Saving the Light at Chartres
Page 34
General Orders: Headquarters, Third US Army, General Orders No. 75 (October 21, 1944).
“Making him a saint”: Tilar Mazzeo, Irena’s Children (New York: Gallery Books, 2016), xii.
“Methods for protection of monuments”: André F. Noblecourt, The Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, Museums and Monuments VIII, trans. from original French text of August 1956 (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1958), text available online at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000071205, 130; Elizabeth Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures: French Art and Heritage under Vichy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), 102–18.
“Professor Peter Sahlins”: John Hickey, “Notre Dame Fire like the Burning of the Library of Alexandria, Historian Says,” Berkeley News, University of California, Berkeley, April 15, 2019, https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/04/15/notre-dame-fire-a-loss-to-the-french-that-americans-cant-completely-visualize/.
NOTES TO PROLOGUE
“Crown jewel was its cathedral”: Reims Cathedral’s naves were the length of a football stadium. It was France’s equivalent of Westminster Abbey, site of coronations of kings, royal weddings, and funerals since the Middle Ages, built in the twelfth century on the site of the basilica where Clovis I was baptized by Saint Remi, bishop of Reims, in 496, which in turn had been built on the site of Roman baths.
“He knew then what it meant”: Maurice Landrieux, The Cathedral of Reims: The Story of a German Crime, trans. Ernest E. Williams (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), 11.
“German officers couldn’t believe”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 12. His phrasing, quoting Abbé Andrieux’s diary from two days later.
“Prussians claimed . . . the shelling was a mistake”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 13. Two Prussian officers had set out for Reims but hadn’t returned, so the Prussian commander assumed they had been taken prisoner and so ordered the batteries to make the city suffer the consequences. The two officers had never even set foot in Reims. The bombardment (182 shells) killed 60 and injured another 140.
“Abbé Rémi Thinot”: Landrieux would later write—in his 1920 book—a memorial footnote dedicated to Thinot, praising his dedication to the cathedral, his “ardent nature,” his almost “foolhardy courage,” and his contribution as photographer of a third of the many photos in the book. Thinot joined the French Army in January 1915 and was killed while performing his duty as chaplain, meriting a military citation, which read, “Having gone into the trenches at the moment of an attack to perform his ministerial functions, he was there mortally wounded whilst going to the succor of soldiers buried under the débris of a mine explosion, and while exhorting the men to do their duty.” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 4, n. 1.
“Violent gust of air”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 17.
“Hurt to see their Joan of Arc”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 21.
“Electricity in the air”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 22; Landrieux’s phrasing.
“Proclamation that the hostages would be hung”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 23; the phrasing is that of the proclamation.
“French troops entered the city”: Relieved to see them go, most townspeople had feared they would have been next to be ordered to “host” German officers. Word circulated that a German staff colonel had said on Friday evening to his French host, “Tomorrow you will hear a violent cannonade. You will probably have the moral satisfaction of seeing your own troops back; but behind Reims, on the heights, we shall stand firm, and we shall not loosen our grip upon you.” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 24.
“Red Cross flag”: On the seventeenth, Abbé Andrieux brought a third Red Cross flag that eventually weathered all storms, ensuring that at all times two flags were visible on the cathedral, which continued to float on the ruins, long after the ensuing fire. Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 27.
“Pity for the coming disaster”: Landrieux later learned that the French had decided that if the Germans had wished to make the cathedral a shelter for German wounded, why not make those wounded a safeguard for the cathedral, since an army does not fire on its own wounded? Or, “at any rate, one had not seen it done yet.” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 25.
“Only a chaplain”: Abbé Prullage, curate at Stadholm, in Westphalia.
“Shell crashed through . . . archbishop’s palace”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 28.
“Five German officers among the wounded”: “There was no room for mistake [sic],” Landrieux concluded, “and the wounded German officers—there were five of them—were under no illusion” about their fellow German units: “they were aiming at the cathedral!” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 29.
“Shells . . . fell throughout the town”: One’s ears followed the direction of the shells. One could feel them coming—sneaking, menacing; then suddenly bursting quite close, or maybe passing with an angry whistle over our heads, to carry destruction a little farther away. With a grip of the heart we marked the places where they fell. We recorded the wound without having seen the blow: a falling wall, a roof broken in, like a soft crust beneath a furious, invisible shock; then a jet of smoke, black, thick, heavy, which spurted upwards, enormous and powerful, as from the crater of a volcano, the noise of the explosion reaching us a long time afterwards.
Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 30.
“Soldiers in their red uniform trousers”: Associated Press, “Conditions in Vienna Reported as Normal,” Dallas Morning News, November 23, 1914, 7.
“Killing their own soldiers”: The major was a Dr. Pflümacker. Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 32.
“Stone chunks littered”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 34.
“The a cappella lament”: Landrieux wrote, “One had the impression of a hostile power, tenacious, stubborn, insistent, in a merciless struggle to overthrow the temple. The shells bit into the stone, broke down the walls, battered in the roofs, made havoc with statues, pinnacles, bell turrets, and counterforts. But the bruises were not deep enough, nor the wounds wide enough, the mass of the structure was not broken; the cannon had not succeeded in that. The monstrous howitzers had not arrived. The noble mutilated building still stood erect, more majestic than ever under the tempest.” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 38.
“Stained-glass rose window burst”: Landrieux described the breaking of the rose window: Soon we heard a hard cracking noise: half of the Great Rose broke, and a thick smoke entered through the breach. And just at this moment a ray of sunlight, the only one we had seen during this day of fog and rain, filtered softly through the gaping wound, slowly traveled along the nave to the sanctuary, caressed the altar, remained there a moment, and then disappeared.
Man’s effort proves powerless: we are defeated.
The arches are still trembling beneath the shells.
With a terrifying rumble, and the sound of breaking and crashing, the scaffolding fell on the Parvis, and fire flakes flutter in eddies under the roofs.
Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 40.
“Cast the straw out”: Landrieux emerged believing that but for the straw in such quantities in the naves, the fire may not have caused so much damage. In the end, a spark from a shell was all that was needed to cause the huge blaze. Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 39.
“Streamlets of lead”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 42.
“The sparks pricked on their faces”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 42.
“Four distinct fires”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 42.
“Wretched man, what are you going to do?” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 44.
“The captain ran to the factory”: But the next day at the cathedral, the fire’s debris still smoking, Landrieux found three more prisoners, burned alive on the spot. He saw “their limbs convulsed with pain and on their faces the fixed expression of a supreme vision of fear and anguish.” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 47.
“A symbol of hope”: “A silent furnace, withou
t flames or smoke, was glowing; and this furnace, its contours clearly outlined by the nave and the transept, formed, stretched over the city, an immense fiery cross, the Corps of Redemption: disaster, spread out before the face of Heaven, moulded itself in to the symbol of hope.” Landrieaux, Cathedral of Reims, 53, n. 2, quoting the commandant, who continued, “The spectacle was grant and terrifying. [No] spectacles have moved me to such grief as this enormous fiery cross, in a flaming aureole—cross of martyrdom and of hope, which, invisible from below, offered itself on that evening alone to Heaven.”
“Celestial ambassadors”: Malcolm Miller, Chartres Cathedral, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Riverside Books, 1997), 93.
“Landrieux and Thinot carried on”: Within a year and a half, Landrieux was ordained bishop of Dijon. For another decade he continued to publish religious writings and books, including, in 1920, Cathedral of Reims, containing scores of photographs of the Reims bombardment, many by Abbé Rémi Thinot. Thinot entered the French Army in January 1915. Despite his exemption, he served as military chaplain to a French infantry corps. Landrieux praised Thinot for his “ardent nature, his almost foolhardy courage, his apostolic zeal [that] predestined him for this mission.” Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 4.
Thinot was killed March 16 by a bullet in the head at Gueux in the Battle of the Marne, trying to save men buried under debris of a mine explosion. Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 4, n. 1.
“Total war”: The attack became a benchmark for propaganda. But it caused no change in the international norm governing protection of cultural monuments. That norm remained only a nonbinding principle. It traced back to the Brussels Conference of 1874, which had followed the Franco-Prussian War, in which the warring sides had accused each other of illegal acts. But there were no rules for settling claims. That conference proposed, “The commander of a besieging army, when bombarding a fortified town, must take all measures in his power to spare, as far as possible, churches and buildings for artistic, scientific, and charitable purposes.” The Hague Conventions on Land Warfare in 1899 and 1907 codified the Brussels Conference principle into international law, adding only that protected buildings are to be saved only if “they are not being used at the time for military purposes” with “distinctive and visible signs” that are “notified to the enemy beforehand.” It remained the governing rule, unmodified until after World War II. But these rules should not even have been applicable to Reims in 1914, because it was not a “fortified town.” The French had declared to the Germans that Reims was an open town.
“857 days”: Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 52.
“Historic Monuments Department began taking defensive measures”: After partisans during the French Revolution vandalized and destroyed widely, the French created an institutional framework to preserve historic monuments. That framework evolved over the next century when the French state and its units acquired many historic structures, including cathedrals. In 1830, the French Department of Historic Monuments was founded to safeguard and maintain them under the Ministry of Education and Fine Arts, to be overseen by a Historic Monuments Commission (Commission des monuments historiques), its members including archeologists, an inspector general, architects, politicians, scholars, and members of the Council of State (Conseil d’État).
In 1887, the first Law for the Protection of Historical Monuments and Creation of Chief Architects of Historic Monuments was adopted, creating a framework for direct government intervention, setting up a body of chief architects competent in restoration. Churches, however, were regulated by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. But by 1905, the French, having separated church from state, abolished the Ministry of Religious Affairs and reassigned diocesan architects who had worked on cathedrals to work instead under the chief architects for the Department of Historic Monuments. This drive to protect French monuments took a further leap in 1913 when the 1887 act was replaced with a new, stronger law for the protection of historic monuments, which gave the state power to preempt the owner of a classified historic monument and proceed with restoration work. The Department of Historic Monuments could exercise those powers to preserve France’s historic monuments. The new powers of the department would prove critical for later protection of stained glass windows at Reims, Chartres, and elsewhere throughout France.
“Most stained-glass windows had by then been destroyed”: Landrieux wrote, If only it could have removed our thirteenth-century glass also! The most ancient windows, those in the apse, at least the three in the middle, are only slightly touched. For others, behind the transept, two on each side, are riddled with holes; the last are in shreds.
Of the high windows in the nave, whose coloring of reds, purples, and intense blues is so amazingly warm and vigorous, which burnish the rays of the midday sun, only one, one of twenty, is intact. . . .
As for that marvel, a Great Rose of the Entrance, that dazzling mosaic of flowers, where shine in glory around Our Lady triumphant all the fires of the rainbow, it is broken through the middle, half of it remains. . . .
The illuminated gallery of the triforium, of a more severe tone, which formed a kind of modulated foundation of light for the rose window has, with it, suffered the effects of the fire; the four bays in the right have flown into pieces; it has suffered, in addition from the fall of stones. Though one or two bays on the left still preserve some panels entire, the others only retain some beautiful fragments hanging by a thread from the ironwork.
One only of the two roses in the transept, that at the northern crossbar, belongs to the thirteenth century; it is very badly damaged—less, however, than the other, which had been altogether destroyed by a storm and restored in the Sixteenth century. . . .
In the great modern window above the sacristies, one counts several holes. The sombre windows of a blue (perhaps too monotonous) tone in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, and those of a sweet pearly tint in the Sacred Heart Chapel, were seriously spattered by the fall of a shell in the street, by the apse, and the pressure of air, forcing the glass away from the lead, has left an empty silhouette of some of the figures.
Landrieux, Cathedral of Reims, 122–23.
An unnamed British reporter, whose work was published in a Dallas newspaper, wrote in 1919, When, close to a year ago, the German shells crashed down on the Cathedral of Rheims, whatever other damage they may not have done, they certainly robbed the world of a masterpiece of ancient art alike unique and irreplaceable. For the chief glory of Rheims Cathedral, one that haunts the memory even more than the soaring lines and mounting spires of its magnificent fabric, was the solemn beauty and vivid, glowing tints of its noble interior, turned by the light streaming through a myriad storied panea to a veritable dream in chiaroscuro and color. Just so, through those very panea the light had streamed for close to seven centuries, and the quaint medieval figures of saint and angel had watched serenely the crowning of monarch after monarch of ancient France, had frowned, one might almost think, on the English usurper and smiled benignly on the heroic Maid whose mission here reached its culmination. Few things, in fact, bring home to us the very soul of the Middle Ages, with all its mystery and longing and romance, more vividly than do these masterpieces of the stained-glass designer’s art.
“The Romance of Stained Glass: Masterpieces of Ancient Art, and Irreplaceable, Destroyed by the War,” Dallas Morning News, April 2, 1919, 4.
“Further work on proactive preservation . . . was subordinated to more pressing matters”: In 1915, the bombardment continued at Reims, one hundred shells hitting the cathedral that year and the next. Early that year, the cathedral’s architect and the Department of Historic Monuments took steps to protect against further damage, erecting a protective structure around the sculpture-laden doorways of the roofless cathedral’s western facade. Sandbags rested in a thirty-foot V-shaped frame at the west door. Its timbers formed two layers: the lower, head-high, of bags end-to-end; the other, twenty-five feet of horizontal bags, like bricks of a Roman wall. The structure repres
ented Reims’s shout of victory for surviving and was safe enough for Cardinal Lucon, the archbishop, to traverse. It would be another year before masonry protections would be placed elsewhere in the building around other valuable statues and work would commence to collect fallen pieces of carvings and sculpture for future restoration. Once the war ended, the Historic Monuments service would restore the cathedral over a period of forty years.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
“EU–funded project”: Little did I realize that I was witnessing another story unfolding—which could and may be the subject of another book: the restoration of the cathedral’s walls and windows in the twenty-first century, which is becoming a controversial battle of its own between forces wanting to preserve and restore the cathedral to its bright condition as in the Middle Ages and those opposing, wanting to leave it in its current dark condition. And it’s a metaphor for the fact that even this nine-hundred-year-old edifice is itself the focus of an ongoing saga, which may very well continue for another millennium or more.