Lille Citadel

During the 17^th Century, a gifted architect and military engineer named Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban did his bit for France. He was so great that, like Mozart, Nelson, Rodin, Michelangelo and such like, he’s known to history simply by the one name, Vauban, which, as much as it isn’t a terribly well-known name elsewhere, is a name extremely famous here in France with places, colleges, parks, museums and institutions dedicated to his name and memory. His main “thing” was to design and build fortifications of all types. As a decorated soldier who’d been involved in all manner of campaigns and sieges, he was acutely aware of what made a good fortress and what constituted a weak point etc so he was able to devise the most impregnable defences of the age. He combined his military know-how with fiendish geometry and enormous scale to create forts which afforded the defender multi-layered protection and a wide field of vision over any attacker. His designs also entice the attacker into positions of terrifying and inescapable vulnerability between various layers of walls and mounds and, as you walk around these structures, it’s entirely clear that much of the weaponry we have at our disposal 300 years after his death would barely make a scratch on them.

If I walk for 10 minutes from my front door, his Citadel of Lille is at my disposal… except that it isn’t really as it’s so good a stronghold that the army still lives there. (They exist pretty much invisibly to me – the only times I see soldiers, they’re patrolling the railway station as, sadly, no Century has a monopoly on murderous savages).

I can, however, walk right around it and, if I get myself properly organised, I can take a guided tour of the interior on specific dates. Walking around the exterior demonstrates the futility of attack and lays bare the traps designed into it but, as much the structure is a massive geometrical phenomenon and wonder, as are many of his others, it’s one of those constructions which is simply too vast to appreciate from the ground.

From the air, however………

(I deliberately made the middle view 'off-centre" as, that way, the roof of my apartment is also on the photo! (At about "4 o'clock" and just in frame)) These images will enlarge with a click.

March 30th 2007 will mark, precisely, the 300th anniversary of the death of this innovator.