After a victory at Crecy (August 26 1346) Edward III of England set up a bridgehead in front of Calais, installed his court and held festivities while he Laid siege to the town. Reduced to famine the town capitulated on August 4 1347. Eustache de St.- Pierre, Pierre and Jacques de Wissant, Jean d’Aire, Jean de Fiennes and Andrieu d’Andres offered themselves to save the survivors. Queen Philippa de Hainault obtained their reprieve. However the inhabitants were evicted from the town which remained in English hands until Francois de Guise recaptured it in 1558. The monument, by Rodin, was inaugurated on June 3 1895 on the site of the old defences.
A monument was inaugurated in 1791, commemorating the sacrifice of Gavet and Mareschal, who were drowned while rescuing the crew of a Dieppe fishing smack which was sinking near the harbour entrance. That monument disappeared when the rampart against which it was standing was demolished. This present bronze monument by Edouard Lormier was inagurated in 1899 on the boulevard des Allies and transferred in 1960 to this site facing the former maritime district, the Courgain. Each year an official ceremony is held here to honour the memory of those lost at sea.
Outside Parc St Pierre inaugurated in 1904 in honour of the Calais people killed in colonial expeditions. The frontage shows a statue of Valour, the left hand leaning on on the town coat of arms. The top of the memorial shows Glory crowning Capt. Louis Dutertre, hero of the battle of Sidi-Brahim in 1845. Born on the outskirts of Calais, at Coulogne, Dutertre, a regimental infantry officer was taken prisoner by Abd el-Kader. Taken in front of his troops and threatened with beheading, he ordered them not to surrender and shouted ‘Comrades resist to the death’ before being shot and beheaded.
Set up in 1862 on the site of the old town’s defences the Richlieu Gardens were redesigned in 1956.
Rodin’s statue of the Burghers of Calais occupied the strip of land in front of the gardens from 1895 to 1924 when it was replaced by the 1914-18 war memorial, the work of the sculptor Moreau-Vauthier.
Badly damaged by the bombing during the German occupation its place was taken by a memorial by Yves de Coetlogon which honoured the memory of the fallen of both world wars.
The symbolisation of Peace presses an olive branch to its breast.
After the fall of the Empire, Louis XVIII, solicited by a delegation from the town council to return to France via Calais, accepted because ‘it was the shortest route and he was in a hurry to get back home’.
The monument, set up with his agreement to mark his landing on April 24 1814, bears a bronze plaque of the royal footprint and a commemorative text. Declared an historic monument in 1933 the column was removed in 1939, so as not to impede work on the port, and was thus saved from destruction. Constructed of stone blocks it left its former site on the quayside to be erected opposite the Courgain Maritime in 1965.
The Dover Patrol formed a discrete unit of the Royal Navy based at Dover and Dunkirk for the duration of the First World War. Its primary task was to prevent enemy German shipping - chiefly submarines - from accessing the English Channel en route to the Atlantic Ocean, thereby obliging the German Navy to travel the much longer route via Scotland.
On July 1909 Hubert Latham and Louis Blériot settled at Cap Gris Nez, close to Calais and 33 kilometers from the cliffs of Dover. They waited for favourable weather conditions to attempt the crossing of the channel.
Calais owes much of its world wide renown in the lace industry to the Lyons born Joseph Jacquard(1752-1834), inventor of a mechanism consisting of a programmed reproduction of a perforated card which could transfer complicated designs to lace. A statue in the memory of him by the sculptor Marius Roussel, was inaugurated in 1910.
On the plinth two insets recall Martyn and Ferguson who did much to improve the lace power looms.
