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Meanwhile Enguerrand’s Célestin monastery at Villeneuve de Soissons had been vandalized by the Huguenots, restored and ruined again in the battles of the Fronde, and sold as a private château when the Célestin Order was suppressed in 1781. Sacked during the Revolution, it passed through several hands until purchased by Count Olivier de la Rochefoucauld in 1861. Coucy’s grasp at perpetuity was no more successful than most.

Under Napoleon III, the Commission of Historical Monuments recommended restoration of the castle of Coucy and, short of that, urgent work to prevent deterioration of the keep from the ravages of decay. The choice for restoration lay between Coucy and Pierrefonds, a later and more luxurious castle built in the late 14th century by Louis d’Orléans. Because Coucy would have cost three times as much to restore and Pierrefonds was preferred by the Empress Eugénie as being nearer to Paris, the choice went to the latter. Sadly, the architect Viollet-le-Duc, restorer of the medieval, turned away from the major military structure of the Middle Ages. “Beside this giant, the greatest towers known are but spindles,” he wrote. All he could do was encircle the giant by two belts of iron, repair the roof and major cracks, and install a custodian to prevent further thefts of the castle’s fallen stones.

Silent, deserted, inhabited by owls, the great landmark still inspired awe. Tourists came to gaze, archeologists to study its structure, artists to draw its plans and monuments. Life went on in the village at its base and along the road winding down the hill and through the valley to Soissons. The donjon was impervious to time, to the disorders of man and the disorders of nature, but not to those of the 20th century.

In 1917 Picardy, invaded once more, had been occupied for three years by the German army. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the Sixth Army, urged General Ludendorff, Chief of General Staff, to ensure that the castle of Coucy be spared as a unique architectural treasure of no current military value. Neither side, he pointed out, had attempted to use it for military purposes, and its destruction “would only mean a blow to our own prestige quite uselessly.” Ludendorff did not like appeals to culture. Coucy having been unwisely called to his attention, he decided to make it an example of superior values. Rammed with 28 tons of explosives at his orders, the colossus raised by Enguerrand III in the age of the greatest builders since Greece and Rome was dynamited to the ground.

The outer walls, foundations, underground chambers and tunnels, portions of inner walls and doorways survive over acres of tumbled stones. Above a cracked lintel the unarmored knight still engages a lion in combat. For 700 years the castle had witnessed cycles of human endeavor and failure, order and disorder, greatness and decline. Its ruins remain on the hilltop in Picardy, silent observers as history’s wheel turns.

Bibliography

I. MATERIAL RELATING SPECIFICALLY TO COUCY

A. MANUSCRIPTS AND SEALS

B. PUBLISHED WORKS

II. GENERAL

A. PRIMARY SOURCES

B. SECONDARY WORKS

ABBREVIATIONS

AESC Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations

BEC Bibliothèque de l’Ecole de Chartes

BN Bibliothèque nationale

Ec HR Economic History Review

EHR English Historical Review

REH Revue des études historiques

RH Revue historique

RQH Revue des questions historiques

SHF Société de l’histoire de France

TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

I. ON COUCY

A. MANUSCRIPTS

Archives du département de l’Aisne

H 325, folio 239: Cartulaire-chronique de l’Abbaye de Nogent-sous-Coucy. (Modern copy in Bib. de la ville de Noyon, Coll. Peigne-Delacourt, ms. 21.)

H 721: Fondation du couvent des Célestins à Villeneuve-les-Soissons.

Bibliothèque nationale, Paris

Fonds français, nouv. acq., Coll. Bastard d’Estang, 3653–4–5, 3638–9.

Coll. Clairembault, vol. 35, nos. 74–114; vol. 39, no. 81, dossier Coucy.

Pièces originales, 875, dossier Coucy, nos. 1–37.

Mss. Coll. Picardie, vol. x, fo. 207 ff.

Ms.