The Mémorial de la Vendée

After leaving the Historial, we visited the  Mémorial de la Vendée, just a few minutes from the museum, but oddly detached from it.   The experience proved strangely disturbing, especially as we were entirely alone at this point.  

The Mémorial, an ambitious project funded by public subscription to the tune of 10 million francs, was built in 1993 to mark the bicentenary of the start of the War in the Vendée.  The driving force behind the initiative was Philippe de Villiers, the then president of the Conseil général. In May 1993 the building was inaugurated before an audience of several thousand by Alexander Solzhenitzyn.  Les Lucs was chosen as a central "place of memory" since it is the site of a particularly notorious massacre by the Republican infernal columns. However, the declared intention behind the Mémorial is to commemorate not only those who died in the Vendée but "all victims of totalitarian regimes." 

The right-wing agenda does not need labouring.  In April 2013, when Lech Walesa was invited to lay a "stela of reconciliation" at the site, local socialist politicians boycotted the event.  Since then, tempers have cooled, but one supposes that the presence of the Mémorial continues sit uncomfortably within the region's tourist offering.

I decided to leave the historical and political debate on one side and concentrate on monument itself.  The design is the work of the highly regarded museum and set designers, Christine de Vichet and Philippe Noir, of the "Agence Itinéraire".  There are contributions by various local artists on display, and original ambient music by the composer and conductor Rémi Gousseau. 

DESCRIPTION

According to the guidebook, "At the Mémorial in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne, everything is allusive, suggestive; everything is in shadow, beginning with the buildings and the path that leads to them":

The central organising concept is that of a "corridor of memory", effectively a sort of pilgrimage route. The existing 19th-century memorial chapel on the hill overlooking the site, has been incorporated into the curated space: "The pathway up to and through the  the structure itself should not be separated from its wider setting.  A symbolic axis leads from the monumental gate up to the memorial chapel of 1867 on the hill above via a footbridge over the River Boulogne".

Having passed through the first "claustral" gate, the visitor walks along a pathway marked by a series of display boards illustrating major events and figures from the war of March-December 1793.  To the right of the entrance is a room containing a more detailed audio-visual guide to the events surrounding the massacre at Les Lucs.  (Unfortunately, the wooden doors, the leaflets and the general air of enforced solemnity reminded me of the anteroom to a crematorium chapel.) 

The Memorial building itself is intended to evoke a mausoleum.  We are told that it is deliberately small scale, austere and minimalist in style: the architectural design is a hermetically sealed bloc, flanked by two monumental doors, one the entrance and one the exit.  The doors are tall but narrow to accentuate the idea of enclosure. The space is "in a way a reliquary, a place of contemplation." 

This may be optimistic - to me it seemed an ugly grey concrete bunker of a building: the outside is already beginning to weather badly.  However, inside, the dark was so intense, you really did get the sense of being shut a tomb, and the constant piping of Rémi Gousseau's solemn, funereal music from all directions added to the sense of unease.

The interior is divided into four rooms or at least "four stages".  (I'm following the guidebook here, because I got too confused to grasp the arrangement at the time.) 

• - A video of the "annihilation of the Vendée" between December 1793 and Spring 1794.
• - Symbolic objects: (rosaries, sacré-coeurs, scythes, hats, a monstrance)
• - Historical texts
• - Memory of the massacre. A crypt perpetuates "the memory of all the victims of the Terror".

The first room is almost empty, containing only a sandpit and a screen showing a video which evokes the insurrection and extermination of the Vendée.  There are no words or realistic images.   The coloured graphics, "at the limit of abstraction", show windmills, the pious of the Marais, a crowd marching, broad-rimmed hats, scythes, fire, the conflagration of the countryside. 

In the second room, various symbolic objects are displayed in illuminated cases. They are few and isolated.  Tapestries created by Denise Mornet and Monique Chapelet feature sacred hearts, rosaries and religious symbols. There are hooked scythes and farm tools, like those used by the Vendean peasants as makeshift weapons.  A cardboard monstrance recalls the clandestine offices of the refractory priests.  Occupying a central position, is a glass case which displays a wide-brimmed "chapeau rabalet", with a hole in the side - such hats, we are told, can protected against the sun but not against enemy bullets.

The third stage recreates a pathway of water and broom. Two abstract statuettes, by the sculptor Jacky Besson, represent a Vendéen couple, upright and firmly planted in their native soil, "primitive persons, like menhirs, hieratic, issuing from chaos". 

Ten display boards reproduce texts of the Convention which castigate the revolt in the Vendée.  It seemed to me a pity to have included this historical material, which is notoriously open to interpretation.

The final stage, the crypt, is devoted to the memory of the massacre at Les Lucs.  On the ground small pointed standing stones represent the anonymous victims.  The cube shaped space is surrounded by a peristyle with pale light showing through opaque square windows of glass.  The final movement of Rémi Gousseau's music is an atmospheric setting of the hymn of the Vendeans, the Vexilla regis.

I was not sure in the end, what to make of my experience.  Despite the occasional feeling of being in Disneyland - or perhaps Puy du Fou?  - the effect was disconcerting.  However, for all the sophistication of the artwork, it is difficult to move past the sheer paupicity of material remains and contemporary visual reference for this war.  "Symbols" like the hat and religious emblems are not much more than stereotyped storybook objects.  We visited the Catholic memorial chapel afterwards - a little naive perhaps, but at least within the frame of reference of the people who died.  The real worry, I suppose is what is the point?  The Mémorial makes a statement of sorts, but not one that really furthers historical understanding. 

References

The information in this post is mostly taken from the free leaflet available at the site.

You can hear Rémi Gousseau's "Musique pour le Chemin de la mémoire" on his website: 
https://remigousseau.com/compositeur/