A son of the provincial bourgeoisie, Jean Jaurès graduated first from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la Rue d'Ulm in 1878 and received the third-highest mark in the examination for the recruitment of philosophy teachers in 1881. He then taught at Albi, before returning to Toulouse in 1882 to assume his role as senior lecturer in the faculty of arts. In 1885, he was elected the Republican member of parliament for Castres. It was defeat at the elections held four years later that led him to run for office in in the Toulouse municipal elections, this time as a socialist.

Opportunism

Jaurès was not always a socialist, less still a Marxist. When the Republic was permamently founded after a decade of equivocation about the regime (the Second Empire collapsed in 1870 and the Republic was proclaimed but the divided monarchists dominated the Chamber of Deputies), Jaurès was only twenty years old. He became involved in politics in 1885, becoming the MP for Tarn at 25. Thus, he was the spirtual heir to Jules Ferry and sat among the «opportunists», or socially moderate Republicans. He found the radicals of Clemenceau too restless and the Socialists violent and dangerous to the Republican order under construction.

He was not particularly interested in the fate of the working class, and put his by now mythical eloquence at the service of the first social laws of the regime (freedom for trade unions, protection of union representatives, the creation of workers' pension funds, etc.). A son of 1789, he believed in institutional and Republican reformism, in the alliance of workers and the bourgeoisie for the triumph of liberty, equality and fraternity. In 1889, the Republicans won the general election but lost the seat of Carmaux (Tarn). Baron Reille and the marquis of Solages (who were elected members of parliament for Castres-Mazamet and Carmaux, respectively), the owners of mines in Carmaux, used every means at their disposal and applied as much pressure as possible to defeat the Republican, who advocated state control over companies. He was a lecturer in Toulouse and defended 2 theses before running in the municipal elections (1890).

The great Carmaux strike

Jaurès was removed from the political life of the nation when the great Carmaux miners' strike began in 1892. The mayor-elect, Calvignac, a former miner, trade unionist and socialist, was dismissed by the marquis of Solages for failing to attend several meetings in order to fulfil his obligations as the elected leader of the municipal government. The workers went on strike to support the mayor, of whom they were proud. The French government sent in 1500 soldiers from the Army in the name of «freedom to work»; the Republic seemed to be taking the side of monarchist employers against the legitimate defence of the universal suffrage of the people of Carmaux. In France, this was another Panama Scandal. Jaurès would no longer support this Republic, which was showing its true colours, with its capitalist members of parliament and ministers for whom finance and industry took precedence over respect for the laws of the Republic. He engaged with the miners of Carmaux, from whom he learnt about class struggle and socialism. Having begun as a bourgeois intellectual and social Republican, he emerged from the Carmaux strike an apostle of socialism. Under pressure from Jaurès, the government ruled in the Solages-Calvignac dispute in favour of Calvignac. Solages resigned from parliament, while naturally Jaurès was appointed by the workers of the mine to represent them in the Chamber of Deputies. He was elected despite the votes of constituents in rural parts of the constituency, who did not want «sharers». From then on, Jaurès would engage in the ongoing and resolute defence of workers. In Albi, he was the inspiration for the famous workers' glass factory. In the wine-growing area of Languedoc, he would visit the «free winegrowers of Maraussan» who created the first cooperative cellar.

The Dreyfus affair

He also fought for the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus. At the time he opposed orthodox Marxists, including their leader, Jules Guesde, for whom Dreyfus was a bourgeois officer and therefore guilty. For Jaurès, the despondency at the misfortune and injustice suffered by Dreyfus removed class differences; Dreyfus was no longer a privileged member of society or exploiter, but a man who had suffered unfairly. He founded the newspaper L'Humanité in 1904 and in 1905, was one of the major protagonists in the fondation of the SFIO, which unified the various socialist parties in France.

Pacifism

Jaurès' pacifist position shortly before World War I made him very unpopular among nationalists, and he was assassinated at the Café du Croissant on rue Montmartre in Paris three days before the commencement of hostilities. The assassinatation achieved its objective, in that it allowed the left to rally together, including many socialists who had been hesitant, to the «Sacred Union». At the beginning of the «Great War», and in response to the massacre resulting from it, many French villages named roads and places in his honour, as a reminder that he was the fiercest opponent of such a conflict. A station on the Paris underground rail network also bears his name. The song by Jacques Brel, Jaurès (1977), recalls the point at which the politician became a mythical figure for the working classes. The French Socialist Party has paid tribute to him through its political foundation, the Fondation Jean-Jaurès. After four years and eight months in custody, his assassin, Raoul Villain, was acquitted on 29 March 1919.

Some quotes

«Courage is looking for and telling the truth, not living by the law of the triumphant lie and echoing unintelligent applause and fanatical booing.» (1903)

«I have never disassociated the Republic from the ideas of social justice, without which socialism is nothing more than words».(1887)

«A little internationalism distances one from one's country; a lot reduces it». [list]«Capitalism brings with it war just as clouds bring with them storms»

Jean Errard was a Protestant from Bar-le-Duc. After studying mathematics and geometry, he received training from Italian engineers at the service of the Duke of Lorraine, Charles III, where he was taken on in 1580. In 1583, the Duke gave him money to publish books (notably Le premier livre des instruments mathématiques mécaniques – First Book of Mechanical Mathematical Instruments). When his protector joined up with the Catholic League, Errard had to leave Lorraine in 1584 and took refuge in the Calvinist principality of Sedan, in the service of the La Marcks, Dukes of Bouillon, where he received the title of engineer of the Prince of Sedan. He continued work on the bastioned urban enclosure and then, in 1587, left for Jametz, as Sedan had decided to fortify the location’s defences. At the end of 1587, Charles III of Lorraine’s troops laid siege to Sedan, which capitulated on 24 July 1589. Jean Errard then took refuge there.

Errard made a reputation for himself with his long defence of Jametz (six months). The newly crowned King Henri IV heard of his exploits and called him into his service. He accompanied the sovereign on various campaigns to win back his kingdom, leading siege operations, building bastions and installing new fortifications.

He became a fortification engineer in Picardy and Île-de-France. Henri IV put him in charge of rehabilitating the defences at most of the fortresses. The King gave him the title of First Engineer, admitted him to the Royal Council and ennobled him in 1599. He built the citadels of Amiens and Verdun, modified the fortresses at Doullens in the Somme, Montreuil in the Pas-de-Calais, in Sedan and in Sisteron, where the front and side of the bastion form a right angle.

Jean Errard was the first to apply the principle of bastioned fortifications in France and to lay out their principles. His work earned him the title of "father of French fortifications”. His strategic thought was shaped by geometry: Errard used it to explain all the processes enabling him to lay out different polygons, whether regular or irregular, needed to fortify a site.

A major rule in his theoretical work lies in the fact that the defence of a site should depend more on infantry than on artillery, whose firepower at the time was not effective head-on.

His system comprised bastions, with room for two hundred infantrymen shooting head-on, and measuring some 70 metres wide. They had 30-metre-wide artillery batteries on each side – the principle behind his freestanding fortifications inspired Vauban.

His plans called for covert ways to defend the glacis (notion of "defilade"), as well as ravelins between the bastions to protect the curtain wall doors (notion of "flanking"). The main disadvantage of this defence system is that it presents bastions whose excessively sharp angular layout does not provide a full guarantee of safety for the besieged occupants.

Errard’s theoretical principles inspired the work of engineer Jean Sarrazin, Chevalier Deville (1595-1656), who refined the notion of flanking and divided up the covert ways, and Blaise Pagan (1607-1667), who inspired Vauban, promotor of the ravelin (evolved from of the barbican), for whom the bastion is the result of the broken, winding layout of the enclosure.

As an engineer, Jean Errard worked on hydraulic questions. In 1594, he designed a system for transforming the energy produced by a waterwheel using a shaft, eliminating the problems related to the ebb current. In 1600 he drew up plans for a chain control system for water pumps, later used by Arnold Deville.

Errard wrote “Premier Livre des instruments mathématiques et mécaniques”, released in Nancy in 1583, and “La Géométrie et pratique générale d'icelle” (Paris, 1594). He was also one of the first translators of Euclid and published “Les neufs premiers livres des Eléments d'Euclide traduits et commentez” in Paris in 1604 and 1605.

His greatest work is “La fortification démonstrée et réduicte en art”, whose first edition came out in Paris with a royal grant in 1600. The treatise’s success led to a second edition in 1604 and German editors released copies in Frankfurt in 1604, 1617 and 1622, as well as in Oppenheim in 1616 and 1617. His nephew, Alexis Errard, then undertook to reorganise the original edition based on his uncle’s notes and published a third edition in Paris in 1620.

Born on the 28th September 1841 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds (Vendée), Georges Clémenceau, after a typical Vendeen childhood, followed in his father's footsteps to become a doctor, studying first in Nantes then in Paris in 1865. He had already begun to show a fledgling interest in politics in the Latin Quarter. At 24, he became a doctor of medicine and subsequently left for the United States to study the American Constitution. He stayed there for five years where he married. On returning to France, he participated in the Parisian uprising against the imperial regime. Elected mayor of Montmartre at thirty years old, followed by a post as deputy for the Seine region, he also held office as a Parisian city councillor, as president of the city council in 1875, and as deputy of the Var region in 1880.

The Tiger

Clémenceau, who was head of the extreme radical left from 1876, violently opposed the colonial politics of Jules Ferry and was responsible for the fall of several governments, hence his nickname of ?Tiger?. Defeated in the elections of 1893, he subsequently returned to his first love, writing, and in particular, journalism. He worked on various newspapers including the Aurore in which he was responsible for publishing the article ?J'accuse? written by Emile Zola in favour of Dreyfus.

Elected senator of the Var region in 1902, he was to become Minister for Interior Affairs followed by President of the City Council from 1906 to 1909. He created the Ministry for Work and passed laws on weekly rest days, the 10-hour working day(!), worker retirement?he also harshly repressed strike action, however. When he was voted out of office, he joined the opposition and founded a new newspaper: ''The Free Man'' which became ''The Chained Man'' in 1914 due to censorship.

The father of victory

On the 20th November 1917, Poincaré appointed him as President of the City Council once again. He took some unpopular measures, however he made himself popular by fighting in the trenches, cane in hand (at 76 years old!). He completely trusted Foch's judgement, against the advice of his deputies. After the Armistice, acting as Chairman of the Peace Conference, he showed himself to be unmoveable with Germany. He was never completely satisfied with the treaty however, finding fault within it. Clémenceau ran as candidate for the President of the Republic in 1920, but was beaten by Deschanel. He then retired to his little fisherman's house in Saint Vincent sur Jard in the Vendée, where he continued to write, voicing his dismay at the rearmament of Germany. He passed away on the 24th November 1929, at his home in rue Franklin in Paris.

(Turin, 10 August 1810-Turin, 6 June 1861)

Cavour, a liberal-minded Piedmontese political leader, was an architect of closer Franco-Italian ties and negotiated the Treaty of Turin, which attached Nice and Savoy to France on 24 March 1860. Camillo Benso, Count Cavour, descended from an old Catholic Piedmontese noble family on his father's side; his mother was a Swiss Calvinist. He started his career as an army corps of engineers officer, but his liberal opinions led him to resign in 1835 and he spent the next 20 years on his estate in Levi, turning his interest to his century's innovations: agricultural techniques, machines, the railroad and credit institutions. He founded the Agrarian Association in 1842 and published a study on railroads in Italy in 1846. Cavour's travels enabled him to hone his knowledge of politics and of the French language. In 1847 he founded the newspaper Il Risorgimento, where he campaigned to establish a constitutional monarchy.

In 1848, Cavour was elected to Piedmont's parliament as a conservative but anticlerical deputy and held various positions in the government, including minister of agriculture in 1850 and of finance in 1851. That is when he became a leading figure in Piedmont's politics. Cavour campaigned to expand Piedmont at Austria's expense. After Austria defeated Italy in the war of 1849 (Treaty of Milan, August 1849), he concluded that it was necessary to seek outside help to achieve Italian unity under Piedmont's authority. The count thought that Napoleon III's France would be the most reliable ally. He took advantage of the seat that the belligerent powers offered him at the April 1856 Congress of Paris after the Crimean War (a military rather than political and strategic presence) to raise the Italian issue and test the ambitions of French foreign policy. Cavour worked on bringing about closer economic and cultural ties between the two sides. One result of his efforts was that work on the Mont-Cenis tunnel began in 1857. Meanwhile, he was preparing for war against Austria, in particular by turning Alexandria into a fortress and creating the maritime arsenal in La Spezia.

Cavour was Italy's envoy at a seven-hour meeting with Napoleon III in Plombières in July 1858, when he negotiated the details of the Franco-Piedmontese alliance, including the conclusion of a military front against Austria (confirmed in January 1859), the creation of a confederated Italian state, Italy's handover of Nice and Savoy, and Prince Jerome Bonaparte's marriage to the daughter of Victor Emmanuel II, the king of Piedmont. He was personally involved in Italy's march towards freedom from the Austrian yoke and resigned from the Piedmontese parliament in July 1859 after the Franco-Austrian armistice of Villafranca. Victor Emmanuel II won the war and pursued his goal of unifying the peninsula by annexing the insurgent states of central Italy. Cavour was asked to join the government in January 1860, when he was put in charge of negotiating French ratification in return for the handover of Nice and Savoy by referendum (Treaty of Turin, 24 March 1860).

Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II backed Garibaldi's march on Rome in secret because of their concern for how France and Austria would react. After the Roman and Sardinian troops were crushed, the count established Piedmont's laws and administrative systems throughout Italy. On 14 March 1861 he witnessed his work's crowning achievement when Italy's first parliament elected Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont the king of Italy.

Clément Ader was the only son of François Ader, a carpenter. He had an inquisitive, inventive mind and took an interest in bird flight at a very young age. After the baccalaureate, he studied at the Institut Assiot in Toulouse, graduating in 1860. Ader joined the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Midi de la France railroad company in 1862 and worked there until 1866, when he started filing his first patents, in particular for the "rubber bicycle" in 1868. After 1873, Ader focused more of his attention more to aviation, building models, making many plans many drawings and trying to resolve the problems of manned flight: wing load, the propeller's effectiveness, etc. Meanwhile, he filed a patent for an invention that improved the telephone and invented the theatre-phone in 1881, enabling him to amass a comfortable fortune.

From 1885 to 1890, Ader worked on his prototype, Eole, a "winged device for aerial navigation called the Avion", which he patented on 19 April 1890 and experimented on 9 October of the same year on the grounds of the de Gretz-Armainvilliers château: the flight was 50 meters long. Ader continued his work in secret, improving the engine's performances. His goal was to build another aircraft, Avion 2, for which he signed a contract with the army. But high costs combined with military spending cuts in 1894 forced him to give up on the project.

Ader was able to finance his third prototype, Avion 3, which he finished in 1897 and tested in Satory on 12 and 14 October 1897; this time, the aircraft flew a distance of 300 meters. In 1902, however, Ader abandoned his aviation work because the army had withdrawn funding and he was unable to meet the costs alone. He retired to his Muret estate in 1905. The next year, when Santos Dumont took off in an aeroplane in Bagatelle, the French press hailed him as "the first Frenchman to fly", prompting Ader to leave retirement and bring his work to the public's attention. He published La première étape de l'aviation militaire (The First Step in Military Aviation) in 1907 and L'aviation militaire (Military Aviation) in 1909, in which he expounded his views on aircraft's role in future wars. His work's value and importance were recognised late in life, when he was named a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1922.

Son of François Queuille and Marie Masson de Saint-Félix, Henri was born into a bourgeois family in the provinces.

When his father, a chemist, died in 1895, the Queuilles moved to Tulle where the teenager attended the lycée starting in 1896. The young graduate studied medicine in Paris, where he made friends with Maurice Bedel and Georges Duhamel, before moving back to his home town in 1908. In 1910, he married Margueritte Gratadour de Sarrazin, with whom he had two children – Suzanne and Pierre. He rapidly rose in politics: member of the town council in 1912, mayor and general councillor of the Corrèze department the following year, and member of Parliament in 1914.

During the First World War, his service as a doctor with various ambulances on the Eastern Front earned him the Croix de Guerre 14-18.

A moderate member of the Radical Party, he entered the government of Alexandre Millerand in July 1920 as Undersecretary for Agriculture. Recognised by his peers, he held many ministerial portfolios (Agriculture, Health, Post, Public Works, Supplies), being appointed minister nineteen times between 1920 and 1940. He was the main driving force behind French agricultural policy between the wars (creation of rural engineering, creation and organisation of agricultural education, technical development of the countryside, etc.); he notably presided over the Fédération Nationale de la Mutualité et de la Coopération Agricole (National Federation of Reciprocity and Agricultural Cooperation).

He nationalised the railways and created the SNCF (French National Railway Company), and headed the Office National des Mutilés, Combattants, Victimes de Guerre et Pupilles de la Nation (1937). In 1939 he published Le Drame agricole: un aspect de la crise économique.

A staunch supporter of the Republic who worked with the Socialists, he became close with Edouard Herriot, but refused to vote to hand over full powers to Maréchal Philippe Pétain on 10 July 1940. He was then removed from his functions as mayor of Neuvic. His son Pierre’s membership in the Resistance made his contacts with Free France easier. Hettier de Boislambert convinced him to leave for the United Kingdom.

He reached London in April-May 1943, along with Astier de la Vigerie, Daniel Mayer and Jean-Pierre Levy, despite his distrust of de Gaulle. In May, he sent out a call to the French peasantry over the BBC, and was then appointed President of the landing commission in charge of developing the measures to be taken upon the Liberation of France. Two months later, the Vichy government issued a decree stripping Henri Queuille of his French nationality and his mandate as Senator. In August, he left for Algiers, where de Gaulle, bringing together the political parties, brought him into the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFLN - French Committee of National Liberation) in November 1943. Queuille asked to be relieved of his functions in September 1944, when the government moved to Paris, to return to his political career. He was elected mayor in October 1945, then member of Parliament in the legislative elections of 1946.

The war memoirs written by this recipient of the Médaille de la Résistance were published in Journal 1939/1945.

Loyal to Edouard Herriot, he headed the government of the 4^th Republic between July 1948 and June 1954. He was President of the Council (Premier) three times, curbing social unrest, the rise of Gaullism and government instability, applying a policy people called “immobilism”; he did not hesitate when it came to using force (October-November 1948) and postponing elections. But this policy enabled the Republic to survive.

His foreign policy activities led to the signature of a Franco-Vietnamese agreement in March 1949, practically recognising the colony’s independence, made France a member of the Atlantic Alliance and implemented the Marshall Plan the following month.

Defeated in the legislative elections of 1958, Henri Queuille returned to life in local politics. He transformed his town into a leisure resort, set up an agricultural high school and a technical school. Pursuing work on his memoirs that he had started in 1944, he gathered archives, documents, eye-witness accounts and objects from the Second World War and the Resistance, thus comprising the main collection of the Museum that bears his name.

Marc René of Montalembert was born at the end of Louis XIV's reign in Angoulême, on the 15th July 1714. Born into an ancient and noble family from Poitou, he was betrothed by birth to the pursuit of arms and chose a military career. He distinguished himself during the Austrian war of succession, and in 1742 became captain of the Prince of Conti's guards. After becoming academician of the Sciences in 1747, he was noticed by the Duke of Choiseul who gave him the mission of seconding the Swedish and Russian army generals during the 7-years war, during which he commanded the operations in Pomerania. He became field marshal in 1761, subsequently serving in Brittany, whilst at the same time preparing a work dedicated to the art of fortification.

In fact, the last years of the Ancien Régime were marked by a period of relative opposition to change in military architecture. Although Cormontaigne can be considered as one of the heirs of Vauban, the designs of Marc René de Montalembert are radically opposed to those of the famous Marshal. A trained artilleryman, he preferred the Vauban principles of concentrated fortification, attacking the enemy with concentrated firepower served by numerous cannons, that were ever more accurate as well as more powerful. He was thus responsible for creating numerous cannon foundries in France, including the Ruelle forges, near his birthplace. Taking inspiration from the restructuring of the artillery orchestrated by the Lieutenant-General of Gribeauval, the Marquis of Montalembert advocated making the cannon the front line of defence, rather than the rifle preferred by the former general commissioner for the fortifications of Louis XIV's reign. Between 1776 and 1794, he published the eleven volumes of his major work, "perpendicular fortification, or defensive art over offensive art". Convinced of the need to adapt the fortifications to new developments in firearms, Marc René de Montalembert recommended placing the combat zones further away from the central fortresses themselves, and broke away from the sharp angles and recesses that characterised the bastions and curtain-walls built by Vauban. He was something of a pioneer, calling for the advent of fortresses built in a polygonal layout, reinforced with cannon towers and caponiers, but stripped of advanced defence fortifications. The architectural layout put forward by the Marquis of Montalembert consisted of several forts positioned side by side, directly facing the enemy. His theories were virtually ignored in France during his lifetime. The short-lived fortress erected in 1779 on the site of the fort de la Rade (Island of Aix) was one of the only examples of defensive edifices built by the Marquis. This fortress, with its triple casemate firing levels was destroyed however in 1783. It was not until the XIXth century that other forts were built based on the principles decreed by the Marquis of Montalembert, including fort Boyard off the coast of the Island of Aix, and the fortress of La Ferrière in Haïti. The perpendicular fortification had more success with foreign military engineers, in particular, the Austro-Sardinians. The fortified site of Esseillon is therefore a remarkable example of the architectural ideas of Marc René of Montalembert put into practice. Among the forts which make up this impressive fortified barrier, the Marie-Christine fort is without doubt the most characteristic of the Marquis' innovative designs: this regular hexagon built in 1819 enabled concentrated perpendicular artillery fire within a restricted space. Condemned during the Revolution having never seen his theories on military architecture put into practice, Marc René of Montalembert died on the 26th March 1800 in Paris.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was born on 2 August 1834 in Colmar (Haut-Rhin department). During his childhood in Paris, he demonstrated his artistic gifts and his future became clear as he visited the capital’s workshops and monuments during his studies at Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

From 1843 to 1851 he went to painter Ary Scheffer’s workshop, and during school holidays in Colmar he took drawing lessons with Mr Rossbach.

In 1852, Bartholdi moved into a workshop in Paris and the following year he filled one of his first orders for his home town – a statue of General Rapp, inaugurated in 1856.

At 21, he took a trip to the Middle East, Egypt and Yemen.

Along the Nile he discovered a rich civilisation whose monuments have survived the ages. This enriching, 8-month journey enabled Bartholdi to bring back sketches, drawings and photographs and, more importantly, it confirmed his vocation in statuary.

In 1857, he presented a project for a fountain that was selected in a competition organised by the city of Bordeaux, but it did not take shape for another 42 years, in Lyon, on the Place des Terreaux.

From 1863 to 1869, in Colmar, he produced the Martin Schongauer monument and the fountain dedicated to Admiral Bruat, took a second trip to Egypt, and sculpted his Petit Vigneron, exhibited at the covered market in Colmar.

In 1870, he made the first model of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. During the Franco-Prussian War he was an officer in the national guard, then aide de camp for General Garibaldi and a government liaison agent. Angered by the loss of Alsace-Moselle, Bartholdi said to his friend Edouard de Laboulaye, "I will fight for freedom, I call upon all free people. I will try to glorify the Republic over there, while waiting to find it once again at home." He left for the United States, seeking to ensure Franco-American friendship.

In 1872, he produced "The Curse of Alsace" and prepared a funerary monument for the National Guards fallen during the war. In 1873, the statue of Vauban was inaugurated in Avallon. In 1874, he produced bas-reliefs for the Unitarian Church of Boston.

In 1875, for the exhibition in Philadelphia, he completed a fountain and also produced a statue of Champollion. Then, with the founding of the Committee of the Franco-American Union, he got down to work on the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.

The hand and flame were completed in 1876 and exhibited at Madison Square for 5 years. That year, Bartholdi also produced a statue of La Fayette for the city of New York.

In 1878, the head of the future Statue of Liberty was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

From 1879 to 1884, he produced the Gribeauval monument in Paris, the Lion of Belfort, the statue of Rouget de Lisle in Lons-le-Saunier, and the statue of Diderot in Langres.

On 4 July 1884, France presented the United States with a statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. In 1885, a replica measuring a few metres in height was installed on Ile aux Cygnes in Paris, while its big sister boarded the "Isère". The statue was inaugurated in New York on 28 October 1886, and other copies of the work were later installed in Hanoi and Bordeaux.

From 1888 to 1891, Bartholdi produced the Roesselmann monument and the Hirn monument in Colmar, then the Gambetta monument in Sèvres.

From 1892 to 1895, he presented two works in Paris dedicated to La Fayette and Washington and a sculpture representing Switzerland assisting Strasbourg, while a statue of Christopher Columbus was shown at the Chicago World’s Fair.

In 1898, the Schwendi monument was inaugurated in Colmar.

In 1902, for the Place des Ternes in Paris, he produced a work dedicated to the “Aéronautes” (hot air balloons) of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, “Les Grands Soutiens du Monde” (which can be seen in the courtyard of the Musée de Colmar).

In 1903, he completed the monument dedicated to Vercingétorix for the city of Clermont-Ferrand, based on a model created in 1870.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi fell ill and died in Paris on 4 October 1904.

In 1907, his widow left the artist’s house and models to the city of Colmar, where a monument to his memory was inaugurated.

In 1912 Belfort posthumously inaugurated the Trois Sièges monument.

The Bartholdi Museum opened in 1922, four years after the return of Alsace-Moselle to France.

His works included the monument to Sargent Hoff, Hero of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, at Père-Lachaise Cemetary in Paris (division 4).

René Quillivic was born in Plouhinec in Finistère in 1879, the son of a peasant fisherman.

He began training as a sculptor, although he had not been born into it, at the workshop of a carpenter and joiner in his village. He managed to secure a study grant, thanks to Georges Le Bail, the MP and later, senator for Finistère, and went on to the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. During his years of training, he always tried to portray a certain cultural tradition, which he very soon realised was unique.

Even before the war, he was already familiar with funeral commemoration. But it was particularly in a post First World war context that René Quillivic became one of the most famous sculptors of Brittany. Almost all of Quillivic's commemorative monuments are in Finistère. René Quillivic found special ways of using the traditional methods of the statue makers of Brittany in the 15th and 16th centuries. He increasingly used kersantite in creating his pieces, under the aegis of Donnart, a stone mason and tombstone maker from Landerneau. Kersantite (wrongly called Kersanton Granite) is a rock found in northern Finistère, around Brest harbour. It has a closely packed grain, a sombre grey colour that is almost black in the rain and is not susceptible to erosion. "In fact, as his monumental creations appeared, kersantite quickly became the symbolic rock for Breton commemorations, because very few materials are quite so closely associated with the land and the history of a country, as well as for its lasting quality." wrote Sylvie Blottière-Derrien, Secretary of State for ex-servicemen and victims of war in "Monuments de Mémoire - Monuments aux morts de la Grande Guerre, Mission permanente aux commémorations et à l'information historique" (in "Monuments of Remembrance - Monuments to the dead of the Great War and the permanent Mission for commemorations and historical information") in 1991. René Quillivic's choice of themes for his works had a regional context, close to the heart of Bretons. His models are familiar, well known and easily recognised by people. Thus, at Bannalec, people from the village recognise the sister of the glorious aviator, Le Bourhis in Quillivic's funeral monument. In the same way, in Plouhinec, the portrait of his own mother is set in stone. "René Quillivic knew how to promote a commemorative sculpture that is specifically Breton."
The monument to the dead of Pont-Scorff (Morbihan) The initiative for this work came from Princess Henri de Polignac who wanted to pay tribute to her husband who was killed on the 25th September 1915 at Auberive in Champagne. This work was created by René Quillivic under the supervision of the architect Charles Chaussepied and the stone mason and tombstone maker, Donnart.

The monument of Saint-Pol-de-Léon (Finistère), inaugurated in 1920 is a work commissioned by the mayor of the commune, created by the sculptor Quillivic in conjunction with the architect Charles Chaussepied. The recumbent statue represents a "poilu" (foot soldier). Four country women are depicted on the corners of the funeral stone: one of them wearing a large mourning headdress, another wearing a country headdress, the third a town headdress and the last one is dressed as a middle-class woman in mourning. Through these choices, "all social groups and ages are represented: the first is aged about 50 or 60, the second a widow of 30 or 35, the third is a very young widow and lastly, the young middle class woman symbolises a fiancée."

Finistère

• Saint Pol de Léon
• Roscoff
• Guiclan
• Châteaulin (on Jean Moulin)
• Pont-Croix - Plouhinec
• Plouyé - Scaër
• Banalec
• Coray
• Ile de Sein

Côtes d'Armor

• Loudéac
• Pleumeur-Bodou

Morbihan

• Pont-Scorff

Louis de Cormontaigne was born in Strasbourg in 1695. He entered the service of the King in 1713, and began serving as a volunteer in the sieges of Fribourg and Landau, before becoming an engineer in 1715 at the age of twenty, and chief engineer in 1733. He participated in the most memorable sieges up until 1745 when he became brigadier and director of fortifications in the towns of Moselle (Metz, Thionville, Bitche, Verdun, Longwy).

Although he had never known Vauban, Louis de Cormontaigne was one of the most famous successors of this celebrated engineer, developing his ideas and further improving the bases created by his predecessor. Shortly after his death an official report featured the following statement 'All engineers are in agreement that not one of them has all the qualities required for war and the art of fortifications to the extent possessed by Monsieur de Cormontaigne'.