In 1885, Rodin was commissioned by the French city of Calais to create a sculpture that commemorated the heroism of Eustache de Saint-Pierre, a prominent citizen of Calais, during the dreadful Hundred Years’ War between England and France (begun in 1337).
Now the burgers are defined essentially as a citizen of a town or city and who is typically a member of the wealthy bourgeoisie.
However, while they may stand together with a sense of familiarity, none of them are making eye contact with the men beside them.
They are drawn together not through physical or verbal contact, but by their slumped shoulders, bare feet, and an expression of utter anguish.
Rodin followed the recounting of Jean Froissart, a fourteenth-century French chronicler, who wrote of the war or perhaps what is known today as a war correspondent.
War correspondents are, according to several news outlets as , “the grunts of the journalism world … covering dangerous wars in obscure places for the world’s media.”
From ancient times to World War II to the modern conflicts in the Middle East, journalists and scribes have taken calculated risks and put themselves in harms way to inform and to explain important historical events to the public.
One of the most famous chroniclers of that period is Jean Froissart who gathered information, by talking to combatants and talking notes during and after the fury of battle.
Froissart (c 1333 – c 1410) was born in France and traveled throughout Western Europe including England, Scotland, Italy and the Low Countries.
He is best remembered for his books (referred collectively as the Chronicles of Jean Froissart) that covered events occurring in Western Europe between about 1325 and 1400.
Allegedly Froissart accompanied Edward the Black Prince during his campaign at Castile in Spain.
Edward was the first son of Edward III, King of England – his nickname is said to be either from the color of his armor or the ferocity of his temper.
According to Froissart, King Edward III made a deal with the citizens of Calais:
if they wished to save their lives and their beloved city, then not only must they surrender the keys to the city, but six prominent members of the city council must volunteer to give up their lives.
At the time, the leader of the group was Eustache de Saint-Pierre, who Rodin depicted with a bowed head and bearded face towards the middle of the gathering.
To Saint-Pierre’s left, with his mouth closed in a tight line and carrying a giant set of keys, is Jean d’Aire.
Jacques de Wissant, Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d’Aire
The remaining men are identified as Andrieu d’Andres, Jean de Fiennes, and Pierre and Jacques de Wissant.
Unbeknownst to the six burghers, at the time of their departure, their lives would eventually be spared.
However, here Rodin made the decision to capture these men not when they were finally released, but in the moment that they gathered to leave the city to go to their deaths.
Back Ground : The Hundred Years War
It is very obvious now, but at the time, it was hard to imagine that this conflict was the beginning of a war to last for over a century.
In the beginning. it was thought, it was only a skirmish or at least, a passing conflict between the kings of England and France, in a territorial conflict involving dynasties, because it is linked to an inheritance.
The war started because Charles IV of France died in 1328 without a son.
Edward III of England then believed he had the right to become the new king of France through his mother.
The French did not want a foreign king, so Philip VI of France said he ought to be king because by the Salic law women could not rule or transmit the right to rule to their sons.
The two countries went to war because of this disagreement.
At the beginning of the war France was the stronger of the two countries.
France had about 17 million people while England had only about 4 million people.
France also had an alliance with Scotland against England, and England tried to ally with parts of the Low Countries.
But the English won a great victory at sea in the Battle of Sluys in 1340 which prevented France from invading England.
After that the war was fought almost totally in France.
The two rival dynasties fought for the throne at the largest kingdom in Western Europe.
The war marked both the heights of chivalry and its subsequent decline and the development of strong national identities in both countries.
England won again at the Battle of Crécy in 1346: the English however, had better weapon technology such as, the longbow which was part of the reason for the victory.
In the early part of the Hundred Years’ War, Edward III of England conducted a siege of Calais that lasted close to a year.
Hundreds of women and children from the town were sent away by the French commander.
The English let them pass without harming them.
The siege itself is well documented. Edward needed possession of the town to keep the route from England to France open for English soldiers and military supplies crossing the Channel.
Calais was a stoutly built stronghold surrounded by treacherous marshes, and attacking it would have been difficult – or perhaps Edward preferred to leave its fortifications intact.
So he chose to starve out the residents.
Eventually, in August 1347, the inhabitants of Calais surrendered to the English forces.
Edward III demanded that six of the most prominent citizens (burghers) leave the city in sack cloth with nooses around their necks presumably to their death, carrying the keys to the city.
Six of Calais’ prominent citizens volunteered and walked out to meet the king barefoot, in rags, gaunt from a year of near-starvation.
Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the oldest was first to volunteer.
Eustache de Saint-Pierre was regarded as the core figure in the group of six condemned men, the oldest but also the first to risk his life by volunteering to go and hand over the keys of Calais to the victorious King of England.
Here, he is represented naked, as was Rodin’s usual practice before clothing his figures, half the actual size, with emaciated face and wasted body.
The lively, energetic modelling accentuates the work’s dramatic character,with his veins seeming to protrude from under the skin, his large knotty joints still strong.
Lifting his right foot, Eustache de Saint-Pierre seems about to embark upon his heroic march.
In its energetic handling, quasi-flayed appearance, verticality and, to a lesser extent, its immobility, this figure seems to herald Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man.
It has retained its autonomy and individuality, even though it was designed to be inserted in a group.
Rodin sought to represent varying degrees of heroism and grief in The Burghers of Calais.
While some figures embody stoic self-sacrifice, others succumb to fear.
This figure, unable to disguise his emotional distress, externalizes the suffering of his brethren by grasping his bowed head with massive, outstretched hands.
Jean d’Aire is a sculpture by the French artist Auguste Rodin, first conceived around 1885 as part of the planning for his group The Burghers of Calais.
After the first group modello, he made individual studies of each figure.
The first such study of d’Aire was nude, followed by one partially covered in a kind of toga and with the noose round his neck more obvious.
He holds a cushion bearing the keys of Calais and is drawn to the left by the noose.
A bronze cast of this second version is now in the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City and other collections.
The tension of Pierre de Wiessant’s twisted stance announces his conflicted state as he approaches his own demise. The left side of his body stands erect, proceeding toward the enemy English camp while his right side pivots backward, his foot dragging behind him.
Raising a large splayed hand, he shields his gaze from his fate.
Pierre de Wiessant, the fourth to volunteer in the Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais).
Jacques de Wiessant, younger brother of Pierre de Wiessant, Jacques is the youngest burgher, stands with arms outstretched and mouth open. Reluctantly he is the 5th volunteer in the Burghers of Calais
(Les Bourgeois de Calais) expressing disbelief perhaps at the others for giving in so easily
.
He turns sideways toward Jean de Fiennes with one arm raised and his mouth open as if to console Jean of their fate and to instruct him not to make matters worse.
This magnificent statue is an inspired after cast which took many, many hours of study to replicate; created by the lost wax method and are very well received and cherished by customers from Cyprus, France, Spain, Germany and the United States.
Andrieu d’Andres, is the weeping burgher.
Edward ordered that they be beheaded.
His wife, however, intervened.
Edward III’s queen was known as Philippa of Hainault.
She was born in Valenciennes (either in 1311 or in 1314).
The town is in the Pas de Calais region, so the burghers were her compatriates.
The chronicler Jean Froissart was also born in Valenciennes, in about 1333, and Philippa was his patron.
So it is possible that Froissart was inclined to heighten the drama or romance of her life’s events just a bit, for posterity.
By 1347 she had given birth to at least 10 children since her marriage to Edward in 1328. Although she went on to have two more children.
She was a sensible-looking woman who was apparently sufficiently authoritative to act as regent when her husband was away waging war (as he often was).
She arrived in Calais fresh from having supervised a victorious battle against the Scots.
Froissart says she led the troops herself, but he may be exaggerating. Still, she sounds brisk and competent, and battles didn’t faze her.
According to the medieval chronicler Jean Froissart, the heavily pregnant Queen Philippa threw herself at her husband’s feet and said:
“Gentle sir, since I have crossed the sea from my home in great peril to be with you, I have desired nothing of you. Now therefore I humbly beg you, in honour of God and for the love of me, that ye will have mercy on these six citizens.”
The king looked sullenly at the queen and then said: “Ah, dame, I would you had been elsewhere, for if ye make such request to me, I cannot deny you. Wherefore I give them to you, to do your pleasure with them.”
The queen caused the six citizens to be brought to her apartment, had them clothed in garments suitable to their station, and gave them dinner. Finally she had each of them brought out of the English host under safe guard and set at liberty.
Can’t you just see the scene?
The 6 dignified but emaciated men, the stern king, the tender-hearted, pregnant queen, the menacing English soldiers, the exhausted survivors watching anxiously from the walls of Calais… and the chronicler scribbling it all down for posterity, complete with a happy ending for all concerned.
The ensuing siege lasted eleven months, during which the English set up a small garrison town outside the walls.
Edward was hoping that the French king, Philip VI, would come to the rescue of the people of Calais, which would allow for a proper pitched battle against his foe.
Thousands of English soldiers were there, ready for a fight. But the French king (who was, by the way, Philippa’s uncle) never appeared.
When King Philip failed to appear after all those months, the residents of Calais had to admit defeat.
Writer Jean Prasad documented the story, The King talking, to his advisers my anger burns in me against this people, but I do not want to be alone against you all.
Sir Walter go back to Calais and tell its commander that this is the limit to my mercy 6 of the chief citizens of the place are to come out with their heads and their feet bare with halters around their necks and with the keys of the town in their hands with these 6, I shall do as I please the rest I will spare.
Six can be sacrificed for the sake of the whole town, and indeed six were brought out with shaved heads marched over to the Kings camp and their dread and the terror was running through the bones of these heroes, for all to see, which Rodin captured that majestically.
(It’s interesting to note that the sculpture was originally rejected by the people of Calais, because in their opinion it didn’t portray the heroes of the story as heroic enough he wanted it at ground level so that people could walk around it and essentially experience the emotion and the terror of the protagonists however they disagreed and they wanted it raised up because that was the only way that they could add a little bit of heroism and dignity to these six heroes.
Auguste Rodin’s sculpture it represents freedom freedom from oppression similar to 2001’s heroes of United Flight 93 .
However, for others looking at it it represents terror it represents 6 people that are going to their deaths and you can see this emotion in the sculpture they look at it.)
At that point, things get a little murky.
Froissart’s detailed account is all very well, but he wasn’t actually there.
He got the story from someone survivors, and English accounts of the siege do not mention the scene with the pregnant queen.
There seems to be agreement that the six men did emerge to signal the surrender of Calaias.
According to one French historian, the business with the barefoot burghers was a typical surrender ceremony, based on medieval penitential rites, and by no means unique to Calais.
Apparently, the ritual allowed the conquering sovereign to retain his authority while pardoning those at his mercy.
This theory suggests that executing the six burghers would have represented a shocking breach of protocol.
An English historian suggests that Edward gave the order to execute the burghers because he was furious that he hadn’t been able to fight Philip.
It wasn’t the first time Edward had wanted to massacre those at his mercy – but every time he had been talked down.
“Aware of the accusations of cruelty which would be brought against him if these men were killed, Edward did what he had always previously done: he relented when begged to do so by someone dear to him… It was as if in each case he was trying to play the dread king, ‘terrible to his enemies’ as well as the compassionate monarch.
At Calais, as elsewhere, it was a method which confused and frightened his enemies.”
Philippa’s biographer also sheds light on a marriage in which the queen’s role seemed to be that of sorting out her husband’s impulsive gestures, good and bad:
“It has been remarked of Edward that he was always more ready to be generous to an enemy that just to a friend; and he gave away posts and honors so lavishly that sometimes he forgot, and granted the same thing twice and three times over to different people, and was then annoyed because they grumbled.”
Philippa’s job seems to have been keeping everything straight and smoothing ruffled feathers, and one imagines that interceding for six burghers was all in a day’s work for her.
But she probably did her persuading quietly behind the scenes, rather than in public.
The story also symbolized French heroism in defeat.
Rodin created the sculpture in the 1890s, two decades after a French defeat at the hands of the Germans, giving three-dimensional shape to popular national heroes of the time.
I think that is why this particular sculpture is visible to all who walk down the rue de Varenne.
It is (or was once) a part of the French psyche and their sense of national pride.
Six humbled but dignified men, ready to accept their fate, holding the moral high ground, if not the military power.
From 1348 to 1356 there was very little fighting because of the Black Death.
Another tragedy indeed.