Clermont-en-Argonne

Climb the spur and the past is written into the stone. On the very top, the Sainte-Anne chapel — once the castle's own chapel — was rebuilt in 1338 by Henri IV, Count of Bar, a regional lord. The little County of the Clermontois passed through the houses of Bar and Lorraine before, in December 1648, its eighty-three communities were handed to the Grand Condé as a princely reward. During the civil war called the Fronde his fortress was modernised around 1652 in work often linked to a young Vauban, then in Condé's camp — the engineer who would later fortify all of France. The royal siege that followed left the town gutted, its people falling from some 2,500 to about 600, though the Treaty of the Pyrenees restored the prince in 1659 and his heirs held Clermont until the Revolution abolished the county in 1790.

Part-way down the hill stands the church of Saint-Didier, rebuilt in lace-like flamboyant Gothic through the 1500s; its six-sided apse vault is dated 1530, and Nicolas Bousmard, Bishop of Verdun, consecrated the finished building in 1577. Inside, the Saint-Roch chapel shelters a Mise au tombeau — six carved figures gathered around the dead Christ — whose central 'Sainte Femme au Bonnet' is attributed to Ligier Richier, the celebrated sculptor of the Lorraine Renaissance, placing Clermont on the regional trail of his work. The glowing windows above were made in 1936 by the Paris master-glazier Jean-Jacques Gruber.

The twentieth century nearly erased all of it. On 4–5 September 1914 Württemberg troops set the town alight and deliberately torched the church, which stood roofless for four years before its restoration in 1919–1922; the Sainte-Anne plateau, honeycombed with galleries used as a dressing station, signal post and shelter, looked out over the trenches while the vast American Meuse–Argonne offensive of 1918 thundered just to the west. War returned in July 1944, when about a hundred local men were deported to the Natzweiler-Struthof and Dachau camps and only twenty-eight came home. Quieter memories linger too: the playwright Casimir Bonjour was born here in 1795, and the Argentine film actress Tilda Thamar died in the village in 1989.