What I know of the divine science and holy scripture, I learnt in the woods and fields. Vines and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.
- Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
I was sorry to leave the colourful town of Bar-sur-Aube, with its abundance of historic buildings and its shops and cafés. I felt I hadn't done it justice, arriving too tired to enjoy the town much last night and then leaving again first thing in the morning! But such is life in the road, and so after picking up a few more lunch supplies from the supermarket in Bar-sur-Aube, we left the town, crossed over the river Aube, and climbed a steep hill up to the chapel of Sainte-Germaine above the city, on the site where the saint was martyred by the Vandals in the year 451.
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| Crossing the Aube |
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| The chapel of Sainte-Germaine |
We continued along a dirt track through the forest to come out above a hillside covered with champagne vineyards, leading down to the village of Baroville in the valley below.
We climbed another steep hill coming out of Baroville - in fact, the whole day was a series of ridges and valleys, all running east to west, and as we are walking south we cut across them all. Vineyards gave way to another forest as we walked along a straight gravel road known as the Sommiere des Moines - "the monks' mattress" - leading to the site of the former Abbey of Clairvaux.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux has a special significance for me on this walk, as I walked for one month in England last year from my birthplace in Leeds to the start of the Via Francigena in Canterbury and then to Dover along the route mapped out by Tony Maskill-Rogan as St. Bernard's Way, following in the footsteps of monks travelling from the Abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire to Citaux, their mother house in France.
Clairvaux is one of the Cistercian abbeys founded by Saint Bernard to reform the Benedictine monastic order. Founded in 1115, it was enlarged beginning in 1135 and largely reconstructed in the 18th century.
But the Abbey of Clairvaux is no longer an abbey; it's a maximum security prison! Like all the other abbeys in France, it was confiscated after the French Revolution and became state property. It was sold to an industrialist and the 12th-century church was converted into a glass factory, taking apart the stones from parts of the abbey that were no longer needed and using them in the construction of the factory. After only 15 years the company went bankrupt and the abbey complex became state property once again; Napoleon I had it converted into a prison, and that is what it still is today. Though the prisoners are now housed in new buildings on the site where the church used to stand, and not in the historic buildings, the abbey complex can only be visited as part of a guided tour. There was one about to depart just as I arrived, so I joined in.
Photographs are not allowed inside the complex for security reasons, but here is one of the gateway!
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| Entrance to Clairvaux Abbey / prison |
The initial prisoners were rebellious soldiers, but after the collapse of the Paris Commune in 1871, a number of Communards were held there. Revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui spent some time in solitary. Clairvaux became the largest French penitentiary of the 19th century.
Clairvaux prison was once again in the public eye in 1971 when two convicts, Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems, took as hostages a nurse, Nicole Comte, and a prison guard, Guy Girardot, who were subsequently murdered. When Buffet and Bontems were captured, Bontems claimed the murder was Buffet's idea. Buffet said that he wanted death. Both of them were sentenced to death in June 1972; they were among the last prisoners in France to be guillotined.
On 16 January 2006, several detainees who were serving life sentences in Clairvaux Prison signed a manifesto denouncing the "false" abolition of the death penalty. They declared that it had resulted in a slow and continuous punishment, a sort of death in life, and called for the restoration of the death penalty.
Forty prisoners are still held in the facility, but are due to be transferred elsewhere before the end of the summer. And so Clairvaux Abbey will finally be converted from a place of confinement, whether voluntary or forced, to a place for leisure, events and celebrations.
In the meantime, the only facility for wining and dining, or for sleeping, in Clairvaux is the Hôtel de l'Abbaye, and that is where we are tonight!
Bar-sur-Aube - Abbaye de Clairvaux 16.5 km
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