A visit to Le Creusot

Of course the extremely hot weather could explain the fact that very few people visited the Le Creusot museum, the Château de la Verrerie, the permanent exposition 'Le Métal, La Machine et les Hommes’ and the small theater on Friday July 16 2010. As a former industrial city, Le Creusot does not invite for an elaborate acquaintance in the first place. It is a series of villages with at its center – as a result of recent town planning – a multifunctional government building and a shopping mall, located at a square that struggles.

Ecomuseum Le Creusot. Top left: Forecourt of the Château de la Verrerie, former cristal factory, which became the residence of the Schnieder family. Top right: the former glass overs, which were rebuild in the 19th century as a theater and a chapel. Bottom left: The Jeu de Paume, in which the exhibition 'Le Métal, La Machine et les Hommes' about the history of the iron and steel industry in Le Creusot is located.

The complex of museum buildings is a bit further down the road and the distance, differences in height and the still visible effects of the old industrial infrastructure, make the walk not too attractive. However, the Château de la Verrerie is situated beautifully on a high hill that faces a vast, slightly wild park.

The glass museum and the industrial exhibition have become museums of museums: museal time has stood still for the last deaced. In both buildings I came across a static exhibition with showcases and elaborate text panels (everything in French), no clear route or story and – with the exception of a single ancient movie – no new media whatsoever. On the museum’s terrain, there is nothing to eat or drink, the bathrooms are vintage 1900. The two museum shops look fresh though, and they burst with all sorts of brochures about city and region and the other nearby museums that are part of the Le Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines Ecomuseum. The Jeu de Paume and the Château de la Verrerie are in bad repair and there is no climate control in any of these building’s rooms. The little theater has been restored lately, the chapel in the other glass oven cannot be visited.

Inside the Musée de la Verrerie building

The presentations are very object centered. Although the objects may be very interesting of themselves, they originate from the archives of the metal company and the Schneider family and thus represent – unconsciously and unintentionally – a 'top-down’ perspective. This specific material is strongly connected to the local past and, as a consequence, cannot link to the developments that came after the factory’s and Schneider family’s time of glory. The visitor does not discover anything about developments after the factory’s closing an the start of the Ecomuseum.

The perspectives of then are continued in the presentation of today: the ruling gaze of the bird’s-eye perspective of the drawn and photographed panorama’s of the Le Creusot’s complexes with their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century smoking chimneys, the perspective of two immense maquettes (coming from the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris): both are rashly re-used in the present presentation. Bird’s-eyes and maquettes represent completeness, organisation and power. I had expecteded a more bottom-up view from this very museum, one of the first ecomuseums on the world, or at least a more critical analysis of the visual material of the factory’s and family’s archives.

Exhibition in the Jeu de Paume. Right: detail of one of the big maquettes build for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris.

Another deficiency is the lack of cohesion between the various presentations and buildings that share the same site. The theater could function very well as a departure area. The ceiling’s iconography refers to queen Marie-Antoinette als patroness of the eightteenth-century cristal factory and with that to the beginning of Le Creusot as a industrial city. The link with Marie-Antoinette provides the entrepreneural Schneider family with an aristocratic cachet.

The Schneider family's theater, midst of the nineteenth century. The family's seats were in their own loge in the back. In the ceiling the double eagle of the Habsburgs, family of the French queen Marie-Antoinette.

Private theaters were very fashionable in the midst of the nineteenth century. The Château Le Digoine (only 20 kilometers away from Le Creusot) has one too.  According  to the Schneider family’s pedigree (which we found in the Château de la Verrerie) the Schneiders managed to mary into the French royal class at the end of the nineteenth century, lust as the German Krupps manages to marry into the German royal class.

The Schneiders turned the former glass factory into a sophisticated residence. They did not want to see their personnel walking through the building and accross the forecourt, so they constructed an elaborate corridor system beneath the complex, including electrical lights and railways. Little wagons could travel between the kitchen and dining room and the personnel could walk through the residence without being seen.

As a side track form the main guiding tour, I was able to glance at these underground corridors and it was there that I saw the bottom-up perspective that I missed in the museal presentations. Exactly these 'top-down’ invisible corridors systems connect modern reality to the feudal representations of Le Creusot.