Mont-Saint-Michel

Mont-Saint-Michel is a granite tidal island about a kilometre off the coast of Normandy in north-western France, at the mouth of the Couesnon River. A shrine to the archangel Michael was founded on the rock in the early eighth century, and from 966 a Benedictine abbey grew there, its church and monastic halls stacked up the slopes above a small walled village. For centuries it drew pilgrims across the dangerous sands, resisted every English attack in the Hundred Years' War, and later served as a prison before becoming one of France's most visited monuments.

Before the abbey the rock was called Mont Tombe. According to legend, the archangel appeared in 708 to Aubert, bishop of Avranches, and told him to build a church on the islet; Aubert is said to have modelled it on the shrine of Saint Michael at Gargano in Italy and dedicated it in 709, placing a small community of canons there. The earliest written account of these events is a Latin text of the ninth century, and some later details, such as the story that a tsunami turned the hill into an island at that time, are unsupported. Under the Carolingian Empire the shrine attracted pilgrims, but Vikings seized the mount in 847 and the clergy left for a time.

Once the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte had been agreed, it was Rollo who paid for repairs to the damaged buildings and called the clergy back, and in 933 his son William Longsword annexed the surrounding district from Brittany, bringing the mount firmly into Normandy. In 966 Duke Richard I, dissatisfied with the worldly canons, replaced them with Benedictine monks; this date is treated as the founding year of the abbey. In the eleventh century the architect William of Volpiano began a Romanesque church whose crossing sat on the very summit, supported by crypts and chapels built against the rock. The monastery backed William the Conqueror in his claim to England, and the mount appears in the Bayeux Tapestry. Abbot Robert of Torigni added lodgings, a hostelry and a new church front between 1154 and 1164.

When Philip Augustus of France seized Normandy from King John in 1204, his Breton ally Guy of Thouars burned the village and killed its inhabitants, and the fire spread to the abbey. Philip then paid for rebuilding in the Gothic style, and the monastic block known as the Merveille, with its refectory, knights' hall and cloister, was finished in 1228. Further walls and towers followed under Abbot Pierre le Roy between 1386 and 1410. During the Hundred Years' War English forces besieged the mount twice, in 1423 to 1424 and in 1433 to 1434, but its small French garrison held out, and two English bombards abandoned in 1434 are still displayed there. In 1469 Louis XI of France created the Order of Saint Michael and planned to make the abbey church its chapel, though the distance from Paris prevented it.

Pilgrimage declined after the Reformation, and the abbey was increasingly used as a jail under the old monarchy. After the French Revolution it was closed in 1791 and turned into a prison, first for priests who opposed the republic and later for political prisoners such as Armand Barbès and Auguste Blanqui; people called it the Bastille of the sea. A campaign supported by Victor Hugo helped bring the prison to an end in 1863. The site was classified as a historic monument, and Édouard Corroyer led major restoration work from the 1870s. The neo-Gothic spire, crowned with a gilded statue of the archangel by Emmanuel Frémiet, was completed in the late 1890s.

German forces occupied Mont-Saint-Michel from June 1940 during the Second World War; it was left undamaged and was freed during the Allied advance through Normandy in the summer of 1944. Monks returned in 1966 for the abbey's millennium, and since 2001 a community of the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem has lived there. UNESCO listed the mount and its bay as a World Heritage Site in 1979. The causeway of 1879 had caused the bay to silt up, so a dam on the Couesnon was begun in 2009 and a light bridge replaced the causeway in 2014, letting the tides flow round the rock again. The site receives more than three million visitors a year, and overcrowding at peak times is a recognised problem.