The Route Napoleon and an extraordinary life

When Napoleon Bonaparte arrived at Golfe-Juan in 1815 with a few hundred loyal troops, he was afraid that his tiny army might be overwhelmed and he himself arrested. So he not only landed on an obscure Mediterranean beach but subsequently crept into France through a back road, over the mountains via Grasse, Digne and Grenoble, rather than taking the main route up the Rhône valley.

The road in question, known then as the Route des Alpes d’Hiver, was designated the Route Napoleon in 1932. In June of that year, a four day ceremony of inauguration was held along the new Route. It was celebrated by an assembly of notables, including the national Minister of Tourism, the Prefects of four departments, the officers commanding four battalions of the Chasseurs Alpins mountain regiment, several senators and numerous mayors….and a lowly priest named Jules Chaperon.

Why was he there? Because he was the one who had thought up the whole idea!

As founder and chairman of the Syndicat d’Initiative (tourist office) for the Artuby Valley, through which the Napoleon had passed in 1815, Jules Chaperon proposed creating the Route as a way of bringing tourists to his high country. Seventeen years and a world war later, his concept came to fruition.

The Logis du Pin, where Napoleon stopped in 1815 with (below) the same building today on what is now the Route Napoleon in the Artuby valley. The top photo is from 1931, just before the Route was designated.

Chaperon was never more than a parish priest and an army chaplain, but he led an extraordinary and very full life. We know a great deal about it because he kept a daily journal. Several original volumes are held in the archives of Grasse’s heritage library at St Hilaire; they formed the basis of a biography* which was published in 2000.

An international incident

Born in 1877 and brought up near Vienne in the Dauphiné, Chaperon studied theology at a seminary in Tunisia. He was present at the notorious 1899 Fashoda incident, on the river Nile in what is now South Sudan. The 'incident' was a confrontation between 150 French colonial troops and 1,500 British-led Egyptian soldiers in five gunboats. The spat nearly caused a war between France and the UK. It was so serious that Queen Victoria almost cancelled her annual visit to the Riviera!

(Left) New York Times, 15th October 1915: 'Rumours of War'. (Right) Cartoon from the Wales Evening Express: French poodle 'Well if I can't have the bone, I'll be satisfied if you'll give me one of ths scraps'. The bone is labelled 'Fashoda'.

In 1900, Chaperon was hospitalized in Hyères with tuberculosis and was advised, typically for that era, to spend time in mountainous country for his health.

The priest-organiser

Ordained in 1902, he was assigned to a small group of Var parishes centred upon La Martre in the Artuby valley at around 1,000 metres. The village is 50km north west of Grasse.

Finding himself in a poor agricultural area, Chaperon set about radically improving the well-being as well as the saving the souls of his parishioners. He created what amounted to a series of social services in his high valley, including a home for the elderly, various charitable and economic associations and one of France’s first holiday camps.

Fervent about local history, he opened a small museum, organised fêtes to draw in visitors and created the Syndicat d’Initiative (that is, the tourist office) for the Artuby. Perhaps having discovered that on March 3rd 1815, Bonaparte paused at an auberge, the Logis du Pin, on the main road two kilometres from La Martre, in 1913 he proposed the idea of the Route Napoleon.

The orphanage

Building, no doubt upon his own experience, he was also passionate about preventing and curing tuberculosis. In 1903 he organised an association named ‘Notre Montagne’ which raised funding to rescue abandoned children who were infected with or in danger of the ‘white plague’, as it was known. By 1906 he had raised sufficient funds to buy a decrepit house near La Martre which, with the help of his cousin and childhood friend, Émilie Morel, became the basis for an orphanage. In 1912, it was transferred to a much larger house close to the village. When war broke out in 1914, he and Émilie added a military hospital for wounded and convalescent soldiers.

This decorative facade in La Martre was once the office of both the Tourist Office ('Syndicat d'Initiative de l'Artuby') and the Notre Montagne society and orphanage, both established by Jules Chaperon

The Great War

Chaperon tried to join the army in 1914, but was told he was too old at 37. But in 1916, he was able to become a military chaplain on the western front. His diary in March 1917 vividly describes conditions, not only for the French soldiers but of the Germans taken prisoner, around a low-lying and waterlogged village on the Marne which was wiped out by the fighting. Not content with such experiences, he afterwards was assigned to the French troops who helped the Italians finally beat Austro-Hungary in the Veneto in 1918.

Chaperon as a chaplain during the Great War

Experiences in Turkey

After the war ended in the west, France was amongst allies, including the UK, who supported Greece’s attempts to take over Anatolian territory in what is now Turkey. It then had a substantial ethnic Greek population in towns including Smyrna (now Izmir). It’s the reason why there are still many streets in France (including locally in Cannes and Beaulieu) named ‘Venizélos’ – Eleftherios Venizélos was the Greek prime minister who led his people into their ultimately disastrous invasion.

Chaperon was in Turkey during an appalling episode at Gaziantep in Cilicia in the south east. Gaziantep, then named Aintab, had a large Armenian population that had suffered immensely during the 1915 genocide. Nationalist soldiers under the ultimate command of Mustafa Kemal (later ‘Ataturk’) besieged the city in early 1920, but a French column came to the Armenians’ rescue. Fighting between the French, Turks and Armenians continued until the French withdrew in late 1921, leaving the Armenians to the tender mercies of the Turks. Chaperon’s diaries describe his harrowing experiences there.

New York Times, December 30th , 1921. Aintab is now known as Gaziantep, in modern Turkey.

He subsequently served in Istanbul, where his time in Gaziantep made him especially sensitive to the plight of Armenian refugees from Anatolia, and he was able to arrange the transfer of some Armenian children to Notre Montagne.

During Chaperon’s years of absence, it was Émilie Morel who directed activities in La Martre, ran Notre Montagne and then organised the journey of the orphans from Turkey.

The orphanage house in La Martre was small, isolated and subject to severe winter weather. When he returned to France in 1922, Chaperon sought a larger site for it. He found it at an abandoned farmhouse on the chemin de Hautes Ribes here in St François. When he, his staff and the children first arrived, it is said that they more or less had to ‘camp out’.

(Above) a postcard of the orphanage on the chemin de Hautes Ribes in 1941 (known as a 'préventorium' because its aim was to prevent tuberculosis). (Below) The same building today, known as La Naouc.

A pioneer of fund-raising in the USA

Money was needed to re-construct the site and Chaperon went to find it, principally in the USA. Between 1924 and 1932 he went each year to New York and built a network of donors there. Only the great recession eventually stopped his journeys.

Extract of a fund-raising brochure for Notre Montagne from 1924, when Chaperon started his US sojourns.

After the last of his annual trips in 1932, Chaperon was in his mid-fifties and one could say that he’d lived several lives already. He surely deserved his quieter life thereafter, looking after orphans for the next 20 years!

Memorial to Jules Chaperon on the chemin de Hautes Ribes at the site of the orphanage. The inscription reads 'who brought Armenian orphans who had survived the 1915 genocide here and cared for them until his death'. There is a similar plaque at La Martre.

Émilie Morel

It is clear that Émilie, who must have been an extraordinarily strong character, was Jules Chaperon’s closest collaborator, sharing his deep humanitarian and religious commitments. She was killed in a car accident in 1937 when driving herself alone close to La Martre, which must have been the worst blow which Chaperon ever suffered. His last years seem to have been blighted by her loss and then the second war and its aftermath.

Memorials to Chaperon and Morel

Chaperon died in Grasse in 1951. He and Émilie share a grave and headstone in the Ste Brigitte cemetery here.

Émilie Morel's inscription reads that she 'fell victim to her own fervent charity after devoting her entire life to serving the elderly and children'. Jules Chaperon's that 'after fighting so hard for others, he succumbed to the weight of his devotion on the field of honor of charity.'

A memorial service was held in 2011 in Grasse cathedral on the 60th anniversary of his death. Today, the Notre Montagne orphanage is the Lou Naouc holiday residences. Possibly, as a pioneer of holiday camps, Chaperon might have approved.

But perhaps his best memorial is the Route Napoleon. When you see all the notices along the Route, the communes which claim it, the symbolic bees decorating the start of the ‘pénétrante’ road above Cannes, the Route’s own website (www.route-napoleon.com/ile-delbe-et-cote-dazur/la-martre), etc., etc., remember Jules Chaperon.

*La Vie Mouvementée du Curé Jules Chaperon (‘The Eventful Life of Father Jules Chaperon‘), Roger Fauck, L’Harmattan, 2000. Mr Fauck’s book doesn’t mention the Fashoda incident, so Chaperon’s involvement may be apocryphal, but it’s a great story.