A Brief Visit to the Louvre

Any visit to the Louvre that would do justice to the museum and its collections would, necessarily, not be brief. The Louvre ranks as one of the world's largest museums and its collections include indisputably the world's most celebrated works of art. So instead of a full account, here's a brief report on some aspects of an afternoon's visit.

The Louvre was originally a sober fortress, built along the Seine in 1190 by king Philippe August. The modern (i.e., 16th Century) Louvre on the site of fortress is the south wing of the Cour Carré, commissioned by Francois I. From the Left Bank, you can walk to the Louvre on the Pont des Arts.

Excavations for the 1989 "Grand Louvre" pyramid and associated remodeling revealed the foundations and moat of Philippe August's castle. Today you can walk around the moat and into the base of the Great Tower, some 15 meters in diameter.

The dry moat had served for centuries as a dumping spot for all sorts of discards. The Louvre's extensive exhibition of the building's history displays many of these items, including coins and clay pipes. The supports for the bridge across the moat still stand.

The Louvre's oldest room is the Crypt Sully (or Lower Hall), which dates from the 12th Century. The columns and vaulting were added between 1230 and 1240.

The Cour Napoleon, just west of the new pyramid, is jammed with traffic because the Louvre is a long building, and there aren't many ways for cars, buses and trucks to get across between the Rue de Rivoli and the quays of the Seine.

Other places in the building remain much quieter, even kind of lost. While some of the courtyards have been roofed over and turned into exhibition space for sculptures, others remain unrestored and tantalizingly inaccessible to the public except by looking through windows.

The great public spaces of the contemporary Louvre lie under I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, the emblem of the Grand Louvre project of the 1980s. I've never warmed to this project, which seemed like a space-age intrusion into Paris's largest-scale and most interesting building. After all, it took Versailles to supplant the Louvre as a palace. The pyramid does provide needed light for the museum's main lobby. The glass slopes and their adjacent basins make for some disconcerting views, though. For example, a couple of kids walked in the narrow gap between the pyramid and a basin, seemingly suspended in a futuristic world.

To stick with the museum's more classical aspects, the Louvre's long wings stretch from the Cour Napoleon to the Jardin des Tuileries. These wings house galleries that, for me, define a museum of art. This gallery is luminous and awe-inspiring. It's actually pretty easy to get lost in this vast set of spaces.

The painting collection includes unbelievably famous works, such as the Mona Lisa. You go from room to room, painting to painting, experiencing the shock of recognition, something like seeing a celebrity in a restaurant. For example, Ingres's Odalisque is today an iconic work, even if at first showing it generated controversy--not because of the nudity but because critics thought that the figure had extra vertebra in her spine!

Similarly, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, in addition to being a great work of art, carries with it both the artist's political message and all of the additional meaning that the painting accumlated through its use as a symbol of freedom.

Ferme de la Haute-Bévoye

In an earlier post about a stroll cirumnavigating the Fort de Queuleu, I wrote about walking past the Ferme de la Haute-Bévoye, which is just outside the village of Grigy. Thanks to blog correspondent Pierre Cazenave, who sent me a trove of information, I can write more definitively about this fortified farm.

There was an estate at "Halte-Bévoi" as early as 1372. The area of the farm eventually became part of the village of Borny, which was merged in Metz in the 19th Century. Haute-Bévoye is the only fortified farm in the city of Metz.

This history comes from "Les Fermes-Châteaux du Pays Messin," by Albert Haefeli, who writes about the succession of rural nobility who called Haute-Bévoye home. In 1712, the farm was acquired by Jean Antoine Chautant, the general contractor for the fortifications of Metz and of Thionville, who thus became Lord of Haute-Bévoye, Vercly and Béville. His family has owned the estate ever since (at least as of Haefeli's publication in 1972). The fortifications were originally a chateau, of which some parts remain. Of the present chateau, a large 18th Century mansion, Haefeli wrote that it is without interest. Of course, to your wonderstruck American observer, the chateau looked plenty interesting.

Although the estate is owned by the descendants of Chautant, there's a farmer who conducts the day-to-day operations. Here's a view of the Ferme de la Haute-Bévoye from the farm's fields.

Le Chateau de Schoeneck

One afternoon during Susie's and my visit to the Vosges du Nord, I hiked to the ruins of the Chateau de Schoeneck. Even at a fast clip, the walk was pretty much 15 minutes of steep climb, through a mixed forest.

As I neared the top, through the trees I could begin to see the castle, built on top of the red sandstone that is typical of the region.

The original castle at Schoeneck appears to have been built by the 12th Century. In the 13th Century it traded hands between the bishops of Strasbourg and Lichtenberg. By the 16th Century, the castle's lords were adapting it to artillery, and during the Thirty Years War it served as a refuge for the residents of three neighboring villages. By the mid-17th Century the garrison had dwindled to four men. And in 1680 French troops occupied the castle and dismantled it. So by the 19th Century, the castle looked like this--a romantic ruin.

Schoeneck looks much the same today. It has the same towers, walls and ramparts, in the same state of ruin.

A dedicated group of volunteers is working to preserve the Chateau de Schoeneck. Their Web page describes the castle's history, shows pictures, explains the parts of the castle, shows how to get there, and describes their restoration work. When I visited, two volunteers, accompanied by an exceptionally large dog, were restoring the foundations of one of the artillery bastions.

Here's the castle's main gate, from the outside, where people seeking entry would cross a draw bridge.




The northern end of the castle has the seigneur's residence. Even in the castle's ruined state, you can make out important elements of daily life in the Middle Ages, such as fireplaces.

To me, Schoeneck's most remarkable aspect involves the staircases carved directly into the rock on which the castle was built. This the north staircase.

The double window, visible from below, is another striking feature, with its twin arches and window seats. You can easily imagine the residents of the castle looking out.

From the highest point of the Chateau de Schoeneck you can appreciate its strategic position. Trotting down the path takes you back to the parking lot, and from there the road takes you down the valley to right, toward Niederbronn-les-Bains.

Chateaux d'Alsace

The ridges above the Alsace's Route des Vins are crammed with ruined castles. In the 30 kilometers between Dambach-la-Ville and Eguisheim I count no fewer than 16 castles, plus Haut-Kœnigsbourg, and not counting the fortified villages. None appears to have survived intact; most were were slighted after the Thirty Years War or after Alsace was integrated into France. A few--such as the Chateau de Haut-Kœnigsbourg and the Chateau du Hohlandsbourg--have been restored. Most of the rest are pretty much in ruins, such as these castles above Ribeauvillé.

The castles above the Route des Vins served a military rather than residential purpose, as attested to by their destruction in the mid-17th Century. So these castles were never updated, like Blois or even Chaumont, into Renaissance chateaux. Thus they kept their medieval form when they were used, and because they were ruined they were never transformed into residences. So there they are, above vineyard and above forest, some close to town and others a real hike.

The Chateau du Hohlandsbourg is one of five castles standing on the lower ridges of the Vosges mountains just outside the village of Eguisheim. A ten-minute uphill walk takes you to from a parking lot to the the castle, now partially restored, and notably big and forbidding.

Construction on the castle started in 1279. Unlike most of the neighboring castles, Hohlandsbourg was built from granite. You can get an idea of the huge size of this castle from this view of its central courtyard. The buildings below all stand within the castle's inner walls.

The castle was taken in the Thirty Years War, and then dismantled, four years later in 1637, by the French. Together, the local villages have helped to in part restore Hohlandsbourg. The ramparts, especially on the east side, provide views over the valley of the Rhine and the Vosges Mountains.

To the north, you can see the Donjon de Pflixenbourg, a doleful tower that once served as the residence of the Emperor's representative in Alsace.

To the south, you can see the towers of the Donjons de Eguisheim, which we visited next.


A short hike from the road takes you to these three red sandstone ruins, named Weckmund, Wahlenbourg, and Dagsbourg, respectively. They belonged to the Eguisheim family and then to the Bishops of Strasbourg. They were burned in 1466 during a conflict between the burghers of the city of Mulhouse and the local nobility.

Some of the ruins show traces of how the castles served as residences. I noticed, in this section in particular, stones to support beams and columns, perhaps on the sides of fireplace, on the walls.





This tower, like the one shown above, has its entry far above the ground. This was a key defensive feature: access was only by a tall ladder that could be pulled up in case of danger.








Here we are amid the ruins, with the valley of the Rhine behind us.

I mentioned that local fortifications included not only these castles but also many villages that had city walls and sometimes a castle in the center. Some of these village fortifications still remain. Here, for example, are part of the walls of Bergheim.


And this is Bergheim's main gate to the city, built in 1300 and still in use. We had to drive through the gate to reach the center of the village.

Haut-Kœnigsbourg Castle

Easily the single most spectacular sight of the Route des Vins, the Chateau of Haut-Kœnigsbourg surveys a great swath of Alsace from its moutain top. This castle's interest comes less from its place in medieval history and more for what it has come to represent in more modern times.

The castle, built of the red sandstone typical of the region's important buildings, saw its heyday between 1479 and 1633. A castle on this site was first mentioned in 1147. After a coalition of cities attacked and burned the castle in 1462, the Theirsteins acquired and rebuilt it. The castle was destroyed again in 1633, this time by the Swedes, who were allies of France against the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years War; the castle was beseiged, pillaged and burned. It remained a ruin for more than 250 years. And here's where the story starts to get interesting.

As I've recounted in other posts, in 1871 the new German Empire annexed Alsace and the Moselle region of Lorraine in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. By the turn of the 20th Century, Kaiser Wilhelm II--the same Kaiser Wilhem who so intently Germanified Metz--wanted to assert his imperial power in the face of continuing unpopularity in Alsace and to stamp Alsace as historically tied to Germany.

In 1900, he embarked on an ambitious restoration of Haut-Kœnigsbourg to its glory of the 17th Century, risen again as a symbol of the success of German power against France and its allies. The restoration, led by Bodo Ebhart, recreated the castle as he imagined it before 1633. The work took eight years and involved building a railroad up the mountain for hauling materials.

The result was basically a brand-new Renaissance castle, full of medieval details such as working drawbridges. The restored castle harkens back to other restorations driven by visions of an imagined chivalric era, such as Viollet-le-Duc's over-restoration of Carcassonne. Haut-Kœnigsbourg became a ceremonial place, a museum rather than a working fortress or a palace. Parts of the interior, such as the dining hall, were elaborately painted and furnished to convey Wilhelm's vision of the castle as a link to Germany's Hapsburg past.


Wilhelm left his mark on the castle rather literally. His monogram appears everywhere--painted as a decorative motif on the ceiling of the dining hall, and carved as an insignia on hearths in bedrooms.

The restoration of Haut-Kœnigsbourg became itself a locus of conflict.
Alsaciens unhappy with the Kaiser's rule could, in effect, criticize the Kaiser by criticizing his architectural ambitions. For example, there were heated claims that Kaiser had built the tower of the central keep significantly higher than that of the original castle he sought to resurrect. The Kaiser's alleged overreaching in building the tower thus served as a counterpart symbol to the might of the castle itself.

Wihelm II abdicated under pressure in the wake of the First World War and the German Revolution; he fled into exile in the Netherlands. I was astounded to learn, when we visited Haut-Kœnigsbourg, that he lived until 1941. A raving anti-semite, Wilhelm blamed "the tribe of Judah" for his downfall and called for the extermination of the Jews. And as Hitler rose to power, Wilhem apparently hoped that Nazism would renew interest in the German monarchy.

And this brings me to the other main point of interest in Haut-Kœnigsbourg. Ironically enough, given its resurrection by Wilhelm II as a symbol of German imperial might, the castle served as the chief setting for the Jean Renoir's 1937 anti-war film La Grande Illusion, one of the greatest movies ever made. The film, banned in Hitler's Germany, recounts the experience of French prisoners of war in the First World War; Haut-Kœnigsbourg played the part of Wintersborn, their "inescapable" mountain-top prison. As soon as you enter the castle, you see the staircase where the film's character de Boeldieu played his flute to distract the guards while his comrades escaped.

The close quarters of the interior of the castle contrast sharply with the extended views its ramparts provide.