Military History | Abbaye Saint-Michel de Frigolet — A Camp in the Emptied Abbey

The Premonstratensian canons of Saint-Michel de Frigolet were expelled in 1903, under the French laws against the religious congregations, and went into exile at the abbey of Leffe in Belgium. Their house stands alone in the Montagnette, the low wooded hills between Tarascon and Avignon. Most of it was built in the nineteenth century around a twelfth-century cloister, and seen from the hillside above it is a long church with two spires, tiled conventual ranges, crenellated corner towers and a wall round the whole of it. From August 1914 the French administration interned nationals of the enemy states. The test was nationality. Men of military age from Germany and Austria-Hungary were treated as soldiers, and were interned with their families. The officials of the day called the places they were sent camps de concentration, a term that has not meant since 1945 what it meant then, and the Ministry of Culture's Base Mémoire still catalogues its Frigolet photographs under it. An army photographer worked there in 1916. One plate is titled "Camp de concentration de l'abbaye de Frigolet. Internés en corvée" — internees on fatigue duty. Otto Gutfreund, a sculptor from Dvůr Králové nad Labem, was in Paris in 1914 and volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. He fought on the Somme, in Artois and in Champagne. He was also a Habsburg subject, and Prague's Vojenský historický ústav records that from 1916 to 1918 he was interned at the Frigolet camp. The cloister was classified a historic monument in November 1921, before the canons came back in 1923. There is a community at Frigolet again, with two guesthouses, a bookshop and a restaurant, and the abbey publishes its visiting hours. 📸 Cover: the abbey seen from the hillside above, with the Montagnette behind it. Aleks, 28 October 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0. Second image: the twelfth-century cloister walk, among the parts of the house classified in 1921. Olivier, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.