Is it disrespectful of history to talk about how unique sites can be institutionally and socially recreated over millennia? Despite the impertinent tone of the query, one is forced to ask it when confronted by this magnificent granite outcropping, one covered with a stunning array of built structures. With such a history, one must ask as well about the malleability of the human character and spirit - as well as, of course, the astonishing malleability of erstwhile solid, resistant granite.
The igneous extrusion of Mont-St.-Michel, located at the inner part of a magnificent, sandy, shallow bay has hosted a series of proprietors, from the pagan Celtic cults of prehistory to the global visionaries of UNESCO. Even the Roman and Catholics took centuries to decide which saint to whom the monastery should to be dedicated, finally deciding upon Saint Michael, a holiness inherited from the Hebrew tradition denoting a likeness to God. Is there something about the trek across the tidal flats up to the massive escarpment that launches the spirit toward a culturally-transcendent, perhaps innate, spirituality here? There must be. The attacks of English in the Hundred Years' War, of the Germans in the Second World War seem to have left only ephemeral traces on the massive stone structures. Different, however, were the depredations of the modern state, those that from the Ancien Régime until the 1870s used the once-holy site as an all-too-secular one for incarcerations. Involuntary home of enemies of whatever current government ruled France, Mont-St.-Michel hosted dissidents from aristocratic counterrevolutionaries of the 1790s, to republicans resisting Napolélon in the 1800s, to Victor Hugo during France's last monarchies. One wonders: did Monsieur Hugo have to tread the human-powered wheel that brought provisions to the heights of the monastery-turned-prison?
Of course, the walk up the slope is a bit trying, but one has to think about the Benedictine monks who reputedly scaled two thousand steps daily to perform their spiritual duties. In the Knights Hall, those same monks might have met Jacques Cartier, the great "discoverer" of Quebec or King François I, the most worthy predecessor of Louis XIV who dared to envision a unified France in the early sixteenth century-or perhaps they were happy just to illuminate holy manuscripts in the unusually well-lit scriptorium. Hence, for those who may have inclinations in spiritual, military, literary, or political majesty, Mont-St.-Michel will always have a special, universal meaning.
