The Mont Saint Michel

The Mont Saint Michel, Wonder of the West, is World Heritage

 Site by Unesco in 1979



This high tourist place with the doors of Normandy and Brittany, is drawn up in the middle of an immense bay invaded by the spring tides of Europe. In 1874, the site was classified historic building and since 1979, the Mount-Saint-Michel is registered .

It is at the request of the Archangel Michael, “chief of the celestial militia» that Aubert, Bishop of Avranches built and consecrated a church Oct. 16 709. In 966, at the request of the Duke of Normandy, a community of Benedictines settled on the rock. The pre-Romanesque church was built before the year one thousand.

The eleventh century, the Romanesque abbey church was founded on a set of crypts at the top of the rock and the first monastery buildings were built up against its north wall.

In the twelfth century, the Romanesque monastery buildings were extended to the west and south.

The thirteenth century, a gift of King Philippe Auguste of France after the conquest of Normandy, allowed to undertake all the marvel of Gothic: two three-story buildings crowned by the cloister and the refectory.

The fourteenth and fifteenth century, the Hundred Years War made ​​it necessary to protect the abbey by a set of military constructions which enabled him to withstand a siege of more than thirty years. the Romanesque choir of the abbey church, collapsed in 1421 was replaced by the Gothic choir in the late Middle Ages.

This great spiritual and intellectual center was with Rome and Saint Jacques de Compostela, one of the most important pilgrimages of the medieval West. For almost a thousand years men, women, children came by roads called «paths to paradise» hoping with the Archangel of judgment, weighing of souls, the assurance of eternity.

Became a prison during the Revolution and the Empire, the Abbey will require significant restoration work from the late nineteenth century. It is entrusted since 1874 to serve the historical monuments.

The celebration of the millennium monastery in 1966 preceded the installation of a religious community in the old abbey perpetuating the primary purpose of this place; the prayer and welcome. Brothers and Sisters of the Monastic Communities of Jerusalem provide the spiritual presence since 2001.

Alongside the development of the Abbey a village grew up since the Middle Ages. It thrives on the southeastern flank of the rock, protected by walls dating back mostly to the Hundred Years War. This village has always been a commercial.

The Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel

Centre for National Monuments


  mont_saint_michel_nuit2The long history of Mont-Saint-Michel would have begun in 708, when Bishop Aubert erected on Mount first shrine in honor of the Archangel to install a small community of canons. In 966, the Benedictines settled in the Mount at the request of Duke Richard I of Normandy and were responsible for the development of the new monastery. Soon, the abbey became a major pilgrimage site of the Christian West but also a center of medieval culture which were produced and stored a large number of manuscripts.
Political crossroads and intellectual where the Carolingian traditions and the gréco-Arabic influence crossed, the abbey also profited from the exchanges between Great Britain and France. The architecture of the abbey testifies to the control and the know-how of the Middle Ages. Its plan can be brought closer no other monastery. Taking account of the shape at a peak of the Mount, the architects rolled up the buildings around the granitic rock. The abbey church, located at the top of the Mount, rests on crypts which create a 80 meters length platform. The building of the Wonder as for him is often evoked like the floret of the architecture of the abbey. He is the witness of the architectural control of the builders of XIIIème century who succeeded in supporting on the slope of the rock two bodies of buildings of three stages. The structures are increasingly light progressively with the progression towards the top. Thus, the faith, the culture, art and architecture constitute the strong identity of the Mount-Saint-Michel. But it is also a village which always evolved/moved in the wake of the abbey since Xème century. To XIVème century, it extended already to the feet from the rock. The ramparts which surround it in make an example of military architecture. During the war of Hundred-Years, they resisted all the English attacks and made of the Mount-Saint-Michel a symbolic system place of the national identity. Following the Revolution, the properties of the church were declared “goods national” and in 1793 the abbey was reconverted in prison. This transformation sacrilege was in fact saving for him since it avoided the demolition to him. In 1863, an imperial decree put an end to it