Le Quesnoy - Lieux Et Monuments

Lieux Et Monuments

• Les remparts, édifiés à l'époque espagnole et remaniés par Vauban et ses successeurs jusque 1914.
• * The walls, built at that time Spanish and edited by Vauban and his successors until 1914.
• The bastion Verde Hospital siege. The bastion Green is the smallest but the most interesting of bastions of Quesnoy. Its doors, the oldest, attributed to Charles V, date from about 1540. The work was then modified, enhanced and refined several times. In 1759, the top sides were removed thereby increasing the capacity of the structure and the surface of the bastion. The interior space thus created allowed the addition of four underground rooms accessible only by a courtyard. The superstructure was modified in 1882.
• The belfry of the Town Hall, solid and chunky, which was destroyed many times, in 1794, 1918 and 1940. The first tower was built in 1583. It now houses a belfry of 48 bells. Directly adjacent to the belfry, the town hall built in 1700, offers a fine example of classical building. The grand staircase in the lobby is a classified architectural work.

• The memorial of the town, near the town hall, is a work created by Valenciennes sculptor Félix Desruelles.

• On the ramparts, another work by Desruelles commemorates the liberation of the city (World War I) by ANZAC troops from New Zealand. This monument of the New Zealand fixed on a curtain wall between the two bastions of the Gard and Saint-Martin, is dated 1922. Like many memorials of the Great War, it was opened the weekend of July 14, 1923, Sunday 15 to be exact, in the presence of Marshal Joffre, Lord Milner and Sir James Allen (NZ). The New Zealand government decided in 1920 to include his youth lost in stone. Thus, the "jack of all trades" British architect, Samuel Hurst Seager was appointed official architect of the Great War memorials of New Zealand. His work was noticed by a traveling exhibition for "improving the aesthetic standards of memorials" had seduced the local authorities. Hurst Seager thus received the task of designing the memorials of Longueval and Le Quesnoy in France, Mesen in Belgium and Chunuk Bair in Gallipoli - the four foremost places of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force during the Great War. In addition to designing, S. Hurst Seager had to find the ideal location of the memorial. So it was he who oversaw the erection of the monument whose implementation was provided by the artist Felix Desruelles the creator of the monument to the dead of the town. The plan of the New Zealanders monument in itself was the work of a designer of the British Flying Corps from Scotland, Robert Henry Fraser, a specialist in plastering and founder of the Art War Memorial Tablet in 1918.

• In the Cemetery, a marble sculpture given by the state : Les deux douleurs or the two pains, by Theodore Roosevelt.
• The castle, built in the twelfth century by Baldwin IV of Hainaut, it was the home of the Counts of Hainaut, also Counts_of_Holland#List_of_counts_of_Holland and Counts_of_Zeeland#List_of_counts_of_Zeeland. Its last ruler was a woman who was born at the Castle in 1401. Charles the Bold and his daughter were the last sovereigns to live there. It was later neglected and almost abandoned in the sixteenth century. Of the prestigious Medieval castle there are few vestiges: a gateway and a set of remarkable Romanesque cellars. The current large building called Cernay is mostly 1681.

• The Tower of Baldwin the Builder. This tower is one of the oldest parts of the fortification. Vulnerable at its top to artillery, this was razed. However, it is home to a beautiful vaulted room, allowing the reception of fifty men.
• The Fauroeulx gate. It is the only gate that has not suffered in Le Quesnoy from the World War II. It connects the city with the horn work of Faulroeux.
• The bastion Caesar, which was built under Louis XIV of France from a structure built by Charles V, one hundred and thirty years before. The restoration of the right flank of the bastion in 1991 helped find the artillery embrasures arranged in the sixteenth century, masked by the brick veneer created by Vauban in the seventeenth century.
• The chapel of the hospital building curiously built in latticed soft stone, gothic style, is actually a nineteenth century structure and a fine example of neo-gothic architecture of the period.