By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 24, 2006
LE MONT-SAINT-MICHEL, France -- For 13 centuries, this imposing outcrop of granite just off the coast of France, with its unforgettable, eerie silhouette, has withstood the ravages of man and nature. Its abbey has welcomed pilgrims, its ramparts and towers have helped repel invaders, and its shores have stood up to some of Europe's mightiest tides.
But today, Mont-Saint-Michel, long a symbol of French power and identity and the country's most popular tourist destination outside Paris, is succumbing to a relentless invasion of silt and sea grass, which are surrounding the island and threatening to make it part of the mainland.
"If we don't do anything at all, in 40 years Mont-Saint-Michel will be part of the continent," said François-Xavier de Beaulaincourt, who is leading a project to stop the shoreline's advance. By his account, it was about 2 1/2 miles from the island in the mid-1800s, but today, depending on tide levels, it can be as little as 50 feet away.
Historically, the island has been ringed by sand flats at low tide and water at high tide. The dramatic setting and buildings make up "an unequaled ensemble" that is "one of the most important sites of medieval Christian civilization," according to the United Nations, which declared the island and its bay a World Heritage Site in 1979.
"Without the sea, it is not Saint-Michel," noted Joel Barbadette, 46, who runs several museums on the island.
Determined to avert the loss of a cultural icon, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin last week announced a six-year, $207 million project to push back the encroaching silt, calling Mont-Saint-Michel "a small piece of eternity you can touch with your finger."
The key component is a dam and tidal reservoir complex that would store seawater at high tide then release it in a powerful stream at low tide to flush sediment away from the island and keep it from becoming landlocked.
A 37-acre parking lot at the foot of the pyramidal island would be moved inland, restoring the area to its natural state. And a 127-year-old, 1.2-mile causeway from the shore to the main gate is to be moved and partially rebuilt as a bridge to allow the free flow of water around "the rock," as many local residents call it.
"It's important to restore the magic of the site by getting rid of the cars and mobile homes and allowing le, Mont to be a real island -- it is our duty to the coming generations," said Mont-Saint-Michel Mayor Patrick Gaulois, one of 26 people, including 11 monks and nuns, who live on the island.
"Being an island is part of its strong identity -- a gem in the sea," he said. "The project may fail, but if we don't do anything against the silt, it will inexorably get worse."
Mont-Saint-Michel takes its name from St. Michael the Archangel, who is said to have appeared in a bishop's dream in 708 and ordered a chapel to be built here. Over the centuries, it became a center of pilgrimage, religious scholarship, French resistance and, eventually, tourism.
The island measures about 2,950 feet around its base and rises to a height of 262 feet. At the top stands a massive Romanesque and Gothic abbey complex, whose steeple brings the total height of the island to more than 500 feet. It can be seen for miles in every direction.
The island and abbey have survived at least 13 major fires, several cataclysmic collapses, numerous Viking and Protestant invasions and 70 years' use as a prison after the French Revolution. It was the only part of Normandy that was never occupied by the English during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). Its perseverance has made it one of the most enduring symbols of French national identity, visited by as many as 30,000 tourists a day in the summer high season and 3 million a year overall.
According to Beaulaincourt, all bays undergo a natural silting process when incoming high tides deposit debris that outgoing tides are not strong enough to remove. The process is particularly pronounced in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, where local lore has it that incoming tides travel as swiftly as a galloping horse.
The natural silting problem here was exacerbated by human activity, Beaulaincourt said.
First came Dutch engineers, who at the behest of the Normandy government built a series of canals in the 19th century to reclaim land along the shore for poor farmers. Then came the construction of the causeway to the island in 1879 at the mouth of the Couesnon River, stopping the free flow of water around the island and accelerating the buildup of silt and the rise of the seabed.
Five years after the causeway's completion, the author Victor Hugo saw the future and wrote: "The Mont-Saint-Michel must remain an island. We must save it from mutilation!"
Today, Beaulaincourt said, the bay around the island is losing 50 acres a year to spreading sea grass.
Under the project, the lower part of the Couesnon River will be dammed, and water will be allowed to flow into it at high tide, backing up into a reservoir. The dam gates will be closed and, after the tide recedes twice daily, opened again, spewing 53 million cubic feet of water into the bay around the island and flushing away the sediment.
After 10 years of this, he said, the seabed in the vicinity of the island should be about 28 inches lower than it is today, returning about 125 acres of marshland to its original state as tidal flats. Mont-Saint-Michel would remain an island, surrounded by a large expanse of water at high tide for 153 days a year, or about three times more often than it is now.
Those calculations are based on experiments with a 9,700-square-foot model of the project in Grenoble, with the results confirmed by a team of international experts, Beaulaincourt said.
But many people on the island are skeptical.
"It's just to remove the cars -- I don't buy the whole ecological argument" about saving the island, said Bruno Tardif, a snack bar manager who has worked on Mont-Saint-Michel for 30 years and is one of about 1,000 people who commute to work from nearby coastal towns. Like other vendors, he appeared mostly concerned that new businesses would develop around the proposed parking lot on the mainland, siphoning commerce from the island.
"It's the will of humans to reclaim land, and now, like a yo-yo, they are doing everything they can to put it back into the sea," said Alain Noslier, 55, a tour guide. "But Mont-Saint-Michel is striking geographically, biologically, historically and religiously, and if it goes inland permanently, it will lose its character."
Brother François, who heads a group of six brothers and five sisters from the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem who conduct services in the abbey, said Mont-Saint-Michel was laden with powerful religious symbolism that is important to protect -- the mountaintop, the story of the archangel's appearance, the sand flats where pilgrims wander, waiting for the parting of the sea at low tide.
"In the first verses of Genesis, it says, 'In the beginning the earth was empty, a blur, and the winds of God were blowing and turning upon the water,' " creating an indistinguishable mass of earth, sky and sea, he explained, standing on a terrace outside the abbey. He motioned to the west, where a gray sunset at low tide was reflected on pools of water and sand flats stretching for miles to the ocean. "That's it."
Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.
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