SINCE GERMANY’S REMILITARIZATION OF THE RHINELAND, A SLOW pace of events had built steadily the way a brook swelling in spring might intensify into a raging flood. Journalists and government leaders who feared that Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland would be only a beginning to Hitler’s aggression saw greater dangers in Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and at the same time the demands for German-Czech autonomy in the Sudetenland in April turned into military threats that usurped the attention of British, French, and US diplomats. Through spring and summer 1938, French newspapers reverberated with headlines heralding the transforming international landscape.
Consequently, by mid-1938 Minister Jean Zay could wait no longer to act on the question of preserving France’s most precious national treasures. He signed a four-stage advance order authorizing Georges Huisman and his team at the Fine Arts Administration to launch the removal of the Chartres windows.
The pressure inside France only increased when the German-Czech dispute reached a breaking point on September 24. In response, France partially mobilized its military, called up reservists, and invoked controls on transportation and censorship of the press. Jean Maunoury, who had been designated as assistant to Jean Trouvelet in the Chartres removal project, was one of the call-ups, but Huisman had anticipated Maunoury’s mobilization and on the same day furnished Maunoury’s own assistant, Michael Mastorakis, with the necessary instructions and plans to take over the lead.
On Sunday, September 25, French newspapers reported developments unfolding in Munich and Prague: Chamberlain had met Hitler, who had stiffened, now demanding that the German Army be allowed to occupy the Sudetenland and that the Czechs evacuate by September 28, which Chamberlain had put to the Czechs, who rejected Hitler’s demands, backed by both the French and the British cabinets, the Czechs having already mobilized fully. In response, Chamberlain had proposed an immediate four-power conference to settle the dispute in a last-minute effort to avoid war.
At 7:00 p.m. the next evening, four men left by car for Chartres: Jean Trouvelot, Louis Linzeler, and two Parisian master glassmakers, Messieurs Delange and Bourgeot. The temperature was in the sixties; a storm was moving in with windy, cloudy skies, bringing with it showers. After an hour, the men could see the hill and atop it the cathedral’s twin towers. They drove to the prefecture, where they met Jean Chadel, then serving as secretary-general to the prefect, who suggested they convene with the volunteers at 7:30 the following morning. Chadel also authorized Trouvelot and his team to request volunteers from among the military’s 150 designated troops.
The next morning, amid overcast, windy skies and rain, the volunteers, contractors, and laborers, grouped in teams of five to eight, began lowering the scaffolding materials stored in the attics. They did so by means of ropes through the keystone holes of the vaults.
Within hours, the first twenty-five reserve enlisted men had arrived, with more arriving throughout the morning. Volunteers helped first in clearing the cathedral’s nave of its hundreds of wooden chairs, transporting them to the crypt at the Church of Sainte-Foy, several blocks from the cathedral, and onto the esplanade of the garden of the bishopric across the cathedral’s plaza.
To make room for scaffolds, teams moved away the wooden confessionals—already detached from the walls—into areas without windows. Workers also cleared candlesticks, ornaments, fixtures, interim decorations, and statues from the side altars, together with the high chandeliers and other large electric lighting equipment.
Soldiers and volunteers cleared furniture, and military trucks brought the specially fashioned wooden crates, which had been stored in the cellar of Loëns. They installed the crates in the attic through four small doors in the clerestory, located more than fifty feet above the nave’s floor. In a long and difficult task, they hoisted each crate by ropes to the clerestory, each load requiring six men. They eventually used a van to assist in pulling the ropes, and they stored the raised crates in the attic of the ambulatory at the foot of each window, maneuvering through the tight passage under the attic.
The teams initially struggled with the scaffolding, but by 9:30 a.m. they were growing more skillful, assembling scaffolding with increasing speed, assembling and installing the first of the scaffolds, each thirty-two or forty feet in height, in the narrow passage at the foot of the tall windows, completing fifteen to eighteen of the many scaffolds the massive task would require, by 5:00 p.m. While installing the upper portions, they made ready the telescopic platforms for use for the lower portions of the windows—units that consisted of crude, early versions of today’s cherry pickers.
In the choir chapels, which were difficult to access with telescopic platforms, workers installed six scaffolds. By the end of the second day, they had installed the last of the tall scaffolds.
As soon as access to the windows was available, the master glassmakers and glass painters, Charles Lorin and eight of his men, went to work with chisels, beginning to unseal flashings and detach the hard putty that held the windows fast to their iron framework.
While the artisans detached windows wherever scaffolding or telescopic platforms gave them access, workers continued clearing out the attic, removing wood debris, wood paneling, and other flammable materials.
Meanwhile, Jean Trouvelot and his on-site architects, Michael Mastorakis and Louis Linzeler, were ready for the next steps, but they were hesitant to begin the window removal. On the one hand, they sought to permit the artisans to remove as much hardened cement as possible, in order to minimize the damage that would be inflicted on the windows if rush removal were to be commanded. They feared that they had to be ready as soon as possible to remove the windows in the event of any attack—when trucks would have to be requisitioned away and specialists whose skills were needed for such work would likely be mobilized for other military duty and unavailable for the delicate Chartres work.
Relief from the dilemma soon came. The French government had already announced that it would not intervene in a war over Czechoslovakia. Only a few days later, on September 30, Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini signed the Munich Agreement with Czechoslovakia. In that agreement, Czechoslovakia ceded the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for a German, Italian, British, and French guarantee of the territorial integrity of the rest of Czechoslovakia—a grasp for peace to appease Hitler.
At least for the moment, the Fine Arts Administration could postpone removal of the windows, forestall mass requisitioning of military and civilian volunteers and trucks, and allow additional time for the craftsmen to systematically “release” most of the windows from their bay jambs: it was slow, careful work replacing the flashings and seal-ants that had been made thirteen years before—which had employed hydraulic lime and cement for its perfect seal, now to be replaced by limed flashings and plaster made for quick and easy removal to avoid breakage—and reinserting them using that new malleable plastic material as caulking rather than cement so that later the windows could be removed by less skilled workers. The abatement in geopolitical tensions would relieve pressure from the risk that the skilled craftsmen would later be drafted for combat. While the “preremoval” readying work was being conducted, the Fine Arts Administration continued to line up and train a large workforce to be held on standby for the next phase of the Chartres operation.
As an added precaution, Trouvelot, Mastorakis, and Linzeler took the step of selecting a number of windows throughout the cathedral that could be removed immediately to establish “air holes,” to relieve air pressure from nearby explosions—in the hopes of minimizing damage to the glass that remained.
These developments allowed the Fine Arts Administration the time to select the second of the two window-removal alternatives: mount all available scaffolds and hoists, complemented by other makeshift devices; make ready all packing material; remove window flashings in situ; secure the stained-glass windows with pins (the barotères and feuillards) to be restored and kept in place; and make them ready in situ to prepare for the rapid and easy removal of the greatest number of windows if as a result of war tensions or outright invasion the need to remove, transport, and hide the windows became unavoidable.
As events transpired, the time available for preparation would prove longer than Jean Trouvelot and his colleague would have dared to hope. Within a week of the Munich Agreement’s signing, the number of workmen at Chartres was cut to a minimum, leaving only a few craftsmen, using the scaffolding remaining in the side aisles, to continue to release and reputty the thousands of window panels and flashings and to seal the outer edges of each window to its masonry window jamb. The scramble of workmen—with the clatter of metal tools and shouts that had reverberated in the cathedral in the first days of the operation—now subsided into an orderly pattern that permitted church services to return and allayed fears of a wholesale panic and breakage. Part of the ambulatory stained-glass windows and sections of the high choir and transept were restored and reinstalled with soft putty and soft flashings.
The scaffolding installed in September 1938 remained in place for that year, except for a few scaffolds that were moved to repair windows.
And as it turned out, Jean Trouvelot also determined that it would be necessary to modify the strips (feuillards) of the windows of the ambulatory. Meanwhile, the Fine Arts Administration took advantage of the time between late 1938 and August 1939 to complete preparatory work on the windows and other parts of the cathedral.
During that time, specialist volunteers rendered what Trouvelot characterized as extraordinary service, but their private businesses suffered from their having to invest time and resources into instructing the project’s workers and providing for insurance.
In November 1938, Achille Carlier resurfaced in the debate to close and relocate the airfield near the cathedral, launching what he called a “national petition for the suppression of the Chartres aviation camp that threatens death to the cathedral.” He appeared in a radio interview to press his petition and campaign. The senate debated the matter, but the motion to adopt was defeated.
In late January 1939, a new player had entered the picture—Jean Moulin, another World War I veteran, who had been appointed prefect of Eure-et-Loire, based at Chartres, early in 1939. He was a staunchly republican lawyer from Béziers near the southern French coast southwest of Montpellier, and he would become a renowned member of the French Resistance, unifying its many factions at de Gaulle’s direction during World War II. Before coming to Chartres, Moulin had served in a series of positions in the prefectures of a number of the French administrative departments and in France’s Air Ministry during the early 1930s, where he had been active in efforts to send planes and pilots to assist the Spanish republicans during the Spanish Civil War.
Five months later, the annual religious pilgrimage to Chartres honoring the Virgin Mary had to hold Mass outdoors, next to the cathedral, for the first time in centuries.
In late August, after three years of planning, the Directorate of Museums launched the national operation to evacuate artworks from museums.
But still they refrained from ordering removal of the stained-glass windows from Chartres.