Video. The amazing story of the stained glass windows of Chartres, hidden in the Dordogne during the Second World War

Ct is a small story in the big one that has been covered over by the strata of time. A story that remained in the memories of elders, forgotten for most people. Until one day, a local historian brings it back to light, extracts it from the darkness in which it slumbered, that of an old quarry once renowned for its beautiful limestone: Fongrenon. This story is that of the stained glass windows of Chartres, hidden for five years in the Dordogne, during the Second World War.

Ct is a small story in the big one that has been covered over by the strata of time. A story that remained in the memories of elders, forgotten for most people. Until one day, a local historian brings it back to light, extracts it from the darkness in which it slumbered, that of an old quarry once renowned for its beautiful limestone: Fongrenon. This story is that of the stained glass windows of Chartres, hidden for five years in the Dordogne, during the Second World War.

It all began well before the conflict, in the 1930s, when the Ministry of Fine Arts drew up a plan in advance to secure the most precious national works. Among them, the stained glass windows of Chartres, dating from the 12th^e century, famous all over the world for their inimitable blue. For them, the chosen destination is the Dordogne and more precisely the Fongrenon quarry. Today attached to the town of La Tour-Blanche-Cercles, the old farm rests peacefully at the bend of a bucolic path as there are many in green Périgord. But at the time, activity there was abundant and this is partly what led the State to take an interest in it.

Why here?

“A whole bundle of elements led these stained glass windows here,” says Frédéric de Monner, the current owner of the premises. First of all, it’s a story of men…” Indeed, the chief architect of the historical monuments of Eure-et-Loir, Jean Trouvelot, had a counterpart in the Dordogne, Yves-Marie Froidevaux, who himself worked with the architect Paul Cocula, connoisseur of Fongrenon for having used the stone on building sites. It was he who had the idea of ​​storing the Chartres treasure in these vast galleries carved into the rock.

Then there was the La Tour-Blanche freight station, which was then mainly used for the local stone trade. “It made it possible to guarantee the rapid transport of the stained glass windows from Chartres”, explains Frédéric de Monner. Above all, the State had long decreed that Périgord had safe shelters for many national jewels: “The castles of Hautefort and Bourdeilles, in particular, have also hosted several works”, confirms Thierry Baritaud, heritage engineer and Périgourdin keen on local history (1), the first to have unearthed this history of limestone and glass in the early 2000s, by chance during his research.

Jean Moulin in the loop

On June 9, 1940, faced with the debacle of the French army and the arrival of German troops at the gates of Paris, the Beaux-Arts validated the transfer of the stained glass windows from Chartres, in agreement with the prefect of Eure-et-Loir, a certain… Jean Moulin. Of the 923 boxes containing the 3,000 square meters of windows dismantled and deposited at an impressive speed, 539 left Notre-Dame cathedral urgently for the Dordogne. But the advance of the enemy troops making the roads and the railways dangerous, the other half of these stained glass windows remains in the crypts of the cathedral and will remain there until the end of the conflict.

At Fongrenon, the crates are transported to the bottom of the quarry, several hundred meters from the entrance. They are arranged in three vast rooms. “The crates should not be stacked in any way, they were tidy […] on dry limestone, with a constant ambient temperature of 13°”, describes Thierry Baritaud.

In the silence of Fongrenon, inscriptions on the white rock still testify today to this resistant activity.

Resistant carriers

During the day, the quarrymen protected the windows of the occupier by busying themselves. At night, guards took turns: “Carriers, but also sometimes their children or the children of those who left to join the maquis”, says Patrick Belard, another Périgourdin who, with a whole team from the Association for the Assembly of Vehicles Périgord Vert (ARVAPV), recently brought to light these facts that are more than eighty years old, largely inspired by the work of Thierry Baritaud.

In the silence of Fongrenon, inscriptions on the white rock still testify today to this resistant activity, in particular a list of official guardians. Or a “Vive de Gaulle” written and accompanied by a cross of Lorraine. Or even caricatures, in particular one of Hitler completed with this sentence: “130 cases by his fault. A Resistance that ended between November and December 1945, when trucks, supervised by gendarmes, came to collect the precious stained glass windows to repatriate them.

(1) Thierry Baritaud is also a member of the Historical and Archaeological Society of Périgord (Shap). He recorded all his research on the stained glass windows of Chartres in a bulletin published in 2006.