They Built Chartres

He had been bishop since 1006 when during the night of September 7, 1020 fire destroyed the Carolingian cathedral. He immediately undertook its reconstruction after he received assistance from the King of France, the Count of Chartres, the Duke of Normandy, and the King of England so he could make it the biggest and most beautiful cathedral of all. He also started the Écoles de Chartres [Chartres Schools], whose teachings would make an impact throughout the Western world.

Nephew of court poet Philippe Desportes, he leads the life of a libertine. He travels to Rome where he becomes familiar with Italian burlesque. A very modern poet, he attacks the mores of his time in his verses, entitled Satires, to which he owes his celebrity.

Embassy Secretary in Rome, in 1666, he becomes an historiographer of buildings, and in 1671, Secretary of the Architecture Academy. He is the founding member of the Academy of Writing and Belles-Lettres. Friend and biographer of Poussin, he is considered the first French art historian.

He teaches at the Petites Écoles of Port Royal, supporting arguments in favor of Jansenism. Author of Essais de morale  [Essays on Morality] (1671-1678), he comes back to Paris in 1683, after his exile to the Low Countries and Flanders.

With no real calling, he took holy orders. He was then appointed Vicar-General of Chartres in 1787. He settled in Paris in 1788 and then published his famous pamphlet, What Is the Third Estate? (1789). As Deputy of the Third Estate, he plays an important role during the Revolution. Elected Director in 1795, he sits on the Council of Five Hundred, which he presides over during 1797. He made preparations for the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (Year VIII), with which he succeeds, along with Bonaparte. Although distanced from high political office, he is made Count of the Empire in 1809, and peer during the Hundred Years’ War. Banished because of regicide in 1816, he is exiled in Belgium and only returns to France after 1830.

A journalist who was an advocate of new ideas (he had traveled to England, Holland, and the United States), he was founder of the newspaper, Le Patriote français [The French Patriot], and the Société des Amis des Noirs [The Society of the Friends of Blacks]. A member of the Jacobin Club from the beginning of the Revolution, he called for the proclamation of the Republic after the King fleed (June 20th and 21st, 1791). Deputy of the Legislative Assembly and Convention, he was one of the leaders of the Girondist Movement (sometimes called the “Brissotin Movement”). Because he had strongly opposed the Montagnards and Robespierre, he was executed by guillotine in 1793.

A solicitor in Chartres, he is elected Deputy of the Third Estate in 1789. He was a member of the Society of the Friends of Blacks and the Jacobin Club. Mayor of the Commune of Paris (Nov. 1791-Nov. 1792), first president of the Convention, and member on the first Public Health Committee, he rallies around the Girondists. When they are eliminated (June of 1793), he attempts a federalist uprising in Normandy. When it fails, he commits suicide.

He goes into the National Guard in 1789. When he is 24, he is appointed Brigadier General and the Army Commander-in-Chief for troops in the West. In 1794, as General of the Sambre-et-Meuse Army Division, he commands the right flank during the Battle of Fleurus, where he decides the victory:  the Republic is saved. During the 1796 campaign, he is mortally wounded on September 19 and dies two days later at Altenkirchen (in Austria), after having been paid last homage by Austrian generals. His remains are transferred to the Pantheon in 1889.

This solicitor is famous because of his courage during the Reign of Terror when he defended Brissot, Charlotte Corday, the Queen Marie Antoinette, and Princess Elisabeth, the King’s sister. He is arrested but saved from execution because of 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794) and Robespierre’s downfall. In 1824, he becomes Solicitor for the King’s Council during the Restoration, and President of the Ordre des Avocats [bar association] Council.

During 1895, he argues in favor of socialist ideas. Dreyfusard, in 1900 separates from his old comrades in the struggle because he disapproves of their anti-clericalism and anti-militarism. The Cahiers de la Quinzaine [Fortnightly Notebooks], which he founds in 1900, details the movement’s evolution: he links the socialist mystique to a kind of French homeland mystique. He goes back to practicing the Catholic faith in 1908 and makes pilgrimages to Notre Dame de Chartres between 1912 and 1914. From that time forward, at the same time, he writes prose works that are often polemical, and always engaged, and lyrical works replete with spirituality. Mobilized on August 4, 1914, he is killed by a bullet to the forehead on the eve of the Battle of the Marne.

This former city employee built his own home in 1930. Its installation on the outskirts of the city bring him into proximity with sandpits and garbage dumps where he finds an enormous quantity of pottery debris and pieces of glass that he decides to re-assemble. He begins to decorate his home with this rejected material at the end of the 1930s, and he does not stop until his death.

Appointed Prefect of Eure-et-Loir in February of 1939, he takes on, starting in September of 1940, the heavy responsibility of a wartime department administrator. He becomes famous because of his patriotism and his humanity. Upon their arrival, the Germans try to make him sign a document that accuses black troops and the French army of carrying out a massacre against women and children. In spite of the fact that he has to suffer physical abuse at their hands, he refuses; he prefers to have them cut his throat. In the end, they let him go and he endeavors to protect the population from the occupying army’s acts of violence. Dismissed from office by the Vichy Government on November 2, 1940, he becomes a part of the French underground. Charged by General Charles de Gaulle with the responsibility of organizing the French Resistance, he creates the Conseil National de la Résistance [National Council for the Resistance] (May, 1943). Shortly thereafter, the Gestapo in Lyon arrests him. He dies after being tortured during his deportation to Germany. He was interred in the Pantheon in 1964.

When the war forces Franz Stock, a German priest at the German parish in Paris to choose his camp, he does not make the choice based solely on his nationality. In October of 1940, as chaplain for the Fresnes and La Santé Cherche-Midi prisons, he lends his spiritual and moral support to prisoners and those who have been condemned to death. With the Liberation in August of 1945, he again chooses the prisoners he ministers to, but they are German prisoners, his compatriots, at Cherbourg, Orléans, then at Morancez (close to Chartres). He organizes the séminaire des barbelés [barbed wire seminary] there, for which the French authorities have granted him responsibility, and which is carried out until 1947. Since 1961, his remains have rested in the Saint Jean Baptiste de Rechèvres Church in Chartres.