René de la Coste-Messelière

René de La Coste-Messelière, a pioneer on the Way, was one of the personalities who, since 1950, inspired the Société Française des Amis de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle and gave it its reputation. He left his mark on the renaissance of pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela. With his authorization, we reproduce here the article written by Gérard Jugnot, former president of the Society, in April 1998 in the magazine “Pays Cathare”.

It wasn’t until the 50s that the roads to Santiago became not just a pilgrimage route, but also a historical and cultural route. This modern vision, responsible for the new craze for these routes, is that of René de La Coste-Messelière, an archivist who always combined the pilgrim’s effort with scholarly knowledge.
The spectacular and unexpected renaissance of the Compostela pilgrimage at the end of the 20th century is largely the fruit of René de La Coste-Messelière’s tireless activity over a period of forty-seven years. Throughout his life, until 1996, this archivist and paleographer, who graduated from the Ecole des Chartes in 1950, devoted himself to the rediscovery and enhancement of these paths, which had been virtually forgotten since the end of the 17th century. President or founder of a number of Compostellan associations – the Société des amis de Saint-Jacques, the Centre d’études Compostellanes, the Centre de Culture Européenne Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle, in the royal abbey of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, in Charente-Maritime – he also edited the magazine “Compostelle” and organized some remarkable international exhibitions on the theme.
His greatest achievement, however, was to have given new energy to this pilgrimage by giving it historical legitimacy. René de La Coste-Messelière never separated scholarly knowledge from the pilgrim’s effort. Conversely, he believed that the asceticism of the walker gave historical science its full meaning and living dimension: “Those who walk know, those who know walk!”
It was on the “caminofrances”, the Spanish part of the Compostela route, that he took his first steps as a pilgrim, in the early 50s. He was then in his thirties. Shortly afterwards, he was chosen as the historical advisor for the first film to be made on the Way of St. James. In a document of the period, we can see him, dressed as a walker, pipe between his teeth, striding along the old path, crossing a Castile barely recovered from the war and little different from the one the 13th-century pilgrims had discovered, taking part in the harvest according to ancestral rites, stopping in towns and villages where there is no motorized traffic, dirt roads and no electricity, passing through places that today are unrecognizable or have disappeared, such as Puerto-Marin, which has since sunk beneath the waters of the Mino to make way for the construction of a dam…
A tireless walker
And what can we say about Santiago de Compostela, an almost-deserted city, walked only by old women, where only the great monuments are recognizable? Or how about the cathedral, where time seems to have stood still, even if a few ritual gestures are still performed: putting your hand in the tree of Jessée, banging your head against the statue of Master Maico and flying – always spectacular – the “botafumeiro”, the giant censer. Like all pilgrims who have reached their goal, he’s both happy and a little sad to feel the adventure behind him, knowing that he’ll keep on going.
On several occasions, he was given the opportunity to explore the region on horseback. First, in 1963, from Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, on the way to Arles, then from Paris, in 1965, the very year in which one of his most famous exhibitions was held at the Archives nationales. The image is astonishing: proudly mounted on their mounts, the troop of horsemen crosses Paris from the Tour Saint-Jacques to the old Porte Saint-Jacques, standards unfurled… In 1971, when he set off once more, the figure of La Coste-Messelière had become familiar to the people living along the route: a tall man with whitening hair, a small moustache and a permanent pipe-smoking habit. Easy-going and direct, he now speaks fluent Spanish, but with a dreadful French accent. Dirty and disheveled on arrival at the stage, he puts the care of his mount before anything else, and firmly imposes this discipline on all his team-mates, despite the fatigue accumulated along the way. And with the same exacting standards, a few minutes later he appears impeccable in his parade outfit.
Meticulous researcher
But René de La Coste-Messelière is not just a rider. He is also a passionate and meticulous researcher in the extreme: those who have known his office at the Archives nationales, where he has been one of the curators since 1952, cluttered with documents and files, worked with him to set up major Jacobean exhibitions, edit the magazine “Compostelle” or prepare conferences and papers, know this well. Surprisingly, however, the man who is now regarded as the specialist in the history of the Galician pilgrimage – he was appointed a member of the Franco-Spanish cultural agreement’s “Pilgrim’s Way to Santiago” commission and of the Galician autonomous government’s (xunta) commission of pilgrimage experts – waited until 1993 to publish the book he should have written long ago (1). Discretion on the part of a man more preoccupied with restoring to its rightful place a route which he finally walked seven times, and which he wanted to be considered at last as the “first European cultural route” and part of the heritage of Humanity… And the modesty of a man who probably felt that of all his high distinctions – including his appointment to the rank of Officer of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, in 1993 – nothing was worth his title of “adopted son of the city of Santiago de Compostela”.
Gérard Jugnot