The Burghers of Calais

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Rodin's The Burghers of Calais in Calais, France

The Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais) is one of the most famous sculptures by Auguste Rodin, completed in 1888. It serves as a monument to an occurrence in 1347 during the Hundred Years' War, when Calais, an important French port on the English Channel, was under siege by the English for over a year.

The story goes that England's Edward III, after a victory in the Battle of Crécy, laid siege to Calais and Philip VI of France ordered the city to hold out at all costs. Philip failed to lift the siege and starvation eventually forced the city to parlay for surrender. Edward offered to spare the people of the city if any six of its top leaders would surrender themselves to him, presumably to be executed. Edward demanded that they walk out almost naked and wearing nooses around their necks and be carrying the keys to the city and castle. One of the wealthiest of the town leaders, Eustache de Saint Pierre, volunteered first and five other burghers soon followed suit and they stripped down to their breeches. Saint Pierre led this envoy of emaciated volunteers to the city gates and it is this moment and this poignant mix of defeat, heroic self-sacrifice and the facing of imminent mortality that Rodin captures in these figures, which are scaled somewhat larger than life.

In history, though the burghers expected to be executed, their lives were spared by the intervention of England's Queen, Philippa of Hainault.

The Burghers of Calais in Victoria Tower Gardens, London, England. Under French law no more than twelve casts of this piece were permitted after Rodin’s death. The London casting, purchased by the British Government in 1911, is one of them

The monument was proposed by the mayor of Calais for the town's square in 1880. This was an unusual move, because normally only monuments to Victory were constructed, but France had suffered devastating losses in its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and it longed to recognize the sacrifice that its young men had made. Rodin's design was controversial, as it did not present the burghers in a heroic manner, rather they appeared sullen and worn. The monument was innovative in that it presented the burghers at the same level as the viewers, rather than on a traditional pedestal, although until 1924 the city council of Calais, against Rodin's wishes, displayed the statue on an elevated base.

While the original statue still stands in Calais, other versions stand in

Victoria Tower Gardens in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament in London
the gardens of the Musée Rodin in Paris
the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia
the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California
at Stanford University in California *
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
the sculpture garden of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem
the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
at Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, and
the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo

Note: * Stanford's Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts has several smaller studies of this work. Note that Stanford's installation is as Rodin wanted: mounted flush with the lawn of the Main Quad.

The Burghers of Calais

See also