Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  Within a week, Auguste Labouret, an internationally recognized Parisian stained-glass artist and innovator, gave Huisman a memorandum of recommendations concerning the Chartres windows. He recommended that the speed of the operation be balanced against the care the fragile windows would require. He further advised that, although entrusting several Parisian glassmaker workshops with removing the glass would offer its advantages, the sudden mobilization of the rescue operation would likely be slowed to the point of compromise by organizational complications in the assembly of a large, scattered team with varying travel times and modes of travel. In the end, Labouret also suggested specific courses of action to be taken in case of bombardment and made recommendations for the necessary manpower and scaffolding. He argued against removing any windows at night.

  Meanwhile, the Parisian scaffolding firm Solidevit performed its on-site study for the Fine Arts Administration and on March 9 proposed, for a fixed price, to conduct a trial run of the assembly of its recommended type of scaffolding.

  On May 1 the Fine Arts Administration completed its review of vendors’ proposals solicited for production of special crates to hold the windows and ordered one thousand, to be constructed with nonflammable packing materials and so-called fireproof wood.

  Several weeks later, the administration rejected the need for an on-site generator to power lights during a night removal, maintaining the machinery’s upkeep would be difficult and also that the delicate procedure of the window removal should never occur at night in any case. The administration also purchased other necessary materials for the protection project, to store near or within the cathedral.

  In France’s national elections that May, candidates of the left and center parties—which joined as the Popular Front—won a majority of parliamentary seats, the Socialists holding the plurality and forming a coalition with Radicals to appoint Socialist Léon Blum as prime minister.

  In June, Blum appointed Jean Zay new Minister of National Education and Fine Arts. Zay was a journalist and lawyer from Orléans with a wife and two young daughters who in 1932 had been elected deputy of Loiret and then reelected in May 1936. Zay gave up his law practice in 1936 to enter government service. Blum had chosen Zay largely because of his youth. Zay had been known as one of the group of young Turks who had sought to renew the Radical Party and in 1935 had pushed it to join the Popular Front. A Freemason with Jewish roots, Zay urged left-wing unity, supported Spanish republicans, and would oppose the Munich Agreement of 1938.

  Zay wore distinctive heavy-rimmed, round-lensed eyeglasses, and he stood out in many additional ways, not as an anticapitalist or militant but as a man who consistently reached to operate on a high moral plane and resist what he perceived as trends toward decadence. The introduction to his file in the French National Archives describes him as having “an energetic and positive nature” and as “an endearing man, dazzling with talent, of finesse and intelligence, but attentive and sensitive, sometimes profound.” Zay was a pacifist but, with Hitler in power, opposed fascist states and considered the League of Nations a failure.

  Zay contributed leadership, energy, inspiration, and a radical activism to the Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts. His administration applied modern principles of planning and logistics, focusing on procuring personnel, training them across organizations, purchasing equipment and supplies from dual sources, securing financing, coordinating with the military, and engaging local volunteers for training on-site.

  Zay also reanimated the government’s preparations for preservation of artworks and cultural monuments and guided them in a new direction, building on the work René Planchenault had begun years before. What set Jean Zay apart was his passion—his sense of great purpose in whatever he set about doing. For him, the work of monument preservation was part of the core function of education—to help the people, from all walks of French life, to try to make sense of the world that seemed again in the 1930s to be gyrating out of control. He operated according to a moral compass, and it is entirely fitting that his ashes would eventually be installed in the Paris Panthéon, immortalizing him as one of the great players in the French Resistance. At the onset of World War II, he would quit his ministry post to join the military, suffering a tragic fate when the Vichy regime arrested him, tried him for treason along with a host of other left-leaning political players, and imprisoned him.

  Zay wrote a wartime prison diary, published in 1946, in which his meditation displayed what one commentator called “an amazing degree of literary panache and verve.” Zay identified with Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been unjustly imprisoned in 1895. Zay jotted in his diary a description of Dreyfus by another French author to the effect that “persecutors could not divest him of his priceless inner freedom.” Zay exhibited that inner freedom. While in prison, not only did Zay maintain the diary, but he also wrote a detective novel that was published under the pen name Paul Duparc. In addition, he grew radishes, tomatoes, and flowers in a tiny gravel path.

  Zay arrived as the new minister of National Education and Fine Arts at a time when the Fine Arts Administration was increasingly focusing on the Chartres windows among its wide range of projects. Following Achille Carlier’s March trial run of the window removal at Chartres, Pierre Paquet, within the Fine Arts Administration, wrote a May 23 report to the commission detailing the Fine Arts Administration’s efforts to respond expeditiously to the urgency advocated by Carlier and the Chartres stained-glass-rescue committee; that same day the Historic Monuments Commission approved purchase of the equipment proposed by Émile Brunet—excepting a generator and the telescoping cranes, which were still under consideration but were later approved as well.

  In early July, on request from Zay, the defense minister agreed to make 124 soldiers available to the Fine Arts Administration for removal and crating of the Chartres windows, adding that by October the number could be increased to 250.

  But the Fine Arts Administration had greater responsibilities for preservation of France’s cultural patrimony beyond the provincial concerns of one cathedral in one city. Beginning in 1936, the interior, defense, and education ministries began a coordinated effort to incorporate a national “passive” civil defense, consisting of nonmilitary measures to protect French heritage from aerial attacks. The Direction des musées—or the Directorate of Museums—directed public art museums throughout France to assemble lists of art objects (paintings, sculptures, and archeological and decorative objects) that would need to be evacuated in the event of war. The Fine Arts Administration also had to decide whether it would evacuate private collections as well as those of public museums. But while it struggled to realize its mandate, political change intervened.

  Overall, although the Fine Arts Administration’s planning by the end of 1936 had aligned in many ways with the preservationist steps advocated by Achille Carlier, the leadership team at the Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts and at the Historic Monuments Commission determined Carlier’s plan to be unrealistic; his plan was too aggressive and risk-prone to gain traction. Carlier had insisted that a team of 350 workers—many to consist of volunteers—when summoned, would be able to gather at Chartres Cathedral, clear three thousand wooden chairs from the nave, move the confessionals out of the way, lower most of the scaffolds through the ceilings and others from the storage rooms, reposition and assemble the scaffolds, and gather the one thousand crates and packing materials from storage areas in designated groupings to designated points, all in the first hour, and then mount the scaffolds and simultaneously remove the hundreds of windows, lower their thousands of glass panels, pack them in crates, and deposit them in the crypt, all in one additional hour. The Historic Monuments Commission instead chose to prioritize security along with speed. So it called on the workshops of France’s master glassmakers to propose an alternative plan.

  Nevertheless, the agitation of Achille Carlier and his team of volunteers and Chartres Cathedral’s civic supporters appears to have performed a valuab
le function—and would again in the near future: They had forced the Fine Arts Administration to expedite and make critical preparations—to build trapdoors and keystone sleeves and to order manpower, equipment, and supplies. More important, Carlier and supporters had deployed the knowledge and support of Chartrains whose lives were intimately woven with the cathedral. And Carlier seems to have forced the professionals to listen to the citizens and grapple with their fears. But now it was up to the Fine Arts Administration to fit all the Chartres players—government, citizen, and military—into the larger national need to preserve monuments under mounting threat of German invasion.

  In January 1937, director general of the Fine Arts Administration, Georges Huisman, determined that the government would undertake to evacuate all works of art “worthy of state protection” from all museums and many private estates in eastern and northern France and move those artworks to the south and west into protective sites, including one hundred castles, as well as prepare for the protection of culturally significant historic buildings, like Chartres Cathedral. Although preparation began right away, another year and a half would pass before a law would be adopted to provide a national legal framework for the passive-defense program, giving the state the necessary authority, including powers to requisition privately owned buildings for storage of art and to designate personnel, including volunteers, reserve soldiers, and even veterans, who could be called up for nonmilitary duties within two years of completing military service.

  In addition to the Fine Arts Administration’s behind-the-scenes preparations to protect France’s national treasures, the Historic Monuments Commission authorized purchase of supplies for rapid removal of Chartres’ stained glass and payment of fees to the architects working on the project.

  Blum stepped down as prime minister in mid-1937, but Zay stayed on in the Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts, and during the next year he moved the wartime-national-preservation project forward. Two months after Blum’s departure, Zay issued a set of secret, far-reaching instructions on the protection of France’s monuments and works of art against war damage. He ordered his staff to classify monuments and artworks under a kind of heritage-triage system and designated eight administrative departments from which artworks were to be withdrawn and, for each, a corresponding department in the country’s interior to which the artworks were to be directed. Zay premised his directive on the belief that no part of the country could be sheltered from aerial attack and that precautions must be taken against attacks near munitions factories on the basis of lessons learned from the damage to the stained-glass windows of the Basilica of Saint-Denis after the 1918 La Courneuve explosion. Zay wrote, “It is better to pursue measures that may ultimately prove useless rather than leave oneself exposed to be taken by surprise.” In another report, Zay prescribed building protective walls of sandbags around fragile buildings, removing stained-glass windows, and using various means to prevent fires.

  In October 1937, Zay established general principles that he later directed be disseminated in a secret directive throughout the north of France. This report was likely based on the work of René Planchenault, begun as early as 1932. Zay ordered Georges Huisman at the Fine Arts Administration to promulgate the secret order by recirculating a memo previously issued in 1935 by Inspector General Eugéne Rattier of the Historic Monuments Administration in which Rattier had without success requested that the architects of the Historic Monuments Administration assemble an inventory of French artworks and answer detailed questions concerning buildings housing the works. Zay now instructed staff countrywide to promptly follow their head architects’ orders and provide Huisman answers to Rattier’s 1935 questions, all to facilitate central ordering of equipment and supplies for evacuation and passive defense of those works.

  A critical matter remained to be resolved, however: The Fine Arts Administration had not yet secured sites in which the evacuated art, including the stained-glass windows, could be stored. The Ministry of Defense chose the western and central regions of France as those in which storage depots would be established.

  In the second half of 1938, Fine Arts Administration and Directorate of Museums staff began to search for suitable facilities within those regions that met the militarily mandated criteria: The sites had to be away from urban centers and strategic targets, yet easily accessible by rail or road, sturdy and large enough to withstand nearby explosions, close to water for firefighting, and in climates neither too cold nor humid for paintings. But even when storage buildings satisfying all of these difficult criteria could be found, they couldn’t be used until Ministry of Finance officials offered indemnity payments to property owners, who were required to permit curators and guards, with their families, to live on-site indefinitely. For stained-glass windows, that storage facilities meet all of the criteria was essential. But even as late as 1938, no destination for the Chartres windows had been secured.

  The Fine Arts Administration had to engage in comprehensive multisite planning for evacuations they knew might have to be implemented at any time. The sites needing protection included Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle, Chartres’ cathedral and Church of Saint-Pierre, and the cathedrals at Bourges, Amiens, and Metz.

  They worked on the far-reaching project throughout 1937 and the first three-quarters of 1938, engaging dozens of contractors and vendors to plan, procure, and place supplies and equipment in storage near the various cathedrals for quick access when needed. But such planning and procurement was only part of the problem posed by this vast undertaking. The need for personnel trained to carry out the necessary work was a thornier problem and perhaps a greater source of uncertainty: most Frenchmen of suitable age and physical ability to the tasks were subject to conscription and immediate call-up in a military mobilization. This posed a potential risk too great to ignore. Furthermore, the exodus of artwork to be conducted via trucks and trains across the country would require guards and teams of workmen. To manage the problem, the authorities called on military workforces to prepare the artworks for shipment and for assembly in the storage depots. They created a new military unit that would be known to France’s wartime Grand Quartier Général (GQG) as the Service des Monuments au G.Q.G.—or the Historic Monuments Service—whose mandate would be to protect the convoys who would evacuate, first, France’s moveable art and, second, its cathedrals’ stained-glass windows.

  Captain Lucien Edward Louis Prieur, a Parisian-born architect and World War I veteran, headed the new unit. Prieur worked closely with civilian officials, including Ernest Herpe, a widely experienced chief architect who would join the Historic Monuments Service in 1939 and eventually head the Fine Arts Administration.

  Many planners and project managers were involved in the Chartres project. In 1938, over at the Fine Arts Administration, Director General Georges Huisman appointed Paris architect Jean Trouvelot as Chartres project leader for both the cathedral and the nearby Church of Saint-Pierre, to be assisted by Jean Maunoury, and Michael Mastorakis, another state-trained architect at Chartres, to assist Maunoury in turn. Contractors responded with bid proposals. Some were accompanied by lists of proposed workers.

  They anticipated that specified essential workers would have to be issued security clearances by the military and granted waivers from mobilization and transportation permits to enable them, with their families, to travel to Chartres.

  The equipment and supplies needed for the window-removal work would not fit in the cathedral’s attic. So the Fine Arts Administration arranged for two storage facilities: First, it gained access to the nearby granary and cellar of Loëns, five hundred feet northwest of the cathedral, in which to store the empty wooden crates. Second, it leased from the military a portion of Building Q in the Rapp District of Chartres, a half mile southeast of the cathedral, next to the Church of Saint-Pierre.

  By mid-March 1938, fears of German invasion heightened further when Germany incorporated Austria. On April 10, Édouard Daladier became France’s prime minister, and h
e kept Zay on in the Ministry of National Education.

  The international crisis over the Sudetenland in September 1938 would serve as a technical run-through for the protection of historic sites across France. On September 6, with war appearing imminent, France’s Division of Public Buildings distributed fire extinguishers and materials for sandbags to cities throughout the country and recruited workers to create protective ramparts.

  On September 9, Enterprise Mathieu & Marçais, a Paris construction contractor, delivered to Jean Trouvelot a complete proposal to supply managers, manpower, and equipment to oversee major portions of the Chartres project, with lists of equipment and personnel—including each man’s address and biographical profile—to be processed for security clearances, mobilization waivers, and transit permits.

  Between 1936 and mid-1938, crews brought material, tools, and equipment to Chartres Cathedral and the nearby cellar of the Loëns and Rapp Building for use in both the cathedral and the Church of Saint-Pierre. Contractors cut holes for as many as three dozen exit hatches in the attics and roofs of the north and south ambulatories for hoisting tools and equipment from below the floors of those ambulatory attics, and inside the cathedral in the attic of each ambulatory they installed metal sleeves in the keystone holes of such ambulatory vault, through which scaffolding would be lowered to the cathedral floor when needed.

  Without elevators or power winches, workmen hauled hundreds of lengths of tubular pipe and fittings for scaffolding, in interchangeable pieces, up circular stairways to the cathedral’s attic, whose ceiling extended more than forty feet above the vaults of the nave.

  Atop the nave, in the main attic, workers traversed boardwalks resting on the crossbeams above the ancient vaults, where they stacked designated pipes and fittings above their respective assigned keystones, which would later be opened, through which to lower the equipment by ropes down to the floor of the nave. Other equipment and supplies they carried up circular stairways to be stacked in the towers’ storage rooms, some to be hoisted up through the exit hatches cut into in the ambulatories’ ceilings, the other portion to be lowered through openings in the balcony floors through keystone holes of the ambulatory vaults.