Mantes-la-Jolie
It is likely that nobody who will read this article has any idea that Mantes-la-Jolie is a town nestled into a curve of the Seine river about 50 km northwest of the center of Paris. The town, at the limit of the Paris region called Ile-de-France and the Normandie region, became significant to me recently because I was reading the works of Henry Adams. Henry Adams is one of the more interesting public intellectuals in American history. I wrote about him in a 2015 article about Gore Vidal’s novel Empire.
The key historical characters in the book are John Hay and Henry Adams. With their wives and Clarence King they made up The Five of Hearts; a circle of friends that created a literary and political salon across Lafayette Park from the White House. Hay came from Illinois to Washington to be President Lincoln’s private secretary. During the period of the book he was the Secretary of State for President William McKinley; and after his assassination, he continued to serve in the same capacity for President Theodore Roosevelt. Adams, a member of the most prestigious American families, was the great-grandson and grandson of presidents. He was also known in his own right as a political thinker and writer; his memoir The Education of Henry Adams is considered one of the greatest American books ever written.
Adams frequently visited France and wrote a wonderful book about Gothic architecture, as described by Wikipedia:
In 1904, Adams privately published a copy of his “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres“, a pastiche of history, travel, and poetry that celebrated the unity of medieval society, especially as represented in the great cathedrals of France. Originally meant as a diversion for his nieces and “nieces-in-wish”, it was publicly released in 1913 at the request of Ralph Adams Cram, an important American architect, and published with support of the American Institute of Architects.
It was in this book that I came to read about Mantes (now called Mantes-la-Jolie – Wikipedia, Mantes-the-Pretty in English).
The last of Norman art is seen at Mantes, where there is a little church of Gassicourt that marks the farthest reach of the style. In arms as in architecture, Mantes barred the path of Norman conquest; William the Conqueror met his death here in 1087. Geographically Mantes is in the Ile de France, less than forty miles from Paris. Architecturally, it is Paris itself; while, forty miles to the southward, is Chartres, an independent or only feudally dependent country. No matter how hurried the architectural tourist may be, the boundary-line of the Ile de France is not to be crossed without stopping. If he came down from the north or east, he would have equally to stop,—either at Beauvais, or at Laon, or Noyon, or Soissons,—because there is an architectural douane to pass, and one’s architectural baggage must be opened. Neither Notre Dame de Paris nor Notre Dame de Chartres is quite intelligible unless one has first seen Notre Dame de Mantes, and studied it in the sacred sources of M. Viollet-le-Duc.[see note at the end of the post] Notre Dame de Mantes is a sister to the Cathedral of Paris, “built at the same time, perhaps by the same architect, and reproducing its general dispositions, its mode of structure, and some of its details”; but the Cathedral of Paris has been greatly altered, so that its original arrangement is quite changed, while the church at Mantes remains practically as it was, when both were new, about the year 1200.
As I have written for LewRockwell.com about the cathedrals Notre Dames de Chartres and Notre Dame de Paris, I felt compelled to visit this great church in Mantes-la-Jolie (officially not the seat of a bishop, and therefore, not a cathedral). Adams wrote “The church at Mantes is a very early fact in Gothic art; indeed, it is one of the earliest; for our purposes it will serve as the very earliest of pure Gothic churches.”
According to Adams, “The church towers at Mantes are very
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
