by Diccon Bewes
The Palace wasn’t the only hotel that didn’t survive in its intended form (it was converted into apartments above the museum). The Hotel Royal once hosted princes and emperors, as befits its name, as well as Thomas Cook himself during that first tour. It is now a casino. And the imposing Hôtel de Ville, or town hall, actually once was a real hotel. Others simply disappeared, replaced by one of the countless modern creations, although Chamonix seems to have avoided the worst excesses of development in architectural terms, at least, with many fine examples of old buildings still around. They might be disfigured by the tourist trappings that dominate the town – the pedestrianised centre feels like one endless shop-bar-restaurant-café, with little sign of real life or business that isn’t tourist related – but it could be much worse. This isn’t Benidorm in the Alps, despite (or perhaps because of) a long history of tourism.
The Hotel Royal, where Thomas Cook stayed, is now a casino, but Mont Blanc and the dark pinnacles of Aiguille de Midi have stayed the same
Chamonix was discovered in 1741 by two young Englishmen on a jaunt around the Alps. Of course it had long been there, thanks to a Benedictine convent, so its “discovery” was in a similar vein to that of America by Columbus. The two gentlemen in question were William Wyndham and Richard Pocock, and it was their reports to the Royal Society of mighty glaciers and mountains that made this Alpine valley the must-see of any Grand Tour.
Shelley, who seemed to get around an awful lot, waxed lyrical about the place, and by 1865 the village was welcoming 12,000 visitors a year, a huge number considering the time and effort involved in reaching Chamonix. The turn of the century saw winter sports blossom, fuelling the construction of more hotels and attractions, culminating in the first ever Winter Olympic Games in 1924. And in all that time, one thing hasn’t changed much: the headache of accommodation in high season. Look at these two guidebook entries:
In August and September the inns are frequently so full that travellers arriving late at night have the greatest difficulty in obtaining accommodation.
One of the biggest headaches in Chamonix is finding a bed, especially if, as a walker or climber, you’re having to sit out bad weather while waiting to get into the hills. All hotels need booking in advance and tend to be expensive.
The first is from my trusty Murray Handbook, but isn’t so different from the second, taken from the Rough Guide to France, published 150 years later. What has changed is that there are now two high seasons, as in any Alpine resort: summer for walkers and winter for skiers.
Our visit to the Alpine Museum makes me appreciate two things. The first is how comfortable tourism has become. Looking at what yesterday’s travellers had to put up with in the way of heavy clothes and rickety carriages, uncomfortable shoes and simple skies makes me thankful to be a twenty-first-century tourist. A train tour of the Alps may no longer be the cutting edge of travel, but at least you won’t get blisters or heatstroke along the way. You only have to see black-and-white photos of ladies clambering over glaciers and up ladders in full-length skirts and heavy coats to understand that we take a lot for granted. Perhaps that’s why those pictures are popular postcards in every Chamonix souvenir shop.
Secondly, I realise how shockingly ignorant I am about Savoy, the French province that encompasses Chamonix and Mont Blanc. To me it means green cabbages and posh hotels, neither of which brings snowy mountains to mind. But the lovely old maps, with their sepia tones and ragged edges, make it look so much more intriguing, somewhere worth exploring historically if not geographically.
Savoy was one of those royal states that inhabited the European map for centuries and then simply disappeared, swallowed up by larger, stronger neighbours. It wasn’t the only duchy or kingdom to vanish, but it had one of the more ignominious exits: traded away in a secret deal. At its height Savoy stretched from Lake Geneva down to the Mediterranean and its rulers married their way into other royal houses. The reason there’s a Savoy Hotel in central London is because when Eleanor of Provence married Henry III, she brought her pack of Savoyards with her – including her uncle Peter. In 1263 he built the Savoy Palace (which later burned down during the Peasants’ Revolt) before heading back to Savoy to become its Count. However, being sandwiched between France and the Austrian Empire wasn’t so great, and repeated French invasions meant that Savoy’s independence was fairly fluid. It was one such defeat by France in 1536 that led to the Bernese annexing Vaud and Geneva gaining independence. Realising that their capital, Chambéry, was far too close to the enemy, the Savoyards made Turin their new capital, and that changed everything.
With an HQ behind the protective wall of mountains, Savoy could survive continued French attacks, but with the centre of gravity now in Piedmont, the French-speaking parts of the realm lost their importance. Life became more Italian, which didn’t just mean a healthier diet but also a new outlook. In 1720, Savoy-Piedmont gained the island of Sardinia, which meant that the Duke of Savoy was now also King of Sardinia. Napoleon tried to spoil the party by conquering everything except the island itself, but after his defeat the House of Savoy (and Sardinia) was stronger than ever and had its eyes on a bigger prize.
Italy in the 1850s was even more chaotic than it is today, not least because there was no country to speak of. The King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel ii, realised that to unite Italy under Savoy/Sardinian rule he would need help kicking out the Austrians. So he made a secret pact with Napoleon iii of France: he would get Savoy and Nice in return for giving them troops to fight Austria. No one thought to ask the people. The war didn’t last long and in the peace treaty (signed in Zurich in November 1859) Austria ceded Lombardy to the French, who then gave it to Sardinia in exchange for Nice and Savoy. To make things look legal, the Treaty of Turin (24 March 1860) made the French annexation formal and a referendum a month later added the seal of popular approval. An astonishing 99.8 per cent of Savoy said yes to joining France, possibly because the vote was rigged or maybe because there were no alternatives: staying part of Sardinia, independence or joining Switzerland (as some in northern Savoy wanted) were not on offer.
And that was the end of Savoy. Its fate was to instigate the unification of Italy (the hero of that campaign, Garibaldi, was born in Nice), only to end up being swallowed by France. But at least it survived in one form, two French départements, which is more than can be said for its royal house. The former duke, Victor Emmanuel ii, duly became the first king of Italy in March 1861, with a capital in Turin, but then it was pretty much all downhill. After centuries of ruling Savoy, the royal family lasted only 85 years in Italy and the fourth king, Umberto ii, abdicated in 1946. They might have been better off staying where they were; who knows, Savoy could have survived as a small independent duchy, a mountainous Luxembourg, if you will.
Thankfully, one good thing came out of this tale of cabbages and kings. During the short Austro-Sardinian War, the two sides clashed on 24 June 1859 at Solferino in Lombardy, and Henry Dunant was there to witness the horrific aftermath. He went back to Geneva a changed man. Perhaps, in a roundabout way, the Red Cross is Savoy’s legacy to the world. In the giant game of political chess that was nineteenth-century Europe, Savoy was a pawn sacrificed by its owner for bigger gains. Without that move, there might have been no war, no Solferino and no Damascene moment for Monsieur Dunant.
That potted history finally makes it clear to me why the Murray guidebook has the long-winded title of A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont. When the book was written, Savoy and Piedmont were not part of France and Italy respectively, but were (together with Sardinia) a separate country – one that was a natural extension to a Swiss tour. By the time the guide was published the borders had changed, so that Thomas Cook’s first tourists actually visited only two countries: France (including Chamonix) and Switzerland.
If it had carried on raining for another day, we would have said an early goodbye to France and headed for the hills of Switzerland, in the hope that the we
ather would improve. Another wet day in Chamonix was too much to contemplate. Instead, we wake up to sunshine and now have the problem of deciding what to see in our one fine day. There isn’t enough time for everything (we have to be over the border by this evening), so we plump for the two main sights, the two reasons Thomas Cook brought his group here: Mont Blanc and the Mer de Glace. Snow and ice here we come!
It turns out that the rumours were true: you can see Mont Blanc from the centre of Chamonix. It really was there all along, behind the banks of cloud and sheets of rain. And it is white, sparklingly white against a deep blue sky. However, it’s also very round, more dome than peak, so it doesn’t look like it could be western Europe’s highest mountain at all. It’s just a lump that’s marginally higher than its neighbours, and most probably would have been ignored if it hadn’t been the tallest one around. That accident of nature meant that Mont Blanc was top of the list of Mountains To Be Conquered, which it duly was on 8 August 1786 by two Frenchmen, Jacques Balmat and Michel Gabriel Paccard. The closest we will get today is Aiguille du Midi, an eagle’s nest of a pinnacle reached by cable car – on a very long cable.
Of course, we aren’t the only ones desperate to get out and up now the sun has graced us with its presence. After days of being cooped up, everyone else has exactly the same idea, so although we arrive at the cable-car station in good time, there’s already a lengthy queue. It’s probably like that every day in fine weather, with a steady flood of tourists desperate to experience the ride up. And it’s quite a ride, an ear-popping, jaw-dropping 20 minutes inside a giant glass box that holds 72 people at a time.
Our cable car has half of Japan in it, including a giggly clutch of ladies swaddled in layers of fleeces and hats. Each time the car lurches over a pylon, they all fling their arms in the air and whoop with delight, as if we’re on a theme-park ride. Not everyone finds it amusing. At the halfway point we deboard one car and reboard another that’s waiting to take us up to 3842m above sea level (and more than 2700m above Chamonix). The second section has no pylons, just one long cable, so the whoopers are temporarily silenced. Instead, we all concentrate on the ever more dramatic views, up to Mont Blanc, across to the glacier and down to Chamonix, which already looks like a model village on the valley floor.
The cable car glides into its upper station and we are disgorged, light-headed with excitement and altitude, only to find that there’s still one stage before we get to the top. The Aiguille (which means “needle” in French) is divided into two columns of rock linked by a metal bridge, with the cable-car station, plus the café and shop, on the lower North Column, looking down on Chamonix. To reach the very top, and so the panorama terrace, it’s necessary to cross the bridge and take a lift up the last 65m. No one is rushing to step out onto the icy metal. After such a quick ascent, the change in the air is a shock – not so much raspingly thin but achingly crisp. Every breath seems to reach the farthest corners of my lungs, so my alveoli all crackle with the cold. They’ve never known anything like it.
My mother isn’t enjoying the altitude so instead opts to take in the view from the café over a hot chocolate, but I slither across the bridge, glad to have a warm coat and thick gloves. The metal handrails would probably freeze a layer of skin off if you touched them with bare hands. Long stiletto icicles hang from every ledge and form a dramatic pelmet across the doorway to the Central Column. Inside it isn’t much warmer, but at least there’s no wind. I squeeze into the lift for the final spurt, feeling like a giant as I’m the only passenger over about 1.6m tall. I begin to wish that my Japanese extended beyond konichiwa and arigato.
The 360-degree views from the top can for once be truthfully described as breathtaking. It’s a winter wonderland on a summer’s day: peak after peak after peak in every direction, all snow clad in the squintingly bright sunshine (even with sunglasses). From this angle and (shorter) distance, Mont Blanc looks more imposing, though still not as majestic as the Matterhorn, which is visible to the southeast. But both are overwhelmed by the vast proportions of the landscape as a whole. Standing on top of a pillar of granite, which is actually nothing more than a rocky needle in a mountainous haystack, I feel very insignificant.
Immediately beneath us the snowy slopes are dotted with tiny black figures in groups of three and four, following thin grey lines in the pristine white expanse. This hardy few are using the good weather to achieve their dreams of scaling Mont Blanc. Rather like Mark Twain, who “climbed” the mountain from Chamonix via a telescope, I’m content to admire it from afar, albeit closer than Miss Jemima ever got. Modern technology (this cable car opened in 1955) means that visitors are now able to do and see things of which the Victorians could only dream: sailing up into the sky to look down on the world below, all without breaking into a sweat. The splendour of being on top of the Aiguille will stay with me for ages, but it felt a bit too easy, as if we were not respecting the mountains themselves. Then again, I was never going to climb up, so it was either this or the telescope. And, following Murray’s advice, I hadn’t packed mine.
After Balmat and Paccard, there have been many others brave, or foolish, enough to tackle Mont Blanc. The first woman to stand on the summit was a local servant, Marie Paradis, in 1808, although some say she was carried part of the way by the men in her group, including Jacques Balmat. A rival claim for being the first woman on top came 30 years later, in the shape of Henriette d’Angeville, a 44-year-old French aristocrat who lived in Geneva but whose grandfather had been guillotined during the French Revolution. She most definitely was not carried up, as her guides already had their hands full. Her 1838 ascent is famous for its excess: six guides and six porters had to carry two legs of mutton, two loins of veal, 24 chickens (cooked not live), 18 bottles of fine wine (plus one small barrel of plonk for the porters), a bottle of cognac and 3kg of chocolate. Henrietta wore a special outfit of pantaloons and petticoats to overcome the disadvantages of climbing in heavy dresses with long hems, but even that weighed over 7kg (including the black-feather boa). She became known as “la fiancée de Mont Blanc” and was still trotting up mountains at the age of 69.
It took another 17 years for anyone to reach the summit without a guide, let alone six, but in August 1855 Charles Hudson, a village vicar from Yorkshire, did exactly that. And that was barely two weeks after he had been one of the party to conquer Switzerland’s highest mountain for the first time. At 4634m high, Dufourspitze (or Monte Rosa in Italian) was obviously used as a practice run for the main event; quite some warm-up. Hudson was one of the stars of the Golden Age of Alpinism, when British mountaineers were climbing peaks almost as fast as their compatriots were conquering countries. It all came to a tragic end on the Matterhorn ten years later.
Switzerland’s most famous mountain had been one of the last great Alpine peaks to be tamed when, on 14 July 1865, Reverend Hudson and six other men stood on the pointy peak for the first time. Four of them would die during the descent from the summit when a safety rope snapped, dragging the helpless men over a cliff. The calamity was front-page news in Britain, where the continuing exploits of the nation’s fearless mountaineers had long been celebrated. Hudson fell to his death along with Chamonix-born guide Michel Croz, fellow climber Douglas Hadow and Lord Frederick Douglas, brother of the Marquess of Queensberry and uncle to Lord Alfred (Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend). One of the survivors, renowned mountaineer Edward Whymper, endured the inquests and rumours and went on to write a bestseller about his feats, Scrambles amongst the Alps. One of the mountains he scaled in the Canadian Rockies is named after him, as is a street in Chamonix, the town where he died (in 1911) and is buried. Hudson’s remains lie beneath the communion table in Zermatt’s English church, which opened five years after the tragedy; a suitably fitting last resting place for an Anglican vicar.
As for the fastest ascent of Mont Blanc, that was achieved in July 1990 by a Swiss climber, Pierre-André Gobet, who recorded an amazing time of 5 hours, 10 minutes and 14 seconds – and that’s
for the round trip from Chamonix. He ran up to the top in 3 hours 38 minutes and then sprinted back down in 1 hour 32 minutes. The extra 14 seconds was probably how long he spent on the summit.
These days about 20,000 people a year follow in the footsteps of those past climbers, though most take a little more time than M. Gobet. You can book five- or six-day guided packages, which include three days of acclimatisation and practice on nearby peaks. Apparently, the climb itself isn’t technically one of the hardest. The Mountain Spirit Guide website summarises it thus: “If you ask the ‘climber’ – the ascent is a walk, but if you ask the ‘walker’ – the ascent is a climb.” And if you ask a normal person, it’s a step too far.
We shouldn’t forget that the real height of Mont Blanc changes, depending on the depth of the snow-and-ice cap that crowns the peak. Officially the mountain is always 4810m above sea level, but the actual summit (that is, the highest point of rock) is only 4792m. Those extra few metres probably make all the difference when you’re climbing up.
Our descent into the valley feels faster than the upward journey, although of course it isn’t. The two cable cars operate in tandem, one going up as the other comes down. Watching the other car glide past as if hanging by a thread, albeit a reassuringly stout metal one, I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking that our little box is travelling just as precariously. And I’m not at all certain Miss Jemima would even have set foot in such a terrifying contraption. Usually I love cable-car rides – Switzerland has plenty of them – but on this one my mouth is dry, my palms wet. I take my mind off the fact that we’re dangling hundreds of metres above the ground and tune into the English voices among the background chatter: a party of male climbers comparing achievements, the mountain equivalent of a pissing contest. It’s a relief to get back on terra firma.