Against this background of spatial practices and the architectural forms which housed them, practices and forms which remained largely unchanged for centuries after the Middle Ages, we may now better divine the specific architectural and urban implications of revolutionary actions in the late eighteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution and the Terror that followed, acts of vandalism targeted the holy relics of the church; these acts of vandalism were accompanied by later acts of iconoclasm directed against carefully selected images adorning the cathedral exterior. Both were preceded by governmental decrees suppressing the cathedral clergy, depriving the cathedral of its substantial possessions and revenues, and forcing the bishop and his subordinates to renounce their offices.47
Attacks on the cathedral’s famed collection of relics, many of which were housed in three micro-architectural structures located between the piers of the choir, led to the removal of relics from reliquaries and their unceremonious abandonment in a ditch behind the cathedral.48 Even here, the sacral differentiation of spaces from the preceding period was observed, if blasphemously so. The ditch into which the relics were tossed was located in a remote corner of the Cemetery of St Jerome that occupied much of the land directly east of the cathedral and served as a necropolis for the canons (Figure 4.4). Thus, the saints went from reverent interment in precious vessels to humiliating burial in a common grave of the sort typically reserved for those at the lower margin of society. This was, indeed, a humiliation of saints, to borrow the name of a medieval ritual studied by Patrick Geary,49 but one serving secular political interests, not ecclesiastical ones.
Eyewitness accounts of the 1793 desecration of the cathedral relics affirm that the head of St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, was among the chief targets.50 The relic collection at Chartres was particularly rich in head relics, none more important than this one which took over from the head of St Theodore as the relic on which a candidate for admission to the chapter of canons swore an oath testifying to his free and legitimate birth, immediately before he was received into the choir and assigned a stall.51 Donated in 1205 by Louis, Count of Blois and Chartres, who had obtained it abroad during the Fourth Crusade,52 the head was located first at an altar addossed to the easternmost pier on the south side of the nave and, later, at an altar under the northern side of the jube (Figure 4.2).53 Given its ritual function and location at the threshold to the privileged space of the choir, concerted attacks on this relic suggest that revolutionary violence at Chartres was specifically anti-clerical.
If the saints were no longer to inhabit the cathedral, then perhaps their house could be torn down too. In fact, a proposal was adopted by the local government to demolish the cathedral as an unsupportable eyesore on the republican town.54 Fortunately, common sense prevailed after an architect argued that debris from such a demolition would overwhelm the town (a point that we may better appreciate since the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001). Instead, the cathedral as a Christian church and sanctuary of the Virgin Mary was to be closed; the building was then re-inaugurated as a temple dedicated to the goddess of Reason and, later, to the cult of the Supreme Being.55
As for iconoclasm, that damage to the exterior of the cathedral during the French Revolution was concentrated on the sculpture of the north fagade serves to corroborate my argument in favour of the largely clerical nature of the north cloister.56 Seven large column statues, all now lost, were carted away from the north porch in 1794 (Figure 4.8): one from the eastern flank of the porch, all four statues from the left porch bay (which may have been the specific entrance used by the bishop in his private capacity),57 and two from the central bay. Other signs of damage may well also point to revolutionary iconoclasm: to give only one example, the battered head of the local saint Potentian, who is clearly garbed as an archbishop and placed on the western flank of the porch next to another local saint, the virgin Modeste. Why was destruction largely confined to the north, when the south transept also displays a great number of ecclesiastical figures? I submit that the iconoclasts directed their destruction against those effigies most associated with the clergy as an exclusive community, i. e. the sculpture fronting ‘their’ fagade to the north. This suggests that the physical concentration of clerical power in the buildings of the north cloister and the typological representations of that power on this fagade proved irresistible provocations to an anti-clerical audience. That the mostly universal saints garbed in liturgical robes on the south fagade were not touched, nor the kings of either the west or north fagade, only highlights the very local framework of the violence at Chartres: it was iconoclasm by a local audience directed against local powers and the imagery which was still identified with them.
These anti-clerical acts would not be particularly noteworthy were it not for the canny way in which events proceeded. The statues which were removed from the north transept porch, as well as silver figures of the apostles which had adorned the nave piers, were reused to ornament a new secular structure: a sacred mound or artificial mountain which, for the sake of civic festivals, was erected on the site of the former high altar in the choir.58 Here, for instance, statues representing Synagoga and Ecclesia, originally located in the left bay of the north transept porch where they prefaced imagery illustrating the Infancy of Christ, were reused after having been renamed ancien regime and republique, respectively, demonstrating that the temporal and moral relationship between the two was both understood and preserved, even as the physical context and nomenclature changed.59 On their sacred mound, they continued to serve as ‘frozen music’, a backdrop for secular music dramas such as Reason Victorious over Fanaticism that usurped the place of earlier biblical and hagiographic drama performed in and around cathedrals in the Middle Ages.60 Nevertheless, it is obvious that the removal of these and other figures from the cathedral and their relocation intentionally violated clerical control over the sacred structure and its surrounding spaces.
More significant than such isolated instances of iconoclasm, however, is the fact that spatial practices were disrupted as well. The nave of the cathedral was given over to lively patriotic dances rather than solemn religious devotion and the crypt, site of the oldest and holiest cult spaces of the cathedral, became instead a huge wine cellar, occupied by the wine merchants of the town.61 In citing the ways in which the spaces of the cathedral were secularized and democratized, I do not mean to paint a monochrome picture of activity in the Middle Ages and succeeding centuries. One seventeenth-century author raged against the pollution of the transept porches by the activities of merchants, games players, buffoons, tooth- pullers, singers and vendors of songs, and others.62 A chapter ordinance of 1327 demonstrates that perceived spatial abuses were not limited to the exterior of the cathedral nor to the post-medieval era. It ordered certain types of people expelled not from the perimeter of the cathedral but from its very nave: wine criers, merchants of spiced wine, sellers of candles, ribald persons, and children.63
Nevertheless, the unobstructed, unregulated access of all kinds of people to the cathedral interior following the Revolution and the proliferation of civic, commercial, and broadly secular activities there implies a figure – ground reversal of the sort described by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in discussing the Uffizi Palace in Florence: i. e. what had been a protected, closed architectural figure against open urban ground itself opens up, functioning as public ground against which the exterior spaces of the surrounding precinct shrink and read as isolated figures.64 To adopt Rowe and Koetter’s further analysis of the debate between models of acropolis and forum,65 we see that, at Chartres, revolution led to the interpolation of the latter into the former. In particular, a de-emphasis on the solemn liturgical nature of the west-east axis of the cathedral may have redirected public circulation to the west fagade in a way that anticipated the development of new urban circuits in the nineteenth century, spurred by the arrival of the railway in particular.
These changes in spatial processes that appropriated existing spatial form to new ends had an important counterpart in new social form that attempted to solidify revolutionary changes in social processes. The promotion of a rational utopia achievable in this world and given symbolic form in the de-sacralized cathedral entailed a radical attack on the exclusiveness of the clergy; henceforth, bishops and priests were to be elected by the populace and to act as civil servants, just like representatives to the National Assembly to which the elected clergy had to swear loyalty.66
In light of these findings regarding the interiorization of public space following the Revolution, it may seem paradoxical that the appearance of the cathedral today (Figure 4.1) does not fully reflect the symbiotic state of cathedral and town in earlier periods (Figures 4.4 and 4.5). The democratization of access to the cathedral following the Revolution was reinforced by changes to the urban fabric in the nineteenth century. From the year 1865 on, a project of degagement proceeded, involving the demolition of edifices surrounding the cathedral, particularly to the east and west, as well as the widening of certain important streets leading to it, all in order to make the building conform to the Beaux-Arts ideal of nineteenth-century architects and planners: i. e. the monument as a sculptural object isolated in space (Figure 4.3).67 Thus, the cathedral’s dominance over the town was maintained, even as the latter became more ‘imageable’ (in the formulation of Kevin Lynch).68 One of the most important factors contributing to the movement to free the cathedral from the encumbrance of its urban fabric was surely the contemporary expansion of the railway.69 The Chartres station, one stop on the Paris-Le Mans line, was sited to the north-northwest of the cathedral. This changed the dominant patterns of circulation in the town by giving it a new nexus away from the densest part of extant development; it further dictated that visitors arriving now by train approached the cathedral from the north-west (Figure 4.1) – not the south, as with earlier carriage traffic from Paris (Figures 4.6 and 4.7) – so that what first confronted their eyes was the tall west fagade with its two soaring spires.