It was originally the church of a Benedictine abbey founded in 558 by Childebert I, the son of Clovis, King of the Franks.

[1] Originally located outside the walls of medieval Paris, in the fields and meadows of the Left Bank, known as "les Prés", the church was the center of an important abbey complex, famous for its scholarship and its production of illuminated manuscripts, and was the burial place of Germain, and also of Childebert and other rulers of the Merovingian Dynasty.

In the Eleventh century it housed an important scriptorium which produced scholarly manuscripts which were distributed throughout Europe.

The newly rebuilt church was consecrated by Pope Alexander III on 21 April 1163, The flying buttresses, the first in the Ile-de-France, were added at the end of the 12th century.

These included a new Abbey church by architect Pierre de Montreuil inspired by the newly built Saint Chapelle.

They were particularly devoted to research and scholarship, They trained monks to collect and study texts on varied subjects and produced very fine illuminated manuscripts, which circulated throughout Europe, and made Paris one of the leading academic centres of the continent.

[13] Until the late 17th century, the Abbey owned most of the land in the Left Bank west of the current Boulevard Saint-Michel and had administrative autonomy in it, most clearly for the part outside the walls of Paris.

(see also: September Massacres) In September 1792, during the French Revolution, a group of about one hundred priests, who refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to the new Revolutionary government, were being held in the Abbey prison, along with aristocrats who had been arrested by the Jacobins, and Swiss Guards who had survived an earlier massacre.

On September 2 The Revolutionary leader Georges Danton gave a speech to his assembled followers on the Champ de Mars, declaring "We ask that anyone refusing to give personal service or to furnish arms shall be punished with death.

[15] During the rest of the Revolutionary period, The Abbey and the church were closed, and the buildings were used for storage and manufacturing gunpowder and arms.

Other works recovered included the marble statue of the Virgin given to the Louvre by Queen Jeanne d'Evreux.

[17] The saltpetre stored in the church during the Revolution had badly damaged the pilings on the north side, and the nave itself could not be used.

For this purpose he employed colourful frescoes illustrating scenes of the Old Testament which announced the coming life of Christ.

During the same period, the architect Baltard commissioned sculptors to make new capitals for the columns of the arcades in the nave, choir and apse, based on the medieval originals stored in the Cluny Museum.

[20] From 1848 to 1853, Baltard restored the top level of the western tower, opening up the bays, and remaking the columns and other architectural features, but leaving nothing of the original 12th century work.

[21] From 2017 to 2020. the City of Paris and the church carried out a major restoration of the interior of the building, particularly the 19th century murals in the nave, whose original colours had faded.

On the south side of the church, along Boulevard Saint-Germain, the walls and vaults are supported by a row of flying buttresses from the end of the 12th century, the first in the Ile-de-France region.

The nave is bordered with small chapels, and concludes with the choir, where the clergy worshipped, and where the altar is located.

Some of the elements of the original, such as the capitals of the columns in the arcades of the nave, were in poor condition and have been moved to the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages.

[27] During the 19th century restoration of the church, the neoclassical artist Hippolyte Flandrin was selected to design the overall decor.

It contains a series of small chapels decorated with Romanesque arcades of slender columns whose capitals feature the heads of angels and classical sirens.

The square chapel is of an extreme simplicity, with windows high up the walls giving it a large amount of light.

Numerous other artists assisted the project, notably Alexandre Denuelle, who painted the elaborate designs which framed the murals.

[34] The marble pulpit in the nave (1827) was designed by Quatremère de Quincy, the highly-influential theorist and art historian who led the movement promoting classical Roman and Greek features in French architecture.

The original sculpted capitals of the columns in the nave were removed in the 19th century, and placed in the Cluny Museum for their preservation.

The new column capitals installed during the renovation by Hippolyte Flandrin were directly inspired by the surviving originals, which, in a very poor state of preservation, had largely been transferred to the Cluny Museum.

[37] During the 19th century restoration, new windows for the rest of the church were designed by Flandrin, and were made by the master glass Alfred Gérente.

Some windows, including a scene showing the death of Saint Germain, are currently in the collection of Winchester College.

It was located in what is now the Boulevard Saint-Germain, just west of the current Passage de la Petite Boucherie.

The prison was known for its extremely poor condition, for example, in 1836, Benjamin Appert wrote :[44] The cells are abominable and so humid that the soldiers incarcerated there, often for minor offences, must subsequently go to the Val-de-Grâce hospital to recover from their imprisonment.During the Revolution it became notorious as the site of some of the September Massacres that took place on 2–7 September 1792.