About ten kilometers to the city, the spires of the Cathedral come into view and soon, the entire edifice can be seen, on top of a hill, dominating the landscape. It is not symmetrical: one spire dates from the XII c. while the bell tower is a Renaissance creation. And as you get closer, it resembles more a massive heap of stone than any other Gothic church of its size: it lacks refinement and finesse; inside and out, it is dark and heavy; it does not so much sit as brood on top of its hill, hemmed in at ground level by medieval streets and old trees that all but hide it from every angle.
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At first glance, aside from its sheer size (which can be oppressive) and the faint air of mystery inside, it does not impress or, indeed, commend itself too readily.
But of course, you would not be in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Chartres to have a “first glance” at the cathedral. Much like Bourges, just about the only thing to bring you to Chartres is the cathedral itself and, more to the point, what you will already have read about it. And so, it is nearly impossible to arrive at Chartres a tabula rasa; your impression of the building is necessarily shaped by its history. [On this, please see previous note.] And what a history!
The Cathedral of Chartres is the first church built in the High Gothic style. The architect took elements of the Abbey churches of St. Denis and the Notre Dame cathedral and enhanced them in every direction. For all its ungainly weight, it is a marvel of construction, a mass of innovations. Indeed, its heft can be explained by the very innovations involved: the church was to be so tall and so light that it was not clear if the walls and the buttresses would work – indeed, elsewhere they did not and the roof collapsed. You forgive the architect that he erred on the side of safety and sacrificed grace for solidity; indeed, the more you learn about the history, the more its very solidity signifies grace. And then there are the statues and the stained-glass windows. More on these later.
Chartres the town was not always so forlorn. The Beauce, which lies outside Paris and of which Chartres was the market centre, was called the “granary of France”. Chartres was also a major pilgrimage site in its own right, having a claim not only to periodic visits by the Virgin, but also the cloak of the Virgin in which she gave birth, or got pregnant, or got to “know” Joseph (the point is, she did something that made her other than a virgin). A Romanesque cathedral was built in the IX c. to accommodate the relics and the pilgrims. Soon after, it burnt down; the replacement cathedral burnt down barely a hundred years later; its replacement also went down to fire, only 14 years after completion, in 1194.
Once again (as in 1144, when construction had begun on the newly burned-down church), Church, the state and society came together; money poured in from every corner of France; serfs and the nobility hitched themselves to carts and carried stones up the hill; hundreds of masons and glass-workers worked on a project that, because of its scale, none was to see to completion. The geometric relations of the building are mind-boggling but not implausible; the soaring roof is built over a wide Romanesque foundation, thus requiring endless innovation and improvisation; in conception, it is a reflection of Platonist ideals.
According to Kenneth Clark, “[c]ivilisation means something more than energy and will and creative power[:] … a sense of permanence. … Civilised man must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back.” It is precisely in their conscious looking forward that the funders and builders of Chartres represent a new moment in European history; in its sense of proportion, its massive solidity, its permanence, Clark notes, “Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation.”
There is of course more to the cathedral than its role in Western civilisation; and it would not be as much a tourist attraction as it is if it were the object only of medieval history buffs. Despite what I have described as its massive darkness of construction (noting, of course, that they were attempting something that had never been done before, and so it was reasonable to make every precaution), the cathedral is remarkably light in two respects: its statues and its stained glass windows.
There are ten thousand of the one and 170 of the other. And almost all date from the original construction. It is impossible to do justice to the windows with mere words: and even the pictures do not entirely capture the beauty of the panels. The details can be seen only through a zoom lens; the windows were truly made for the glory of God and not simply – or just – for propaganda purposes. Of the statues – and there indeed is bewildering number of them – the elongated ones at the portals are the most striking. They are of kings and queens and princes long gone and mostly forgotten; there is, then, no historical interest in seeing them. Rather, it is the humanity of the faces that captures and captivates. After all, when we hear Gothic, we think of gargoyles and Marilyn Manson; but these figures demonstrate a serenity of soul that is almost post-modern, new age: these are characters you would see as extras in Dharma and Greg and not on Ozzy Osbourne …
The Renaissance was supposed to have underlined the primacy of Man over Church; Michaelangelo is often said to be the highest point of the Humanist Art of the middle parts of the last millennium. And yet, at least to these untrained eyes, Clark is right: this is the epitome of the great awakening; if anything, the terrifying images of Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement are a step down and away from the intimate humanity, immense calmness of soul and softness of features carved into these thousand-year old stones. I came away from Chartres lightened and enlightened.
From there to the coast of Normandy is a physical distance of about a hundred kilometers and a moral one of an entire universe.
The city of Caen captures what might be called the most immense irony in the sad history of mankind. At the heart of the city are two abbey churches and a castle dating from the XI c., built by and for William the Bastard, otherwise known to history as William the Conqueror (of England), who established a French dynasty that ruled England directly, and in French, for over four hundred years. On the outskirts of Caen is the Memorial to the landing of the Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy, just shy of 900 years after William’s invasion forces left these same beaches. And yes, it really did take all that time for second invasion force to cross the channel. This time, the English came to restore France to the French …
The Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames were constructed by William (the same bastard) and his wife Isabelle to atone for the fact that they were cousins and so in the eyes of the Church were committing incest by marrying one another. Either because of that, or because William was a bastard (in all the manifestations of that word) or for some other reason, the churches were not consecrated until well after they well build. Still, the Abbaye aux Homme is a remarkable piece of late- Romanesque architecture – at least, from the outside. Inside is a slightly different story.
Like many other churches and abbeys, the Abbaye was ransacked during the Revolution that was supposed to bring reason and liberty to the equal brotherhood of Man. One of the casualties was the tomb of the Conqueror. His remains were dug up and scattered. The revolutionaries forgot the memo on Western civilisation. (Asked what he thought of Western Civilisation, Gandhi is reported to have replied, “it would be a good idea.”) Eventually, someone recovered a single femur and proclaimed it as one belonging to William the Fat Bastard. Some time later, when the waters were calmer, the femur was re-interred and a whole new tombstone placed on the grave. In 1927, on the occasion of William’s 900th anniversary, the town of Hastings donated two panels of grates for the polished tomb. I found the new décor inside somewhat garish; I’d like to think the donation as a typical British ironic statement: “We not only add to the garishness, but ensure that you are forever imprisoned in there.”
Two closing notes on William before we leave him, his castle, his incestuous marriage and his undignified final final burial. Thirty kilometers south-west of Caen is the town of Bayeux. The cathedral there is a tiny gem; its Bishop, Odo (not to be confused with the security chief on Deep Space Nine – so far as we know, the good bishop was not a shapeshifter), William’s half-brother, blessed the invading force in this very cathedral. And, when the force was victorious, ordered the making of the “Bayeux tapestry”, a 70-meter scroll of linen that sets out the story of Harold Godwin’s betrayal of William and William’s ultimate victory at Hastings. It’s a remarkable piece of story-telling – and propaganda.
And the second note? Ah … sitting in a café called “La Conquête” in the central square of a tiny Norman village on the coast (as with every other square along the coast, this one is called “Place de Guillaume le conquerrant”), you occasionally hear the French mutter “les maudits rosbifs” under their breaths: The English are invading and gobbling up the land around here. They have money and their launching an invasion force across the English Channel is not as difficult as it used to be. It only took 900 years … but better late than never …
I never made it to the actual landing sites of the Allied Forces, but I did get to Arromanche, where the artificial ports (called “mulberries”) used by the Allies in the landings can still be seen. A bit further up the coast I went to see the German guns and bunkers overlooking the Channel. As you stand here, looking out into the sea, at the coastline and inland, you get a wholly new appreciation of the immense challenge the invaders were facing: and, with that, renewed, reinforced admiration for the courage of the men, and boys, who landed on these shores.
The Memorial at Caen gives you only a small indication of what it was all about: it is a celebration of life more than of war; of the hard-won freedom than the hardness of the winning. The most poignant statement at the Memorial site was the one on a slab of rock from Norway: “Son, protect the freedom we have won.” And the most incongruent – positively insulting, in my view – was the famous statue of a knotted handgun, with the inscription “Non-violence” under it.
For one thing, as a general matter, the banality of “non-violence” as a creed, as a philosophy, in the face of palpable evil is nowhere more apparent than in the writings of Gandhi on the question of Jews in Germany. He writes, in November 1938:
I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them [German Jews] to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah. It will be then a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanised man. The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity.
A month later, in response to criticisms from Germany and elsewhere, he notes:
Herr Hitler is but one man enjoying no more than the average span of life. He would be a spent force if he had not the backing of his people. I do not despair of his responding to human suffering even though caused by him.
Six million Jews, four million Poles, ten million Russians – dead, killed through the active agency of German citizens or passive starvation – twenty millions dead, and this, only in Germany, not counting the scores of millions who were killed in other theatres. It is surely a moral monstrosity of the first rank to suggest, as Gandhi did, “I do not despair because Herr Hitler’s or the German heart has not yet melted. On the contrary I plead for more suffering and still more till the melting has become visible to the naked eye.”
The banalities of “the Middle Temple lawyer, posing as a fakir” aside, I had a specific problem with the “Non-violence” statue on the grounds of the Memorial. Allied victory was bought at the price of the blood of a generation of men, by the force of the most massive Armada ever assembled in our rich history of massed forces, and against the most lethal armed machine that the evil mind of man could conceive.
Let Non-violence be celebrated, if it must; let Gandhi’s statues adorn public places and Martin Luther King Day be declared a holiday. But, in the name of all that is sacred, not here; not on the grounds of the Memorial to the thousands who gave their lives on these beaches.
Let us not forget that it was blood, gunpowder and steel, and not prayer and passive suffering, that won the freedoms we enjoy today. The objective was not to melt the heart of Herr Hitler, but to drive the invading forces out of occupied lands. As we face more blood and gunpowder, but also as we face more subtle threats to our liberty, let us heed the Norwegian call to her Sons, which is a noble call to all of us: “protect the freedom we have won.”