Cotignac: the first apparitions of the Modern Era (1519)

Our Lady of Graces appeared on August 10, 1519, to a humble woodcutter from France's Provence-Alps-Cote d’Azur region, named Jean de la Baume. The following day, she appeared again, accompanied by the Child Jesus, the Archangel Michael and Saint Bernard. The Virgin Mary asked for a chapel to be build on the spot and promised many graces to those who would come to pray there. Following this apparition, the villagers built her a shrine, which soon had a national renown.

Notre-Dame-des-Grâces church in Cotignac / © CC BY-SA 3.0/Bococo

Reasons to believe:

Jean, the woodcutter, was a sedentary man with little formal education and definitely not acquainted with books. Even supposing that someone had introduced him to sacred iconography, it is hard to see how he could have invented the detailed description of his vision, surpassing the knowledge of the clergy of his time, without making a single mistake! Jean didn't know who Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was, but the religious who questioned him were able to identify the saint from the description he gave them.

The various accounts of the apparitions, preserved to this day, are accurate and consistent with each other. For example Melchior Pasteur (born in Cotignac in 1598) recounted the apparitions according to the account given by his parents, who themselves had heard it from local people who lived through the events. Therefore the story of the Marian apparitions in Cotignac was carefully passed down orally for a century, before being written down.

The growth of the shrine was extraordinarily rapid, proving that the local population, as well as the civil and ecclesiastical authorities were convinced of its authenticity and that Jean's account was credible. Construction of a small church began only a month after the apparitions and pilgrimages began arriving.

Numerous miracles and miraculous cures occurred through the intercession of Our Lady of Graces, shortly after the Marian apparitions and for 500 years after that, without interruption.

The spiritual fruits of these apparitions have reached an incredible scale and continue to touch thousands of faithful today.

These apparitions coincide exactly with the birth of Protestantism, which rejected devotion to and the intercessions of the Virgin Mary. This context is not insignificant.

On June 7, 1660, when Louis XIV and his mother Anne of Austria were visiting Cotignac, a rare apparition of Saint Joseph, along with the discovery of a miraculous spring not far from the shrine, added to the spiritual importance of the site.

Despite periods of instability and violence, especially the French Revolution, the shrine never disappeared (the church was ransacked and rased during the French revolution but has been restored to its original appearance), and continues to attract approximately 140,000 visitors every year, making Cotignac the most visited place in the Var region of southern France.

Summary:

On August 10, 1519, Jean de la Baume, an elderly woodcutter from Cotignac (France, Var), saw the Virgin Mary on a small hill to the south of the village of Cotignac, called Mount Verdaille. The apparition asked him to tell the villagers and priests to come to the hill in procession, and to build a chapel there to honor her under the name of Our Lady of Graces.

The following day, Mary appeared a second time to Jean de la Baume, in the same place, but this time accompanied by the Child Jesus, the Archangel Michael and Saint Bernard. The apparition promised many graces and other heavenly blessings to the people who came to this miraculous hill.

The following month, a procession was organised at the site and, in the days that followed, it was decided to build a small church, as the apparition had wished. The decision was reached jointlyt by the local clergy and the villagers. The project was expected to be long, difficult and with no guarantee of success. Despite all this, construction began, and the church ended up being completed in record time by the fervent villagers.

However, the testimony of Jean de la Baume, a good and devout man, did not by itself convince the village. The people threw themselves body and soul into building the church because of the miracles occurred in the days just following the apparitions, proving that Jean was right and that the Virgin Mary was indeed present and active in Cotignac. As early as 1522, the municipal authorities of Aix-en-Provence went there to pray to Our Lady to stop an epidemic of plague. The regional pilgrimage was launched.

Over the following decades, the number of pilgrims grew exponentially. The sick, the poor, pregnant women, priests, monks and nuns came to Cotignac from all over Provence, and soon from distant towns.

In the 17th century, Cotignac became a national shrine, popular with the nobility and the royal family. In February 1638, Brother Fiacre-de-Sainte-Marguerite, a Discalced Augustinian, was sent to Cotignac by Queen Anne of Austria to ask the Virgin for an heir to the throne of France. Louis XIV was born nine months later. On February 10, King Louis XIII signed a public vow consecrating the kingdom of France to the Virgin Mary. In 1660, King Louis XIV and his mother came in person to Cotignac, where Brother Fiacre's heart was buried under the altar of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Grâces. The Sun King gave a black marble stone to the shrine, now displayed on one of the walls of the church.

No "canonical" investigation - in the modern sense - was carried out at that time, because this process wasn't in place until the 19th century, which in no way proves that all apparitions before 1800 were false. At the time, the Church took a different approach. The diocesan bishops observed, accompanied and questioned witnesses, priests, leaders of religious communities and lay people. Their main concern was pastoral. They judged the tree by its fruits and determined once and for all the origin of visionary phenomena. And indeed the spiritual and human fruits were visible in people's lives. Pope Leo X wisely granted indulgences to pilgrims in 1521, and the French episcopate decided in 1615, with the approval of Pope Urban VIII, to have religious from the prestigious Oratoire de Paris staff the shrine.

To this day, even without any official letters of approval of the apparitions (which is the case, for example, with the Miraculous Medal apparitions at Rue du Bac in 1830), the Cotignac shrine is still thriving.

The sources mentioning the two apparitions of Mary and St. Joseph have been the target of unfair and unjustified criticism. The existing historical archives dating from the early 17thcentury cannot be compared to modern journalistic investigations: at that time, neither the "press" nor "public opinion" existed as such. The religious nature of the accounts in no way invalidates their accuracy, objectivity, depth or historical interest: the Church was and is in the service of the truth, not primarily of media "objectivity". What's more, these accounts, approved by the Church and civil institutions, did not emerge in a vacuum: they are the written form of an oral account that is perfectly familiar to historians of the Ancien Régime.

In 1630, the learned Jesuit François Poiré mentioned the Cotignac apparitions in detail. Twenty years later, another Provençal author, Melchior Pasteur, who was born in Cotignac, mentioned the events of 1519 in his Traité des bénéfices et des censures ecclésiastiques, explaining that he had heard about them from his parents, who had themselves heard about them from contemporaries of Jean de la Baume. All subsequent accounts were inspired by these two authors, as well as by the historian and translator Pierre-Joseph de Haitze (d. 1737), one of the great scholars of Provençal history.

Nothing has been able to extinguish the spiritual flame burning bright at Cotignac, not even the Reign of Terror of 1793: the church was ransacked and destroyed, but quickly rebuilt identical to the original!

Patrick Sbalchiero

Beyond reasons to believe:

The longevity and spontaneous, incredible growth of the shrine, its great popularity and the good character of all key protagonists all contribute to making the Cotignac apparitions a major event in French Christian history.

Going further:

EWTN documentary, Shrine of the Holy Family: Provence, France (DVD, an original EWNT Production)

More information:

Louis Martel, Étude historique sur l'oratoire de Notre-Dame-de-Grâces en Provence, Paris, Téqui, 1881.
Official website of Our Lady of Grace Shrine in Cotignac