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La Charité-sur-Loire (Nièvre) - Promenade des Anglais et le Pont

            The Postcard

A postally unused carte postale that was published by L. Lenormand of Orléans. The card has a divided back. The lady and child have been positioned especially for the photograph.

La Charité-sur-Loire

La Charité-sur-Loire is a commune in the Nièvre department and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of eastern France. In 2019 the commune had a population of 4,742 individuals.

La Charité-sur-Loire lies on the right, eastern bank of the river Loire, about 25 km northwest of Nevers.

History of La Charité-sur-Loire

The settlement of La Charité grew up around the Cluniac priory of that name, founded on an island in the River Loire in 1089.

During the Hundred Years War, the town was liberated from the English by French forces in 1435. 

A great fire ravaged the town in 1559. The nave of the priory church stood in ruins until the late 17th. century when it was rebuilt, albeit with its length diminished and the stone of its original façade repurposed for the reconstruction works.

In the second of the French Wars of Religion (1567–8) La Charité withstood eight months of siege by Catholic forces. In August 1570 it was one of the fortified towns given the status of Huguenot safe havens by the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

By the time of the French Revolution, only a dozen monks remained in the priory, which was sold to private individuals and preserved. A highway that was to have been driven through the church was deflected by the report of Prosper Mérimée, the first inspector of monuments (and author of Carmen), who classed it as worth saving in 1840.

Features of La Charité-sur-Loire

Features of the commune include:

-- The priory church, burial place of Simon I de Senlis, Earl of Huntingdon. At the Benedictine priory of Notre-Dame-de-la-Charité-sur-Loire in Burgundy a large-scale monumental porch relief sculpture depicts Christ in a mandorla surrounded on one side by the Virgin Mary and on the other the archangels Gabriel and Michael. 

This is the “Tympanum of the Virgin”, one of two remaining portals out of an original five which formed the priory church’s west façade.

A mandorla is an almond-shaped aureola, i.e. a frame that surrounds the totality of an iconographic figure. Mandorlas often surround the figures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in traditional Christian iconography. It is distinguished from a halo in that it encircles the entire body and not just the head.

Although much mutilated, the relief appears to show tonsured monks genuflecting with hands clasped in attitudes of prayer occupying the same celestial space as Christ and his attendant figures. 

-- The church of Sainte-Croix-Notre-Dame, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998, as part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France.

Taken on: August 12, 2023

Tags:

postcard

old

nostalgia

nostalgic

Charité

sur

Loire

Promenade

des

Anglais

Pont

Bridge

1559

1567

1568

79CSL85

bench « less

Sets appears in: • France

Groups appears in: • Private and historical pictures before 1914

Stats: 230 views

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