Throwing Lions to Christians – Frank McNally on St Ronan and the cult of French rugby

It may not explain events in Marseille last weekend, but it seems an interesting coincidence that this week (June 1st) marks the feast-day of a sixth-century holy man widely revered in northwestern France: St Ronan.

According to tradition, he first rose to fame as a bishop in his native Ireland before embarking on voluntary exile to Brittany, where he lived an ascetic life.

He was briefly troubled there by a woman who alleged he had the ability to transform himself into a wolf and said that, during one of these lupine adventures, he had eaten several sheep and her daughter. Tried by the then standard method of having wild dogs set on him, he proved his innocence by surviving. Then he established the woman’s guilt of child murder before intervening to prevent her execution. He also restored her daughter to life.

The saint’s power over animals is said to have survived even his death. When a dispute arose about where he should be buried, the decision was left to a team of wild oxen. Attached to a cart carrying the body, undriven, they brought it to a spot near the end of the Breton peninsula and stopped.

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The village that grew up there is now called Locronan (“Hermitage of Ronan”) and has at least one other claim to fame, featuring on the official list of “Les Plus Beaux Villages de France”.

This is an association of French villages that meet the criterial of being both beautiful and bucolic, with a minimum of two national heritage sites and a maximum of 2,000 residents. There were 156 at last count, heavily concentrated in the South. Locronan is one of only four in Brittany.

As for the saint’s religious legacy, that continues in the annual Breton “Pardons”, a series of ceremonies that run throughout the summer months. Similar to the Irish “patterns”, these are dominated by processions around sacred sites, with pilgrims hoping to gain indulgences by participation.

The event related to St Ronan is known as the Troménie and especially associated with the wearing by pilgrims of traditional Breton dress.

In five out of every six years, it’s the “Petit Troménie”, walked over a route of six km every July 2nd. But every sixth year, the “Grand Troménie” takes place along an ancient 12km path, which is cleared for a week of pilgrimages, day or night. The next one of those is in 2025.

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The saintly associations of Brittany are in keeping with a mysterious subdivision of France, much noted by historians and geographers alike, called the St Malo-Geneva line. This is an imaginary boundary running diagonally across the country from the Cotentin peninsula (where the Cherbourg ferry docks) to the northern French Alps.

Among other things, placenames involving the word “Saint” are far more likely to occur west of that line. But as Graham Robb noted in his great 2007 book The Discovery of France, the demarcation is or was associated with many other differences too: “At least until the late 19th century, it appears with surprising regularity when various sets of data are plotted on a map: south and west of the line, people tended to be shorter and to have darker hair and eyes; they were less literate, lived in smaller places, had less taxable income and were more likely to be employed in agriculture.”

You could argue that today, the Saint Malo-Geneva line still separates the predominantly beer-drinking French from the wine-lovers. And maybe it explains the distribution of French rugby vis-a-vis football too.

Except for the Paris franchises, the Top 14 rugby clubs are all located south and west of the boundary. Mind you, there are none in St Ronan’s Brittany (the other Ronan’s La Rochelle is the farthest north), whereas French football has several Breton clubs.

Even if the sixth-century Ronan was not implicated in throwing Leinster’s Lions to the Christians last weekend, however, La Rochelle may have had other supernatural help. For much as rugby is a near religion in parts of Leinster, western France has an actual church dedicated to the sport.

Situated in a village in Les Landes, the Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Rugby was established by the parish priest in 1964 after the deaths of three local players in a road crash.

The chapel’s prayers include one that translates: “Stand beside us to give us strength and desire in our quest for victory. But also stand beside us in the terrible scrum of existence …” Of its several rugby-themed stained-glass windows, one depicts the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus as he throws the ball into the line-out.