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Paradoxplace Italy Spain Britain Photo & History Pages Links to French Cathedral and Abbey Photo Pages in Paradoxplace Link to all Abbey and Cathedral Pages in Paradoxplace
France Burgundy (Bourgogne), Champagne & East Bourgogne, Franche Comté, Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne Ardennes
MAP OF FRENCH PILGRIMS' ROADS TO SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA MAP OF THE VIA FRANCIGENA, PILGRIMS' ROAD FROM CANTERBURY TO ROME
LINK TO INSIGHT PAGES ON THE CISTERCIAN ORDER LINK TO FRENCH CISTERCIAN ABBEYS
Back to Paradoxplace France Photo Galleries
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LINK TO REIMS (CHAMPAGNE) PAGES
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BURGUNDY MAP AND PAGE LINKS
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Link to another photo rich web site
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There are lots of Sofitel group hotels in Burgundy. Above - Paradox's North Burgundy HQ in 2007 - the IBIS hotel in a field near Avallon. An ideal base for seeing North Burgundy - easily findable from the A6, 20 minutes from Vézelay and Salieu, 45 minutes from Fontenay and one of the best country restaurants around at nearby Buffon, 60 minutes from Autun, and with Cluny, Nevers, Beaune, Dijon, Sens et al all day trippable - and all through beautiful countryside like the Morvan National Park (the darker green area on the map). And Nathalie, Ozlem and the other hard working staff at the hotel could not have been more pleasant and helpful.
We have also spent a couple of well looked after nights at the old Novotel on the banks of the broad River Saône in Macon, and at the IBIS in Nuits Saint Georges - a location whose potential is obvious to any red wine lover.
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An outstanding coffee table tour de force in the quality of both its commentary and photography
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BURGUNDIAN ROMANESQUE
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More Photos from Vézelay in 2007 Vézelay's Tympanums and Narthex Sculptures Vézelay's Medieval Narrative Capitals Labours of the Month and Signs of the Zodiac at Vézelay
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Autun (South Central Burgundy) - Cathedrale St-Lazare with Gislebertus' Glorious 1130-35 Tympanum More Gislebertus in the Musée Rolin Narrative Capitals in the Nave and Chapter House and Zodiac Signs and Monthly Labours - 1st Half - 2nd Half of the year
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Zodiac Signs on the Portal of the Clunaic Church of St-Lazare, Avallon
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Saulieu (centre of Burgundy) - Basilique St-Andoche with and
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The Church of Saint Etienne in Vignory (which is actually in South Champagne) was built in the 1000s. It is interesting in its own right as one of the oldest around, and also as the inspiration for the design of Tuscany's Abbazia di Sant'Antimo. It lies on the Via Francigena just north of Chaumont, which is at the top right of the Burgundy map above.
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The Abbey of Cluny (South Burgundy)
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CLUNAICS AND CISTERCIANS
It was in Burgundy (Burgogne), which in pre-nation state Europe was outside the effective jurisdiction of the then King of France (who initially only held sway over the small area of the Île de France around Paris), the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, that the heavyweight monastic reform movements emerged. The first was the Abbey of Cluny which over the first two hundred years of its life from 910 built up a network of around 1,000 Clunaic Priories across Europe and wielded enormous temporal and spiritual power. The Abbey of Bec in Normandy became a leading European centre of learning from the mid 1000s, but did not build an empire of daughter establishments like Cluny.
The second major reform movement was the Cistercian Order (the "White Monks" from their habits of coarse bleached wool, contrasting with Benedictine black), which was established at Citeaux in Burgundy (Latin Cistercium) in 1098 by Benedictines who had had enough of the wealth and corruption that had overtaken the Benedictines and by then had also spread to the supposedly reformed Cluny. The Cistercians were the first order to be founded with a constitution ("The Charter of Love" drawn up by English Saxon nobleman, monk, third Abbot of Citeaux and Saint, Stephen (Fr: Etienne) Harding (c1060 - 1133)), which inter alia laid down that their abbeys were to be sited in isolation - away from towns and villages and "far from the concourse of men" - and also set out the first international governance mechanisms known to any western organization - who had what power and how were they appointed, how were standards set and maintained, etc.
However, it was the energy, inspiration and writings of St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) which propelled the Cistercians from being a promising idea into a major Pan-European Abbey Movement, during an extraordinary period of expansion which resulted in the existence of 530 Cistercian abbeys by the end of the eleven hundreds, just one hundred years after the order's foundation.
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Foundation Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny in Chablis Country |
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near Montbard and Fontenay
September 2007 - Sunday (and Monday) lunch and an art purchase at Le Marronier (Buffon)
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Team Paradox 2007 Peugeot - the last to leave after Sunday lunch at the Restaurant et Hotel "Le Marronnier" on the Burgundy Canal at Buffon
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Buffon is where Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 - 1788) was born and did much of his work. Buffon, in case you had not heard of him, was the pre-eminent botanist of his age, and, rather in the style of the great Muslim scientist al-Idrisi hundreds of years earlier, he decided to write a history of nature. The "Histoire Naturelle" took 40 years to research and write, and extended over 36 volumes.
In it he made the interesting assertion that living things in the "New World" were inferior in nearly every way to those of the "Old World". In the New World, Buffon stated, the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, the animals without size or vigour, their constitutions weakened by the noxious vapours that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests. In such an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. "They have no beards or body hair, no ardour for the female, and their reproductive organs are small and feeble." No wonder there's the odd bit of friction between the USA and France.
The Comte set up a large (for the times) ironworks in this area which can still be visited. Interestingly in earlier times it had been the Cistercian monasteries who had pioneered many ironworks in central France (the nearby Cistercian Abbey of Fontenay for example still has a medieval iron forge building).
Buffon also made one of the first scientific attempts to measure the age of the earth ... by trying to observe the rate of cooling of metal spheres he had heated to white hot, and extrapolating the results to the cooling of the earth. His models generated an answer of between 75,000 and 168,000 years.
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Plus ça change .... 2004 Peugeot in the same spot
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Links to other pages in Paradoxplace:
All original material on this site © Adrian Fletcher 2000-08 - The contents may not be hotlinked, or reproduced without permission
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