In general should routes be placed before or after middleware?

Oddly, when I moved my middleware in front of my routes, my routes stopped working. I got no error, on the client or the server.

My fetch() calls seemingly disappeared.

However when I put the routes before my middleware, the routes begin to work again.

I’m refactoring code and have no idea why this is happening.

// load middleware
const middleware = require(__dirname +'/middleware');
app.use(middleware.session.session);
...

// load routes
const routes = require(__dirname + '/routes');
app.use('/articles', routes.articles);
...