The Surprising History of ‘O Holy Night’

But several Decembers ago, in stop-and-go traffic, I pushed a yard-sale cassette into the dash and heard something I’d unaccountably missed—the original “Minuit, Chrétiens,” sung in French.

“Minuit, Chrétiens!” it begins, “c’est l’heure solennelle, où l’Homme Dieu descendit jusqu’à nous!” “Midnight, Christians! It is the solemn hour when the Man-God came down to us!” That’s the ticket. Announce the good news right out of the gate! And on I listened, and became more and more fascinated. “Le monde entier tressaille d’esperance”—“the whole world trembles with hope,” a beautiful image of that shivering and astonished night.

But it was at the next verse that my ears really perked up. “Le Rédempteur a brisé toute entrave / La terre est libre et le ciel est ouvert / Il voit un frère où n’était qu’un esclave / L’amour unit ceux qu’enchaînait le fer.” The forceful image of a Redeemer as chain-breaker and brother of slaves had me madly guessing about the song’s history. It must be some time after the revolution because it’s genuinely Christian, but not terribly long afterwards, with its language of brotherhood unchained, its rather irregular theology, and the notable absence of a certain bourgeois namby-pambitude that comes to mind when one thinks of later-19th-century France. The 1830s, or maybe the ’40s, I guessed, and once we’d extricated ourselves from the commute, I went to check it out.

And found a most astonishing story, with laurels, brickbats, calumny, anti-Semitism, cameo appearances by Brook Farm and Action française—in fact, enough nuts for the finest array of the 13 desserts traditional at Christmas feasts in the Languedoc, where “Minuit, Chrétiens,” an example of a cantique de Noël, was first performed in December 1847.

The little town of Roquemaure had recently fixed up the 17th-century organ in the parish church, according to most accounts, and M. l’abbé Petitjean requested, for a Christmas debut, a song from the local poet, lawyer, and wine merchant Placide Cappeau. At the time there was residing in the town a soprano, Mme. Émily Laurey, a friend of the renowned composer Adolphe Adam, who agreed to write music expressly for her to perform this new canticle of Christmas, and she did, in the church of St. Jean-Baptiste et Jean l’Évangeliste at the Christmas midnight mass 1847. And along with the Christ child, that night, was born an immortal song, as necessary to a French Christmas as “Silent Night” has become elsewhere.

Lots of the locals seem to have taken the composition to their hearts. There’s at least one report soon afterwards of cantique fatigue: Every bourgeois piano along the main street of one provincial town was tinkling out the strains of Monsieur Adam’s composition within weeks. But as it circulated more widely, it began to run into trouble—theological trouble, which has followed it almost to this day, and critical trouble, which is of course eternal.

First of all, you see, the poet Cappeau was a Voltairean free-thinker who made his Redeemer a sort of energetic redresser of inequities, including the burden of original sin. He was, says Gérard Cholvy, the late French historian to whom nearly all of this essay is indebted, “a republican, a democrat, and a socialist, in the sense that was understood in 1848.” From the start, Cappeau’s theology was recognized as unconventional, indeed dubious. In the earliest version of “Minuit” the “Man-God” Christ descends to “stop the rage” of His Father, when orthodox theology says that Christ came from love, his and his Father’s, for eternity, not for a drop-by to calm down the Old Man.

The first version also says that Christ came to erase the “original stain” of Adam’s fall, but it was Cappeau who heretically wiped it out 30 years later, striking the line from his poem because he didn’t believe in the “absurd doctrine” and emphasizing Christ as the redresser of inequality and injustice. By then as well, the pantheist writer Alphonse de Lamartine had called the “Minuit” “the Marseillaise of religion,” a judgment with which French churchmen were inclined to concur, though they didn’t at all take it as praise.

Instead it neatly encapsulated, for many, the political as well as the theological problems of the “Minuit.” The “echoes of ’48,” as a critical priest called them, the breezes that blew republicanism and socialism, nationalism and a sort of liberation theology, rustled the olive leaves of Roquemaure briskly on their way toward rattling the church’s rose windows, yet another threatened storm after decades of peril and upheavals.

Since 1789, the French church had been outlawed, pillaged, given a modicum of legal rights, told it couldn’t listen to the pope, told maybe it could, been given back some of its rights but not others, had those too occasionally snatched away. Cappeau’s heterodoxy came along at a time when the ecclesiastical establishment was very much out of patience with being insulted, and it was not kindly received.

Many were inclined to reject it on aesthetic grounds, too, as “the last word in useless bad taste.” The movement to revive Gregorian chant had started in France only a few years before; its proponents saw it not only as a beautiful and exalted way to approach God but as part of restoring the life of the church itself. Why would anyone prefer to “dress a clown up in a monk’s hood” by shoehorning in “the product of the momentary conjunction of an Israëlite and a Pelagian”—that is, of the Jewish composer Adam and the heretical lyricist Cappeau?

This harsh characterization was a later one, though it would have made sense to the contemporary critics of the “Minuit.” But I’ve discovered as I worked on this essay that while Pelagian do-goodery might be implied in Cappeau’s words, the supposed Jewishness of Adolphe Adam is far from a demonstrated fact.

From curiosity I looked into Adam’s biography. His father, also a musician, came to Paris from Alsace, where Adam has long been a surname—an Alsatian source says that first names, in their German forms, are commonly so used, and the first name in the list of examples is . .  . Adam. His funeral was at his parish church in Montmartre, and I haven’t found anything to suggest that his family were converts, which is usually in sentence two of any biography of Mendelssohn or Disraeli.

Of course, accuracy wouldn’t much have concerned the song’s critics, who thought calling something Jewish was the ultimate insult; the accusation above was launched in 1923 in a Catholic journal. Unsurprisingly their fascist contemporaries were even more unpleasant—Action française sneeringly called the composition “Jewish music” in the same year.

In North America the “Minuit” seems to have quickly become indispensable to a Quebec Christmas service, imported in the 1850s by a Canadian who had studied music in France. The theological controversy wasn’t unknown there, but the cantique became synonymous with Noël, and it was long an honor to be chosen soloist on Christmas Eve. Cholvy suggests jokingly at one point that everyone knows, presumably in Quebec as well as in France, that Protestants go to midnight mass on Christmas, too, just to hear the “Minuit, Chrétiens”!

The story is different in the United States. The slight air of elevated abstraction in the English version of 1855 with which we are all familiar, “O Holy Night,” with its saccharine glaze of sweetly gleaming stars and angel voices and chocolate box Magi, seems quite a distance from the original. Where Cappeau tells the proud and haughty to regard the crèche and bow their high heads, John Sullivan Dwight’s travelers are led by a “serenely beaming” light to stand in the stable with “glowing hearts.” This discrepancy is not so perplexing when one learns that Dwight was not only a Unitarian minister but a leading light in later transcendentalist circles, even unto being the director of the school at Bronson Alcott’s Brook Farm.

“Minuit, Chrétiens” has remained sufficiently controversial in France that as late as 1990 the famous soprano Jessye Norman was forbidden to sing it in Notre-Dame de Paris. At the same time it’s widely regarded as the sine qua non of a joyeux noël. Perhaps first lady Melania Trump, who recently told some children that it’s her favorite Christmas song, is of a mind with a group of French university students several decades ago. Cholvy had been lecturing about the history of this cantique, sung, he said, in “the old days” at Christmas. Oh, no, not the old days, said the students, producing battered lyric handouts from their parishes. “Mais monsieur, on le chant chez nous.” “We always sing it back home.”

Priscilla M. Jensen is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.