THE FRANCHE COMTÉ: AUXONNE AND BESANÇON
East of Dijon, from the centre of which radiated Burgundian influence
and power, was a proud and independent political division which, until
1330, never allied itself intimately with the royal domain of the French
kings nor with Burgundy. From this time, as a part of the Burgundian
dukedom, it retained the right to be known as the Franche Comté, and was
even then exempted from many impositions and duties demanded of other
allied fiefs: "_Burgundiæ Comitatus, Liber Comitatus_," was its official
title.
It is characteristic of the independent spirit of the people of these
parts that they should tell Henri IV, who praised the wine they offered
him, when he was making a stay among them, and was being entertained in
Besançon's citadel, that they had a much better one in the cellar which
they were saving for a more august occasion.
The Franche Comté is in no sense a tourist region; its varied topography
has not been given even a glance of the eye by most conventional
tourists, and its historical souvenirs have been almost entirely ignored
by the makers of romances and stage-plays. Switzerland-bound travellers
have an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with this
comparatively little known corner of old France as they rush across it
by express train via Pontarlier, but few avail themselves thereof. For
this reason, if no other, the architectural monuments of the Franche
Comté come upon one as genuine surprises.
From Dijon our way lay through Genlis and Auxonne to Besançon, and there
is no better way of approaching the heart of things, though it will
require some courage on the part of travellers by train to accommodate
themselves to the inconvenient hours of departure and arrival. The
traveller by road will have a much easier and a much more enjoyable time
of it; and right here is a suggestion of a new ground for touring
automobilists who may be tired of well-worn roads. It is just as
enjoyable to hunt out historic monuments with an automobile as with a
Cook's ticket and a railway train--more so, some of us think. It would
certainly not have been possible for the makers of this book to have
otherwise got over the ground covered herein, so let not the
ultra-sentimentalist decry the modern mode of locomotion.
Winding its way between the confines of Burgundy and the Comté the
highroad from Paris to Pontarlier and Switzerland led us first to
Auxonne. Genlis we passed _en route_ and almost had a thrill over it by
recalling the notorious Comtesse de Genlis. We racked our brains a
moment and then remembered that the celebrated "_bas bleu_" hailed from
somewhere in Picardy, so, then, this particular Genlis had no further
interest for us, above all in that there was no chateau in sight.
Auxonne (the old Ad Sonam of the Romans, afterwards corrupted into
Assona, then Assonium and finally as it is to-day) was but a dozen
kilometres beyond Genlis, and, sitting astride the great highway from
Paris to Geneva, was early a fortified place of great strategic
importance. Vauban traced its last ramparts and it was thought likely to
hold its rank for all time, but now the fortifications have disappeared
and the city no longer takes its place as a frontier outpost, that
honour having been usurped by Besançon in the Jura.
Of the military and feudal past there are still vivid memories at
Auxonne. The chateau-fort is still there, built in different epochs by
Louis XI, Charles VIII and Louis XII, and these works combined to make
an edifice seemingly all-resistant, or at least formidable to a high
degree. The chateau is still there, in part at least--not much has
actually been despoiled, but actually the railway station is more
militant in aspect. The stranger coming to Auxonne for the first
time--unless he be prepared beforehand--will have grave doubts at first
as to which is the chateau and which is the _gare_. The latter has a
crenelated cornice, meurtrières pierced in its walls, and the vague
appearance of bastions, all of which are also found in the real in the
old chateau grimly overlooking the swift-flowing Saône. The enormous
flanking towers of the real chateau, in spite of the city having been
shorn of its prime military rank, are still kept in condition for the
service of long-range guns, for the French are ever in a state of
preparedness for the invasion which may never come. The lesson of "71"
was well learned.
On the great entrance portal of the chateau is blazoned a
stone-sculptured hedgehog, the _devise_ of Louis XII, and in opposing
niches are two carven angels holding aloft an escutcheon. Another
doorway is hardly less impressive, though somewhat vague as to the
purport of its ornament, which stands for nothing military or even
civic.
This introduction to the militant glory of the Auxonne of other days is
a ripe indication of the dignity with which the place was one day
enhanced. Of a population to-day of something less than five thousand
souls, the city shelters nearly three thousand soldiers of all arms. Its
warlike aspect can hardly be said to have changed much from what it was
of old in spite of the fact that its importance is lower down in the
scale.
Another warlike reminder is the statue which rises proudly in the Place
d'Armes. It is that of the Sous-Lieutenant Bonaparte as he was upon his
arrival at Auxonne, a pallid youth just out of the military school of
Brienne.
In the plain neighbouring upon Auxonne, a sort of mid-France Flanders,
is a populous town with a momentous and romantic history, albeit its
architectural monuments, save in fragments, are practically nil. The
Revolutionary authorities took away its old name and called it "Belle
Defense," in memory of a heroic resistance opposed by the place to the
invading Duc de Lorraine in 1616. Gallas had freed the Saône with
thirty thousand men, and with Cardinal La Valette at the head of his
army (a cardinal whom Richelieu had made a general) found Dijon so well
guarded that he turned on his steps and attacked what is to-day Saint
Jean-de-Losne. Fifty thousand soldiers in all finally besieged the
place, and less than fifteen hundred of the inhabitants, and a garrison
of but a hundred and fifty, held them at bay. The Duc d'Enghien, the
future Grand Condé, then Governor of Burgundy, was able to send a feeble
body of reinforcements and thus turn the tide in favour of the besieged.
For this great defence Louis XIII exonerated the city from all future
taxes, and the grand cross of the Legion d'Honneur was allowed to be
incorporated into the city arms, as indeed it endures unto to-day. The
tracings of the former fortifications are plainly marked, though the
walls themselves have disappeared.
Dole is commonly thought of as but a great railway junction. Besançon
and Montbéliard are the real objectives of this itinerary through the
Franche Comté and the half-way houses are apt to be neglected. For fear
of this we "stopped over" at Dole.
Dole's historic souvenirs are many and have in more than one instance
left behind their stories writ large in stone. The present Hôtel de
Ville was the old Palais du Parlement, built in the sixteenth century,
from the designs of Boyvin, who was himself President of the Chambre at
the time. Within the courtyard of this old Parliament House is an
impressive donjon of a century earlier, the Tour de Vergy, which offers
as choice a lot of underground cells, or _oubliettes_, as one may see
outside the Chateau d'If or the Castle of Loches. The Palais de Justice
at Dole, with a magnificently carved portal, was formerly the Couvent
des Cordeliers and dates from 1572.
The memory of Besançon in the minds of most folk--provided they have any
memory of it at all--will be recalled by the opening lines of Stendhal's
"Rouge et Noir." "_Besançon n'est pas seulement une des plus jolies
villes de France, elle abonde en gens de coeur et d'esprit._"
The flowing Doubs nearly surrounds the "Roc" of Besançon with a great
horse-shoe loop which gives a natural isolation and makes its citadel
more nearly redoubtable than was ever imagined by Vauban, its builder.
From an artistic point of view Besançon's monuments are not many or
varied if one excepts the Palais Granvelle and the military defences,
which are made up in part of a number of mediæval towers and Vauban's
citadel. There are four great sentinel towers surrounding the city, all
dating from the period of Charles Quint, but the city gates, piercing
the fortification walls, were built also by Vauban between 1668-1711,
and are by no means as ancient as they look.
The Palais Granvelle, of the sixteenth century, has a fine dignified
monumental aspect wholly impressive regardless of its lack of magnitude
and the absence of a strict regard for the architectural orders.
Liberties have been taken here and there with its outlines which place
it beyond the pale of a thoroughly consistent structure, but for all
that it undeniably pleases the eye, and more. And what else has one a
right to demand unless he is a pedant? In general the civic and domestic
architecture of the Franche Comté are of a sobriety which gives them a
distinction all their own; the opposite is true of the churches, taking
that at Pont-à-Mousson as a concrete example.
The street façade of the Palais Granvelle is undeniably fine, with a
dignity born of simplicity. Its interior façade, that giving on the
courtyard, is freer in treatment, but still not
[Illustration: _Palais Granvelle, Besançon_]
violent, and its colonnaded cloister forms a quiet retreat in strong
contrast with the bustle and noise which push by the portal scarce
twenty feet away.
The Palais Granvelle actually serves to-day the purpose of headquarters
of Besançon's Société Savante.
Nicolas Perrenot, Seigneur de Granvelle, its builder (1533-1540), was
the chancellor of Charles Quint, and brother of the Cardinal de
Granvelle, minister of Charles Quint and Philippe II. He was descended
from a noble Burgundian family, not from a blacksmith as has faultily
been given by more than one historian.
Charles Quint, in writing to his son, after the death of his
chancellor--"in his palace at Besançon," said: "My son, I am extremely
touched by the death of Granvelle. In him you and I have lost a firm
staff upon which to lean."
The centre of the admirable town house of the sixteenth century is
occupied by a vast courtyard surrounded by a series of Doric columns in
marble, supporting a range of low arcades. The principal façade is built
of "_marbre du pays_," which is not marble or anything like it, but a
very suitable stone for building nevertheless. It might be called
"near-marble" by an enterprising modern contractor, and a fortune made
off it by skilful advertising. It is better, at any rate, than armoured
cement.
The structure rises but two stories above the _rez-de-chaussée_, but is
topped off with an "_attique_" (a word we all recognize even though it
be French) and three great stone _lucarnes_, ornamented with light
open-work _consoles à jour_.
Each story is decorated at equal intervals by a superimposed series of
columns. The first is Doric, the second Ionic and the third Corinthian,
and each divides its particular story into five _travées_.
The entrance portal is particularly to be remarked for its elegance. It
is flanked on either side by a Corinthian column and is surmounted by a
pair of angel heads in bronze.
Drawing closer and closer to the frontier, the face of everything
growing more and more warlike the while, one comes to Montbéliard,
practically a militant outpost of modern France, though actually its
importance in this respect is overshadowed by neighbouring Belfort. At
Belfort Bartholdi's famous lion--a better stone lion by the way than
Thorwaldsen's at Luzerne--crouches in his carven cradle in the hillside
ready to spring at the first rumours of war. If France is ever invaded
again it will not be by way of the gateway which is defended by Belfort
and Montbéliard, that is certain!
[Illustration]
Montbéliard is a little fragment of Germany that has become French.
Rudely grouped around the walls of the old chateau of the Wurtemburgs,
the town remains to-day an anomaly in France, more so than the greater
Strassbourg and Metz are to Germany, because they have become thoroughly
Germanized since "la guerre" and the "annexation," which are the half
whispered words in which the natives still discuss the late
unpleasantness.
How did this little German stronghold become French? One may learn the
story from "Le Maréchal de Luxembourg et Le Prince d'Orange," by Pierre
de Ségur, better even than he may from the history books. The tale is
too long to retell here but it is undeniably thrilling and good reading.
The town, the chateau and the local duke were, it seems, all captured at
one fell swoop. There was no defence, so it was not a very glorious
victory, but it came to pass as a heroic episode and a Wurtemburg castle
thus came to be a French chateau.
The Chateau de Montbéliard has all the marks of a heavy German castle.
It has little indeed of the suggestion of the French manner of building
in these parts or elsewhere. To-day it serves as a barracks for French
soldiers, but its alien origin is manifest by its cut and trim.
The history of Montbéliard has been most curious. Its name was derived
from the Latin Mons Peligardi (in German Munpelgard) and the
principality, as it once was, had a council of nine _maîtres-bourgeois_,
as the city councilmen were called. The principality comprised the
seigneuries of Héricourt, Blamont, Chatelet and Clémont. For a time it
was a part of the Duchy of Lorraine, then it passed to the house of
Montfaucon, and then to the Wurtemburgs, who built the castle. The
Treaties of Luneville and Paris made it possible for the tricolor to fly
above the castle walls, otherwise it might have remained a German town
with a burgomaster instead of a French _ville_ with a _maire_.
The Tour Neuve of the chateau dates from 1594 and the Tour Bossue from
1425. The main fabric was restored in such a manner that it would seem
to have been practically remodelled, if not actually rebuilt, in 1751.
It preserves nevertheless the _cachet_ that one expects to see in a
castle of its time, albeit that an alien flavour hovers around it still.
It is worth continuing in this direction a step farther to Belfort in
the "territory," although it is actually beyond the confines of
Burgundy's "Free County." Belfort is worth seeing for the sake of its
"Lion," though if one is pressed for time he may take a ride in Paris
over to the Rive Gauche and see the same thing in the Place de Belfort,
or at least a miniature replica of it.
In the midst of the great entrenched camp of Belfort rises "La Chateau,"
as Belfort's citadel is known. It sets broad on its base nearly five
hundred metres above sea-level. The chateau and the "Roc" were first
fortified in the sixteenth century, since which time each year has added
to the strength of the defences until to-day it is perhaps the most
strongly fortified of all the frontier posts of France.
It is at the base of the massive "Roc" which bears aloft the chateau
that is sculptured Bartholdi's celebrated lion. Its proportions are
immense, at least seventy-five feet in length and perhaps forty in
height.
The ancient Tour de la Miotte is all that remains of a fortress of the
middle ages, so Belfort's claims rest on something more than its
artistic monumental remains, though the silhouette and sky-line of the
grouping of its chateau and citadel are imposingly effective and
undeniably artistic.