"An Infernal Spectacle": Franco-Prussian War Dead in Bazeilles
I've never visited Bazeilles, but its ossuary, which contains the remains of more than 2000 soldiers who died in 1870, exerts a fascination over me from afar.
This article contains graphic descriptions of dead bodies that some readers may find disturbing.
What images does your mind conjure at the mention of the term “war memorial”? Perhaps it’s the dark expanse of the Vietnam Wall, the Menin Gate, or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
You will probably not imagine a chapel with piles of bones and mummified body parts surrounded by skulls. Yet that is exactly what you will find if you visit the ossuary for the dead of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) at Bazeilles in France.
If you don’t know what an ossuary is, let me—or rather the Merriam-Webster Dictionary—explain: it’s “a depository for the bones of the dead.” In France, ossuaries are a culturally acceptable way to preserve the bones of dead humans. The Paris catacombs are probably the most famous exponent of this phenomenon. Also in other countries, the display of bones as well as the use of bones in church buildings is not unknown—exemplified in the Chapel of the Bones in Evora, Portugal, Sedlec ossuary in Czechia, and the charnel house in Hallstatt, Austria. Such treatment of human remains is less common nowadays. However, the twentieth century still provides some examples: an ossuary was built at Douaumont near Verdun after World War I to house the bones of thousands of unidentified soldiers who died there. The Choeung Ek stupa, which contains skulls of people murdered by Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, could also be considered an ossuary. With the exception of the charnel house in Hallstatt, the common thread that links these ossuaries is the fact that the names of the dead are unknown. This is also the case for the dead of Bazeilles: they are anonymous.
The Franco-Prussian War took place between July 1870 and January 1871. It resulted in 40 000 dead on the German side and 140 000 (!) on the French side. Not all of these deaths took place on the battlefield; in the pre-antibiotic era, disease killed thousands as well. The 2000 men in the Bazeilles ossuary, however, are battlefield dead who were killed on 31 August and 1 September 1870.
Just a few weeks after the battle, the following account of the battle’s aftermath was appeared in a French newspaper. Written by “a person from Brussels who had gone to Sedan,” it gave a firsthand account of the fighting and its aftermath:
The population of Sedan was then called upon to bury the French dead. Seventy-two were placed in each grave, divided into six rows of twelve corpses, one above the other, and covered with a layer of earth barely 50 centimetres deep. A crude cross indistinctly marks the places thus serving as a mass grave.1
This scant 50 centimetres of earth would come back to haunt the people of Bazeilles. The bodies weren’t buried deep enough, and it didn’t take long before rotting body parts began to emerge from the soil. It did take a while, however, to figure out what to do with them. Only in 1876 was the ossuary built with a view to permanently housing these remains.
Visiting Bazeilles in the same year that the ossuary was inaugurated, Georges Lefèvre described it thus:
After descending the twelve or fifteen steps of a stone staircase, one enters a narrow gallery that traverses the entire length of the crypt. To the right and left, cells, barely illuminated by a window, open their iron gates onto the central gallery. This is where the bones are piled up. The French are on the right, the Germans on the left—at least as far as the shreds of uniforms allow us to recognize any nationality amid this already decomposed debris.2
In 1895, things had changed little:
A few steps lead from the garden, all laughing with greenery and sunshine, to the icy, almost dull crypt. A pale orange light spills through the air vents into the fourteen grilled boxes arranged parallel to each side of the access tunnel. And this light softly caresses hundreds of skeletons scattered in two flowerbeds extending the entire length of each vault.3
These remains, especially the mummified body parts, both repulsed visitors and left them unable to look away. A feeling of fascinated horror pervaded contemporary descriptions. Their gloom and sense of the uncanny reminded me of Gothic novels; the bodies in these accounts weren’t merely dead. They might have been partitioned and, for the most part, unrecognisable as individuals, but they still acted as if they were alive. Hands seized, lips screamed, teeth grimaced and eye sockets, though devoid of eyes, still gazed fixedly:
A hand still holds a fragment of cloth, seized in the last convulsions of agony; the bullet remains embedded on a broken rib, and it seems that this dreadful charnel house has preserved for the dead the appearance of the carnage in which they succumbed.4
We are shown a skull whose bones appear to be wrapped in skin; the mouth of this head, emaciated and devoid of eyes, is dilated, one might say, by a scream.5
…we can distinguish, here and there, a shin still lodged in a spurred boot, a withered hand held clenched on the hilt of a sabre, the head of a Turco, as if mummified in its dark skin which, despite the passage of time, has retained the hairs of a fine moustache. We walk along the narrow passage only on tiptoe, fearing that these newly awakened dead will rise up… Before these human remains which you seem to see quivering in the last convulsions; in the presence of these grimacing heads and the fixity of all these eyeless gazes, we shudder with horror and feel the icy sweat of the blackest hallucinations rise on our foreheads.6
Writers tended to focus on material gore rather than meditate on any religious or moral teachings imparted by the remains. These body parts, some of them still embedded with bullets, were a kind of time capsule that allowed viewers to witness the moment of these men’s deaths in 1870. At the same time, however, the “eyeless gazes” could serve to mitigate the voyeurism by staring back to challenge the visitor. Perhaps this silent judgment convinced at least one writer that a visit to the crypt was not just a macabre day out. Leon van Neck believed that this “infernal spectacle” held lessons for future generations. The way in which he proposed these lessons be taught, however, may surprise modern sensibilities:
Facsimiles of this hallucinatory ossuary should be installed in cities throughout the universe to spread the terror of the horrors of war throughout the world.7
(Could the implementation of van Neck’s suggestion, made in 1910, have prevented the world war that broke out only four years later? Who knows!)
Not everyone agreed with these grim characterisations. In 1903, a Commander Venet made “a sort of pilgrimage” by bicycle across the battlefields of the Meuse. In Bazeilles, he visited the ossuary, where the guide showed him a section containing “some of the dead of your regiment, sir.” Venet was certainly touched by this link to his brothers-in-arms, and his description brings to mind the body of Christ on the cross:
It is deeply sad and moving, but not at all repugnant; and then there hangs over these pierced, incomplete bodies such a thought of eternal and well-deserved rest that the mind is entirely penetrated and absorbed by it.8
Venet’s reaction was uncommon among his contemporaries and I don’t know that many modern readers will share his sentiments. For my part, I certainly thought that many of the accounts that I’ve quoted here made the crypt sound more like a haunted house than war grave. However, I’m looking at them through my twenty-first century eyes and I haven’t visited the ossuary in person. Maybe that would make all the difference.
Or maybe it wouldn’t. There is a historical component to any reaction but there is also a cultural one, exemplified by the reaction of German troops in Sedan in World War I. In 1914, as German soldiers marched across France, they retraced the path of the imperial army from 1870. In Bazeilles, they were so horrified by the exposed bones and body parts of their comrades that they built a concrete tomb for the German remains.
The French bones are still unburied and can be viewed today. Photos from 2011 show mummified body parts, although the head of the Algerian soldier whose “hideous rictus” discomfited nineteenth century visitors thankfully seems to no longer be on display. If you’re thinking of visiting, the ossuary is open year-round and admission is free (although you might pay later in the form of sleepless nights).
On appela alors à la population de Sedan pour enterrer les morts français. On en plaça 72 dans chaque tombe, divisée en six rangs chachun de 12 corps superposés, et on les recouvrit d’une couche à terre d’à peine 50 centimètres. Une croix grossière marque indistinctement les endroits servant ainsi de fosse commune. (Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 15 September 1870)
Après avoir descendu les douze ou quinze marches d’un escalier de pierre, on pénètre dans une étroite galerie qui traverse la crypte dans toute sa longueur. A droite et à gauche, des cellules, à peine éclairées par un soupirail, ouvrent leurs grilles de fer sur la galerie centrale. C’est là que sont entassés les ossements. Les Français sont à droite, les Allemands à gauche, autant du moins que des lambeaux d’uniformes ont permis de reconnaître, sur ces débris déjà décomposés, une nationalité quelconque. (Georges Lefèvre, Le Radical, 9 November 1886)
Quelques marches conduisent du jardin tout riant de verdure et de soleil à la crypte glaciale et presqu’ennuitée. Une lumière orange pâle s’épand par les soupiraux dans les quatorze loges grillées et parallèlement rangées aux deux côtés du tunnel d’accès. Et cet éclairage caresse mollement des centaines de squelettes éparpillés en deux plates-bandes s’étendant sur toute la longueur de chaque caveau. (Gazette anecdotique, littéraire, artistique et bibliographique, 15 June 1895)
Un main tient encore un fragment d’étoffe, saisi dans les dernières convulsions de l’agonie; sur une côte brisée, la balle est demeurée incrustée, et il semble que cet épouvantable charnier ait gardé aux morts l’apparence du carnage dans lequel ils ont succombé. (Georges Lefèvre, Le Radical, 9 November 1886)
On nous montre un crâne dont les os paraissent enveloppés de la peau, la bouche de cette tête, émaciée et privée d’yeux; est dilatée, dirait-on, par un cri. (Gazette anecdotique, littéraire, artistique et bibliographique, 15 June 1895)
…on distingue, çà et là, un tibia encore logé dans une botte éperonnée, une main desséchée retenue crispée sur la poignée d’un sabre, la tête d’un turco, comme momifiée dans sa peau basanée qui, en dépit du temps, a conservé les poils d’une fine moustache…. Devant ces restes humains qu’il vous semble voir tressaillir dans les convulsions dernières; en présence de ces têtes grimaçantes et de la fixité de tous ces regards sans yeux, on frémit d’horreur et l’on se sent monter au front la sueur glacée des plus noires hallucinations. (Edmond Collignong, Sedan trente ans après, 1900)
Des centaines de crânes sont rangés, servant de bordure à des monceaux d'ossements, recueillis sur le théâtre de la lutte. Il y a des crânes avec les poils de la barbe, des dents blanches, grimaçant ; des bras avec des lambeaux d'uniforme, des jambes avec des morceaux de botte. C'est un spectacle affreux, infernal. Il faudrait installer dans les villes de tout l’univers des facsimilés de cet ossuaire hallucinant pour répandre dans le monde entier l’épouvante des horreurs de la guerre. (Léon Van Neck, 1870–71, 1910)
C’est profondément triste et émouvant, mais nullement répugnant; et puis il plane sur ces corps troués, incomplets, une telle pensée de repos éternel et bien mérité, que l’esprit en est tout entier pénétré, absorbé. (Commandant Venet, “Une excursion à bicyclette aux champs de bataille de la Meuse,” Revue mensuelle/Touring-club de France, 15 September 1903)