Monument aux morts

English translation

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History

In the aftermath of the First World War, the parish church of Rauret, a village in the Velay region on the borders of Haute-Loire and Lozère, proves too small. Régis Roche, architect in Le Puy-en-Velay, proposes in 1919 the addition of a new chapel to the church, which would form the south aisle of the nave and would be built in memory of those who died for France. The prefect, seeing in this project an indirect means to finance the enlargement and consolidation of the church, refuses to grant the ministerial subsidy for this chapel which is a war memorial only in name. The commune then decides to build at its own expense the extension of the church and to attach to it, in the manner of a lateral portal on the west façade of the church, a war memorial designed by architect Roche and entrusted to Jean Arnaud, stoneworker in Le Puy. Sculpted from stone from the local Jagonas quarry and completed in 1926, the Rauret monument takes the form of a sober tomb-niche flanked by two columns with foliage capitals, which carry a polylobed arch sheltering a cenotaph. The background of the tomb-niche is engraved with the names of the children of the village who died for France. The monument shows great attention to ornamental detail (decorated archivolt with balls, decorated tailloirs) which draws from the sources of Velay Romanesque art and echoes, for example, the portal of the church Sainte-Foy de Bains, near Le Puy. It thus testifies in stone to the rediscovery of Velay Romanesque style, initiated twenty years earlier on paper by the important work on Religious Architecture in the Romanesque Period in the former diocese of Le Puy (1900) by Noël and Félix Thiollier. Homage paid to those who died for France, the war memorial of Rauret thus also constitutes an erudite reverence made by the men of the interwar period to the Romanesque architecture of Velay. Bibliography: Pierre Taillefer, "Rauret", in The Protection of First World War war memorials, Collection Patrimoines en Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, 2019, p. 32-33; Georges Michel, Memory of the Great War: The war memorials and victims of 14-18 in Haute-Loire, Le Puy-en-Velay, Editions of the Academic Society of Le Puy-en-Velay and Haute-Loire, 2008, p. 105-106; Departmental Archives of Haute-Loire, 160 O 4-2 (continued).