Reims, the comeback kid

Published May 23, 2015

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Paris - For several minutes, I am convinced I have gone the wrong way. The cobbled lanes of medieval Reims have faded behind me, the twin towers of its cathedral drifting into the distance. I have crossed the wide grass of Les Promenades, the mile-long curve of park which delineates the upper edge of the centre – in doing so, passing beneath the strong shoulders of the Porte de Mars, the 3rd-century gateway which marked the entrance to the Roman city.

Where, I am starting to ask, is the site which hosted one of the 20th century’s main events?

The Musée de la Reddition (Surrender) is literally on the wrong side of the tracks, where Reims begins to flee into its northern suburbs. And if Rue Franklin Roosevelt, the street in question, bears the name of one of America’s most hallowed leaders, there is little else about the area which hints at great men and big deeds.

Yet it was here, in the early hours of May 7, 1945, that Germany formally renounced its assault on the planet, and the Second World War in Europe came to an official conclusion. Seventy years ago, the red-brick structure which dominates this dingy road was the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force – General Eisenhower having shifted himself east from Paris as his foe began to fail. A week earlier, on April 30, Hitler had committed suicide in Berlin.

Yet Eisenhower’s command bunker was not just the nerve centre of the war’s last days. It was also a school. And still is – a fact which continues to throw me off the scent, forcing me to wade through the education rituals of a weekday morning, pupils cluttering the pavement outside the Lycée Franklin Roosevelt amid a mass of cigarette butts and chewing gum splotches. It is only when I reach the west end of the building that I find my destination. I know this because of the words, fixed in hard iron (in French) over the door: “It was here that the agreement which finished the Second World War was signed.”

 

The Musée de la Reddition is not a large institution, barely more than three rooms – of which the third is all-important. The chamber where surrender was confirmed has been frozen in time, campaign maps – showing the state of play in Germany, Burma, the Philippines – still covering its walls. Then there is the table, preserved behind glass – not a noble slab of oak, but the sort of unvarnished workhorse you expect to find in a school..

An adjacent photograph captures the scene in 1945, the protagonists forever ensnared in black and white – a chorus of American, French, British and Russian soldiers. One man, though, is missing. Eisenhower, famously, did not attend. Explanations as to his absence vary – that he found the process distasteful; that, with Admiral Karl Doenitz, the new German head of state, busy elsewhere, there was no one of sufficient rank at the table to justify his presence. So he skulked upstairs, leaving matters to his chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, as – at 2.41am – Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, the head of Germany’s armed forces, provided the crucial swirl of the pen.

Photographs are currently on display in the Place du Forum. Here are telling images – US troops marching through in August 1944, locals savouring their deliverance. Gazing at these faces, farmers in from the vineyards which frame the city, the equation briefly strikes me as incongruous – dark times in a city best known for the light golden colour of its most celebrated product; hard truths in the home of soft champagne bubbles.

Yet in many ways, Reims has been defined by war and despair. It was one of the main urban victims of World War 1 (1914-1918), its position (almost) on the front line leaving it 80 percent ruined by the time of the Armistice. However, if Reims was a corpse in 1918, it was the comeback kid of the 1920s, reborn in that decade’s fine style. Bursts of Art Deco greet you everywhere – marble flourishes on elegant apartments, mosaics on sumptuous facades.

When I wander into the centre, I find the crown jewel. The Bibliotheque de Reims was a gift to the city – funded by US industrialist Andrew Carnegie – which emerged in 1928. It looks like something from F Scott Fitzgerald’s dreams – a wrought-iron gateway, a lobby encased in marble where a pale chandelier of remarkable beauty holds court; a reading room where light seeps in through intricate windows of green and yellow tiling. I am still captivated by the building as I drift to the nearby Café du Palais and encounter more of the same, the glass canopy above my head giddy with the bright outlines of birds in flight.

From my table, I can see Notre Dame, the 13th-century cathedral which acted as the soul of pre-Revolutionary France, staging the coronations of its monarchs. It died on September 20, 1914, brow-beaten by a German artillery attack which caused its roof to melt and its gargoyles to vomit molten lead. Its resurrection was slow, painful – although not without compensations. Behind the altar, in a rear chapel, three stained-glass windows bear the fingerprints of Marc Chagall – a triumvirate of biblical scenes crafted between 1968 and 1974 to replace a set of 19th-century panes eaten by the flames.

They are an emblem of healing. There is another in the flagstones outside the main entrance, a plaque which recalls July 8, 1962 – the day Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer met at the cathedral, the leaders of France and Germany symbolising reconciliation by attending mass together. Explaining the choice of location, De Gaulle would later describe the city as a “theatre of many clashes”.

l www. reims-tourism.com

The Independent on Sunday

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