Hidden twins? Spalen Gate and St Paul's Church

Around 500 years separate two of Basel's most famous landmarks. And yet they have much more in common than you might think: in the 18th century, the name ‘Paulustor’ or ‘St Paul's Gate’ came into use for the Spalentor, which has completely disappeared again today. But how did this sacred corruption come about?

Given the strikingly similar proportions, was Karl Moser inspired by Spalen Gate? (Collage)

In his reference work ‘Basler Kirchen’ (published by Helbing & Lichtenhahn in 1917), Basel historian Ernst Alfred Stückelberg (1867-1926) suggested a derivation from a church dedicated to St Paul in the former Gnadental monastery in Spalenvorstadt. He referred to a Latin document dated 29 January 1346, which the Jura scholar Joseph Trouillat had transcribed in his five-volume collection ‘Monuments de l'histoire de l'ancien évêché de Bâle’ and which contained the decisive sentence about the consecration of the church: "ecclesiam vero in honore sancti Pauli apostoli consecravimus et dedicavimus".

Stückelberg's thesis caused a veritable scholarly controversy. Only a short time later, his colleague, the ancient historian Felix Stähelin (1873-1952), voiced strong objections and quoted the historian Daniel Albert Fechter (1805-1876), who in 1852, in the ‘Basler Taschenbuch’ he published, described Paulus being the eponym as a ‘burlesque invention’ and ‘a linguistic piece of legerdemain unique in its kind’. Stähelin argued that, to his knowledge, not a single document existed in which the monastery church in question was referred to as St Paul's Church. Rather, it had simply been titled ‘Gnadental’ or with later, equally temporary patrocinia (‘St Clara extra muros’, ‘St Laurentius’) - although Stähelin admitted that he lacked specialist hagiographical knowledge.

Stückelberg replied that changes of patronage were very rare and had never before been documented in Basel. The patronages of St Clare and St Lawrence cited by Stähelin would therefore have referred to the choir and an altar in the monastery church respectively; the naming of St Clare was subsequently avoided in order to rule out confusion with the Clarisse monastery in Kleinbasel. In a final reply, Stähelin considered it impossible that names of saints that only appeared two centuries after the Reformation could be derived from a patron saint that had not been documented since 1346. The derivation of the term ‘Spalen’ from the Latin palus ('stake', ‘palisade’) propagated by Fechter is historically very well documented and widely accepted today. However, what caused the (re-)emergence of a St Paul's patronage around the Spalenvorstadt, which has been documented since 1755 (even the name ‘St Paulusberg’ was found for the Spalenberg), can only be surmised.

Was it perhaps resourceful Francophiles who wanted to emphasise Basel's proximity to France? Stückelberg suggested that there must be further evidence for his thesis in historical sources from Sundgovia or travelogues by Council prelates and Huguenots. He pointed out that in French the church was called ‘église St-Paul’, the Spalenvorstadt ‘faubourg St-Paul’ (St Paul's suburb) and the Spalentor ‘porte St-Paul’, i.e. St Paul's gate. He drew a comparison with Gänsbrunnen in Solothurn (French ‘Saint-Joseph’) and noted: ‘The Catholic thus favours the religious, the German-speaking Protestant the profane place name’. In any case, a steel engraving made by the English illustrator William Tombleson in 1835 proves that the name ‘Paulustor’ spread beyond the city limits.

It remains unclear whether the Protestant Reformed Church Council was aware of all these facts when the naming of St Paul's Church was being discussed. The name ‘St Mark's Church’ was also under discussion and the originally preferred name ‘New St Leonard’ was rejected by the governing council. Would a different decision have been made afterwards if it had been known that the latter-day granary was once the first St Paul's Church in Basel?

The following fun fact rounds off the presumed relationship of the hidden twins: The site where St Paul's Church was built from 1898, just a few hundred metres from Spalen Gate, was previously a country estate owned by the Legrand family, who came to Basel as Huguenot refugees in the 16th century, and whose most famous member Johann Lukas Legrand (1755-1836) became the first president of the French vassal state (the ‘République helvétique’) and thus of a national government in Swiss history.

Just as Spalen Gate may have owed the brief renaissance of its slangy second name largely to the French speakers, St Paul's Church is also built on French-influenced foundations to some degree - in a double sense, as some of the sandstone in the church walls comes from Luxeuil-les-Bains in the Vosges.

Text and research by David Rossel