Lessons from Chateau De Calberte

There are small incidents in one’s life that, even as you experience them, you know you will never forget. Three decades ago I had one of those moments: a history tutorial on the fragility of human progress. It was given to me in a hidden valley in an obscure part of France, not by a professor but by a silversmith.

My wife and I were on vacation in the Cévennes at the southeastern edge of the Massif Central. The Cevennes is an empty region of steep hills, covered in dense vegetation, crammed and jammed into one another.

We were in the middle of nowhere staying at a farmhouse with rooms for rent. It was high summer: too hot to lie outside in the sun, too humid to read in the shade.

On the hillside opposite the farm, through some woods, we noticed a well-preserved early-Middle Ages fortress. There was a stout, sturdy keep and a round tower topped by what looked like a little mushroom cap. It was film-set perfect, almost unreal. But a small plume of smoke coming from somewhere inside the battlements proved people were living there.

Seeking diversion from the miserable heat, we drove as close as we could get to the building. Then tramped through a few hundred meters of forest to get to the door. We passed a small earth mover abandoned on its side and a bosun’s chair with a half-empty bag of cement mix in the seat. The rigging for the chair ran up to the fortress’s battlements.

We knocked and were greeted by a couple in their mid-40s, Daniel and Irene Darnas. They invited us in, and as we walked up into the main part of the fortress, we stepped back to the beginning of the millennium. The place, the Château de Calberte, was more than midway through a major restoration; building stones and masons’ tool were laid out on tarpaulins. Pulleys and ropes ran up the side of the keep. Two teenagers smeared with plaster mix — the Darnases’ children — looked down from a platform at us.

The Darnases gave us a quick tour and then invited us for lunch: omelet and a salad, and a coupe of the local blanquette. While we ate they told us the chateau’s story. The original buildings dated from the 11th century and had been abandoned by the end of the 14th, their demise brought about by the breakdown of social order during the Hundred Years War.

The couple also told us their story. Daniel Darnas had inherited the Château de Calberte from his mother in the 1960s. It wasn’t a family heirloom. As he explained it, his mother was a devout Christian, and later in life, as a form of service, she had become a prison visitor befriending criminals serving long sentences. A prisoner his mother had spent a great deal of time with — my memory is vague here but I think Daniel Darnas said the prisoner was inside for murder — had willed the property to her. It was a total ruin.

When she passed away, Daniel Darnas inherited what was still a wreck and felt a responsibility to this piece of history that fate had bequeathed to him. He made it his life’s work to restore the place. It was a gigantic and quixotic undertaking. A big, bearded man, he was a silversmith from Lyon, not a builder. As we sipped our sparkling wine from silver goblets he had made, his wife explained that they had spent every sweltering summer holiday, Christmas and spare weekend for the last 20 years working on the place. When their children were old enough they were enlisted on the project as well. That was all, just the four of them.

The conversation in French and English veered from the personal to the historical: The cost to the family of dedicating their lives to the restoration gave way to a discourse on historical impermanence. This empty, junglelike bit of France had once been sufficiently wealthy to have such a building. The wool trade generated the revenue. Thousands of sheep still graze the Cévennes’ high pastures. We speculated about the events that might have led to the chateau being abandoned: plague, war and bad governance. Feudal lords chose the wrong strongman to align with.

Usually when I have this kind of conversation it’s in an interview with a professional historian, archaeologist or journalist. I think the reason I knew I would never forget it was precisely because Daniel Darnas was not a specialist. His contact with history was visceral: He and his family were recreating it stone by stone.

When lunch was finished, he insisted that I had to see something. He took me for a tour along the exterior wall. The Château de Calberte is jammed onto a steep, rocky outcrop and the wall in some places is at least 20 feet high.

He explained that when he and Irene Darnas had first seen the place the walls had long since caved in on themselves. The couple pulled the stones out and eventually solved the jigsaw puzzle of how they had originally been assembled. He pointed to the different layers of stone just above our heads. The first layers were flat and had been cut by masons in such a way that they fit together effortlessly with very little mortar. He asked me to look a little higher. The stones were smaller and more haphazardly arranged.

His theory was the workmen who initially built the chateau had very advanced masonry skills. But over the centuries, as the region suffered war, plague and economic collapse, those skills had been lost. The last workmen who expanded the chateau simply didn’t know the advanced stonecutting techniques. The upper layer of the walls with the tinier stones was weak, more easily breached, and the walls were broken down again and again by brigands until the place was abandoned.

Do you understand why I’m telling you this story? he asked in a schoolmasterly way.

Yes, I said. Human progress isn’t a one-way process. We can forget how to build things. We can go backward as well as forward. He nodded.

And, of course, it isn’t just technological innovation that can go backward. Societies can forget the social and political innovations that allowed them to flourish.

That conversation took place in the summer of 1987 and I have thought of it often since. I thought of the Darnas family and the Château de Calberte when reporting on the war in Bosnia, watching what had been a progressive society rip itself apart. I thought of Calberte when President Bill Clinton tore up the Glass-Steagall Act and when the banks were bailed out in 2008 without Glass-Steagall being reinstated. And, of course, since the 2016 election I think of that conversation almost every single day.

I have thought about it so often that I recently looked up the place on the Internet. It made me happy to see that the family have completed the restoration and the Chateau is open to visitors in the summer months.

Looking at pictures of the chateau reminded me of the lesson of Calberte: individuals experience time going in one direction, relentlessly forward into the future, and so we think that history, too, makes the same ever forward progress. But history doesn’t travel like that. It veers from right to left, turns around and goes backward.

We think that a fight for justice won is won once and for all. But the same battles, particularly in the social sphere, are fought over and over. In America the battles for social progress from the 1930s through the 1960s are being refought today. I worry that, as at the Château de Calberte at the end of the 14th century, we have lost the knowledge of how to construct our defenses — political and social — and we may be too weak to withstand the current assault.

(Michael Goldfarb hosts the
“FRDH, First Rough Draft of History,” podcast: )