Giving a child a medal on the day of their christening seems self-evident today. Yet this custom is more recent than one might imagine: it only settled in the nineteenth century, at the crossroads of three much longer histories — that of devotional objects worn on the person since the Middle Ages, that of christening gifts, and that of a French medal industry of which Saumur was the capital.
Before the medal: pilgrim badges
Long before the christening medal, Christians wore signs of their faith on their person. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, pilgrims brought back from the sanctuaries small plaques of lead or tin, pilgrim badges, sewn onto their hat or cloak: the scallop shell of Saint James, the effigy of a saint, the image of a venerated Virgin. The Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris holds several hundred of them, many recovered from the Seine.
These badges disappear at the end of the sixteenth century. According to the numismatist Jean Tricou, they are then replaced by "the round or oval medals with a bail still in use today". Excavations in Provence confirm this transition: at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century, the form of the badges evolves and heralds the appearance of copper-alloy medals. The religious medal as we know it — round, pierced with a bail, worn at the neck — is born at that moment.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Counter-Reformation and the rise of devotion
The Council of Trent (1545-1563), by reaffirming, in the face of the Protestant Reformation, the veneration of saints and the legitimacy of sacred images, opens a long period of flourishing for objects of piety. Medals, rosaries and crucifixes multiply in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are blessed, worn and given; they accompany the great stages of Christian life.
It is in this context that specialised centres appear in France. In Saumur, in Anjou, the pilgrimage to Notre-Dame des Ardilliers draws crowds of the faithful from the seventeenth century onwards. Around the sanctuary settle the patenôtriers, craftsmen making rosaries, whose name comes from the Pater Noster. From making rosaries to making medals is but a step: the metal hearts and crosses of rosaries begin to be struck, then come the medals themselves.
1770: the birth of an industry in Saumur
In 1770, the Mayaud brothers found in Saumur the first true enterprise for the manufacture of religious objects. The master's thesis that the historian Benjamin La Combe devoted to the Mayaud firm, deposited at the Saumur Municipal Archives, traces its history from 1710 to 1901: a general partnership attested from 1808, run under the Empire by Pierre Mayaud, then by Noël-Henry Mayaud, who was also mayor of the town. Shortly after its creation, the sector already employs 500 to 600 people in the Saumur area.
The nineteenth century sees this know-how change scale. Some fifteen rosary factories are recorded around Saumur. Production, long carried out "at home" by independent craftsmen paid by the piece, becomes concentrated in large workshops from the 1830s and 1840s. Mayaud-Frères installs a steam engine in 1859, replaced by a more powerful one in 1861, and has vast premises built between 1860 and 1874. In 1855, the firm enters into partnership with the Monnaie de Paris. Mechanical striking — stamping, which imprints the relief in one blow under an engraved die — now makes it possible to produce fine, regular medals in large quantities. The railway spreads them throughout France. People speak of the "articles de Saumur", and the town becomes the French capital of the medal.
1830-1832: the Miraculous Medal changes everything
An event in Paris would give the religious medal unprecedented popularity. In 1830, in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity on the rue du Bac, a young novice, Catherine Labouré, reports several apparitions of the Virgin Mary. She is said to have asked her to have a medal struck in her image, bearing the invocation "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee".
After two years of hesitation on the part of her confessor, the Archbishop of Paris, Mgr de Quélen, authorises the striking. The first medals come out in June 1832, made by the Parisian goldsmith Adrien Vachette, in the midst of a cholera epidemic. The Daughters of Charity first distribute them to the sick in the hospitals. Healings and conversions are at once attributed to them; the people christen it the "miraculous medal". The figures give the measure of the phenomenon: 500,000 copies distributed in 1834, more than ten million within seven years, and the billion mark passed by the death of Catherine Labouré in 1876. According to the family archives kept by Manufacture Mayaud, it is the Saumur firm that is said to have subsequently ensured the large-scale striking of the Miraculous Medal — a role consistent with its industrial power at the time and its later partnership with the Monnaie de Paris.
For the first time, a religious medal is worn at the neck by millions of French people of all conditions. It durably establishes the idea that a medal can be a sign of protection kept on one's person for a lifetime — and prepares the ground for the christening medal.
What was given at a christening before the medal?
Christening has always been an occasion for gifts. Under the Ancien Régime, in noble and then bourgeois families, the godfather or godmother readily offered a piece of silverware: a silver spoon — hence the expression "born with a silver spoon in one's mouth" — a cup, a set of cutlery. In the countryside, the folklorist Arnold Van Gennep documented an almost universal custom in the nineteenth century: the godfather throws sugared almonds, hazelnuts, sometimes coins, to the children of the parish, to pay symbolically the "welcome fee" of his godchild into the community.
The medal, for its part, is not prescribed by the Church: no rite of baptism requires it. It belongs to custom, and this custom settles in the nineteenth century. Three factors combine: the new fervour born of the Miraculous Medal, industrial production which makes medals affordable to every purse, and the role of the godfather and godmother, witnesses to the baptism, to whom it naturally falls to give the child a lasting sign of their commitment. Gradually, the medal — then the chain that carries it — becomes the christening gift par excellence, one giving the one, the other the other, according to customs that still vary from family to family.
From the twentieth century to today
The twentieth century is harder for the Saumur industry. The decline in religious practice, foreign competition of lower quality but lower cost, and changing fashions reduce the number of factories. The Mayaud house temporarily ceases its activity in Saumur in the interwar period. The know-how, however, does not disappear: the Institut de Bijouterie de Saumur still trains young medal makers, and the dies engraved in the nineteenth century continue to be used or reinterpreted. This is one of the strengths of Manufacture Mayaud, which holds a library of several thousand emblematic historic models that it strikes again or reinterprets. New models, sculpted and struck in France, also come into being to keep this craft of passion alive.
The christening medal, for its part, has come through the century changing in meaning more than in form. It is no longer reserved for practising families: many see it first as a jewel of memory, engraved with a first name and a date, to be handed down. The Guardian Angel, the dove or a simple cross join the Virgin and Child and the patron saints in the repertoire of subjects. But the gesture has remained that of the nineteenth century: a godfather, a godmother, and a small disc of gold or silver that tells a child someone is watching over them.
Sources
- Jean Tricou, "Enseignes de pèlerinages et de dévotion", Bulletin des musées lyonnais, 1957, no. 2, pp. 39-51.
- Denis Bruna, Les enseignes de pèlerinage et les enseignes profanes au Musée national du Moyen Âge, Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996.
- "La pratique du pèlerinage en Provence à la fin du Moyen Âge et au début de l'époque moderne d'après les enseignes et les ampoules", Archéologie médiévale, 2017.
- Arnold Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, cited in Annales de démographie historique, 2009/1.
- Benjamin La Combe, Histoire de l'entreprise Mayaud de Saumur (1710-1901), master's thesis in history, Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 1997, Saumur Municipal Archives.
- Ville de Saumur, "Hôtel Mayaud dit de Castellane".
- Saumur Kiosque, "Saumur a été la capitale française de la médaille", 2023, and "Les patenôtriers au cœur des Ardilliers", 2022.
- Saumur-Jadis, "Du chapelet à la médaille".
- Diocese of Paris, "Sainte Catherine Labouré"; France Catholique, "L'étonnante histoire de la Médaille miraculeuse".