monument aux morts

English translation

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History

As early as August 1916, the Souvenir français planned to have erected by the architect Sautier "a vault and monument to receive the bodies of pontissalian soldiers who fell in the field of honour". This first project was postponed by the prefect pending the end of hostilities. The current monument is the result of a second project launched in 1919 on the mayor's proposal to erect a commemorative monument to the 330 Pontissalians killed in combat. The municipal council voted for the enlargement of the cemetery to accommodate the future monument and decided to submit this work to an architects' competition. In July 1920, Emile Lepine, mayor of Pontarlier, met Maurice Boutterin (1882-1970), Grand Prix de Rome and originating from Besançon, practising in Paris, place des Vosges, as chief architect of civil buildings and national palaces. He asked him to realise the future war memorial with the approval of the Municipal Council. Thereafter, the competition was cancelled. On 21 December 1920, Boutterin proposed to the Commission a first project which the commune rejected, a monumental urn on a base, which is not unlike recalling Boutterin's proposal for the monument to the Great War of Besançon in the parc des Glacis. The following month, Boutterin proposed another monument which was originally intended for another commission, that of the Saint-Claude cemetery of Besançon.

Description

As the regional newspapers unanimously wrote during the inauguration, the monument "represents a fortress defended by two soldiers on sentry duty [which] rises in its whiteness, in the midst of tombs and seems to protect further the bodies of dead soldiers brought back from the front who surround it.". The two poilus were executed by the Besançon sculptor Georges Laethier (1875-1955). Trained at the École des Beaux-arts of Besançon under the sculptor Just Becquet himself a student of Rude, he entered in 1899 the École des Beaux-arts of Paris in the studio of Gabriel-Jules Thomas and Jean-Antoine Injalbert. In 1903, he was appointed professor of sculpture at the École des Beaux-arts of Besançon. He is also the author of numerous war memorials in the region (Ornans, Frasne, L'Isle-sur-le-Doubs, Pontarlier, Baume-les-Dames, Doubs, Besançon, La-Cluse-et-Mijoux and then the sculpture of the schoolboy of the war memorial of Jougne). The monument was staged at the entrance of the cemetery enlarged for the occasion. A monumental avenue leads to a roundabout at the centre of which the monument is placed. The graves of soldiers who did not remain at the front or with their families are installed in three rows in a semi-circle around the monument. The works were carried out in 1921 and 1922. The inauguration of the Monument took place on 11 November 1922. In 1930, the town hall of Pontarlier had grouped around the war memorial the "66 bodies of military personnel who died during the war in the town's hospitals and currently buried in the different polygons of the cemetery" and wished to grant them "individual perpetual leases" or each grave was decorated with "the cast-iron cross of the Souvenir français with its base". The whole took on the function of a necropolis.