Reims in the First World War

Reims, the capital of Champagne and the city in whose cathedral the kings of France had been crowned for centuries, was throughout the war one of the symbols of the Western Front. In September 1914 the Germans occupied it for nine days, and when they had to leave, they halted on the hills a few kilometres from the city. From there their artillery shelled Reims until the autumn of 1918. The burning of the cathedral went round the world as an image of German barbarism, and of a city that at the beginning of 1914 had about 115,000 inhabitants, ruins were left at the end of the war.

Nine days of occupation (September 1914)

After the lost Battle of the Frontiers the French command decided not to defend the city and on 2 September withdrew its troops. On the morning of 4 September the Germans shelled Reims, and in the afternoon Saxon troops of the 3rd Army marched in. The occupiers demanded food and fodder, and the burden of dealing with them fell on the mayor, Dr Jean-Baptiste Langlet. After the defeat on the Marne they had to leave. On 12 September they took about a hundred prominent citizens hostage and threatened them with death if the inhabitants committed any hostile act, and on 13 September the French Fifth Army of General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey entered the city.

The cathedral on fire

The Germans fell back only a few kilometres and occupied the old French forts on the hills around the city, at Brimont, Nogent-l’Abbesse and on the Berru. French attempts to push them off failed, and as early as 14 September the first shells fell on Reims.

On 19 September a shell set fire to the wooden scaffolding by the north tower of the cathedral. The fire spread to the straw laid out in the nave, on which wounded German prisoners lay, and to the roof: the wooden roof frame burned, and molten lead ran into the streets. Some of the prisoners died in the flames; the clergy carried out the rest and protected them from an angry crowd. The Germans claimed that there was a French observation post on the towers, which the French denied. The burning cathedral, a few weeks after the destruction of Louvain, became in Allied propaganda proof that Germany was waging war on European culture itself.

A city on the front line (1915–1917)

The front ran just beyond the suburbs. East of the city the French stormed the German trenches in the First Battle of Champagne, from December 1914 to March 1915, and in the second, in the autumn of 1915. Throughout this time shells fell on Reims: by French reckoning the shelling lasted 1,051 days, and in one night, 28 April 1915, 500 shells fell on the city in an hour and a half.

The population fled, and by the end of 1914 about 60,000 people remained in the city. Those who stayed moved part of their life underground, including into the cellars of the champagne houses, where schools were set up. In December 1915, 400 of the 1,600 pupils were taught there.

In the spring of 1917 the city found itself in the middle of the Nivelle offensive. North-west of Reims the French attacked the Chemin des Dames, and from 17 April, to the east, the Moronvilliers hills in the Third Battle of Champagne. The planned attack on Fort Brimont was postponed and never took place. The shelling then reached its greatest force: in April the authorities ordered the evacuation of the civilian population, and on 27 April Mayor Langlet moved the town hall into the cellars. By French reckoning, nearly 300 shells hit the cathedral during the war.

1918

After the evacuation of 28 February 1918 about 1,500 of the 18,000 inhabitants who had still lived there in January remained in the city. On 27 May the Germans attacked on the Aisne between Reims and Soissons and reached the Marne, but the shoulder of the breach at Reims held, and an attempt to encircle the city near Fort de la Pompelle failed. On 15 July, in the Second Battle of the Marne, three German armies attacked on both sides of the city to cut it off. To the east the attack broke against the elastic defence of General Gouraud’s Fourth Army, and to the west it stalled beyond the Marne. On the front in Champagne, east of Reims, the 1st Polish Rifle Regiment was also fighting at the time.

The counter-offensive of Ferdinand Foch of 18 July drove the Germans out of the salient between Soissons and Reims. In October 1918, as they were retreating along the whole front, the French took the forts of Brimont and Nogent-l’Abbesse, from which the city had been shelled for four years. Reims could breathe again, but of 13,806 houses 8,625 were completely destroyed, and about 800 inhabitants had been killed by the shelling.

After the war

In July 1919 Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau proposed that Reims be awarded the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre with palm, and the citation called it a martyred city. Leaving the ruins of the cathedral as a memorial was considered, but the decision to rebuild prevailed, largely with money from John D. Rockefeller Jr. Work begun in 1919 under the architect Henri Deneux led to the cathedral’s solemn reopening in July 1938.