Saint-Vincent is the patron saint of winegrowers and vineyards. He was celebrated in VÉTHEUIL by the Confrérie of the same name, which had its own chapel in the church and engaged in a number of rituals with all its members.
Indeed, winegrowing has been present in the Paris region since the Middle Ages, especially along the meandering Seine, as wine was traded via the Seine to Rouen and England.
In the 18th century, a number of parishes were major producers of wine from the Seine valley: St-Martin-La-Garenne, Guernes, Vétheuil, Haute-Isle, La-Roche-Guyon, etc. Each of these parishes owned 100 or 200 hectares of vines and produced several thousand hectolitres of wine. Traffic on the Seine to Paris was considerable. One traveler compared the hillsides of La-Roche-Guyon to the banks of the Gironde.
The end of the 19th century was the last phase of vineyard activity in the Paris region. Around 1880-1890, activity began to decline except in Argenteuil, and the Mousseaux press operated for its last year in 1894.
This decline was the result of a number of factors: the uprooting of vines to replace them with rye, years of loss-making sales, the phylloxera crisis, powdery mildew and mildew after 1850, external supply, but also competition with cider (more profitable) from 1750 in the Vexin region.
In the Mantes region and around Limetz in 1899, land prices showed the gradual disappearance of vineyards and, above all, the beginnings of hillside overgrowth:
"When a hectare of vines isn't worth more than a hectare of undergrowth, it's a sign that the time for vines has passed, and that they no longer provide food for the farmer. For a century now, their appearance has remained unchanged; the wild vines still throw up their branches, and only the occasional second home pierces the bushy mass of shrubs that have spread their roots in this fertile soil that has suddenly become ungrateful". (Marcel Lachiver)
The transformation of hillside agriculture was already apparent in the 1930s, and intensified after the 1950s. As early as 1928, Ernest Colas, an arboriculturist from Haute-Isle, lamented the exodus to the cities:
"It was a pleasure, then, to see the green checkerboard of a very prosperous vineyard, free from disease [...] walnut trees [...] have suffered the same fate and have become very rare. The young people of the countryside, better educated than in the past, have emigrated to the towns, abandoning agriculture, which is extremely thankless in Haute-Isle, where the use of farm machinery is practically impossible on sloping land. Old farmers are becoming rarer and are not being replaced; their land is becoming uncultivated, and the hillsides are becoming a vast wasteland invaded by brambles and thorns [...]".
And so the vines largely disappeared from the banks of the Seine.
But who was Saint-Vincent and why was he chosen to become the patron saint of winegrowers?
A young deacon from Saragossa in Spain, Vincent, born in Hues, was martyred and died in Valencia in 304. According to historians, Saint-Vincent became the protector of winegrowers in the Paris region because the first vine growers had worked under the auspices of the Abbey of Saint-Vincent, which preserved relics of the Saint from Spain. This abbey later became St-Germain-des-Prés.
According to some legends, VIN represents the product of the vine, while CENT (SANG) represents the blood of Christ. Another legend has it that wherever Vincent's donkey set hooves, vines flourished!
The winegrowers of Vétheuil and the surrounding area formed a Confrérie for social and religious reasons. We don't know the exact date of the Confrérie's creation, but it may date back to the Middle Ages. In 1900, it still had 100 members. It was dissolved around 1907.
Like all confraternities, it had its own rules, hierarchy, costumes, insignia and rituals. It kept a register and held annual elections to choose the holder of the "processional baton".
The holder of the baton undertook to pay for the feast of Saint-Vincent, celebrated on January 22. Like the Confrérie de la Charité, members of the Confrérie de Saint-Vincent were involved in social work.
Unfortunately, apart from the ritual staff (first quarter of the 16th century), which is listed as a Historic Monument, and the statue of Saint-Vincent, we no longer have any records of this Vétheuil brotherhood: all archives have disappeared.
Other wine-producing villages in the Vexin region also had Confréries of the same type, which died out around the same time. But it should be noted that there are still numerous Confréries de Saint-Vincent active in France today, in all wine-growing regions (Champagne, Burgundy, etc.).
The painting illustrating this article, "The Red Vine", by Vincent VAN GOGH, was painted in 1888 and is part of the collections of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
The photos of St Vincent and the procession sticks are by Pierre Poschadel.
