Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  “Selecting Griff as an observer”: A 1988 report of the Center for Military History on the program lists Griff—but only mentioned his service through July 1935 in Japan and China, not his service in the Philippines. Griff was one of the two thousand West Point graduates (between 1802 and 1975) who had been selected for the military observer role.

  Historically, their intelligence gathering had focused primarily on the Prussians, until 1919. The report reached two conclusions: that the observers were chosen for their individual talent and ability, professional competence, and intellectual brightness, and that peacetime—as opposed to wartime—observations by observers had had the greatest impact on the US Army as an institution. Thomas S. Grodecki, “Military Observers, 1815–1975,” unclassified final report by the Center of Military History, 1–3, 17, 193, March 16, 1988, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a194175.pdf.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

  “Public pressure to act as Germany rearmed”: By early 1936, Hitler had been führer for over a year and had earlier engineered adoption of the Nuremberg Laws. The United States had adopted the Neutrality Acts, which, among other things, boycotted arms sales to belligerent nations. Italy had invaded Ethiopia, and in Britain there were both a new prime minister and a new monarch.

  “Georges Huisman . . . had . . . been leading the Fine Arts Administration”: The choice to appoint Georges Huisman director general of the Fine Arts Administration would have been made by Aimé Berthod, Prime Minister Daladier’s minister of national education, but Huisman was apparently recommended by Jean Zay, who was an influential senator during Daladier’s government.

  “Cannes Film Festival”: Georges Huisman, then forty-seven, was a proponent of modern art. He would carry out Jean Zay’s idea to create the Cannes Film Festival, first conceived by Zay in 1938. Due to the onset of World War II, the festival’s intended 1939 inauguration was postponed until 1946, with Huisman its jury president.

  In June 1940, Huisman, with his wife and son, boarded the ocean liner SS Massilia from Bordeaux, along with twenty-seven deputies, senators, and senior officials, including Jean Zay, bound for Casablanca on June 21, 1940, with the intention of forming a resistance government in North Africa.

  “Jean Verrier”: Then forty-nine, Jean Verrier had worked on, among other things, methods of presenting the fifteenth-century Bayeux Tapestry; as a classmate of René Planchenault, he also worked on classification of objects. Verrier would later become instrumental in the postwar restoration of much of France’s stained glass.

  “Pierre Paquet”: He was then sixty-one. Paquet restored buildings, including Paris’s historic private Hôtel de Cluny, built by the Abbot of Cluny in 1330 and rebuilt in 1510, and Sainte-Chapelle and Brittany’s Mount Saint-Michel.

  “Eugéne Rattier”: He was then seventy-two.

  “Auguste Labouret”: Georges Huisman handmarked the memo for copies to be circulated to several persons, which suggests that they’d attended the meeting: Eugéne Rattier, Pierre Paquet, Émile Brunet, and Jean Verrier.

  “Special crates”: Carlier had insisted that the Reims Cathedral disaster should have taught that all possible steps should be taken to prevent flammable material from being introduced to the site. By November 4, the Fine Arts Administration had received a proposal from a vendor, Marcillet & Point, for one thousand cases to be made of English poplar, a choice of material that would later prove a bad one, exposing the windows to a near miss: Five years after removal and being put into safekeeping, seventy of those wood cases would suffer water damage and rot while in storage in the rooms of the quarry. Their windows would have to be removed and new cases constructed and then repacked, exposing the windows in nearly a seventh of those crates transported from the cathedral to protect them from breakage and water damage.

  “Need for an on-site generator”: Nevertheless, the Fine Arts Administration found a gas-powered generator on a trolley to provide independent light at the cathedral. From the report of Pierre Paquet, May 23, 1936, Mediathèque Char-enton (Paris), 81 28 9.

  The Fine Arts Administration also scheduled on-site tests of telescoping cranes of various sizes and directed its staff to place orders with private ventures for scaffolding and other project materials. Right after the tests, the Fine Arts Administration ordered six telescoping platforms capable of reaching a height of forty-two feet—one of which could extend as high as eighty-two feet—and informed the committee for the preservation of stained glass and the French Army that the Chartres committee might use Carlier’s scaffolding for training volunteers at the old church in Chartres known as the Collégiale Saint-André, to be arranged by Maunoury.

  At the end of May, from his offices at the Fine Arts Administration, Director General Georges Huisman communicated with Madame la Marquise de Maillé about a fundraiser to be held by the Saving French Art group, to raise money to aid in the purchase of the scaffolding.

  “Léon Blum”: He was the first Socialist and first Jew to hold the office of French prime minister, and he formed a thirty-five-member governing council, the Council of the Popular Front Government, with the Socialists holding the majority of seats, Radicals holding over one-third, and Socialist-Republicans two seats.

  “Jean Zay”: Then thirty-two, Zay had been born in Orléans. His father—whose Jewish parents moved from Alsace to France in 1871—edited a daily radical newspaper. Zay’s mother, from a Protestant family in the Beauce region surrounding Chartres, taught primary school. Zay attended secondary school in Poitiers and then became a journalist, director of a radical-socialist newspaper, and a barrister in Orléans. He married Madeleine Dreux in 1932 and with her had two daughters. He joined the Radical Party at age twenty-one and became the youngest member of the National Assembly at twenty-seven.

  “Blum had chosen Zay . . . because of his youth”: Blum wrote, “I think it takes a young person to [lead] the National Education, and that’s why I’m sending you.” Jean Zay, Souvenirs et solitude (Paris: Rene Julliard, 1946), 242.

  For six months prior to the election, Zay had served as undersecretary of state for the presidency of the council under Albert Saurat, Blum’s predecessor as prime minister, and had taken charge of the reform of the state and preparations for the election. In light of Blum’s victory, Zay had influence in Blum’s divided cabinet. A number of the ministers, including Jean Zay, were opposed to Blum’s policy of nonintervention. Marcel Ruby, La vie et l’œuvre de Jean Zay (Paris: L’Impremerie Bereskiak, 1969), 330.

  Under Blum, France collaborated with Britain and twenty-five other countries to formalize an agreement against sending any munitions or volunteer soldiers to Spain.

  “Energetic and positive nature”: Emmanuel Berl and Jean Nohain, “Fonds Jean Zay (1904–2004): Introduction,” Archives Nationales (French National Archives) web-site, accessed September 16, 2018, https://www.siv.archives-nationales.culture.gouv.fr/siv/rechercheconsultation/consultation/ir/consultationIR.action?udId=&fullText=&consIr=&formCaller=&details=false&irId=FRAN_IR_028000&gotoArchivesNums=false&frontIr=&optionFullText=&auSeinIR=trueeftab720; see also Emmanuel Berl and Jean Nohain, interview of Jean Zay, February 10, 1937, in Archives Nationales (French National Archives), 667 AP 56, file no. 2.

  “Modern principles of planning and logistics”: Zay soon became known as France’s great reforming minister of national education. He believed public schools were the workshop for shaping citizens. He modernized France’s education system and brought socially and economically disadvantaged students into the schools, increased the years of mandatory schooling to fourteen from twelve, limited class sizes, harmonized syllabi, created library buses to promote reading in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and launched experimental classes. And he adopted a rule forbidding the wearing of religious symbols or clothing in the schools and also made physical education mandatory, his team building hundreds of swimming pools, soccer fields, and bicycle tracks across France.

  Outside the field of education, Zay unified national theaters, cr
eated museums for modern art and folkcraft, promoted copyright protection, and promoted creation of the Cannes Film Festival as a counterpoint to Venice’s, which had been dominated by Mussolini and Hitler. He also supported creation of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

  “Wartime prison diary”: Benjamin Ivry, “What He Contributed, What He Endured,” Forward, June 28, 2011, https://forward.com/culture/139254/what-he-contributed-what-he-endured/.

  “Captain Alfred Dreyfus”: Zay, Souvenirs et solitude, quoting Anatole France’s description of Major Georges Picquart.

  “Soldiers . . . for removal and crating”: Letter from Defense Minister, July 4, 1936. Mediathèque Charenton (Paris), 81 28 17.

  “Coordinated effort to incorporate a national ‘passive’ civil defense”: Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 68.

  “Lists of art objects”: Led by Henri Verne, director of France’s national museums, the administration developed a system of labeling the relative importance of pieces using colored stickers: red meaning top-priority works, blue for second tier, and yellow and black for works judged not to require evacuation, which would instead be protected on-site. Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 68.

  “Forced the professionals to listen”: Carlier employed confrontation as his primary method for convincing others. Fourteen years later, in the context of a later dispute with Carlier over issues involving a handful of alleged errors in positioning of stained-glass windows reinstalled in the cathedral after World War II, Jean Maunoury would look back to refer to the “vehemence” of Carlier’s 1926 critiques of the Fine Arts Administration and described Carlier as having “failed” in his “contest” with the administration.

  Ernest Herpe, a chief architect of historic monuments since 1920, served as a principal in the Fine Arts Administration later during the Chartres stained-glass window project. In 1939, when Herpe led a major cleaning of the facade of Notre-Dame de Paris, Carlier “went apoplectic,” according to one author who referred to Herpe as Carlier’s “enemy.” Two years later, Herpe would be appointed inspector general of historic monuments.

  “National legal framework for the passive-defense program”: Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 68.

  “Blum stepped down”: Anti-Semites hated Léon Blum. He would twice later return as prime minister of France, first for two months in March 1938, long enough to ship heavy artillery and other much-needed military equipment to the Spanish Republicans. But he was unable to establish a stable ministry. Then, in April 1938, his Socialist government fell, and he was removed from office. His second return lasted two months, starting in December 1946. As such, he was a perennial object of particular hatred from anti-Semitic elements.

  “A kind of heritage-triage system”: So characterized by Elizabeth Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 104. Zay designated four categories—each assigned a color—into which monuments or artworks were to be categorized according to their importance, and he ordered the staff to procure personnel necessary for execution of the orders.

  “Departments from which artworks were . . . withdrawn and . . . directed”: Jean Zay, “Instruction sur la protection en cas de guerre des monuments et oeuvres d’art dans les départments de l’intérieur,” August 12, 1937, AMN R1 4, Archives des museés nationaux, Paris, 3–4. The instructions focused on protection of portals and sculptured elements against explosions of projectiles, withdrawal of all removable objects, starting with stained-glass windows, construction of ramparts, and strengthening defense against fire.

  Zay ordered dispersal of art objects to locations outside urban areas into sites where they could be protected against fire, humidity, and theft. And he ordered the Historical Monuments Service to classify monuments and art objects into four categories of priority, proportionate to their importance: first, monuments or artworks of exceptional importance, for which protective arrangements must be made in peacetime; second, those that were to be protected automatically upon mobilization; third, those for which protection would be carried out immediately on issuance of orders; and fourth, those impossible to withdraw, which must be protected in place.

  “Better to pursue measures . . . useless rather than . . . be taken by surprise”: Zay, “Instruction sur la protection,” 4.

  “Indemnity payments”: Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 70.

  “Captain Lucien Edward Louis Prieur”: He was forty-seven, married with three children, and from Boulogne-Billancourt. He’d been employed since 1926—and during the interwar years—as a chief architect of historic monuments in Bordeaux. He’d studied language science and then architecture at the Paris School of Fine Arts.

  “Ernest Herpe”: He was fifty-two. Some of the staff were young and would later build careers in architecture, protection of historic monuments, and theater.

  Jeanne Laurent, then thirty-six, was a behind-the-scenes administrator in the stained-glass-window-removal project who would later brief the Historic Monuments Commission for authorizations and to report on progress. She was the daughter of a Bretton farmer, educated at the School of Chartres (where she met politicians, intellectuals, and theater personalities). She was trained as an archivist paleographer and had joined the Ministry of National Education in 1930 and then the Fine Arts Administration.

  She would go on to play a role in the French policy of decentralization and democratization of culture under the Fourth Republic. She has been described as “one of those rare women of the high administration who were determined to turn into concrete actions an idealistic project mocked by many.” She succeeded in institutionalizing the concept of theatrical decentralization, putting in place ways to support artistic creation—whether financial, material, or intellectual. In so doing, the arts were made more accessible to all classes of French society, whereas previously they had been perceived by many to be reserved for bourgeois elites. This is why many theater directors in the French capital liked to criticize her. As early as 1952, she was forced onto the sidelines, assigned to a new position unconnected with her previous work. Naomie Retailleau, “Jeanne Laurent: Une Bretonne à la conquête de la culture,” Unidivers: Le webzine culturel de Breton, April 26, 2017, https://www.unidivers.fr/jeanne-laurent-politique-culture-bretagne/.

  “Project managers”: They created an inventory of the windows mapped out on architectural drawings in multiple copies that were to be placed in multiple locations for access and security. To ensure that cases of suitable size and shape would be prepared and stationed nearby to hold the stained-glass windows for transport and storage—and to ensure that workmen would be able to eventually restore each window and return each individual panel to its rightful position—the Fine Arts Administration cataloged each of the cathedral’s bays and its respective windows, as well as its respective iron framework, or armatures.

  With that work, they created a floor plan showing the location and identifying number of each window, indicating its type (stained or clear; scalloped, beveled, or straight) and category, its respective date of creation over the last nine hundred years, name of donor (group or prominent person), the years in which repair work had been done and by whom, where relevant, and, for each window, which category of the four types of protective crate should be used to store and transport it. The plan formed a comprehensive record of each of the 41 high bays with its respective high windows and the aisles with their 38 low windows, aggregating 174 windows in all, containing over 7,700 glass panels, representing over thirty thousand square feet of stained glass.

  “Contractors responded with bid proposals”: A private firm named the Office Commercial des Bois sent a proposal to Jean Trouvelot dated May 19, 1938, to supply wooden crates of poplar in four sizes at a stated cost per crate, to be delivered to the cathedral or other location in Chartres. The proposal excluded panels of Celotex, which it noted would be expensive. The proposal stated that a separate proposal for such panels would be provided in a subsequent step with an additional charge per square meter to be spe
cified. Letter Marcillet & Pont to the Fine Arts Administration, November 4, 1936.

  “Equipment and supplies . . . would not fit in . . . attic”: Materials stored at or near the cathedral prior to September 1938 were listed in a report of Chief Architect Jean Trouvelot, dated October 19, 1939.

  “Building Q”: The building, dating from the thirteenth century, had been used as an extension of the cathedral to store tithes and other payments of rent on the church’s land, typically in the form of food, storing grain on the ground floor and in a vaulted underground chamber, wine in the cellars, and wheat, spelt, oats, and other flours on higher floors. It also contained a prison and an oven. Today it and adjoining buildings house the International Stained-Glass Centre and stained-glass museum.

  “Distributed fire extinguishers”: One report indicates that the 1938 operations ended up securing the sand and bags that actually were needed the following year; without that rehearsal, the military would have absorbed them all. Service des monuments historiques, n.d., Médiathèque d’accueil et de recherche des archives nationales, Paris, F21 3981, document 19.

  “Mathieu & Marçais”: Letter with proposal from Enterprise Mathieu & Marçais, to the Fine Arts Administration, for the full project, with lists of personnel and equipment, September 9, 1938.

  “Celotex”: A brand of board made of cane fiber, used for insulation or as a vapor barrier, siding, or layer under a roof, a trademark of Celotex Limited.

  “Director of passive defense”: Richard J. Overy, The Bombing War: Europe, 1939–1945 (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2013), 562.