Southern French Gothic

After the political eradication of the Cathar aristocracy during the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), the clergy of southern France understood that after having won the war, it was necessary for them to win back the minds of the populace.

In an area poor in stone, the typical construction material was brick, whose use in the Southern French Gothic of the regions of Toulouse, Montauban and Albi became one of its distinguishing marks.

After the Cathar episode, one goal of the Catholic Church was the recovery of the faithful through preaching (hence the foundation by Dominique de Guzmán of the order of the Friars Preachers).

There, the grafting of a single apse of polygonal plan on a church with two vessels gave birth to a starry vault whose complex organization anticipated more than a century on the Flamboyant Gothic.

In opposition to the party developed for the Jacobins and in the rest of the region, the master of Albi preferred to reinforce the overall unity of the construction, minimising breaks in the plan, reducing the horizontal division of the volume and softening the rhythm of the ship's bays.

In the Toulouse region, the typical bell tower appeared in the Romanesque period, with an octagonal floor plan and stories progressively decreasing in size.

The other form of the bell tower, more common in smaller buildings, is the wall belfry, also frequently characterized by miter arches, and often resembling fortifications in having elements such as battlements and machicolations.

At the church of Notre-Dame de Simorre, it was the 19th-century architect and conservationist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc who added battlements and watchtowers to the top of the buttresses.

The same architectural principles of sobriety of construction, absence or limitation of carved decoration, massive appearance, and defensive elements can, however, be found in buildings used for other purposes.