How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

How France Built Her Cathedrals
By ELIZABETH BOYLE O’REILLY Honorary Member of the Société Française d’Archéologie Author of “Heroic Spain” Etc. Illustrated With Drawings By A. PAUL DE LESLIE
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON
How France Built Her Cathedrals —— Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America A-W
How France Built Her Cathedrals

So wrote John Ruskin in one of his flashes of genius, and never was word truer. Architecture is the living voice of the past. Architecture is history. By architecture the forefathers from whom we come relate to us their progress in knowledge, their prowess in handicrafts, their economic conditions, their sorrows, their rejoicings, their aspirations. They wrote it down, those men and women whose blood is our blood, on great stone pages of perennial beauty for us to read— if only we would . By architecture we are linked in a grand solidarity with all that has gone before, with the proud periods of history that thrill us as we read, and with the tragic outbreaks of the oppressed that sadden our spirit.
Whenever men have set themselves to forget this solidarity, their first act has been to fling themselves in frenzy on cathedral and city hall. In 1914 they forgot it, and mighty Rheims fell. They forgot that Bamburg had learned its imagery from Rheims, that German Norbert, revered of St. Bernard, had helped France in the days when Gothic art was in formation, that he died bishop of Magdeburg, and Magdeburg is a Primary Gothic cathedral in the land which frankly called the new architecture opus francigenum . Would the civic halls of Noyon, Arras, St. Quentin, and Ypres lie in ruins if Frankfort and Lübeck had remembered?
In 1793, man again thought to set up a barrier between himself and his past, and he shattered the art treasures of a thousand years and tore down the cathedrals of Cambrai, Arras, and Avranches; he tore down Cluny, the greatest Romanesque church in the world, Cluny the civilizer, that had removed from agriculture its stigma as serfs’ work. Man fancied that to shatter and demolish was to build.