Monastery of the Jacobins

At the eastern end of a long brick church in Toulouse, a single slender column rises 28 metres and bursts at the top into twenty-two ribs that spread across the vault of the apse like the fronds of a tree. Known as the Palmier, the Palm Tree of the Jacobins, it is the climax of a building in which a row of columns runs straight down the middle of the nave, each one carrying the fan of ribs above it. The pillars are only 1.4 metres thick, so the space feels unusually open and light for its height, and the whole church, from the buttresses to the vaults, is built of the region's pink brick.

The church belonged to the Dominicans, who were nicknamed Jacobins in medieval France after their first Paris house on the Rue Saint-Jacques. The order itself was born in Toulouse: in 1215 Dominic gathered a small community of preachers here to win back a region where Catharism was strong, and in 1230 the friars began a modest double-naved church, one half for themselves and one for the people. Over the following century the building grew to its present scale. A choir with side chapels was added from 1245, the choir was raised and vaulted between 1275 and 1292, when the builders solved the problem of covering it by gathering the ribs onto one central support, and the seven-storey bell tower and high windows followed. A new vault for the nave was begun in 1325 to match the choir. The result became a model for Southern French Gothic, a style of plain brick walls, sparse decoration and wide unified interiors that deliberately set itself apart from the elaborate cathedrals of the north.

In 1368 Pope Urban V decreed that the remains of Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian, be brought from Italy to Toulouse, and they arrived in 1369. Today they are kept in a reliquary in the church, to which they were returned in 1974 after a period at the basilica of Saint-Sernin. The convent complex also includes a fourteenth-century cloister, a chapter house, a refectory and the chapel of Saint Antonin, built between 1335 and 1341. After the Revolution the Dominicans were expelled, and from 1810 the church served as an army barracks, with floors inserted and stables on the ground level, until citizens persuaded the army to leave in 1861. Toulouse, the capital of Occitanie on the Garonne, is often called the pink city for the brick of its old centre, where the Jacobins stand a few streets from the Capitole.

Getting there

The church and convent are in the historic centre of Toulouse, about 0.3 km from the main square of the Capitole. The nearest airport is Toulouse–Blagnac (TLS), about 7 km away.