The origin of the plan-relief
In 1981, as part of a permanent exhibition on the fortress and its remains at the Cercle Municipal's Rathskeller, an exact copy of the plan-relief kept at Les Invalides in Paris was produced by the company Les Maquettes EPI. The project was initiated around 1974 by Jean Goedert and Roland Pinnel, Chairman and Director of the Syndicat d'Initiative de la Ville de Luxembourg. Jean-Pierre Koltz, a great connoisseur of the fortress's history, was sent to Paris to begin the project. In the early 2000s, when work was being carried out to restore and enhance the Thüngen redoubt for a museum of the fortress, the plan was transferred to the auditorium on the first floor. This time, the model was presented in a new way: it was set into the ground and covered with sixteen glass panels, providing a bird's-eye view. Visitors can move around the backlit glass panels to count the windows of the houses on the Grand-Rue, for example.
What is a plan-relief?
Plan-reliefs are exact models of fortified towns on a scale of 1:600. They make up a collection that is unique in the world, begun in 1668 under Louis XIV and expanded until 1873, when it already included a model of the destroyed fortress between 1757 and 1777. The Marquis de Louvois, Minister of War, had the idea of having relief plans made of fortified towns in order to present the king with ways of improving the defence of the places taken during the War of Devolution (1667-1668). Since then, the production of scale models has been directly linked to the work of fortifying the towns, presenting ‘portraits in relief’ of both the towns and their surrounding countryside. It was entrusted to the king's engineers. The first phase consisted of carrying out all the surveys, in plan and elevation, needed to represent the square and its surroundings. All information relating to the architecture and topography of the town and surrounding countryside had to be carefully recorded. Because of their large size, the relief plans could not be produced in a single piece, but were made up of several tables.
What about the plan-relief of Luxembourg?
Initially housed in the Tuileries and later in the Grande Galerie du Louvre, the collection of relief maps grew rapidly through the wars, with almost a hundred having already been built by the end of the 17th century. The Napoleonic era in particular saw a major expansion of the collection. The fortress of Luxembourg was recaptured from the Austrians by the French revolutionary armies in 1795, after a seven-month blockade. In the summer of 1802, Martin Boitard (1778-1822), from the Dépôt des Plans-Reliefs in Paris, was sent to Luxembourg with the task of making ‘drawings of all the facades, the isles of the houses, the courtyards and gardens’. Completed in 1805 using limewood, plaster, paper, silk, metal and sponge and measuring 5.50 x 5.40 m, it is made up of a total of fifteen tables. Repaired in 1949, the plan-relief of Luxembourg has been shown to the public at least twice, in 1991 at the Musée des Plans-Reliefs ("Les Forteresses de l'Empire. Fortifications, towns of war and Napoleonic arsenals‘) and in 2012 at the Grand Palais ("La France en relief. Chefs-d’oeuvre de la collection des plansreliefs de Louis XIV à Napoléon III") in Paris. Unfortunately, ‘our’ plan-relief is not on permanent display, either among the 28 models on show at Les Invalides in Paris or among the 15 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille.
