In an age before telephones or telegraphs, how fast did news travel?

One of the most fascinating history books I’ve read is the social / geographic / linguistic history, The Discovery of France by Graham Robb. He really effectively and evocatively demonstrates the effects of geography on the culture and language of France, shining a light on something that I never thought much about but which touched so many elements of French history and society.

For much of the history of that country, it was really hard to get around. There are few navigable rivers and the network of roads the country had were not very extensive and often were poorly maintained. As someone who lives in Canada and doesn’t think much of driving for 700km for seven hours to visit relatives a province away, even in winter, geography in an age before asphalt roads or motorized vehicles is a bit abstract and academic. For such a “small” country (I live in Canadian territory, so that’s most countries), France was hard to travel and easy to be isolated or to disappear.

Stagecoach and travellers on their way to Puycerda, in Ax-les-Thermes in the French Pyrenees, second half of the 19th century. Image from the Gallica archive.

In the same way, I’m unused to delays in information due to geographical distance. If I, say, want to know the up to date results of an election in a different country, or where the latest confirmed cases of Coronavirus have been found, I can pull my smartphone out of my pocket and Google it. Boom, instantaneous information. (How accurate that information is, is an entirely different and concerning question that we’re still hashing out as a society, but regardless the point still stands.) 

We read about the events of the past – for instance, the developments of the French revolution – knowing the ending, the main milestones, in advance. We don’t have to wait anxiously for news. But how quickly would you hear about these things if you lived outside of Paris during the time period? There’s a fascinating passage in Graham Robb’s book discussing it:

Long before railways and the modern telegraph, news of important events could spread across the country at amazing speeds. The usual speed for an earth-shattering piece of news travelling over a hundred miles was between 4 and 7 mph. Le Havre heard about the fall of the Bastille (late afternoon, 14 July 1789) in the early hours of 17 July. In good conditions, Brest, at the tip of the Breton peninsula, was fifty-four horse-hours from Paris. Average speeds fell drastically on longer journeys, even on post roads, where horses and riders were relayed. Béziers – five hundred and twenty miles on post roads from Paris – heard about he fall of the Bastille almost seven days after the event (an average speed of less than 4 mph). Smaller towns might be closer in space but further away in time, unless a local inhabitant happened to bring the news. Vitteaux  – a hundred and sixty-five miles from Paris in the Auxois region east of Dijon – heard about the Bastille from a local tailor who travelled without stopping for two day sand two nights at an average speed of 3 1/2 mph. Even the high-speed messengers employed by groups of traders averaged only 7 mph over long distances.

Despite this, there are several well-attested examples of news travelling at much higher speeds. The arrest of the royal family at Varennes in the Argonne was known on the other side of France in Quimper at 7a.m. on 24 June 1791. On post-roads, Quimper was five hundred and forty miles from Varennes, which means that the news reached this remote and poorly served part of France at an average speed of almost 11 mph, maintained for two days and two nights. This is faster even than the news of the Battle of Waterloo brought by fleeing soldiers. At Villers-Cotterêts, the young Alexandre Dumas found their speed of a league and a half an hour (just over 4 mph) quite extraordinary: ‘It seems that the messengers of misfortune have wings.’

The century’s greatest expert on gossip and pre-industrial telecommunications, Honoré de Balzac, suggested that rumour could travel at about 8 mph. (pages 140-1)

The author then goes on to discuss the fascinating implications of such speeds, namely how they travelled, and how much we don’t know. It wasn’t all by riders swapping horses whenever they got tired. Messenger pigeons were used by some merchants, and there was apparently at least one occasionally used network of stationary messengers who would just shout to the next person a distance away to pass along the message. But the speed that rumours travelled defies expectations, especially as researchers have determined that they often seemed to travel independently of the main arteries of roads. Geography slowed them down, but nothing can stop the human hunger for more information.

Further Reading

• For more interesting tidbits from Graham Robb’s book, take a look at my other blog post, Notable Knitters of Yore: the Stilt-Walking Shepherds of France

The Great Clock of Rouen

The Gros Horloge (Great Clock) of Rouen is iconic of the city. It’s one of my favourite monuments of one of my favourite places in France. Many English speaking tourists to France hit up Paris, maybe the Champagne region (wine) or the Loire Valley (castles!), but if they visit Normandy normally tourists seem to skip past the interior of the region and head straight for the D-day landing beaches of the Second World War. I always encourage people to stop and explore the rest of Normandy, particularly Rouen. It’s the city where Joan of Arc was imprisoned, tried, and burned at the stake! There are narrow cobblestone streets, plus ciders, crepes, and other edible products! You can see and be photographed in front of architecture painted by Monet in the impressionist style! The beautiful Seine river that runs through Paris also runs through Rouen, but you have to deal with fewer Parisians!

The Gros Horloge itself dates from the 1300s and has an amazing little museum inside it. I really enjoyed their audioguides (available in French, English, and quite a few other languages) not only because they were informative, but also because the person speaking the audioguide claims to be the ghost of one of the former clock keepers. When he’s done talking about a particular room, he says that he’ll meet us up the stairs or wherever, and kind of implies he floats up through the ceiling. Charming!

 

Though it’s been run by an electric mechanism since the early 20th century, the old clockwork mechanism from the 1300s is still there, in situ, and is theoretically still in good working order if it were to be hitched back up. It was one of the earliest clocks to sound bells at the quarter of the hour, not just on the hour. The two clock faces also have black and silver globes above them that display the phase of the moon. There’s also a display showing the day of the week with Roman gods representing the day of the week: e.g., Mercury for Mecredi (Wednesday), Diana the goddess of the moon for Lundi (Monday, or the day of the “lune” / moon). In the 19th century that weekday display had been out of use for so long that it was assumed to show the signs of the zodiac! A series of reparations and restorations since the late 19th century make the Gros Horloge of Rouen an excellent functioning example of a medieval clock.

One little-known aspect of the Gros Horloge that not even all residents know is that one of the best views of the Cathedral of Rouen (famously painted by Monet) is actually from the top of the clock’s bell tower. Closed for safety reasons for many years, it reopened for the public in 2006 and have been open ever since. From there you can also see the roof of the only remaining bastion of the castle where Joan of Arc was imprisoned (now called the “Donjon” – the Dungeon). When I lived in Rouen about seven years ago, I found out that if you’re a resident of the city, when you buy your ticket you can present proof of your address and get a resident’s pass and come up any time you want to take in the view over the following year!

So please, do admire this beautiful historic clock from all angles: outside, inside, and on top!

Further Reading by Myself on Other Sites in France

• The Ossuary of St. Maclou in Rouen
• The Buttes Chaumont Park in Paris (can I draw your attention to the pun in the title of that blog post? Au Naturel/”Faux Naturel”/Falsely Natural)
• The Reims Cathedral and the effects of it being bombed during the First World War
• The Statues of Vimy Ridge

Let me count the ways the Bayeux Tapestry was almost destroyed…

The Star – figures in the Bayeux Tapestry pointing at a bad omen: what is now known as Halley’s Comet, spotted in the sky on April 24th, 1066. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

On a rainy day in Normandy last month, I made an obligatory pilgrimage to see the Bayeux Tapestry. I was fairly impressed with their audio guide, which walked visitors along the narrative of the embroidery alongside medieval music. It wasn’t so busy on a weekday in April that we couldn’t go back to the start of the embroidery to revisit and more closely examine certain sections. My favourite details among many are the dwarf Tuvold holding a pair of horses and the appearance of what we now know as Haley’s Comet.

The figure of Turold, as he appears in the Bayeux Tapestry. Image source: this History Notes blog post.

I always like to support museums through their gift shops (they often have the most meaningful souvenirs for me, a history nerd), so while there I picked up a copy of The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece by Carola Hicks.

This book delves into a series of fascinating anecdotes covering not only what we can actually know of how/when/why the embroidery was originally made (which includes surprisingly little solid documentary evidence, mostly assumptions based on material culture and lots of fierce debating over the centuries) but also what’s happened to it over the last 900+ years. Much of that is a series of anecdotes detailing how it was damaged or narrowly avoided being lost or destroyed. Here are some highlights from the Bayeux Tapestry’s biography:

• It has survived more than one fire and centuries of moths.
• It wasn’t stolen, destroyed, or damaged like most of the other church treasures by a mob that ransacked the Bayeux Cathedral on May 10th, 1562.
• Maybe at some point it was longer and pieces were removed. Judging from the assumption of narrative and visual symmetry, there was likely a scene at the end depicting William the Conqueror’s coronation. It may have been removed early on in the embroidery’s history and it’s lucky more of it wasn’t sliced away.
• It is said that the tapestry was nearly cut up and used as a canvas cart covering during the French Revolution and only the timely arrival of a local official rescued the textile from this ignominious fate.
• After the Revolution, it could have been brought to the Louvre in Paris like so many other regional pieces of art and could have easily been damaged or stolen on the way to Paris or afterwards.
• It was nearly sliced into different sections to be used in a parade.
• It actually was brought to Paris to be displayed under Napoleon. An ancient “document” such as this displaying a successful French invasion of England was an excellent propaganda coup during the war. It was luckily returned to its home in Bayeux unscathed.
• For at least a century it was displayed by being wound and unwound on a giant wooden spool, damaging the ends and distorting sections of the fabric. The sight of this damaging method of storage and display reportedly “outraged” English tourists.
• At least one piece of the embroidery was snipped away in the 1810s by English artist and antiquarian Charles Stothard (not his wife as many believed). It was eventually returned.
• The Bayeux Tapestry fell into the hands of the Germans during the Second World War and was once again used as propaganda, this time by Nazis highlighting the Germanic ancestry of the Norman invaders. Now the embroidery purported to show a successful invasion of England by German people at a time when the Third Reich was also aiming to cross the channel and take over England. It could easily have been stolen away by the Germans or destroyed by bombings, as so much European art was during the war.

Author Carola Hicks made the point that one of the most exceptional things about the Bayeux Tapestry isn’t necessarily its workmanship or the narrative it tells, but the fact that it survived. Other perhaps more magnificent examples of wall hangings from the same period may not have made it to the present day simply because they were made of gold or silver thread or more precious materials like silk. The more humbly made linen and worsted wool Bayeux Tapestry may have survived in large part because it wasn’t made of valuable materials. Now we consider it valuable beyond measure for the stories it tells: a 70m remnant of a very precise and yet in many ways still mysterious period of time.

The Bayeux Tapestry’s history is almost as long and storied as the actual embroidery itself. I personally find the stories of how it came to survive to present day almost more interesting than the context in which it was originally produced. The history of artifacts tells us a lot about changing perceptions of what people valued. Mainly, we today are often horrified by the carelessly cavalier way people in the past treated what are now beloved artifacts. In any case, whenever I visit a museum, I enjoy looking at artifacts and imagining where they were and what happened to them in the intervening years between their creation and when they ended up in a climate-controlled glass case in front of me.

The Architectural Scars of War: the Bombardment of the Reims Cathedral

Cathédrale de Reims, drawing by Adrien Dauzats (1804-1868). Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

As a Canadian visiting France, I marvel at the age of the built heritage all around me. Stained glass windows in some churches are considered relatively new if they’re from the 1500s and it isn’t unusual to see windows from the 1200s or earlier. A friend of mine used to spend the summers in the south of France in the family “cabin”: a partially collapsed medieval watchtower with a more “modern” 19th century roof. Many think of these historic buildings as somehow “timeless” or untouched, but in many cases they have lived through centuries of turbulent history and it is quite frankly a miracle they’ve survived to the present day to be seen and photographed by the likes of me.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the city of Reims for the first time for the National Association For Interpretation International Conference. (Pronunciation guide: “Reims” rhymes with the French pronunciation of the word “Prince”.) Every day on my way to the conference centre, I walked past the magnificent cathedral. Before I left town, I had a chance to visit the Palais du Tau museum next door, which explored the history of the building and the coronations that were once held there. There were several displays showing some of the Cathedral’s old gargoyles, and I am so glad I didn’t rush right past them.

These gargoyles look like they’re vomiting metal. Why? The massive cathedral in Reims, where generations of French kings were once crowned, was partially destroyed by bombardment during the First World War. The roof collapsed, leaving only the intricate Gothic façade. After the cathedral was hit, the lead roof melted from the heat of the flames. The molten metal flowed down through the gargoyles, which were after all designed to shunt rainwater from that very roof. These remnants are a powerful reminder of the effects of war. I had to stop and gape at them in astonishment after I fully understood what the little info cards next to them were telling me.

Once I got home, I of course felt compelled to look up historical photos from the war. I’d visited the interior of the cathedral before visiting the Palais de Tau, and at the time I’d had no idea of the extent of the damage and the post-war restoration work. It’s disorienting to see the following photographs of a place that I had just visited. The building now looks, to my inexperienced eye, nearly untouched.

 

 

View of the interior of the Reims Cathedral from the coronation area, 1917. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2570). 

We read about the world wars in books and we see archival footage in documentaries, but in North America the wars feel somewhat removed. However, the signs of war are impossible to ignore in north-eastern France. It may be random post-1950s buildings in an older quarter: signs of post-war rebuilding. Maybe it’s countryside that looks unnaturally landscaped: grassed-over trenches and battlefields. Those older buildings, too, have literal scars. Some places in some other cities, like the Palais de Justice in Rouen, kept the pockmarks from shrapnel and bombardments deliberately as a reminder of the horrors of war. In the case of Reims, they rebuilt a facsimile of the medieval building, though they have new stained glass in 20th century style in some of their windows. That restoration took over a decade and must have been a monumental effort, considering the scale of the damage. Churches and cathedrals are symbols of their communities, and having something like this happen to one must have been a huge blow. I am not surprised that it was the focus of restoration work – but also that this incident remains a point of fascination to people like me even a century later.

A French soldier in front of the bombed out Reims Cathedral, 1914. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EST EI-13 (395). http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b69319463/f1.item

Reims cathedral, 1919. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (643) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53016374d/f1.item

Soldiers and sandbags alongside the statue of Joan of Arc outside the cathedral, 1915. Bibliothèque nationale de France, [Rol, 45160] gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b69085269/f1.item.zoom

Main altar of the Reims cathedral under rubble, 1917. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2570) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9045174m/f1.item

Right doorway of the Reims cathedral with sandbags and fortifications, 1918. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2574) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90306414/f1.item

Interior of the Reims Cathedral after the bombardment, 1914. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2534) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9041996q/f1.item

Interior of the Reims Cathedral after the bombardment, 1914. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2534) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90420216/f1.item

Reims Cathedral, the morning after being bombed, 1917. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (685) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53035955k/f1.item

Flying buttresses of the Reims Cathedral, 1919. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (637) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530160513/f1.item

Tower and south-facing façade of the Reims Cathedral. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (637)gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53016037z/f1.item

Interior of the Reims cathedral, 1918. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2573) gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90306466/f1.item

Notable Knitters of Yore: the Stilt-Walking Shepherds of France

Later this month, I’ll be presenting a talk entitled Interpreting Ecology in a Cultural Context: Respecting the “Buffalo”  at the National Association For Interpretation’s International Conference in Reims, France. (Come say “Hello/Bonjour!”) I’ll be arriving in France a week early to travel through Normandy, visiting friends and historic sites.

To prepare myself for that leg of the trip, I’ve been rereading one of my favourite European history books: The Discovery of France by Graham Robb. It’s a geographical and linguistic history of France outside of the history of the military, aristocracy, or Paris. (AKA the rest of the country, which is rarely spoken about.) This book shifted my entire perspective of French history, namely because Robb eloquently makes the argument that, well, French history isn’t really full of that many French speakers. France is full of hundreds of little, isolated communities, and until very recently (with the advent of trains and highways), it was a very rough country to navigate. Some of my favourite fun facts from this book:

• There were in fact more accurate maps of the surface of the moon than the interior of France in the 1740s.
• There are some gorgeous dialect words that have apparently made their way into standardized French. Some new and delightfully specific ones I learned are “affender” (to share a meal with an unexpected visitor), “aranteler” (to sweep away spider’s webs), “carquet” (a secret place between breast and corset), and “river” (to strip off leaves by running one’s hand along a branch).
• For most of its history, French has been a minority language in the land now known as France. Only about 8 million people, or 20% of the population, of France in 1880 felt comfortable speaking French (as understood by Parisians). That’s not to say that this 20% were native French speakers – that’s 20% could hold a basic conversation in French. There were still French soldiers from Brittany in the First World War who were shot either because of insubordination (they didn’t understand their French orders) or because these Breton-speakers were mistaken for Germans.
• There were shepherds in the Landes region who wore long stilts all day as they followed their sheep. Even on marshy terrain, they could apparently travel at the speed of a trotting horse. Oh, and they had a third stick they used as a seat to create a tripod, and they would knit as they watched over their flocks.

Shepherd from Landes watching over his flocks. Image via the Bibliothèque de Bordeaux.

I very deliberately didn’t post this entry on April 1st, lest it be interpreted as an April Fool’s Day joke. As far as I’m aware, shepherds in the Landes actually did (and sometimes still do) go about on stilts.

Shepherd of Landes, 1818-1819. Image from the Bibliothèque de Bordeaux. 

Further Reading and More Images

• Robb, Graham. The Discovery of France. London: Picador, 2006.
• 1843-1946: The Stilt Walkers of France
• The Stilt Walkers
• The Stilt Walking Shepherds of Landes

“Berger des Landes” (the Shepherd of Landes/the Wastes), 1820, via the Bibliothèque de Bordeaux. (I can’t help but feel this image would serve as excellent inspiration for a character in someone’s historical fantasy novel.)

Return to Rouen Part One: the Ossuary of Saint Maclou

My friend and author Erin Kinsella interviewed me last year about travelling to Rouen, Normandy, in France. I gushed about the history of Joan of Arc, elaborate clocktowers, impressionist history, and an amazingly eclectic ironworks museum. In November 2016, I had the opportunity to return to Rouen. One of the odd but fascinating places I visited was the Aître Saint-Maclou.

“Aître” comes from the Latin word for “atrium” or courtyard, and was used to talk about cemeteries in medieval France. This place had been used as a cemetery dating back to the Great Plague of 1348, though most of the buildings date from the early 16th century, when the plague returned to the city and it began to be used as an ossuary to make room for the more recent dead. Most of the skeletons were moved to the Mont Gargan cemetery in 1780, but recently more skeletons were discovered in the courtyard by archaeologists. The style of buildings, with the white walls and wooden crossbeams, is seen all over Rouen, but this is the only place that I could ever find that had such carvings. They’re all decorated with danse macabre skeletons, skulls and crossbones, and the tools of the trade of gravediggers. There is even a mummified cat on display!

The Aître Saint-Maclou is one of the few surviving examples of medieval charnel houses that still exist in Europe.

The Aitre Saint Maclou in 1908. Photo courtesy of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art.

Further Reading

• “Aitre St. Maclou: An ancient ossuary in Rouen” via AtlasObscura
• “Walking With Death; L’ Aître Saint-Maclou In Rouen“, Normandy Then and Now
• “Travel Tuesdays: Rouen!” with Erin Kinsella.

The Surprising Link Between 18th Century French Fashion and the Partition of Poland

Robe à la Polonaise, ca. 1780. ephemeral-elegance.tumblr.com/post/120253909370/robe-à-la-polonaise-ca-1780-via-the-met

Robe à la Polonaise, ca. 1780. ephemeral-elegance.tumblr.com/post/120253909370/robe-à-la-polonaise-ca-1780-via-the-met

Printed Silk Robe a la Polonaise, ca. 1776-80. ephemeral-elegance.tumblr.com/post/129204368930/printed-silk-robe-a-la-polonaise-ca-1776-80-via

Embroidered Linen Robe a la Polonaise, ca. 1770s. http://ephemeral-elegance.tumblr.com/post/144528866215/embroidered-linen-robe-a-la-polonaise-ca-1770s

These are examples of what is called a robe à la polonaise.  As a non-native but fluent French speaker, I always mentally translated its name as a “dress in the Polish style”, like robe à la française or robe à l’anglaise. Not knowing much about the history of 18th century fashion, I just assumed that it was the style of dress popular among Polish aristocrats that at some point became de rigeur in fashionable French circles, like how “dresses in the English style” came to be popular in France.

However, last week I was drawn into Caroline Weber’s masterful work Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It’s a detailed, nuanced, and fascinating history of the politics of Marie Antoinette’s body and fashion choices, and how they were interpreted by the court and by the public. This particular passage caught my attention:

“… the polonaise did represent a significant move away from such [artificial, aristocratic] costumes by eliminating the restrictive paniers and train of the grand habit and the robe à la française and replacing them with a pert little bustle made from layers of glued cotton. The cut of the overdress was loose. . . and its overskirt was looped up around the hips into three jaunty swags. (These three swags were what gives the dress its name, after the three way partitioning of Poland by Austria, Russia, and Prussia. . .)” (page 147)

Weber discussed many other instances where Marie Antoinette and her compatriots commemorated contemporary events through fashion, often through the elaborate pouf hairstyle. Marie Antoinette’s body was a canvas upon which she could assert her political positions. It is in-character but adds another layer of meaning onto the dresses in this style that I found completely surprising!

“Jeune Dame en robe à la Polonoise.” Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts. 

Further Reading on the History of Fashion

• Weber, Caroline. Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. New York: Picador; Henry Holt and Company, 2006.
• The “Fripperies and Fobs” tumblr for a random assortment of historical fashion pieces from collections all over the world.
• “An Agreeable Tyrant: Fashion After the Revolution“: using actual extant examples of clothing, this website traces American fashion trends from 1780 to 1825.

Faux-Naturel: Constructed Natural Landscapes in Paris

The last time I was in Paris, I had about three hours to kill one morning before I caught a train to Normandy. I asked a friend of mine, an American ex-pat living in Paris, what he’d recommend I do for that time. I only  had until 11am or so – not enough to embroil myself in a museum, really. His suggestion? The Buttes Chaumont Park. 

Map of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, late 19th century. Image courtesy of the Gallica archive. 

I’d never heard of it. I was honestly a bit skeptical, but as a Canadian who works outdoors for a living out in nature the crowds of Paris had been getting to me a bit, so I thought I’d give this park a try. It was an excellent decision, because after about a fifteen minute ride on the metro and a ten minutes’ walk, I encountered this dramatic landscape in the middle of Paris:

I spent a delightful few hours discovering view after dramatic view. There were crags and canyons, bridges four or five stories tall, statues of nature spirits, brightly coloured holly, waterfalls, and a beautiful view of the famous Sacré Coeur in Montmartre in the distance. However, for all its “natural” grandeur, this park is an entirely man-made landscape.

There was a helpful small but unstaffed museum that told me the history of this place. (This history- and nature-loving nerd always appreciates interpretive panels!)

It was once an old gypsum quarry outside of town. In fact, the park gets its name because the gypsum underneath apparently made the earth unsuitable for farming: “chaumont” = “mont chauve”, or bald hill, devoid of plants. At the height of the gypsum mining, the quarry’s galleries were 45 metres high. For many years, the place was used as a dumping ground for garbage and dead horses.

 

View of the park under construction, circa 1865. http://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0001137298

View of the park under construction in 1865.

View of the park under construction in 1865.

By the 1860s, the city of Paris was changing. Hausmann was famously widening boulevards, but Emperor Napoleon III was also ordering the creation of new inner city parks.  The Buttes Chaumont Park was created at this time from the remains of the old quarry. They retained 6 of the dramatic cliffs as the base of the park, then constructed a faux-Roman temple at the top of one of them and a tall bridge to take visitors there. The park was opened on April 1st, 1867, at the time of the Paris Universal Exhibition.

 

Panoramic view of the Parc Buttes-Chaumont, taken in 1867. Image from the Portail des Bibliothèques Municipales Specialisées.

Trolling through archival photographs at Gallica, a lot of the photos emphasize the heights of the dramatic landscape. What does that more than photographing a famous parachutist jumping off its tallest bridge in 1925?

This park with its dramatic, history-filled landscapes is celebrating its 150th anniversary in April, 2017. Now is the perfect time to visit!

Further Resources

• Buttes Chaumont: A Park for the People on the Parisian Fields blog.
• Lost Paris: The Dark (and Dirty) History of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont
• Gallica Archive – hundreds of thousands of historical images and documents of France are yours to explore!

 

Flowers From No Man’s Land

Last winter, I worked as a research assistant for an author writing a book on the Battle of the Somme. While I was at the Canadian War Museum, going through boxes and boxes of mud-splattered diaries and letters written on battered paper from a century ago, I ran across this surprising object. It is a little glass circle containing a clipping of a poem, perhaps from a newspaper, with pressed flowers, presumably from No-Man’s-Land. Holding it in my white gloved hands, I shivered.

We will remember them.

The Statues of Vimy: at the Ridge and in the Museum

I have been oddly silent for the past few weeks, as most grad students tend to be at this time of year. I have been buried beneath a pile of books, peering at microfilm, or lugging texts about. Occasionally I have eaten and slept.

One of my current research projects involves a comparison of the Canadian War Memorial at Vimy Ridge in France and the “original” plasters of those statues by Walter Allward at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

Here are a few of my reference photographs, taken by myself this past December.

I would like to begin by showing this first image, involving greenery without any glimpse of marble, is from the Memorial Forest that surrounds this monument. In fact, the land all around it is legally Canadian soil. You may notice that it looks quite strange; those are scars from bombardments that occurred on this site during the battle for Vimy Ridge in 1917 as well as failed military manoeuvres before and after the Canadians took the ridge in April of that year. When they began work on the site in 1922, it took them two and a half years to remove the majority of the dangerous unexploded bombs, shells, and undiscovered bodies, but even today visitors are not permitted to walk beneath the trees because it was impossible to remove everything.

Here is the memorial itself. The two pylons were meant to represent Canada and France, and the sacrifices they made during the war. The base and the pylons are covered with allegorical figures representing such things as Charity, Peace, Knowledge, the Spirit of Sacrifice, etc. However, the most prominent of these figures is set aside from the rest. She is the one featured in two of these photographs: Canada Bereft, mourning her fallen sons. She overlooks the Douai Plain. Visiting the site, you can immediately grasp the strategic value of commanding the ridge. However, in this case, Canada looks out over a landscape in mourning.

I will, of course, go on at length in my research paper on the intended symbolism of the architect of the monument, Walter Allward. I hope that you can get a sense of the scale from these photographs (taken in amazingly opportune lighting due to the weather: bright sunlight directly above, but with storm clouds in the distance). From the fourth photograph in particular, I feel that one can get a sense of the importance of place for this site; it would not have nearly the same effect, say, in downtown Toronto. The monument is dependent upon its location upon the highest point of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, for which so many Canadians and others gave their lives.

I will also be examining the Allward plasters, which were used to construct these massive marble statues; the latter are more than twice the size of real human beings, giving them a grave, intimidating status. Seventeen of the twenty plasters are on display in Regeneration Hall, a specially constructed room at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Most notably, the plaster for Canada Bereft is absent. Instead, the figure of Hope takes pride of place, though many of the other figures stand shoulder to shoulder in a line, relatively equal and approachable.

 

These plaster casts of the original clay statues sculpted by Allward himself were used as a reference tool for the Italian carvers at Vimy Ridge. They are covered in small pencil markings and even pegs, used to double the ratio from life-size to larger than life in the final product. They were never intended for display but make for a quite interesting one regardless.

I am struggling to compare these two spaces and displays of the “same” sculptures. The Vimy Memorial in France is designed around the landscape, as a testament to the sacrifice that occurred in that locale. Regeneration Hall was designed to house these sculptures, and contains its own, modified symbolism. It is a lofty room, almost reminiscent of Gothic cathedrals in atmosphere, though the asymmetrical walls are constructed of rough metal. An eerie, artificial sound of wind (recorded in the room before windows were put in, capturing a fluke of design) permeates the hall. At one end, there is a tall, triangular window facing East, towards Parliament Hill. If one stands on the loft, facing the allegorical figure of Hope, one can barely make out the Peace Tower, but only if one stands in precisely the right spot: a metaphor for the straight and narrow path that one must not deviate from to achieve peace.

Walk the knife edge of peace. Should you waver, war will ensue.

In design, these two spaces and displays are quite different. However, how have the memorialisation and symbolism of the Allward statues changed in this new space? These are the ideas that I am currently grappling with. There may in fact be more continuity than I had originally believed. Breaking with tradition of the time, Allward seemed to have designed his memorial at Vimy not to commemorate the great victory that occurred there, but to memorialise the dead and give the living a sense of hope.