Military History | Monument Américain, Tours — Sold Back to France for One Franc
· 1932
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Military History | Monument Américain, Tours — Sold Back to France for One Franc
kevin
The American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 volume enters this under "Memorial at Tours" and captions its plate "Memorial Fountain at Tours." The French national inventory registers it as a fontaine dite Monument Américain. It commemorates the Services of Supply, the rear organisation of the American Expeditionary Forces, whose headquarters sat at Tours from January 1918 until August 1919. The commission's own strength figures for that organisation disagree with each other: 644,540 soldiers and 23,772 civilian employees in the 1938 volume, almost 645,000 and 24,000 in a 2019 brochure, 650,000 on its website today.
The ground was not given. It held the Cirque de Touraine, a working music hall, and the commission bought it — the municipal archives record a purchase in 1927 for 100,000 francs and demolition on 3 April 1928. Under a Franco-American agreement of 29 August 1927 France then bought the cleared land back for one franc, and granted the United States the use and free disposal of it in perpetuity. The title is French. The use is American.
What went up was not a monument but a fountain, plumbed and still running, its basin thirty-two metres round. A.D. 1932 is cut on the rim between AMERICAN BATTLE MONUMENTS COMMISSION and ARTHUR LOOMIS HARMON · ARCHITECT. The dedication runs in English on the landward arc and in French on the river arc; the four allegories on the pier are labelled in English only — ADMINISTRATION, CONSTRUCTION, PROCUREMENT, DISTRIBUTION.
The commission's website today carries a heading, "Background," with nothing under it. The circus, the franc and the architect's name are not there. The name is on the stone.
📸 Cover: the fountain from the landward side, the dedication legible round the basin, photograph by Benjamin Smith, 7 April 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the allegory labelled PROCUREMENT on the pier, photograph by Chabe01, 19 May 2023, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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