Waterloo in 20mm

Thursday, 7 May 2020

Plancenoit Church Update

Following some useful input from various people (for which many thanks), one inevitably has to make a decision based upon the available information.

Based on the evidence provided by Siborne, and judging by many churches in the area, the Plancenoit church might have been based on a unitary nave with no side chapels. However, Siborne did simplify his buildings a great deal:

A close up of the only good contemporary picture by Thomas Stoney suggests something different:

Stoney shows a main nave and side chapels, along with a very typical Walloon church spire

This Google Earth Street View is taken from a similar position to the Stoney picture, but further back into dead ground (street view won't let you 'walk' closer to the crest).

And there are indeed other local churches with a similar layout:

This picture of the battle may show two gable ends of the church although I think they are more likely to be other buildings in the village.

Sadly, William Mudford, who painted many scenes of Waterloo, did not go to Plancenoit, but he did paint a scene of Napoleon's carriage being hauled away. The picture has Genappe church in the background, which again has similar side chapels:

I am however the first to admit that the evidence is fragmentary, as this lithograph shows:

This picture feels in the category of 'fanciful' - the second spire to the left is not supported by any other evidence and the woods behind the main church feel wrong.

So in the end one has to make a decision. I find the evidence of Stoney the most convincing and so we are going for the following look:

Many thanks to my father who, as always, is the master builder. As one of you has put it: "just imagine trying to recreate that tower. Four isosceles trapezoids for the base.....bad enough. Then four more for the spire! All must fit and stay a true vertical".

Inevitably, further information has come to light:

This picture painted in 1819 shows a much simpler church. The second spire on the left may be the Prussian memorial which would easily be seen from that position without some artistic licence.

Good view of the cemetery wall

This cadastral map is especially useful for the layout of the village and would suggest no side chapels on the church.

Sunday, 3 May 2020

The Battle for Plancenoit

The Waterloo diorama project is now really getting going, but it's going to take a while, so as an interim step the plan is to show sections of the battle. I'm now turning my attention to Plancenoit.

The village of Plancenoit saw some of the most intense fighting at Waterloo. Partly because of the confused nature of the urban battle and partly because the British weren't involved, the struggle is less well known to the English speaking world than it should be. Historians have done much to correct this during the last 20 years but the battle in Plancenoit still presents fresher opportunities for study than the main fight to the north-west.

In 1815, Plancenoit was home to around 500 people, who fled when it became clear that battle was imminent. Part of the Nassau contingent spent the night of the 17th/18th in the village before withdrawing north to Papelotte. Plancenoit's houses were well built with garden walls and cobbled streets. This made the village easy to defend, although its natural properties could have been enhanced still further had Napoleon taken the trouble to fortify the buildings before the Prussian arrival.

But Napoleon believed that he had damaged Blucher sufficiently at Ligny for there to be no danger of a Prussian intervention and so he did not take this precaution. In Napoleon's defence, the French did not arrive en masse until the morning of the 18th, so time was limited and as Nassauers remained in the village until the early hours of Sunday morning this would clearly not have been possible until they had left.

Napoleon made other mistakes in Plancenoit. Even when he knew the Prussians were arriving from the East, he only drip fed troops onto his right flank and did not move decisively to take the initiative against the Prussians: the most obvious precaution would have been to push guns, light cavalry and engineers to block egress from the Bois de Paris further to the East.

Most of the houses in modern Plancenoit were built in the 20th Century - the village was exempt from the 1914 law protecting Belgian battlefields - perhaps the imminence of war in 1914 did not endear Germans to the Belgians so the village was not protected. But despite these changes, the village is laid out in much the same way as in 1815 and St Catherine's Church still dominates the central square. This area is now the village green.

The modern church

The church was badly damaged in the fighting, which was particularly ferocious around the village centre. Parts of the cemetery wall date back to the time of the battle but the church was rebuilt in the Gothic Revival style in 1856.

So what then did the village and church look like in 1815? To my knowledge, there is only one contemporary picture of the church, sketched at a distance on about 20th June 1815:

The original church has a typical Walloon spire (almost a flèche), central nave and side chapels. The apse at the east end has three sides, just as today

Plancenoit from the heights of Rossomme by the same artist. The spire can just be seen

Another distant view of the church spire

The other obvious source is of course Siborne, but he did not map out the battlefield until some time after. The larger diorama is however an excellent source to work out the layout of the village and the relief.

Siborne's model gives the best bird's eye view of the layout of the village around the church and village green. The difficulty with Siborne is that his church does not show side chapels, only a central nave. My conclusion is that Siborne simplified many of his other buildings (for instance La Haie Sainte) and therefore the water colour is a better source.

Another good way of determining the look of the church in 1815 is to examine other local churches untouched by the Gothic revival:

This picture shows Napoleon's carriage being hauled off as booty. In the background is Gemappes church, which looks very similar to the one at Plancenoit.

Modern photos may not show the original church but they do show the relief and the lay out of the village