed, towering magisterially over the iconic Grand Basin of Forest Park. Sword held aloft but with the blade pointing down, Apotheosis of St. Louis is a 27-foot bronze cast bolted to a massive granite pedestal that commemorates the city’s namesake, King Louis IX of France (1214-70). The original statue was sculpted by Charles Henry Niehaus for the 1904 World’s Fair. In that long-ago summer, it was “the first object to excite definite interest” when patrons ambled through the main entrance, an early history of the fair boasted. After the fair the bronze cast of Niehaus’s “mail-clad leader of Crusaders, holding his sword aloft in the form of a cross” (as described in a 1946 Post-Dispatch report) was moved to its present location on Art Hill. In 1966 it was designated an official city landmark. For more than a century, Apotheosis has been a source of pride for many of the city’s residents and a focal point of Forest Park, one of the largest public parks in the country. This summer, 111 years after it was installed on Art Hill, industrial concrete blocks were installed to barricade the statue from public access. Louis IX has become a battleground for the history and future of the city that bears his name.
Apotheosis of St. Louis. Photograph by Rachel Lindsey, July 10, 2020.
Beginning on Saturday, June 27, 2020, for more than three weeks people have met at the base of Apotheosis both to call for its removal and to defend its continued presence. King Louis IX was in power during the seventh crusade and terrorized French Jews throughout his reign, including burning thousands of copies of the Talmud and forcing Jews, in the language of the Fourth Lateran Council, “to be distinguished in public from other people by the character of their dress,” a measure enacted to prevent “damnable mixing” with Christians. The Crusades he led were responsible for the massacre of Muslims while plundering the Holy Land for sacred objects. But through canonization, Louis IX became remembered for implementing reforms that benefited the poor among other “heroic virtues” that, many argue, set him apart from his contemporaries. What is more, the city named after him is deeply entangled with histories and cultures of American Catholicism and many people see the statue as public testimony to Catholic piety and a virtuous life. In response to protesters rallying for the statue’s removal, lay Catholics and priests have gathered at Apotheosis in prayer and song, holding rosaries and defending their faith.
On June 28, the Archdiocese of St. Louis issued a statement defending Apotheosis as a symbol of “piety and reverence before God.” Though “an imperfect man,” the statement continues, St. Louis “is a model for how we should care for our fellow citizens, and a namesake with whom we should be proud to identify.” Removing Apotheosis from Forest Park would, the diocese cautioned, at once work to “erase history” and distract from much-needed efforts to change policies that contribute to systemic racism in the region. Apotheosis is different from statues of Confederate soldiers or colonial European invaders, supporters seemed to say, because King Louis IX never even imagined the United States or the scale of European imperialism that came after his lifetime. Supporters also feared that violence against statues would lead to violence against people, bringing to the surface very real histories of anti-Catholicism both locally and around the country. Throughout American history, Catholic iconography and devotional objects have been sensationalized as anti-American and used to incite violence against the faithful, often folding anti-Catholicism and white supremacy into each other. A French king. A Catholic saint. A public monument in an American city. In Apotheosis of St. Louis, whose history is on display? Whose history is erased?
The skirmish around Apotheosis is perhaps an unlikely touchstone for debates around public memory seizing American discourse today and casts them squarely into the even murkier terrain of religion in American public life. Should a medieval French king, whose “imperfections” amount to state sanctioned terror, model citizenship for the people of St. Louis? If not, how is this moment of historical accountability different from other moments in our nation’s history when Catholics themselves were targeted as anti-American? However messy the questions are, the answers must include careful scrutiny of the capacity for public monuments to function, as historian Walter Johnson writes, as alibis to white supremacy. The public problem with Apotheosis is not that it has been claimed as a model of Catholic piety but rather that it has been claimed, through sweeping acts of historical erasure, as a symbol of modern American citizenship. Public monuments are seldom about historical facts. They are always about public memory. And public memory is always an intricate dance of visibility and erasure. In Apotheosis, history—never neutral, never absolute—is at once on triumphant display and erased from sight.
When Pierre Laclede and August Chouteau christened their trading outpost “St. Louis” in 1764, they honored both their king, Louis XV, and the medieval saint. The naming of this place—that is, the claiming of this place—were acts of imperial erasures made in the name of God and king. Other movements in the dance of display and erasure are in the material history of the statue itself. Niehaus, who sculpted Apotheosis, was the son of German immigrants to Ohio and studied classical art in Munich and Rome in the 1870s. He became a prominent sculptor of public art when he returned to the United States in the 1880s until after World War I. Regardless of the artist’s intent, the public statuary of this period is almost impossible to separate from ideas of white supremacy circulating in European and American society, particularly energized by mania around ancient sculpture believed to evince the superiority of Western civilization. Niehaus’s statues of American presidents, monuments to Confederate and American soldiers, and sculpted Greco-Roman forms were thus entangled in acts of public memory-making grounded in racist assumptions of modern progress. To draw this history into context is not to erase history but to recognize how public memory is always a matter of storytelling—of listening to some narratives and silencing others.
Apotheosis of St. Louis, towering over the Grand Basin and facing north St. Louis City. Photograph by Rachel Lindsey, July 10, 2020.
Today Apotheosis of St. Louis faces northeast from atop Art Hill, as if to greet the generations who have crossed the Mississippi on their westward journeys. One could say that Apotheosis is both preamble and partner to the city’s other, more famous symbol, the Gateway Arch. Both are caught up in mythologies of westward expansion. And both cast long shadows that cover sins of plunder, exploitation, and violence. In his book, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, historian Walter Johnson calls Americans to “search out the material history of white supremacy and the alibis in which it has been cloaked in order to understand something about structural racism that isn’t otherwise visible.” Not unlike the Confederate memorial removed from Forest Park in 2017 and the statue of Christopher Columbus removed from Tower Grove Park, a few miles south of Forest Park, earlier this summer, Apotheosis in its grand stature is also indisputably an alibi of white supremacy.
Although facing northeast, Apotheosis looks more directly over north St. Louis City and north St. Louis County, regions of St. Louis most heavily affected by decades of divestment and antiblack discrimination. Just a few blocks north of Forest Park, the statue’s sightlines cross the infamous Delmar Divide. These proximal relationships with St. Louis City and St. Louis County are not unimportant. In the decade after Apotheosis was moved to its present site, the city adopted housing covenant ordinances that discriminated against African Americans and Asian Americans and, across the river, a race riot exploded in which scores of Black residents were shot, beaten and lynched by white men. After a continued period of population growth, by the second half of the twentieth century the city’s population began to plummet, in large part due to “white flight” to surrounding municipalities in St. Louis County and concurrent divestment and destruction of black neighborhoods in the city itself. Today the city is at its lowest population density since the 1870s (inversely, surrounding St. Louis County has grown every year since 1880 and has surpassed the population of the City of St. Louis since 1970).
As the weeks of protest and vigil have revealed, Apotheosis also invokes the religious history of its city. After generations of immigration and settlement of French, Irish, Italian, German, Czech, Latinx, Korean, and Black Catholics, among others, today around 25% of adults in the St. Louis region self-identify as Catholic, more than four points higher than the national average and nine points higher than in the rest of the state. As much as any American city can claim to be, St. Louis is a Catholic city and its symbols tell those stories. But among those who now call the St. Louis metro home are immigrant and diasporic communities from across the globe, including thriving Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu communities, and a growing swell of religious “nones.” In fact, according to the most recent data on American religion from Pew, the same total percentage of adults in the region who self-identify as Catholic (25%) either identify with another major world religion (4%) or are religiously unaffiliated (21%). St. Louis is undoubtedly a historically Catholic city, but that history is wrapped up in histories of race and racism that must not be ignored when we reflect on the values we attach to public monuments in shared spaces.
Apotheosis of St. Louis, before the main entrance of the Saint Louis Art Museum. Photograph by Rachel Lindsey, July 10, 2020.
Façade of the main entrance to the Saint Louis Art Museum. The inscription “Dedicated to Art and Free to All,” reflects the museum's public mission within the context of one of the country's largest public parks. Photograph by Rachel Lindsey, July 10, 2020.
Forest Park, where the statue stands, is among the largest urban parks in the United States. The city’s website declares that it “belongs to all St. Louisans” and that it “is more than a scenic backdrop to our city. It is an active participant and catalyst in the St. Louis community.” Further underscoring the intentionally public context of the statue’s location, its picturesque backdrop is the façade of the Saint Louis Art Museum, constructed as the Palace of Fine Arts for the 1904 World’s Fair. Above the large figures of “Painting” and “Sculpture” flanking the museum’s north entrance, patrons and passersby to the museum see the inscription “Dedicated to Art and Free to All,” etching in stone more than a century of civic support that makes admission to this museum, and most other Forest Park museums and attractions, free to anyone and everyone.
Apotheosis of St. Louis is a public monument, not a medieval king, and not an uncontested marker of Catholic piety. It was fashioned within a racialized aesthetic tradition at a time of deep racial violence and is displayed with the air of authority and grandeur for all who pass beneath its shadow. Its messages must always be under scrutiny. For some, it projects the normalization of white Christian supremacy in American life and culture. For others, it claims a pre-Reformation French king as an exemplar of modern Catholic faith, affirming the Catholic heritage of this city. For others still, it occasions both protest against racial injustice and an affirmation of faith in public life. Like all public monuments, its messages are many. And that, in the end, must be part of the calculation among those with the authority to secure its position or to remove it from Art Hill where it stands sentry over the city and its people.
Rachel McBride Lindsey is assistant professor of American Religion and Culture in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University and co-director of Lived Religion in the Digital Age. Her book, A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America was published in 2017.