Église Saint-Louis

Vichy is known for its spa architecture and for the four years during the Second World War when it housed the French government, but its main church is a monument to an earlier chapter: the Second Empire, when Napoleon III made the town fashionable. The Église Saint-Louis was built in the 1860s on the emperor's orders, in a spa town that was growing fast, and it stands at the edge of the Parc des Sources, close to the casino and the main hotels. It is a handsome church of grey and yellow stone, in a mixture of neo-Romanesque and neo-Gothic styles.

Napoleon III took the waters at Vichy several times in the early 1860s and took a close interest in the development of the town. During these years, he commissioned a series of works that transformed it, including the park along the Allier river, the covered galleries and spa buildings, and the chalets built for the imperial family, some of which still stand. The old church of Saint-Blaise, in the older part of the town, was too small and in poor repair for a resort that was attracting thousands of visitors, and the emperor decreed the construction of a new one. The works began in 1862, and the church was completed in 1865. It was dedicated to Saint Louis in honour of the emperor's own baptismal name and those of his father and son.

The exterior shows the style of the period. Two square towers rise on either side of the facade, which has a porch with a carved tympanum showing Christ with the four evangelists, and a gable decorated with mosaics. The architecture draws on the Romanesque churches of Auvergne and Burgundy, the two regions that meet near Vichy, and adds Gothic details in the windows and vaults. Inside, the nave is bright and the decoration colourful, and the stained glass is the most interesting feature. The windows, made by the glass painter Antoine Lusson, represent the patron saints of the imperial family, including Saint Napoleon, whose features were modelled on those of the first emperor, so that the windows are a form of political statement in the language of church decoration.

In the choir hangs a large painting dated 1915 by Alphonse Osbert, a symbolist painter, which adds a twentieth-century touch to a Second Empire church. The church is open every day and entry is free, and it offers a quiet space in a busy part of the town. Visitors can see how the imperial taste shaped even the religious architecture of the spa, and the church contrasts with the more exuberant Belle Époque buildings nearby.

Vichy has much more to see. The Parc des Sources, with its galleries and fountains, is where people have come to drink the mineral waters since the nineteenth century, and the Opéra and casino complex, the Hôtel du Parc and the Boulevard de la République recall different periods of the town's history. The church suits architecture lovers and those interested in the Second Empire, and a visit takes about twenty minutes.