Paris Notes April 03

PARIS NOTES

April 2003

Volume 12 Issue 3

You’re steeped in military history. You’ve marched past ranks of guns, peered into cases of mannequins wearing croissant-shaped hats and entered the Eglise du Dôme’s mausoleum, where Napoleon’s remains rest like those of an Egyptian god. Though your shins may ache from your tour of Les Invalides, before departing it’s worth trudging up to the fourth floor of the east wing of this 17th-century veterans’ hospital. Here you’ll find an exhibit so little-known it’s not even mentioned in the brochures distributed at the ticket booth: the Musée des Plans-Reliefs, or Museum of Relief Maps.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, France found itself endlessly at war with its various enemies. To answer the threat, Louis XIV’s military engineer, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, began developing chains of secured towns along every border and coastline. The invention of gunpowder and cannon balls had made medieval fortifications obsolete, so Vauban tore down or beefed up old towers, lowered and thickened walls, and added sharply jutting bastions to maximize artillery fire.

To keep track of all these bolstered defenses, the Marquis de Louvois, the Minister of War, commissioned scale models of each outpost. From the safety of Paris, the Sun King and his strategists could forget their flat maps and mull over, in 3-D, a town's natural defenses and strategic weaknesses. As Vauban redesigned a fortification or an army captured a new territory, a corresponding model was added like a trophy to Louis XIV's growing collection (numbering 144 by 1697 and transferred to Les Invalides in 1776). Subsequent kings up until Napoleon continued the model making, but by 1870 fortified towns were no longer strategically useful. The "plans-reliefs" as military tools became outdated and the collection deteriorated after years of storage in damp Parisian mansions.

Today, only 24 are on view at Les Invalides, each repaired and carefully cleaned by laser (the others are either in Lille or mothballed for restoration). As you move from model to model in the dim, climate-controlled chamber, each site glows like a preserved laboratory specimen in its airtight glass box. There’s a 7.5x5.5-foot Mont-Saint-Michel as it existed in 1691. The Count of Monte Cristo seems to haunt a diorama of Château d’If. Close-up views of individual forts alternate with 1:600-scale panoramas of entire cities: Antibes, Toulon, Perpignan, Bayonne and Bordeaux. Some of these measure 25 feet on a side.

Every street and rampart, house and furrow, wall and riverbank have been painstakingly reproduced in miniature. Buildings are carved wooden blocks covered in colored paper, hills are papier mâché, trees are human hair wrapped around wire. Shredded silk and sand are glued to rolling landscapes to create the texture and color of roads and fields. Other than a lack of wagons, soldiers, farmers and dogs, the maps open up the past like a series of sculpted snapshots, revealing 18th-century urban spaces and rural landscapes moments before the massive upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary photos provide amusing and sometimes startling contrasts, while an adjacent gallery shows the history of map-making and siege techniques.

In our present age of satellite photography, these relief maps may seem almost naive. But for a pre-photographic, pre-aviation day, they were cutting-edge military intelligence, giving planners God’s-eye views over their fortified towns and ports.

•Musée des Plans-Reliefs: Hôtel National des Invalides, Musée de l’Armée (east wing, 4th floor), 129 Rue de Grenelle, 7th. Tel: (1) 45 51 95 05. Open: daily 10am-5pm; closed first Mon of month. Entrance: 7E (includes entire Musée de l’Armée). Website: www.invalides.org.