Textures

Rheims Synagogue

Towns in the Champagne Region

On our way back from Rheims to Metz, to collect our luggage and head home to the USA, Susie and I visited two towns in the Champagne region, Chalons-en-Champagne and l'Epine. Chalons-en-Champagne, with its twin rivers, the Mau and Nau, has a great deal of charm and a very helpful tourist office. The main square has sidewalk restaurants, half-timbered buildings, and a hotel that, as noted by a plaque, hosted Joan of Arc and her retinue. We ate a nice lunch at one of the restaurants. The city's covered market looks like it's new, but the traditional vendors are still there in force. Note the fancy way the cauliflowers are displayed. Chalons also has a nice synagogue. We didn't get to visit the interior, but the exterior is in the Moorish style that characterizes many of the synagogues of the region. Chalons's synagogue was designed by a local architect, Alexis Vagny, and built in 1874-1875 as part of the great wave of synagogue construction that followed the granting of full citizenship to French Jews by the Crémieux decrees of 1870. Chalons still has an active Jewish community, and the synagogue is in use. A little further along the road toward Metz, we stopped at the village of l'Epine, whose chief claim to fame is its basilica, Notre Dame de l'Epine. This interesting church has a couple of notable contrasts. First, from afar, it looks huge, like the cathedral in Rheims. You can see the basilica from miles away, its towers standing tall on the horizon. Up close, it's more like a scaled-down version of a cathedral, with all the trappings but just smaller. Second, the basilica combines some of the most graceful and luminous Gothic architecture with other windows that are dark and heavy. The town is named for a thorn bush, in which shepherds apparently found a statue of the Virgin Mary. Construction on the basilica started in 1406 and was completed around 1527. The basilica houses numerous works of religious art and notable 16th-Century pipe organ. The facade is ornate, but the rest of the church is simpler. The flying buttresses are particularly graceful and light; compare these buttresses to those the St-Remi basilica, for instance. The interior is relatively simple, with a unity of style of that recalls churches of a century or two before the basilica's construction. Thus Notre Dame de l'Epine combines the lightness of late Gothic architecture with the simplicity of early Gothic. Most of the basilica's stained glass was lost over the years. Here are the remnants of the original 16th-Century glass. In contrast to the lightness of the nave, with great bright windows made possible by those elegant buttresses, the rose window of the west front harkens back to an early Gothic style, with solid and resolute stone framing that's centuries removed from the rose windows of, say, the cathedral and basilica in Rheims.

World War II, Before and After, Below the Vosges

The rolling landscape west of the Vosges du Nord contains hard reminders of the tragedy of World War II, both from before the war and in its aftermath. As you drive the back roads, you encounter the earthen and concrete ruins of the Maginot Line, France's defensive system from the inter-war period. Some of the fortifications, like at Simserhof, are large, complex, well-preserved, and have extensive guided tours. Others are individual bunkers or pillboxes, just lying there alongside the road. Susie and stopped to explore the small set of fortifications at Macheren.

One odd part of this defensive system was the Ligne Maginot Aquatique, a complex of fortifications, dams, reservoirs, dikes and ponds designed to create floods that would bar invasion.

The Ligne Maginot Aquatique was part of the Sarre sector (as in Sarrebourg, Sarreguemines, ...); you can see it at the center of this map, numbered as sector 13, represented as an area of water. It covered the border between the well-defended areas around Metz and Lauter.


Along with the concrete structures, the remnants of the Maginot Line at Macheren include earthworks such as zig-zag ditches running between the bunkers. Macheren is at the west end of the recently designated Route de la Ligne Maginot Aquatique. The bunkers, so plainly for war, now contrast with the gentle countryside of the Moselle. At the start of World War II, though, this land was soaked in blood.

As odd as the strategy of the Ligne Maginot Aquatique seems to us now, it was precisely in the Sarre sector, 18 kilometers long, that French forces won their only battle against the German invasion. On June 14, 1940, these soldiers defeated the German army in an awful battle that ended with 700 French and 1200 Germans dead. June 14 was also the day that Paris fell to the Wehrmacht. The French resistance at the Ligne Maginot Aquatique had been successful but futile. The government of Marechal Petain signed the armistice of surrender on June 22.

The aftermath of the war I find even more sobering. French and German military cemeteries from World War I were already scattered across the countryside. The American dead of World War II from fighting in Alsace and Lorraine are buried in the Lorraine American Cemetery, just north of St-Avold. They were killed while driving German forces from Metz toward the Siegfried Line and the Rhine River. The American soldiers commemorated at the Bitche citadel would be buried here. More Americans servicemen and women lie here than even in Normandy; the final resting place for 10,489 Americans, the Lorraine American Cemetery is the largest American military cemetery of the Second World War.

The cemetery's memorial includes a ceramic mural depicting the fighting. I realized that Susie and I had visited many of the places on this map, some right around Metz, not knowing that they were battlefields.

The cemetery comforts in its serenity and calm but chills in its scope and finality. We were fortunate enough to talk with the cemetery's assistant superintendent, an American who clearly thinks deeply about the fallen with whose care he is entrusted.





The memorial, mostly quite simple, has a tall statue of Saint Avold over the door.










In the interior, you can see the maps of France and Alsace-Lorraine on the wall to the left. Toward the back wall are the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a cross on an altar. And above the altar are figures representing the eternal struggle for freedom. The central figure stands, I think, for the soldiers in the cemetery. And to his sides are religious and military heroes, of history and myth: King David, Emperor Constantine, King Arthur, George Washington.

Another aftermath of the war makes its self apparent, if more subtly, as you drive through the region's villages: abandoned synagogues. Before the war, many of the villages had substantial Jewish populations. They built synagogues, often in the Moorish style then current, and often next to or across the street from city hall. Jewish life was, I gather, a regular part of village life. After the war, these Jewish communities had been destroyed, like most of their synagogues. Many people were deported and killed during the war, and after the war the survivors moved away or died.

In some cases, Jews in Lorraine villages rebuilt their synagogues. The synagogue in Foulquemont, destroyed by the Nazis, was rebuilt in 1962 in a contemporary style. But the community died out, and the synagogue was closed in 2005. It remains abandoned and unused.

Christmas in Metz

Holiday lights festoon most of the streets in Metz's central pedestrian zone. Christmas Eve we walked under the lights to dinner at nearby restaurant, Le Bouchon, which offered special holiday menus. We had a table to ourselves for the evening. The restaurant has the atmosphere of and serves the food of a traditional brasserie--straightforward cuisine.

The bustle in the restaurant contrasted with the increasing stillness of the city's streets. By nightfall the crowds at noon had diminished to a hardy few. And by Christmas Day the streets were deserted. One bakery was open in the morning, but that was it. In the afternoon, Susie and I, with perhaps a dozen other people, attended a seasonal organ concert at a nearby 17th-Century church, Notre-Dame de l'Assomption. The church, with its interior now mostly dark and gray, is undergoing badly needed renovation. Its instrument is a famous organ built by Cavaille-Coll in 1845 and restored by Mutin in 1903 (see http://orguendmetz.free.fr). The restored organ's inaugural concert was performed by Charles-Marie Widor. Our concert, with pieces by Bach and Widor among others, was performed by the church's current organist, Philippe Delacour, who noted that the concert would be relatively short on account of the cold temperature. Indeed, everyone at the concert was bundled up. By the time the concert ended, the sun had set and we were just about the only people out.

The day after Christmas, things began to liven up again by evening. The carousels turned, the Christmas fair booths reopened, and the restaurants again hosted guests. Before dinner we went for a long walk. We bordered the River Meuse as it passed downtown, sweeping alongside key buildings--the cathedral, the "new" temple, and the opera house--all lit monumentally.

The cathedral, one of France's largest, consecrated in 1040 and built mostly between 1250 an 1522, features France's largest expanse of stained glass, ranging from the 13th to the 20th Century. Marc Chagall created the two most recent windows. See http://www.cathedrale-metz.fr and http://french.about.com/b/2008/12/12/la-cathedrale-de-metz.htm.

The New Temple, a Protestant church built in the early years of the 20th Century by Kaiser Wilhem II, who, coincidentally, was Queen Victoria's first grandchild. The church did not meet with the popular approval of the citizens of Metz because its neoclassical Rhenish style clashed with the gothic and classical styles of Metz's other churches. At the time it was built, the new temple symbolized a struggle between French and German cultures during the period of German annexation between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. In 21st-Century eyes, the New Temple's austere dark stone now looks better, especially at night with its lights reflected in the river. See http://temples.free.fr/temples/metz1.htm and http://tout-metz.com/monuments/temple-neuf-metz.

Near the north end of the old city center, we stopped to observe Metz's main synagogue, also well lit. Although Jews were probably present in Metz as early as the Roman era, the modern Jewish presence dates at least back to the 9th Century and then consistently from 1565 on. By 1842, 2400 Jews lived in Metz. The present synagogue, built between 1848 and 1850, replaced a number of smaller and older synagogues. It has a romanesque facade--a more conservative style than the "Oriental" (i.e., Middle-Eastern) style originally proposed by the architects. The building is large--40 meters long by 20 meters wide. During the occupation the synagogue became dilapidated but survived to be restored and listed as a historic monument. See http://judaisme.sdv.fr/histoire/villes/metz/synago/synago.htm and http://www.viejuive.com/associations/communautes/metz.htm.