2. History happens in Alsace

Field of wild flowers or a Monet painting?

One of the issues to be faced when travelling in France, especially in rural France, is that the people of France hold on to the belief the pace of life should match the needs of people, not the other way round. When you are on holiday, you also want to slow down the pace of activity, sleep a bit later, linger over breakfast. But in France you then bump up against the midday closure of nearly everything a tourist wants to see and do. The universal shut down of shops and museums and post offices to mail post cards and pretty much everything else from noon to 2:00 p.m. puts a big dent in the itinerary for the day. Of course the restaurants remain open so you can relax over a two to three hour lunch with a bottle of wine like everyone else, and then try to remember what it was you had planned to do in the morning that seemed important before the bottle of wine.

When you wake up to this view . . . in a charming hotel . . .

. . . with a patio garden overlooking the River Ill . . . it is even more difficult to get moving . . . but we are so glad that we did make it into the centre of Sélestat with nearly 90 minutes to visit the Humanist Library before it closed for the lunch break.

 

In corners of my brain little wisps of information learned long ago in World History class live on. Back then, we learned after the Romans were bested by the barbarian teams not much happened until                                                                      the Merovingians came along, and I loved them because they had great names like Clovis and Pepin and Dagobert, but the greatest of them was Charlemagne, and he was great because he revived learning in Western Europe. Through that doorway with the ornamental grille is the exhibition room of the Humanist Library in Sélestat, the most amazing museum you may have never heard of (I hadn't), where that idea comes to life. 

The Library prohibits photography in the display room, but this website offers some photos of their treasures. A book from the 7th century. A 10th century copy of Vitruvius's ten books on architecture from the 1st century that was owned by the Bishop of Worms. A 10th century manuscript of Horaces's Odes and Ars Poetica packed with comments in the margins written in the tiniest of script. My personal favorite is the book they call the "Birth Certificate of America,"  Matthias Ringmann's 1507 Cosmographiae which indicates worries about gender inequity have a long history: "Keeping in mind that Europe and Asia have been christened after female names I can not conceive why the [new lands] should not be named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Country of America, after its discoverer. . ."

The remainder of the exhibition documents the spread of book publishing with the introduction of movable type, another of those wispy ideas left over from World History. Sélestat was an early centre of printing because of its influential Humanist School, the source of the Library, which trained an early generation of Humanist scholars. 

We popped into Sélestat's Romanesque church, dedicated to Sainte Foy,
 built circa 1170 to 1180 . . . 

with its beautiful carvings . . .

. . . and doorway protectors

And into the nearby Gothic church dedicated to St George, begun in 1220,
with its fantastic stained glass windows.

We then headed off to our evening concert on the road that runs along the Rhine River, and a roadside sign reminded us that Alsace has history much more recent than the Middle Ages. The Maginot Line was the carefully planned, but ultimately useless, border defense devised by War Minister André Maginot to protect France from another invasion . . .

. . . by neighbouring Germany who was not very far away. The Maginot Line was useless because the Germans attacked through Belgium, and blitzkrieged their way through the Belgium-France border, and were in Paris is no time at all. When the attack came to Casemate 253 in June 1940, the 30 soldiers could not hold the bunker for long against a force of 200 German soldiers.

According to the guidebook, the Maginot Line emplacements were offered to soldiers and communities, and some have been turned into museums and memorials like this one. They also had this Sherman Tank with its wartime route from the Western Desert of Libya all the way to Berchtesgaden proudly displayed. . .

. . . and this piece of a Bailey Bridge, the portable bridges used by UK and US troops to cross rivers where the bridges had been blown up for strategic reasons . . . such as on the Rhine . . . but were needed as the Allies headed toward Berlin.

Our Romanesque church for tonight's concert pushed us back into history with this octagonal church built circa 1050 with the same plan as Charlemagne's chapel in Aachen built 250 years earlier. The Ottmarsheim church was built by a Habsburg Count for the Benedictine convent he founded, and where he intended to be buried.

 The French group Obsidienne entertained us with both serious music and humorous pieces. I guess it would have been better if we understood enough French to understand the recitations from a satiric manuscript of the 15th century.

The walls of the galleries decorated with frescoes and paintings
was a beautiful setting for  the concert.