Canon AE1 Program | Fomapan 100
If you’ve read the Lourdes articles, you’ll know that I have a particular devotion to Our Lady and to the sites of her apparitions. So when May 1st came around — the first day of the Month of Our Lady — it seemed only right to do something about it.
Out with the Canon AE1 Program, loaded with a roll of Fomapan 100. Destination: La Rabatelière, about twenty minutes from the house, and the Sanctuaire de la Salette.
I said my Rosary in the car on the way over. Stopped off at the Parish Church of Saint-Charles and said an extra decade. Well, it’s the Month of Mary. Start as you mean to go on.
The French say: En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil. Don’t shed a thread of clothing in April. It was May now and 26°c. The Panama hat was already feeling like too much. Shirt sleeves it was.
I’ve been to La Rabatelière before, about twenty years ago, but I hadn’t really taken it in properly. This time I wanted to do it right.
The Parish Church of Saint-Charles is where you begin. It was built in 1633, consecrated the following year on the feast of Saint Charles; that coincidence of date gave the church its name and its patron. A solid, unshowy building — what the heritage plaques call style bas-breton: a massive façade, plain and purposeful. Exactly the kind of church that says: we are here, and we intend to stay.
Except, of course, they tried to burn it down.
On 8 December 1793, during the War of the Vendée, Republican forces put the church to the torch. For those who don’t know the War of the Vendée: it was the uprising of the western provinces against the Revolution, and the Republic’s response was one of the darkest episodes in French history. The colonnes infernales — the Infernal Columns — swept through this region killing civilians, burning farms, destroying everything they found. Here in the Vendée, people carry a devoir de mémoire, a duty of remembrance. They do not forget.
The church was restored in 1802. A century later, Abbé Hillairet enlarged it; he added a transept to give it the shape of a Latin cross.
Then, in 1905, came the Law on the Separation of Church and State. All Church property was to be inventoried by the state. For a lot of French Catholics, this was not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It was another assault. The Revolution had burned the church down. Now the Republic wanted a list of everything inside it.
In February 1906, word went around La Rabatelière that the inspectors were coming. The parishioners didn’t wait. They dragged tree trunks in front of the doors. When the inspectors arrived, they found the church barricaded and the congregation inside with their priest, refusing to move.
It held. For a while.
On 23 November 1906, they came back with axes. The left side door — the one on the north side of the nave — was broken open. You can still see the marks. Deep ones. Not the kind of thing that weathers away or gets sanded smooth. They are still there because nobody has chosen to remove them. La porte des Inventaires. That is what the door has been called ever since. The Inventory Door. Not a nickname that flatters the Republic.
I stood in front of it and thought: a hundred and twenty years, and there are the marks. The Vendée does not forget. It does not perform forgetting either.
Before heading up the hill I walked through the cemetery, which the municipal council reorganised around 1970. Near the entrance sits a small millstone, on display. It was found in a tomb believed to belong to François Suire (1753-1794): a miller, killed by Republican soldiers during the War of the Vendée. Forty-one years old. Nobody famous. No monument beyond this stone. But there it is. Still there.
Near the central cross is the granite tomb of Abbé Elie Hillairet (1840-1908), the parish priest here from 1873 until his death. He is, as we’ll see, the man behind most of what you can still see in this village. It seems fitting that he is buried at the foot of his life’s work.
Then the climb.
The Sanctuaire de la Salette sits on a hillside above the Petite Maine river, and I can confirm: it is a bit hilly. There were signs for the handicapped route but I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. My legs were killing me by the time I reached the top.
For those who are less familiar with the apparitions of Our Lady: La Salette is one of the great Marian apparitions, confirmed by the Church in 1851. On 19 September 1846, on a mountainside near Corps in the French Alps, two young shepherds encountered a weeping woman seated on a stone. Her name: Mélanie Calvat, aged fourteen; and Maximin Giraud, aged eleven. The woman rose and spoke to them: about faith, about the breaking of Sunday rest, about blasphemy, about a people drifting from God. She gave each child a secret. Then she ascended into the light and was gone.
As apparitions go, La Salette has always struck me as a sorrowful one. Our Lady of Lourdes is serene; you see her in her grotto and feel peace. Our Lady of La Salette is weeping. She comes as a mother at the end of her patience, and her message is a warning. But it is still love. Only love would bother.
Hillairet understood this. He was curé here from 1873 to 1908, and he built this sanctuary as an act of deliberate faith during the most aggressively anticlerical period in French history. The Republic was dismantling the Church’s presence everywhere it could reach. Hillairet planted statues on a hillside.
Work began in 1887. Three groups of statues marking the three moments of the apparition were inaugurated the following summer. A Rosary monument came next. The path climbs to a tower: the Triumph of the Cross. At the summit, the Chapel of the Cross of Jerusalem, a square keep in local schist and brick, built in 1893. A Stations of the Cross path added along the hillside in 1902.
Standing up there, looking out over the valley, I thought about the miller buried down in the cemetery. And the axe marks in the church door. And Hillairet up here, building all of this in the teeth of a state that wanted nothing to do with it.
The Vendée has its wounds. It tends them carefully.
I am officially knackered. The Fomapan went through fine. The Panama hat stayed in the bag.
I drove home with the windows down, thinking that May 1st had been rather well spent.
All photographs shot on Fomapan 100, Canon AE1 Program. La Rabatelière, Vendée, May 2026.
