In comparison to Italy, chant reform in France after the Council of Trent followed a relatively haphazard path, with no centralized efforts to align chant declamation with humanist practice. At the Abbey of Montmartre, however, a cadre of clerics and nobles associated with members of the Guise family provided an environment in which chant reform may have followed strict humanist principles. Part of a strategy to bring the saint to whom the Abbey was dedicated, Saint Denis (now conflated with Saint Dionysius and even Pseudo-Dionysius), to greater prominence, the reform of this chant was also accompanied by the building of a large priory dedicated to Saint Denis and the Eucharist, and the composition (by Antoine Boësset) of a body of polyphonic music based on it. At the same time, another religious foundation, the Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus Christ, developed its own ‘reformed’ chant, this time abandoning the rhythms of antiquity for something much more flexible and ‘modern’. While both institutions were closely associated with the king, the chant of the Oratorians explicitly celebrated the idea of kingship, while the chant at Montmartre actively undermined it.