Military History | Mondement — The Monument That Missed Its Own Inauguration

The French parliament voted this monument in 1920, in a finance law directing that monuments be raised by the nation to perpetuate the memory of the first and second victories of the Marne. Nothing was built for a decade. The association that keeps the site records a competition in 1929 that drew twenty-five designs and awarded no first prize, after which the fine-arts administration commissioned the architect Paul Bigot directly.

Bigot set his shaft on the plateau at Mondement, above the marshes of Saint-Gond, where the French Ninth Army under Foch had faced the German Second and Third Armies from 5 to 12 September 1914. Village and château changed hands on 9 September: German troops of the Guard Corps took them, counterattacks by the Moroccan Division and the 77th Infantry Regiment were thrown back through the afternoon, and the château was retaken toward six in the evening after guns were brought up from Broyes. The German armies withdrew on 12 September. The château is private property and is not open.

What Bigot built is a single shaft of concrete tinted pink, 35.5 metres high on foundations twenty-two metres deep, cast on a metal armature. The culture ministry's heritage register dates the work to 1931 and 1937; the association gives 1933 to 1938, with Henri Bouchard's winged Victory at the top finished in 1936. Across the northern base stand eight commanders in the order their commands held the line — Sarrail, de Langle de Cary, Foch, Joffre, Franchet d'Espèrey, Sir John French, Maunoury and Gallieni — with one private soldier of 1914 among them. Joffre's order of the day of 6 September 1914 is cut beside them.

The inauguration was fixed for 19 September 1939. War was declared on the third. It was inaugurated instead on 23 September 1951, passed to the Marne department in 1969, and was listed as a historic monument on 4 October 1991. An orientation table stands about twenty metres off, and the old village school along the road is now the museum.

📸 Cover: the shaft on its ridge above the plain, seen across the fields; an area view, not a close one. Wernervc, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the relief of the commanders at the base, Weglinde, CC0.