Removal: Chartres, August 1939–January 1940
FOLLOWING FRANCE’S 1938 MOBILIZATION, THE GOVERNMENT RATCHeted war production into high gear, and within six months the Munich Agreement’s promise of peace dissolved into war, as many had expected. When the Germans and the Soviets joined in a nonaggression pact in August 1939, the French again had reason to fear that another war would be fought in their homeland.
By then, France’s military had been moving most French war industry to the interior, which caused dislocation of workers and their families—who were expected to follow the industry—and pressured communities to provide schools and housing. At the same time, over one hundred thousand refugees from Austria, Poland, and other Eastern European countries began arriving in France. And eight hundred thousand French from Alsace-Lorraine moved to the interior, displacing inhabitants and inundating local social-service resources. Compounding those dislocations and efforts to move the new entrants to the southwest, four hundred thousand exiles of the Spanish Civil War were entering France.
By now, Minister Jean Zay had overseen three years of planning for two large evacuations in anticipation of war: museums would have to ship their artworks to depots in the interior, and teams would be poised to remove stained-glass windows from cathedrals and other churches and transport them to safe facilities.
France’s defense ministry would work closely with the Fine Arts Administration to provide security and manpower. Captain Lucien Edward Prieur, an architect and World War I veteran who had headed the civilian Division of Historic Landmarks, would serve as the director and liaison between military and civilians. He had taken charge of positioning supplies and equipment at other cathedrals and churches that would be needed for removal and transportation of their windows—including interchangeable parts for scaffolding—as he had already accomplished at Chartres. He faced a challenge securing personnel, particularly because so many skilled workers had been drafted to fight, so Prieur’s division was forced to develop the capability to train almost a quarter of the workers on-site.
When the German-Czech and German-Polish confrontations reached a breaking point in late August 1939, Zay launched both evacuations. The work on the windows began at Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle and at Bourges’ and Amiens’ cathedrals. There, during the previous twelve months, teams had also reputtied the stained-glass windows. Now workers went into action and, within four days of his order, dismantled and packed the windows at those locations. Attention then turned to the cathedrals at Chartres and Metz.
On August 24, the day after Germany and the Soviets had announced their pact, the French called up their reserves. Late the next morning, a foggy, rainy Friday with temperatures in the seventies, Georges Huisman, at his Paris offices in the Fine Arts Administration, received the call from Zay. The time had come. Then Zay telephoned Jean Trouvelot with the go-ahead to put his teams at Chartres to work.
So on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, the prefect of Eure-et-Loire ordered the cathedral closed and summoned two hundred troops to start the work. They arrived at the cathedral by midafternoon and commenced work directly, first carrying out the three thousand wooden chairs that occupied the floor of the nave and choir and storing them in the bishop’s palace across the square. When room became available, some troops assisted Mr. Faucheux, the designer of the telescopic platforms, to wheel his half dozen inventions back inside the cathedral into position in front of those windows that had already been reputtied and could be removed by workmen.
Artisans from the master glass workshops soon arrived. They included men from the nearby Lorin workshop and from the Paris studios of Gaudin, Tournet, Bourgeot, and Delange. First they worked on the windows that had not yet been reputtied in the work that had begun in September 1938. Those windows that were still attached to their jambs with rigid flashings consisting of especially hard cement would have to be loosened and reputtied. Then they removed the stained-glass panels that had already been reputtied since the start of work in 1938. Those panels, largely ancient ones, would be removed only by the artisans and trained employees of the glass workshops. Their task first consisted of positioning the scaffolding to gain access to each targeted window.
As work got under way, Roger Grand, president of the local Association of Passive Defense, assembled his teams of volunteers from around the city. He also summoned a hundred building workers—who had signed commitments with the prefecture and the Fine Arts Administration. Those volunteers and the committed laborers and tradesmen climbed the hill toward the cathedral.
Meanwhile, troops already on-site began bringing to the cathedral the wooden crates for the windows, together with shredded straw and powdered cork as packing material, all of which had been stored in the cellar of Loëns. They had to start by identifying those of the crates designated to hold the first of the windows to be taken down, identified by window number according to the numbering system adopted by Canon Delaporte in 1918 for all of the cathedral’s 175 windows.
The first teams to work on the windows started with the thirty-seven lower ones in the aisles of the nave, ambulatory, and side chapels. They employed scaffolding assembled inside the cathedral in those aisles. The scaffolding was forty-two feet tall, with five platforms spaced at six-foot intervals; starting at the sixteen-foot level, the scaffolding’s base would be anchored to the lower part of the wall and the upper part anchored to the top of the iron framework of the window bay with ropes as soon as the first panels of glass were removed, in order to minimize shifting of the scaffolding during ongoing work, a step repeated at intervals as the workmen moved lower down the framework.
One of those thirty-seven lower windows was the Assumption Window, number 7 of Delaporte’s 175, which dates to the thirteenth century, located in the south aisle of the nave near the Labyrinth. That window’s twenty-seven picture panels—shaped as circles, semicircles, and quatrefoils—were sandwiched among the window’s forty other background panels.
The workers began on the lower windows by hauling up the wooden crate designated to hold the Assumption Window. Each crate, when empty, weighed on average between fifty and eighty pounds. A team of men hoisted the designated crate up to the top scaffold platform using a set of ropes pulled by workmen and positioned it on the platform. Pairs of men made duplicate copies of a cartoon drawing (likely a rubbing or tracing) of the entire window and each of its many constituent panels and labeled the cartoon with the number 7, matching the window and also numbering each of its many panels, according to Delaporte’s numbering. A pair of workmen on the top platform went on to remove the window’s uppermost panels.
The removal of a stained-glass window requires that it be dismantled into its separate panels, each of which constitutes a separate picture or scene, composed of multiple pieces of colored and/or painted glass. In some cases, a panel consists of a single piece of glass, but in most cases it is a set of as many as several dozen pieces. Usually a window is removed starting with its uppermost panels and moving down toward its lowest panels, first labeling the panels with white paint.
They likely removed those panels by prying them from the soft flashing that sealed them to the masonry window jamb and sliding them from the iron framework that formed the circular and quatrefoil shapes of the window’s panels, placing four to five panels in a simple glazer’s rack. They affixed a pulley at the top of the scaffolding, threaded a rope into it, and lowered the rack while maintaining it in a vertical position. They numbered the crate with a view to storage before packing. They took each panel out of the rack, wrapped it, and placed it in its crate with packing material and then continued, panel after panel, until the crate was full. They then placed one copy of the cartoon inside the crate, covered it with the pine lid, and sealed it with a metal strap, which they drew tight with a hand-operated clamping tool. The fully loaded crates weighed on average between 330 and 400 pounds. The men also labeled the outside of this crate with the catalog number of the window while others sealed it.
A separate team ha
uled the crate to the head of the stairway inside the cathedral along the south wall inside the west portal, which led to the crypt—the twelve-foot-wide and 230-foot-long gallery chapel of Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre beneath the cathedral. They gently eased each crate down the stone steps into the crypt and placed it on the floor on its edge, with its flat side leaning against other crates similarly placed, all ready to be secured, and never placing anything on top of the crates.
As they removed the panels from the aisle windows, the light poured in through the open armatures, and the cathedral was brighter than it had been since the windows had been removed that last time, during World War I. With each stage of removal, the swell in brightness further diminished the shadowy, otherworldly iridescence of the cathedral’s expanse beneath the vaults of the nave.
The next teams assembled other scaffolding on the exterior of the cathedral to reach the twenty-seven upper windows of the nave, transept, and choir, installing that scaffolding onto the narrow ledge at the base of each of those windows, which they reached through trap-doors in the ceilings of the attics beneath the roofs of the clerestory. Among those was the Life of the Virgin Mary Window, numbered by Delaporte as 16, located in the south ambulatory, halfway between the transept and the altar.
For the next project, other teams assembled tall scaffolding on the exterior of the cathedral to reach the seven upper windows of the apse. Among those was the Charlemagne Window, number 38 in Delaporte’s list, which had been the subject of the controversy following the 1918 removal. It was located in the ambulatory on the northeast between two apsidal chapels.
Another team of workers reinstalled tall scaffolding on the interior, against the inside of the west facade of the nave and the north and south facades of the transept, to reach the three lancets topped by the large west rose window, and both sets of five lancets each, topped by the large roses on each of the north and south transept facades. Among those was the North Rose, number 145 on Delaporte’s list. It consisted of fifty-seven intricate windows, each embedded into its own individual window jamb. Those windows were arranged in five concentric circles, each consisting of a dozen matching windows, and each circle composed of windows of a distinct shape, with each divided into as many as thirty-six panels. Its images reflected Old Testament figures, in contrast to the South Rose’s themes from the New Testament and the West Rose’s themes of the Last Judgment. Because the rose windows consisted of a large number of panels embedded individually into their own separate window jambs, they required removing more flashings than was done for the lancet windows. And because they had not been taken away during the 1918 removals—having not been repaired since the nineteenth century—they were also in poor condition, requiring extra effort.
The remaining teams took their direction from the glass painters and their workers in the cathedral, organized into teams to assist the artisans and their employees who would remove the remaining flashings and detach and reputty those of the stained-glass windows yet to undergo such treatment. The glass painters moved on to begin removing the oldest stained-glass windows in those locations that had been prepared in advance. Any idle workers were directed to carry sandbags to the cathedral from their storage in the cellar of Loëns, to be ready to be stacked in the lower bays and around the portals at the end of the window-removal project, to protect them from bomb blasts. By the end of the first day, more than 5,300 square feet of the stained glass had been packed in crates.
The next day, the number of soldiers on-site swelled to two hundred, plus seventy workers consisting of teams of glassworkers from the Lorin, Tournel, and Gaudin workshops. The crews continued to remove stained glass, starting with the work on the thirty-seven lower windows of the aisles, the ambulatory, and side chapels, using the scaffolding inside the building. The base of those windows was sixteen feet above the floor.
On the evening of the twenty-sixth, Mr. Bourgeot, another glass painter from Paris, arrived to prepare for his portion of the work. But a snag developed the same day: army mobilization papers arrived, calling up some of the laborers for deployment.
On the twenty-seventh, Minister Zay gave the order to commence the second major evacuation: exodus of artworks that had been packaged for shipment from museums all over northern and eastern France.
Back at Chartres the work continued. The number of workers available to proceed with the removal work in support of the skilled craftsmen had shrunk to about fifty, due to recall of most of the reservists. Jean Trouvelot asked Jean Chadel to requisition additional workers, a request filled several days later.
In the afternoon, Pierre Paquet arrived to assess progress. Paquet worked for France’s General Inspectorate of Historic Monuments as an inspector general since 1920 and had overseen the restorations of some of France’s great landmarks. With his handlebar mustache, bushy dark beard, and invariably stiff-backed posture, he would have noted how the brightness of the daylight in the aisles of the cathedral from which the stained glass had already been removed, washing out the colors—even in the still-overcast weather—contrasted with the dark richness of the areas in the cathedral whose windows were still intact.
By six o’clock that evening, seventy troops had arrived and had finished carrying the last of the empty crates and straw into the cathedral; later that evening, when the worksite closed, the crews had packed and deposited in the crypt 5,200 additional square feet of the windows.
The next day, about fifty workers were present, continuing removal of windows. In the afternoon, the first contingent of about twenty special construction workers arrived, including masons, carpenters, roofers, and house painters, together with another skilled glass painter, Mr. Delange of Paris. By that evening, another 7,500 square feet of windows had been deposited.
By Tuesday morning, the full contingent of 180 required construction workers had arrived, including a lead fitter from the firm Entrepose to direct the assembly of the large new interior scaffolding to reach the rose windows. The workers filled the cathedral with sounds of hammers striking, crates being dragged along the floor, joined scaffolding pipes clanging, and supervisors directing workers in and out. At midday, the smells of wine and sausage, bread and cheese, and brewed coffee were accompanied by the voices of women bringing and serving food from the bishop’s palace across the square and the seminary. Workers sat and ate wherever they could find space. By day’s end, the workers had packed away another 5,300-plus square feet of windows.
On Wednesday the thirty-first, two additional lead fitters arrived to build scaffolding for the rose windows. The same number of workers as on the previous day continued that day and the next day to assemble the rose-window scaffolding and prepare crates to receive those windows. Minister Zay also traveled to inspect the window removal and other passive-defense work under way at the Parisian churches, Sainte-Chapelle, Saint-Séverin, and Saint-Sulpice. He remarked that those places of prayer and silence were now by necessity filled with the noise of hammers pounding on crates and of the trucks transporting crates to the crypt of the Paris Panthéon, and he spoke with approval of the “passion and action” exhibited by the crews.
Then he visited Chartres Cathedral and jotted in his notebook, “I pushed on to Chartres; a harsh light streamed through the large bay windows, no longer filtered through stained glass, bright light in even the most secret corners.” And, reflecting on the storage of the Paris stained-glass windows and artworks being moved to the crypt of the Panthéon, he called those subterranean reaches “an excellent hiding place . . . where the carefully swaddled works of art slept” but remarked that, in “this underground cemetery, one of the saddest in the world, it seemed to me that one clandestinely celebrated the funeral of a civilization.” He would later write in his memoir,
I continued as far as Chartres: through the wide windows, a brutal light, no longer filtered by the stained-glass windows, entered the cathedral, blazed in the innermost corners of the apse, beamed down upon the defenceless altars. It seemed that the sanctuary had b
een violated, left to the forces of nature. But, a few hundred yards away, military improvidence had built an airfield, and the stained-glass windows of Chartres had been saved from certain destruction by our care.
In the tumult of a developing war, which did not yet consist of heroism but nevertheless already required a great deal of levelheadedness and method, the officials of Public Education and those of Fine Arts rendered to France many unknown services that would be wrong to consider negligible. Across the country, in advance of the war, they showed competence and dedication.
When all who were commanded to mobilize were put in place, each could take up his post, conscience in order: one in his school or museum, the other in the Army. The situation had found them ready for all that depended on them.
The day of Minister Zay’s visit and the two that followed, the workers at Chartres finished building the new scaffolding and removed the rose windows while continuing to remove and crate the other windows. Many of the mobilized workers were then paid and departed, but because the Fine Arts Administration had not yet received all funding needed to pay all of the workers, it proved necessary for Roger Grand and his Association of Passive Defense to loan the funds necessary to pay the workers.
The fifty remaining workers continued with more packing and movement of the loaded crates down to the crypt, and they commenced dismantling the scaffolding. The same day, Sunday, September 3, both the British and the French ultimatums to the Germans expired. By midday, both countries declared that they were at war with Germany.
At the cathedral, the teams continued through September 5 with crating of windows and installing temporary inserts of vitrex and Plexiglas into the empty iron framework of the windows, and then they began to remove the scaffolding. In the crypt, they nailed down and strapped the crates. They also installed protections in the lower bays consisting of a combination of wooden and sheet-metal cladding and sacks of earth for protection.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 14
