ON JANUARY 15, 1915, FRANCE FOUNDED ITS MILITARY AVIATION school at Chartres to train three thousand pilots—becoming its most important such school—but the choice of Chartres would obviously increase the risk to the cathedral. The Germans had already been bombing London, and in March they bombed Paris, beginning with a raid by zeppelins that caused nearly a dozen deaths and thirty other casualties. Thereafter Paris protected itself with barrage balloons.
That spring, new voices began drawing attention to war’s impact on monuments and artworks and began advocating for proactive monument protections to meet new conditions of war. In May, Camille Enlart—a fifty-six-year-old archeologist, lawyer, and photographer—organized France’s first exhibit of photographs to document and publicize German military destruction of French buildings and art. Enlart would later become a mentor to the young Achille Carlier, who would play a significant role in the protection of the Chartres windows. Enlart’s efforts to publicize war damage to monuments failed, however, to mobilize widespread support. His was merely another voice in a chorus of world outrage surrounding the Germans’ destruction of Reims Cathedral and other great buildings that did not sufficiently move the French public, who still supported the war and could not yet see the value of devoting precious wartime resources to minimize damage to buildings. Also that May, Albert Thomas became undersecretary of state for artillery and munitions.
Around this time, Louis Billant invented a new, improved type of hand grenade, the pear-shaped “P1.” Its spoonlike arming lever and percussion igniter were impact-detonated, so long as it landed with the heavy end down on sufficiently hard ground. Undersecretary Thomas solicited Billant to produce large quantities of the new grenade. And so Billant built a factory in a triangular lot beside his workshop on Rue de Tolbiac in a densely populated industrial and residential district in south Paris packed tightly with buildings ranging from three to a half dozen stories tall. The factory consisted of wooden sheds and employed a staff of reportedly more than two hundred workers, of which eighty were women and young girls, most younger than age fifteen, working night and day in two shifts.
On October 20, 1915, at a quarter past two in the afternoon, the factory exploded when operating at full capacity; a quarter of an hour later it exploded again, with equal violence. Reports of the cause conflicted. One journal said the first explosion was caused by the fall of a bundle of grenades from a truck on which a cargo had just been loaded. The explosions blew the factory into fragments and generated a cloud of toxic fog over the area. Another newspaper reported that, in the alley separating two groups of buildings, a truck loaded with different crates, passing over a gutter, violently exploded. The same factory had experienced two prior accidents, with victims.
The Prefecture of Police, anticipating the risk inherent in this type of facility, had prescribed limits on the quantity of explosives stored. It had ordered that explosives magazines be separated from the detonator shop, that separate workshops be maintained for each manufacturing operation, and that grenades be shipped out twice daily to limit the number on hand to five thousand. But the national government was asking for more grenades for the troops, and the shop responded, increasing production to thirty thousand per day.
President Poincairé arrived on the scene, going to an old movie theater that had been converted into a morgue, accompanied by the minister of the interior, Undersecretary Albert Thomas, and local officials. A newspaper reported that the president “and those who accompanied him bowed, moved to tears, in front of these mutilated bodies, almost all corpses of women,” with forty-five dead and another sixty injured, many of whom were wives or daughters of soldiers mobilized at the front. A month later, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris hosted a national funeral service for the victims, with officials in attendance, but though the shock waves from the Rue du Tolbiac explosions brought names and faces of victims to the public’s attention, the tragedy did not result in significant reform. Billant, rather than moving the armaments factory to a rural setting, rebuilt the plant in his home city of Bourges, farther from the front.
Nearly a half a year later in the town of Saint-Denis, about six miles north of Paris, a few soldiers were moving boxes of grenades in an area dense with homes and commercial activity when they must have dropped a box. It exploded and triggered other explosions that “disemboweled” buildings and blew a nearby streetcar off its tracks, splitting it like a log and tossing twenty-pound stones into neighboring streets, killing cart drivers on their seats and leaving horses lying on the road, body parts shredded. People rushed toward the noise to deal with the dozens of wounded. Twenty-eight people died, including eighteen civilians and ten soldiers. Only the nearby police station, constructed of solid stone, remained standing; all other buildings and houses within hundreds of yards from the blast were flattened. The shock wave blew out windows at the town hall of Saint-Ouen, three miles away.
Again dignitaries traveled to the site to lend support, including the city mayor and the president. Two weeks later, on March 8, 1916, notables conducted another national funeral for the victims, in which Undersecretary Albert Thomas delivered a speech. But the state refused to recognize its responsibility for the explosion and to compensate the victims.
The Basilica of Saint-Denis lay less than four miles away. This was one of the great remaining ancient churches of France, where almost all the kings of France from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, and many from before then, are interred. Still, no proactive steps were taken to prepare it or other historic buildings, or their windows, for the risks of factory explosion or other war damage.
A year later at Reims, ninety-four miles to the east of Saint-Denis, German bombardments resumed on April 15, 19, and 24, 1917, the worst group of bombardments causing the cathedral at Reims the most damage of the war.
Six months after those attacks, in early October 1917, Count d’Armancourt, president of the Archeological Society of Eure-et-Loir, convened a meeting of the society in Chartres. Twenty or so ASEL members gathered, including Father Yves Delaporte, a thirty-eight-year-old priest who had been ordained in 1904 and was serving as archivist for the Diocese of Chartres.
At the meeting, the paramount concern was for the safety of the cathedral’s windows. An artillery-shell factory had emerged and expanded at Lucé, a suburb on Chartres’ southwestern edge. Although Undersecretary Thomas, in his authorization order for the factory, had specified in detail the nature and maximum quantities of explosives permissible in the plant, the locals were worried about the likelihood of an accidental explosion or the Germans bombing it. Either event could blow out the stained-glass windows and structurally damage both Chartres Cathedral, which was less than three miles from the plant, and the Church of Saint-Pierre, a mere third of a mile south of the cathedral, even closer to the plant. The society determined at the meeting to urge the prefect, as chief executive of the department of Eure-et-Loir, and appointed by the national government in Paris, to write to the undersecretary of fine arts in charge of historic monuments to warn him again of the dangers posed by the plant and to ensure that all precautionary measures prescribed by the authorization order be applied.
Within weeks, the prefect had written the undersecretary, arguing that the factory posed an extreme danger to the cathedral and Saint-Pierre. The undersecretary responded that he did not believe the cathedral and the church were in danger, because the authorization order issued by the armaments undersecretary would have meant that those materials were being handled safely and that the factory was surely applying all appropriate safety measures. The maximum charge of the various explosives permitted at the factory, the undersecretary continued, was calculated such that the workshops of the neighboring depots would not even suffer shocks in the event of an explosion.
But for those who lived in Chartres, such assurances were no comfort. They perceived three dangers that compounded the risks of German attack: the artillery factory on the southwest of Chartres, the growing military airfield on the east, and the growing mainline railroad traffic from Paris to Bordeaux through the Chartres depot and switchyards, located less than a mile west of the cathedral.
Three months later, in January 1918 at Reims, the Historic Monuments Commission took action in Reims to salvage the remains of the stained glass of the windows of the roofless cathedral. Workers salvaged the remains of the stained glass that were still intact, including some of the nave’s best. Because the authorities thought scaffolding would have furnished the Germans an expedient for more barrage, the Fine Arts Administration arranged for a small group of courageous firemen from Paris and two glassworkers to attempt a salvage operation. In foggy weather, and before daybreak, the team climbed high up to the iron framework of the windows, dismantled what remained, and lowered it to the floor of the nave.
That same month, at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, fifty-eight miles northeast of Chartres, many of the most valuable stained-glass windows were removed and stowed in the cellar of Turenne located within the crypt of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. And they hadn’t acted a moment too soon: less than three months later, Gotha bombers would arrive over Paris and bombard by night, wreaking damage in unpredictable locations throughout the city.
The protection efforts in Saint-Denis served as beacons for other activists around France. And on February 22, 1918, the Historic Monuments Commission convened a meeting, attended by twenty of its members. The commission president was Charles Bernier, a man in his early sixties who served as a lawyer at the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and as an emeritus jurist. He was known as the “father” of France’s Law of 31st December 1913 on Historical Monuments, which first authorized automatic classification of private property to enable the Fine Arts Administration to impose protection on a monument’s owner and even carry out work on the monument to guarantee its preservation. Also guest attendee at the meeting of the Historic Monuments Commission was Pierre Paquet, the commission’s chief architect who in 1920 would go on to become its inspector general and who since 1914 had been working to restore France’s war-damaged historic buildings.
The Historic Monuments Commission met in a ballroom at the Ministry of Culture’s main offices in the seventeenth-century Palais-Royal on Rue de Valois in Paris, an apt setting for the task before them: The room’s sixteen-foot ceilings were ringed by gold plaster moldings, and beveled glass spanned from wainscot to ceiling, along with rich tapestries, reminding all present of the grandeur of historic monuments the commission was to protect.
During the meeting, President Bernier read aloud a letter from the president of the Society of Friends of Reims Cathedral asking permission to have debris, consisting mostly of lead scrap that came from Reims Cathedral, to be sold for use in making small souvenir reproductions of the cathedral, with proceeds to be donated to the cathedral. The Historic Monuments Commission approved, also sanctioning additional appropriation for the removal, packaging, and transport of the remaining stained-glass windows from Reims Cathedral to Paris. Camille Enlart, also a member of the commission, reported that his comparative sculpture museum at the Trocadéro Palace was currently storing two hundred cases of stained-glass windows in its cellars. Enlart proposed, and the commission approved, that the museum’s basement be cleared of rubble to allow for installation of the windows from Reims. The commission appointed a delegation comprised of Enlart and three other members to inspect the space at the Trocadéro museum and give the appropriate approvals, which they did on March 2.
Later in March 1918, the Germans began using their rail-mounted Big Bertha cannon to shell Paris, causing death and destruction. After the cannonades, more Gotha bombings hit Paris on April 12. The attacks of the Gothas would make a deep impression on one Parisian, fifteen-year-old Achille Carlier—then a high school student and future architectural historian and crusader for the protection of French medieval monuments, who in the next war would lead the fight to spur the Fine Arts Administration to proactively protect the Chartres windows. Twenty years after living through the bombardment, Carlier would write that he had felt indignation upon seeing how inadequate were the measures put in place to protect the gates of Notre-Dame de Paris from possible obliteration during the nightly air raids.
On March 15, not two weeks after the meeting of the commission at the Trocadéro, Father Lamey, parish priest in nearby La Courneuve, was riding the tram at 1:40 in the afternoon about a hundred yards from the church in Aubervilliers. A mile and a half north, at a grenade factory at 25 Rue Edgar Quinet in La Courneuve, three men carrying a box of hand grenades heard a click; they dropped the box and ran for their lives. The contents exploded and triggered more blasts, resulting in the deto-nation of twenty-eight million hand grenades, killing fifteen people and injuring another fifteen hundred. People forty miles away reported hearing the explosions. Four miles away, observers reported seeing two vast plumes of grayish-black smoke, turnip shaped and rising thousands of feet into the air, carried by winds, spreading a pall of smoke and fog over the flattened blackened rubble of the town and surrounding farmlands. The explosions destroyed the many brick buildings of the town, including a local maternity hospital—though, miraculously, no babies there were hurt. The explosion also blew out numerous windows at the Basilica of Saint-Denis and other area churches, but many of the basilica’s stained-glass windows had already been removed.
The grenade factory was supposed to store no more than two hundred thousand grenades at any given time. Two weeks before the explosion, the artillery authority at Vincennes, which managed the depot of grenades at La Courneuve, had warned of danger, reporting that more than eighteen million were being stored at the site.
Six days after the explosions at La Courneuve, the Germans launched their spring offensive, which would reach to within fifty miles north of Paris, the deepest advance by either combatant force since 1914. But by late April 1918, the danger of a German breakthrough seemed to have subsided.
In April and early May, at Chartres workmen were already prepositioning iron scaffolding pipes in the attics of the ambulatories on the lower sides of the cathedral. From there, if ordered, they planned to move the pipes to required locations, row by row, to begin removing the cathedral’s stained-glass windows.
The Historic Monuments Commission convened another meeting in mid-May, attended also by commission president Charles Bernier, a Mr. Berr de Turique, and Paul-Louis Boeswillwald, chief architect and inspector general of France’s historic monuments. Also present was Eugene Will Lefevre-Pontalis, architectural historian and professor of medieval archeology, who had taught at the School of Chartres for two decades and had served on the commission since 1911. Nonmembers also participated, including Pierre Paquet (who would go on to become the commission’s inspector general in 1920) and Gabriel Ruprich-Robert, chief architect of France’s historic monuments in Eure-et-Loire and other locations and assistant to the Inspectorate General, tasked with the monuments’ preservation.
The La Courneuve accident and the others before it were a slap in the face to the Historic Monuments Commission. Mr. Ruprich-Robert introduced a proposal made by Émile Brunet, chief architect of the department of Eure-et-Loir, recommending that the commission order the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral to be removed and requesting funds to pay for the work. The members approved. Brunet called it a precautionary measure, motivated by the proximity to the cathedral of the Lucé artillery factory.
On May 25, the ASEL membership met again to discuss the procedures to be used in the removal, approve funds for the work, adopt a plan to photograph each window before removal, observe the work, and ensure that it would be performed only by specialists. In addition, Étienne Houvet was designated to photograph each window as a whole and each individual panel before it could be separated from its window.
Shortly after the meeting, employees of three master-glassmaker workshops began removing most of the stained-glass windows from Chartres Cathedral, storing them off-site. The work was performed by the Lorin workshop in Léves, run by Charles Lorin, founded by his father in 1869; the Parisian workshop of Albert Bonnot, who had been involved in an 1886 restoration at the cathedral; and the Parisian workshop of Jean Gaudin.
The upper windows were removed from the exterior, the lower from the interior. When the windows were removed, workers inserted canvas mounted on frames into the window openings. For the upper stained-glass windows, workmen installed scaffolding outside the cathedral and lowered it from the roof by means of construction equipment consisting of specialized hoppers. For the lower windows, they lowered scaffolding pipe down to the floor of the cathedral, or to each successive level of constructed scaffolding, by rope through openings in the vaulted ceilings of the ambulatories. They painted a number on each panel and prepared a tracing in duplicate of the panel’s images and design, placing one copy of the drawing inside the box holding each panel and affixing another on the outside of the box. Among the challenges they faced were the need to remove the brittle glass from hardened cement.
As the work at Chartres progressed, danger increased of further German advances. The Germans were planning an attack against the British through Flanders. But to disguise that intention, the Germans launched a long offensive against the French across the River Marne, which had been the scene of the heavy fighting four years before, in 1914. On July 15, 1918, the Second Battle of the Marne began with an attack by fifty-two German divisions across the Marne using temporary bridges near Dormans. But soon the British Twenty-Second Corps and several new American divisions reinforced the French and followed with a large Allied counterattack, including twenty-four French and ten US divisions with a force of 350 new French tanks. The counterattack forced the Germans to retreat almost back to their July 15 starting point while suffering 168,000 casualties and 30,000 of their soldiers taken prisoner.
Less than a week after the counterattack, the membership of the Archeological Society of Eure-et-Loir again met to debate dangers to the project at Chartres, including whether to pursue the project, and confirmed that it should continue.
Ten days later, the Allies began a major counteroffensive with the Battle of Amiens, using new artillery techniques and operational methods, including surprise attacks, and using Canadian and Australian mobile assault forces. The offensive, eventually growing into what was called the Hundred Days Offensive, was seen by many as the tipping point in the war and signaled the end of trench warfare.
Later that August, on two successive nights, enemy planes dropped several bombs at Chartres, damaging roads and some buildings but not the cathedral.
On August 30, the commission convened another meeting at the Palais-Royal. President Bernier had received a letter from Henri-Louis Bouquet, bishop of Chartres, asking the commission to halt the removal of the windows and offering to bear responsibility for the abandonment of the removal and replacement of any windows already removed. His reasons likely centered on concern for breakage or loss of the windows. He may also have shared the belief, discussed below, that the cathedral and its windows would be protected by the Virgin Mary and that mortals should refrain from interfering with Divine will. Bernier had also received a letter from Émile Brunet, chief architect in Eure-et-Loir, alerting the president to the August 15 and 16 bombings by enemy aircraft. Bernier concluded, and the members agreed, that under the circumstances there could be no question about stopping the removal and that the commission should even expand the operation to also remove the windows of the Church of Saint-Pierre and take steps to protect the statue-covered porches of both structures.
For five months, through the war’s end and the armistice, they continued the removal work, completing it before either of the two buildings could sustain further war damage. They rescued a total of twenty-nine thousand square feet of stained glass among the 174 windows of Chartres Cathedral and an unknown portion of the windows of the Church of Saint-Pierre. One accident occurred during the removal at Chartres. Specialists dropped a twelfth-century panel, the Virgin, from the stained-glass Tree of Jesse Window. It would be repaired or replaced by a replica. Any crates in which the window panels were stored appear to have been discarded after the windows were reinstalled.
Over the next five years, with the oversight of architect Émile Brunet, the craftsmen of the Lorin, Bonnot, and Gaudin studios restored and reinstalled the stained-glass windows in Chartres and Saint-Pierre, beginning with resealing the windows with hydraulic lime and cement to ensure a better seal and reinstalling the Chartres windows in a modified, more logical arrangement developed by Canon Delaporte according to his research, to better reflect the windows’ original pattern that had not been followed in previous refurbishings.
The authorities learned lessons in their World War I removal and reinstallation of the windows. First, Canon Delaporte’s scholarship of the cathedral and cataloging gave them courage and the confidence to identify and document the complex, delicate collection of windows. The process then was to remove, package, and store them and to repair many before reinstallation. The canon’s scholarship into the iconography, interpretation, and cataloging of the panels was essential to retaining the stories illustrated by the windows. Second, they developed a conceptual framework to identify, label, describe, and place the windows into context. Third, those carrying out the removal, repair, and reinstallation created an early solution to the problem of replacing hard cement with soft caulking to make the task of future removal and reinstallation even conceivable. Before the 1918–1924 project, the risks of breakage of the older windows in the collection may have seemed almost insurmountable.
The last lesson was a subtler one. Over the years, many church supporters and congregants used their faith to assure themselves and convince others that through some miracle the cathedral would protect itself and that intervention by man would impair that process. But as the machines of war became more efficient, the grip of those old notions appeared to weaken, which allowed the authorities to adopt more pro-active policies in response to citizens’ calls for action to protect historic monuments. Would those changes hold for the next war?
Ironically, the great work of Canon Delaport and other supporters, such as the Marianites of Holy Cross—a group of devout laywomen dedicated to the Virgin Mary who had always had a close relationship with Chartres Cathedral—may have detracted from the cathedral’s protection, in that it overly reassured those who opposed so-called passive defense. They were deterred from building shelters to protect vulnerable structures and creating detachments of residents to prepare for and deal with aerial bombardments and just wanted to withdraw into prayer in the hope that the war would bypass the cathedral. In the long run, these detractors were in a sense correct, in that Chartres Cathedral escaped direct bombardments, and in large part the escape was due to factors other than the passive defense measures. Perhaps, as the Marianites claimed, it would come to pass that the Virgin Mary would look over the cathedral during all future wars that would cross France.
One aspect of the window work certainly benefited the cathedral in World War II: The removal of the windows and their replacement with flexible expandable material would have the effect of allowing shock waves to pass through the cathedral with less resistance. That likely proved important in helping the cathedral endure nearby bombing and bombardment and leaving it better able to bear damage from rain, snow, and the elements during the last fraction of World War II after the liberation of Chartres.
A handful of young men who gained important experience in the military during World War I would go on to play vital roles in saving the stained-glass windows at Chartres in World War II. They included Achille Carlier—who as a teenager was so dismayed by the vulnerability of Notre-Dame de Paris to the German bombardments of World War I—and René Planchenault, Ernest Herpe, and Lucien Prieur. Others, in civilian roles, learned from the World War I window removal and restoration in ways that would prove valuable in the next world war.