Journées de Patrimoine, our Normandy heritage ...to destroy or save a Monument...the Crown of Thorns...
| Friday, September 25, 2020
Dear Friend,
It was the end of summer, entrance to golden September and misty autumn. And last weekend was also the Journées du Patrimoine in France, when we turn to the misty past. The Chateau de Courtomer and its rare 17th-century Protestant temple were both listed on the national register of Monuments historiques in the 20th century, but France’s historic preservation movement got its start much earlier.
The "Fête del'Unité" in August 1793, Place de la Concorde, complete with prisoners bound for the guillotine and an auto-da-fé of hated objects. Painting by Demachy, Musée Carnavalet
In our corner of Normandy, the Abbayes aux Hommes et aux Dames, twin abbeys founded by William the Conqueror and his wife Matilda at Caen, as well as a Gallo-Roman archeological site at Vieux-la-Romaine nearby were on the program. There was also a 19th-century chapel covered in psychedelic graffiti by its hip 20th-century priest, and railroad cars from the 1970s to see.
Patrimoine, in the old-fashioned sense, is what the head of a family creates and then leaves to his heirs. In the larger sense, it is the cultural heritage that a place, an epoch, or a nation leaves to the future. That was undoubtedly what William and Matilda had in mind, and perhaps even the priest, but…a red and yellow passenger car?
It’s an understatement to observe that France has a complicated relationship with its heritage. It took centuries of war and civil strife to create a stable national territory, and a bloody revolution to overthrow the monarchy that had forged it over 1,000 years. The French Revolution left deep scars when it tore the Ancien Regime to pieces; affection for the past, loyalty to old things and old ways, still rouses deep and conflicting emotions.
As the Revolution veered away from its Enlightenment foundation towards greater and greater violence, the destruction of les monuments historiques accelerated. Heads were smashed off statues of saints and kings, stained glass shattered, precious objects melted down for bullion or pried apart for jewels. Entire libraries and archives went up in flames. Châteaux and abbeys were quarried for building stone, their valuable lead roofs stripped off. This was not particularly the work of mobs or profiteers. Having confiscated church property and guillotined the king, the revolutionary government was intent on publicly destroying all visible remains of the authority of church and crown.
The painter Hubert Robert captured the nonchalance of a hired crew, exhuming of the tombs of the French kings at Saint Denis in 1793. Musée Carnavalet
A few months after the execution of Louis XVI, hired work crews exhumed the bodies of the French kings from the Abbey church of Saint Denis outside Paris, tossed them in a lime pit, and hacked apart their tombs. An official was sent to Reims to destroy the Sainte Ampoule. The ancient glass vial, used in the coronation of French kings since the 10th century, was smashed to smithereens in a ceremony that strangely imitated a religious fête.
Little children dressed in white, a procession of old men, and citizens singing patriotic songs were summoned to the public square to listen to a fiery speech and witness the destruction. The Sainte Ampoule contained a sacred balm for anointing the kings of France. Furthermore, it had been miraculously transported through the air by a dove into Saint Rémy’s hands just after his baptism of Clovis, first king of France, in 496. Despite dutifully applauding the action, the patriots of Reims furtively gathered up bits and pieces of the vial. The unction it had contained was held to have healing powers. And perhaps they rather regretted the Saint Ampoule’s loss and all it represented.
Normandy, which had a disproportionate share of noble families, was not spared the “vandalisme revolutionnaire.” Our own chateau de Courtomer escaped with a mild sacking, but many of our neighbors were not so lucky. The splendid chateau of the duc de Saint Simon, companion in arms to our own Claude de Saint-Simon de Courtomer, was pillaged and then confiscated from his heir. A speculator stripped the stone, iron, and lead from the building; 31,000 trees in the domain’s forest fell to the ax. Utter destruction was only averted by the buyer’s default. The château de La Ferté-Vidame remains to this day a magnificent ruin, a melancholy monument to the Ancien Regime, and still the property of the French state.
The same fate almost befell the fabulous Renaissance château d’Anet, also nearby. It belonged to the duke of Penthièvre, cousin to the ill-fated Louis XVI. Here was where Diane de Poitiers, mistress to both François 1e and his son Henry II, was buried. The Revolution had no truck with such “despots” and their scarlet women. Diane’s body was exhumed from its tomb on the estate and tossed into a common grave. But the château and its contents were too precious to destroy outright; only after architectural elements of the château and its sculptures were taken to Paris, and the furnishings sold at auction, was the rest of the chateau allowed to fall into ruin. In 1840, fortunately, a private owner began its restoration. And in the 1850s, it was declared a Monument historique.
Diane de Poitiers in her bath, by the famous Renaissance painter Francois Clouet. A great beauty, Diane was said to bathe in milk.
Our local religious edifices were not spared, either. The family coat of arms on the old Chateau church were cut away, and the building temporarily became a grange. At Notre Dame of Seés, the medieval relief of the cathedral’s tympanum is still pitted with the iconoclastic blows of the Revolutionary ax.
The cathedral of Alençon was looted, its roof ripped off, and the building left to subside into ruin. And on the coast, the abbey of Mont Saint Michel became a prison for wayward priests who refused to support the Revolution.
Even for Revolutionaries, the destruction was appalling. Antoine-Augustin Renouard, loyal Jacobin, but also a bibliophile and philologist, was not alone when he addressed the revolutionary government:
“Faudra-t-il briser tous les cadres où se trouve quelques fleurs de lys? Couvrir d’une couche de gris ou noir les productions de Raphaël, de Poussin, de Lebrun, parce que leur pinceau immortel nous a transmis les images des rois ou des princes? Où s’arrêtait donc cette destruction? “
“Must one smash every picture with a fleur de lys [emblem of the Bourbon monarchy]? Cover with grey or black paint the works of Raphaël, Poussin, Lebrun, because their immortal brush has transmitted the images of kings or princes? Where will this destruction stop?”
France, declaimed the Abbé Gregoire, priest and Revolutionary leader, had abandoned the “Revolution of Progress.” Gregoire coined the word “vandalism” and said France was heading for “la barbarie des premiers enfants de la terre.” Furthermore, he added, the barbaric destruction of objets was but the outward expression of dangerous new attitudes which were ushering scientists, artists, and men and women of letters to the guillotine:
“Proclamer l’ignorance, proscrire les hommes instruits, bannir le genie, paralyser la pensée…”
“Proclaiming ignorance, proscribing educated men, banishing genius, paralyzing thought…”
It was one of the “Terroristes,” Bertrand Barère himself, who finally halted the willy-nilly destruction of holy, royal and aristocratic objects.
“Les revolutions des peuples barbares détruisent tous les monuments et la trace des arts semble effacée. Les peuples éclairés les conservent, les embellissent…” he remonstrated. “The revolutions of barbaric peoples destroy monuments and the vestiges of the arts are erased. Enlightened peoples conserve and beautify…”
Objects confiscated from the church, emigrés, and other “enemies of the state” would be stocked in the former convent of the Petits-Augustins in Paris. The artist Alexandre Lenoir organized them into a museum, creating an inventory, and sending away to the provinces for prized revolutionary booty.
Although much of Lenoir’s horde was restored to former owners after the Restauration of the Bourbon kings in 1816, it became painfully obvious in the decades after the Revolution that more than objects were at stake. No longer maintained by the church or the old landed aristocracy, France’s architectural heritage was collapsing.
As the famous historian, novelist, and memorialist Chateaubriand –a frequent guest at chateau de Courtomer -- wrote in 1802:
“Saint-Denis est un désert, l’oiseau l’a pris pour passage, l’herbe croît sur les autels brisés. »
“[The Abbey of] Saint Denis is a desert, the migratory bird rests here, grass grows on broken altars.”
In the royal necropolis of Saint Denis in 1793. Alexandre Lenoir attempts to save the tomb of Louis XII from destruction.
The moldering monuments seemed like the physical manifestation of the country’s profound psychological disarray. The Revolution, thought many, had broken the thread that connected France to the richness and stability of its thousand-year past. In 1830, François Guizot, historian and tireless statesman, created the new post of Inspecteur Generale des Monuments historiques. Prosper Mérimée, novelist and amateur archeologist, stepped into the role in 1834 and piloted the Monuments historiques for the next 20 years. He commissioned the architect Viollet-le-Duc to restore France’s imperiled national monuments, including Notre-Dame de Paris.
Saving significant architectural monuments was the main concern of France’s preservation movement, directed by the service des Beaux-Arts in Paris, until the tournure following the student riots of 1968. Amid the resurgence of egalitarian ideologies, the fate of noble demesnes and religious edifices -- the past itself -- seemed out of touch with current events.
But the French, like the Reimois gathering bits of the Sainte Ampoule, are reluctant iconoclasts. When Les Halles de Paris were torn down in 1971 to make way for urban improvements, indignation surged. What – no longer to gather at the Pied de Cochon for soupe à l’oignon at 3 a.m. ? And even worse, to replace the glass and iron of the great Baltard with concrete and plexiglass boxes?
It was time for a re-examination of « patrimoine» and what it meant.
President Valerie Giscard d’Estaing launched the Année de Patrimoine of 1980. The minister de Culture went on television to explain that no longer was patrimoine about the « coldness of stones, of glass that separates us from objects in a museum. » No, it was also « the village wash house, the little country church, the local dialect or the charm of family photos.» It was language itself, written and oral traditions, simple vernacular architecture.
A vision which brings us to last weekend, when railroad cars from the ‘70s and William and Matilda’s great medieval abbeys drew enthusiastic Normans of all walks of life.
But our attitudes to the past, as Giscard noted, is not static. The fire at Notre Dame de Paris last year touched off another debate about « patrimoine. » Should the roof of the Gothic cathedral incorporate solar panels? Should the edifice be rebuilt according to medieval techniques – or should modern methods prevail?
Curiously enough, I had been at Notre Dame de Paris on Good Friday, three days before the fire. An old friend had proposed that we observe the annual veneration of the Crown of Thorns. Priests in red and white celebrated the mass, assisted by members of two lay orders charged with protecting the ancient relic. The knights of the Ordre du Saint-Sepulchre wore long cream-colored cloaks emblazoned with a red cross. The dames wore full-length black cloaks with hoods. It was a solemn occasion.
I went with the congregation to the altar rail, where we leaned down to kiss the crown, encapsulated in a crystal torque with gold and enamel clasps. Inside the clear reliquary was a wreath of rushes, brown with age, into which several long, sharp thorns had been pressed.
The Protestants who lie under the temple floor at Château de Courtomer were surely spinning in their tombs at that moment; Calvin himself dismissed the Crown as a mere superstition. But it is remarkable to reflect that this very relic has been venerated in France, in this way, for almost 800 years.
The Crown of Thorns, arriving in France in 1239, is shown to the faithful in this piece of stained glass made in about 1245
Louis XVI’s ancestor, Saint Louis, acquired the Crown from the king of Jerusalem in 1239. Barefoot and dressed in a plain white tunic, the king escorted the Crown through the city to Notre Dame de Paris. The Crown was kept safe during the turbulence of the French Revolution, reappearing for public view in 1806. And in 2019, the priests of Notre Dame and the firefighters of Paris rescued it from the flames.
As Giscard put it forty years ago, «Il faut que cette idée de patrimoine ne soit pas une idée de simple conservation : c’est l’expression culturelle de la France à travers le temps passé et en vue du temps futur. »
Patrimoine, to paraphrase, is not simply conservation ; it is the expression of France’s culture through times past and the vision of its future.
And with that thought, we turned from the view of the misty park at Chateau de Courtomer to warm our hands at the crackling library fire.
A très bientôt, au Chateau de Courtomer,
