Berck
Berck | |
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Coordinates: 50°24′32″N 1°35′36″E / 50.4089°N 1.5933°E | |
Country | France |
Region | Hauts-de-France |
Department | Pas-de-Calais |
Arrondissement | Montreuil |
Canton | Berck |
Intercommunality | CA Deux Baies en Montreuillois |
Government | |
• Mayor (2020–2026) | Bruno Cousein[1] |
Area 1 | 14.88 km2 (5.75 sq mi) |
Population (2021)[2] | 13,298 |
• Density | 890/km2 (2,300/sq mi) |
Time zone | UTC+01:00 (CET) |
• Summer (DST) | UTC+02:00 (CEST) |
INSEE/Postal code | 62108 /62600 |
Elevation | 0–30 m (0–98 ft) (avg. 9 m or 30 ft) |
1 French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km2 (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries. |
Berck (French pronunciation:
Geography
Situated just to the north of the estuary of the river Authie, Berck has a huge expanse of sandy beach and impressive grassy-topped dunes facing north onto the English Channel and spreading over some 11 kilometres (6.8 mi).[4] The town itself comprises two parts: to the east, the old fishing town of Berck-Ville, and to the west, the seaside area, Berck-sur-Mer.
Toponymy
Berck is attested through the centuries in various forms: datum Bergis[5] and Berc in 1215,[6] Bierk in 1282.[7]
Its origin has been conjectured to come either from Germanic berg "hill", "mount"[7] or birkja "place of the birch trees", designating the birch tree wood nearby.[8][9] The Modern Dutch word for "birch" is berk.
In Dutch the name is Berk-aan-Zee.[10]
History
The old town was formerly a fishing harbour, which in 1301 was recorded to have 150 homesteads with 800 inhabitants. A mediaeval wooden lighthouse, known locally as a foïer, was built on a dune and lit by charcoal and faggots but this burned down several times. On one occasion at least it was as a result of the continuous conflict between the English and the French in the
The chapel was later extended to join the tower, making what is now the church of St-Jean-Baptiste, but the tower was only converted to a belfry after the sea retired, leaving it 1.5 kilometres inland. It is for this reason that the present division between the original village and the sea-front area exists.[13] As a result, boats were then designed with flat bottoms so that they could be drawn up on the beach and a cart was driven out to them in order to bring in the catch (see Eugène Boudin's painting below).
In the mid-19th century, Berck took on a therapeutic role in the treatment of
At first one had to alight at the nearby town of
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Railway advertising
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The beach station (1911)
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Merlimont dunes station
During
In 1974 the town twinned with Bad Honnef in Germany and in 1981 with Hythe in England.
Buildings
The church of Saint Jean Baptiste was restored in 1954 and the 15th century carvings on its corbels were then highlighted in paint. The choir and belfry are now listed monuments.[18] The new church of Notre-Dame des Sables was opened in 1886 on the marketplace of the beach quarter. Its seating for 1,500 was to cater principally for holiday makers in season and the patients from the many medical establishments profiting from the sea air. There are paintings on the choir walls.[19]
Beside its medical establishments, the beach quarter catered to the moneyed classes in the second half of the 19th century and slowly filled with grandiose villas, hotels and amenities. Among these were handsome casinos, of which the principal was the Eden, also known as the Grand Casino de la Plage, with its theatre and music hall. This was destroyed in 1944 but is survived by its equally gorgeous rival, the Kursaal.[20] The ambitious Cottage des Dunes, which tried to unite a luxury hotel and casino, failed commercially in 1913. After a brief spell as a hospital, it entered into official use.[21] Another official building that survived the bombing was the town hall, which was built in 1893 and has murals painted by Jan Lavezzari.[22]
After the stone tower of St John the Baptist fell into disuse as a lighthouse, it was replaced at first by a primitive oil lamp suspended in the dunes to mark the sandbars at the river mouth. Two years later a 10-metre tower was mounted above a keeper's cottage but this became masked when the maritime hospital was built in 1861 and a new, taller tower was constructed in 1868. The two buildings, referred to locally as father and son (le père et fils), stood next to each other until they were dynamited by the Germans in 1944.[23] The current concrete lighthouse, designed by Georges Tourry, was completed in 1951 and is 45 metres high. Its light can be seen from a distance of 24 nautical miles (44 km).[24]
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Church of St John the Baptist
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The town hall in 1900
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The station casino
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Architecture
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The lifeboat in front of holiday chalets about 1900
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Institut Calot
Aeronautical experiments
The steady sea breezes and the updraft created by the neighbouring dunes once made the town the centre of a number of aeronautical experiments. These began in the final decades of the 19th century with early trials of photography from unmanned kites. Among the first working locally was the English meteorologist E.D.Archibald in 1887; he was followed the next year by Arthur Batut and during 1889-91 by Emile Wenz.[25] The experiments continued until 1914 and some of the photos found commercial use on postcards.[26]
The town has had an aerodrome since 1917. This was in part because at the start of the 20th century, the area played its part in the race to take to the air. The artist
His one-time partner Louis Blériot never experimented with flight at Berck, but he did develop and test the sand-yacht (l'aeroplage) there in 1911 and pioneered the first race over the sands in 1913. Since 1966 a six-hour endurance race has been hosted by the local Eole Club.[28] And since 1986 there has been an annual kite-flying festival each April on the sands, attracting international exhibits of great beauty and inventiveness.[29]
Population
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Source: EHESS[30] and INSEE (1968-2017)[31] |
The inhabitants are called Berckois. Over the past two centuries there has been a steady growth in the population of the town, which in the 1793 census was 983, only a little more than the 800 recorded in 1301. In 1851 this had doubled to 2,216 and after the commercial development during the second half of that century had climbed to 7,799 by 1901. It more than doubled again by 1936 (16,700) but fell to 11,529 by 1946 and as of 2017 stands at 14,189.[31]
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Berck – The sea front
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A sand-yacht on the beach in 1913
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The sands
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The dunes
The 'Berck School' of painters
Painters joined the 19th century Parisian visitors to the town and passed on news of their discovery to fellow artists in the capital. One of the most notable was Édouard Manet, who passed a summer there with his family in 1873. Among the twenty paintings he made were depictions of boats at sea[32] and the beachscape now in the Musée d'Orsay.[33] Eugène Boudin first visited in 1874 and over the next twenty years made Berck the subject of some 120 paintings.[34] He was followed in 1876 by Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, who was so taken with the place that he set up a studio there and until 1885 devoted some six months of the year to recording the area and the fisherman's life.[35]
Following in their footsteps came the sons of local families who, until about 1914, constituted what has been called 'the Berck School'.[36] These included Francis Tattegrain, who was encouraged to take up art by Lepic;[37] Jan Lavezzari, son of the town architect who was also a friend of Lepic;[22] Charles Roussel (1861–1936), who settled in the town in 1886;[38] and Eugène Trigoulet (1864–1910).[39] After World War I the town and its inhabitants continued to be represented artistically by Roussel and by Louis Montaigu (1905–1988).[40] Fishermen in interiors were a speciality of the latter.[41]
A collection of these and other Opal Coast painters was opened in 1979 in the Municipal Museum, sited in Berck's old Gendarmerie, which was built at the end of the 19th century by Emile Lavezzari.[42]
Berck in the arts
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Édouard Manet, The Swallows (Berck meadows). 1873, E.G. Bührle Collection, Zürich
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Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, The beach at Berck. 1876, Palais des beaux-arts de Lille
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Francis Tattegrain, Fishing boats off Berck. 1878, Musée de Berck sur Mer
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Eugène Boudin, The fish-cart. 1880, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
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Jean Laronze, Berck foreshore. 1904, Musée des Ursulines, Mâcon
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Patty Townsend-Johnson, Berck back garden. Watercolour, 1904
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Marie-Joseph Iwill, The flooded road to Berck. 1909, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen
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Charles Roussel, Dune on the outskirts of Berck. Oil on wood, 1920
Among minor artists who have made Berck a subject in their work are Paul Laugée (1853–1937);[43] Eugène Chigot (1860–1923),[44] who had a studio there in 1893; and Georges Maroniez,[45] a judge who painted and photographed in the area during holidays. Two others stayed in the town because of its medical facilities. Albert Besnard was there in 1895 on account of his tubercular son. As a thanks offering for his cure, Besnard and his wife Charlotte decorated the walls of the chapel in the Cazin-Perrochaud Institute between the years 1898–1901.[46] While he was there, he also executed oil paintings[47] and etchings.[48] Jean Laronze (see above) was also there in 1904 for the same reason and painted several canvases during his stay.[49]
The town figures unfavourably in the long poem "Berck-Plage" by Sylvia Plath.[50] She had visited it in 1961 and wrote the poem a year later, mixing there memories of maimed war veterans at the Berck hospital with impressions of the recent death and funeral of a neighbour.[51]
In
Language
The language originally spoken by the inhabitants was Picard, from which originated several expressions used by fishermen.[53] Although it has now retreated before standard French, there are still those who seek to preserve it. Berck has a language association, T'yn souvyin tu?[54] and there have been linguistic studies of the local dialect. These include the poet Edouard Grandel's Lexique du patois berckois (Université de Picardie, Amiens, 1980), Lucien Tétu's Glossaire du parler de Berck (Société de linguistique picarde, 1981) and his À l'écoute des Berckois : Dictons et proverbes, sobriquets (Société de linguistique picarde, 1988). The Picard dialect poet Ivar Ch'Vavar was born in the town in 1951 and, though he now lives in Amiens, has often written about it, most notably in Berck (un poème), published in 1997.[55]
Personalities
- Annette Messager, conceptual artist.
- Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of the French best seller Le scaphandre et le papillon, which was also filmed in the town.
See also
- Communes of Pas-de-Calais
References
- ^ "Répertoire national des élus: les maires". data.gouv.fr, Plateforme ouverte des données publiques françaises (in French). 2 December 2020.
- ^ "Populations légales 2021". The National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. 28 December 2023.
- ^ INSEE commune file
- ^ Paris Aéroport, Paris Vous Aime Magazine, No 13, avril-may-juin 2023, p. 147
- ISBN 2-85023-076-6, p. 72b
- Toponymie générale de la France, Librairie Droz, Genève, p. 732, n° 12349 (read in French) [1]
- ^ a b Albert Dauzat and Charles Rostaing, 72b.
- ^ Maurits Gysseling, Toponymisch Woordenboek van België, Nederland, Luxemburg, Noord-Frankrijk en West-Duitsland (vóór 1226), 1960, pp. 198–199 (read in French, Dutch and German) [2]
- ^ Ernest Nègre, 732
- ^ "A – B - CRGFA". Archived from the original on 11 March 2014. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ La chronique d'Enguerran de Monstrelet, Paris 1858 Vol.2 p.266
- ^ Louis Brésin, Chroniques de Flandre et d'Artois: Analyse et extraits pour servir a l'histoire de ces provinces de 1482 à 1560, Dumoulin, 1880.
- ^ "Berck ville église Saint-Jean-Baptiste, la tour et son clocher". Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ Bruno Vanobber and Nancy Vansieleghem, "Repairing the body, restoring the soul: the Sea Hospital of the City of Paris in Berck-sur-Mer and the French war on tuberculosis", Paedagogica Historica 46.3, June 2010, pp. 325–340
- ^ "Les Forums de Passions Métrique et Etroite !! • Afficher le sujet - VFIL 62 Aire à Berck". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ "La seconde guerre mondiale". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 767.
- ^ KEEO. "Berck Eglise saint Jean Baptiste". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ BERCKOFIL. "Eglise Notre-Dame-des-Sables - BERCK sur MER - images d'antan". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ There are several photos and post cards of these, along with casinos in neighbouring towns, on the Government cultural site
- ^ BERCKOFIL. "Le Cottage des Dunes - BERCK sur MER - images d'antan". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ a b "Jan Lavezzari". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ Paul Billadaz, Berck à travers les siècles vol. 2 Archived 31 May 2013 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Base Mérimée: IA62001159, Ministère français de la Culture. (in French)
- ^ John Ruler, Cross-Channel France: Nord-Pas de Calais, Bradt Travel Guides, 2011 p.120
- ^ BERCKOFIL. "Vues prises par Cerf-Volant - BERCK sur MER - images d'antan". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ Gijsbert-Paul Berk, André Lefebvre and the cars he created at Voisin and Citroën, Veloce Publishing Ltd, 2009 p.11
- ^ Piers Letcher, Eccentric France, Bradt Travel Guides, 2003 p.30
- ^ There is a video of the 2009 festival here.
- ^ Des villages de Cassini aux communes d'aujourd'hui: Commune data sheet Berck, EHESS (in French).
- ^ a b Population en historique depuis 1968, INSEE
- ^ Manet:Experimenting with Plein Air Archived 18 July 2010 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ View online
- ^ A selection at the Paintingall Gallery Archived 23 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Hélène Braeuener, Les peintres de la baie de la Somme: autour de l'impressionnisme, Tournai, Belgium 2001 pp.96-7
- ^ Jean Bridenne, Les peintres de Berck, Le Chasse-Marée - ArMen, 1990
- ^ View a picture by him at Artnet
- ^ BRASSEUR, Frederic. "Jan Lavezzari". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ "Eugène Trigoulet (1864 - 1910), Elégantes sur la plage de Berck". Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ BRASSEUR, Frederic. "Louis Montaigu". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ "Louis Montaigu". Archived from the original on 8 June 2016. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ "The Municipal Museum site". Archived from the original on 19 March 2012. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ "Bateaux sur la plage de Berck Georges Paul François Laurent Laugée Peinture Toile Huile". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ "See online". Archived from the original on 2 April 2012. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ A selection of his work online Archived 15 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ BERCKOFIL. "L'Hôpital Cazin-Perrochaud - BERCK sur MER - images d'antan". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ "Ventes aux enchères Paul Albert BESNARD (1849-1934)". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ See online Archived 2 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine
- French Ministry of Culture. (in French)
- ^ Ariel, London 1965, pp.30-35
- ^ Jack Folsom, Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath's "Berck-Plage", Temple University 1994 Archived 12 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Christian Morel de Sarcus, Biographie
- ^ Confrérie, La. "Lexique - Confrérie du Hareng Côtier de Berck sur Mer". Archived from the original on 24 November 2016. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ QUENEHEN, Alain. "Le Picard des matelots de Berck". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
- ^ Supplément revue L'Invention de la Picardie n°10, (Amiens)