The 20th century – a time of storms
In 1900, the Chateau de Gadancourt was the centrepiece of a prosperous agricultural estate, which sustained and provided work for more than 30 people. No one then imagined the cataclysms which were coming.
The 20th century – a time of storms
In 1900, the Chateau de Gadancourt was the centrepiece of a prosperous agricultural estate, which sustained and provided work for more than 30 people. No one then imagined the cataclysms which were coming.
The 20th century – a time of storms
In 1900, the Chateau de Gadancourt was the centrepiece of a prosperous agricultural estate, which sustained and provided work for more than 30 people. No one then imagined the cataclysms which were coming.
Viscount Joseph de Boury
At the start of the 20th century, young Joseph, the only son of Guillaume de Boury and his wife, was a brilliant young man looking forward to a bright future. His dream would have been to pursue a military career but his duties at Gadancourt led to him going to the French National Institute of Agronomy (“Agro”) as an independent student to prepare himself to take charge of the estate, which had been painstakingly expanded and improved by his grandfather Octave. In January 1914, he married Béatrix de Galembert, daughter of Count Gustave de Bodin de Galembert and the countess, née Marie T’kint de Roodenbeke. The young bride was born in 1892 in Shanghai, where her father had served in the Chinese customs service and post office. Hardly had he returned from his honeymoon in Italy than war broke out in August 1914 and he went off enthusiastically to the front.
Sub-lieutenant in the 328th Infantry Regiment, leader of a machine gun section, Joseph distinguished himself in particular in Argonne on September 28 during the Melzicourt farm affair. He won his first citation for having “by his composure and his energy, slowed down the progress of an enemy attack during the withdrawal movement of the company with which he was in the Melzicourt farm, thus very energetically seconding the captain of the company, wounded in the arm. In the afternoon, he also cooperated effectively in the recapture of Melzicourt, taking command of an infantry section, the leader of which was wounded. “
The Battle of Verdun
A sub-lieutenant in the 128th infantry regiment, Joseph de Boury took part in what was not then known as the Battle of Verdun. . In April 1915, he was in action at the highest point of the Eparges Ridge. “The climb up the ridge was laborious,” he wrote to his wife. “Bullets and shrapnel rained on us. The Germans are facing us on a ridge 250 metres long. We look at each other distrustfully. The artillery was firing from both sides. We tried to demolish each other, to blow up the trenches… What we saw on the battlefield was not pretty. Heaps of mutilated bodies, piles of livid debris, to which the intense action which was continuing without a let-up in the area made it impossible to give a suitable tomb. In the passageways, our feet bumped into corpses at each step…”
From his elevated position in the front line, Sub-Lieutenant Joseph de Boury carried out his duties as an observer charged with helping the artillery to adjust its fire, which all too often missed its mark. As such, he was particularly popular with the troops. But the air in the trenches was contaminated. He caught a fever but refused for a long time to allow himself to be evacuated, preferring to stay with his men. He died of typhus on 17 June 1915 at the military hospital in Gondrecourt in the department of the Meuse in eastern France at the age of 25, leaving behind him a widow and one-year-old twin girls, Bernadette and Geneviève.
Gadancourt – one war followed another
A war widow like many other French women at the age of 23, Béatrix de Boury was faithful to Joseph. She had his body exhumed from Gondrecourt so that he could be laid to rest in the family vault. She decided not to remarry and devoted herself to running the estate. Her parents, who were living with her, gave her their full support. Count Gustave de Galembert was mayor of Gadancourt until his death in 1932.
In 1934, Geneviève de Boury married Yan, Marquis de Keroüartz, at Saint Martin’s church in Gadancourt, while Bernadette, who was one of the first women to graduate from France’s prestigious Institute of Political Sciences (“Sciences-Po”), married Baron Augustin de Meaux in 1937. An air force lieutenant, he was the grandson of Viscount Camille de Meaux, who was twice Minister of Agriculture in the early years of the Third Republic, and was the son-in-law of Count Charles de Montalembert, the celebrated Catholic orator.
After she returned from the exodus which followed the German invasion in the Second World War, Béatrix de Boury spent most of the war years at Gadancourt. The chateau escaped being requisitioned by the Germans. In August 1944, however, in the course of the fighting which preceded the liberation, the village was heavily bombarded from the neighbouring village of Cléry-en-Vexin by the Americans. The inhabitants were able to take refuge in the cellars of the chateau but the roofs of the chateau and the neighbouring church were seriously damaged.
Bernadette de Meaux, who was a member of the Action Committee against Deportation which was set up in summer 1943 to fight against the deportation and forced labour system introduced by the Germans, worked to produce and distribute false papers to those who decided to go underground rather than accept deportation to the labour camps. In March 1944, she was arrested by the German police and held for a month in Fresnes Prison south of Paris. She was released in the absence of proof against her but then became wanted a second time. She hid initially with her husband in the Vexin region, then went to the Massif Central area in central France, where she joined the so-called Roussel demi-brigade of the French Resistance, also known as the Didier group. She took part in the fighting which took place during the liberation of the Allier department, working as a nurse for the Free Interior Forces under the orders of Commander Privat (known in the Resistance as Didier). Her war service led to her being decorated with the Croix de Guerre, with two mentions in divisional dispatches, and with the Medal of the Resistance (Official Journal 27 July 1947). The prefect of the Seine-et-Oise department also appointed her as chairperson of the Gadancourt Liberation Committee. After the war, she took up a career as a painter after studying under painters André Lhote and Paul Colin.
