For 1,051 Days, Reims Lived Underground in the Champagne Cellars

Beneath the city of Reims, in the heart of Champagne, runs a hidden landscape of chalk. The Romans first cut the pits, quarrying the soft white stone in tapering shafts that widened as they went down, and over the centuries the champagne houses inherited them and joined them up into miles of cool, dark galleries. In peacetime the crayères did one job: they held the bottles, at a steady low temperature, through the slow second fermentation that turns still wine into champagne.¹

Then, in the autumn of 1914, the war arrived at the edge of the city and did not leave. For most of the next four years Reims sat almost on the front line, within easy range of German guns, and the people who stayed did the only sensible thing left to them. They went down into the chalk, and they lived there.

The city on the line

The German army reached Reims in early September 1914 and briefly occupied it, then was pushed back a few miles by the French counterattack on the Marne. That left the city just behind the German lines’ reach but not out of it: for the rest of the war Reims lay within artillery range, a target that could be shelled at will and almost never captured.²

The most infamous blow fell on 19 September 1914, when German shells, including incendiaries, struck the cathedral of Reims — the coronation church of the kings of France, one of the supreme achievements of Gothic architecture. The wooden scaffolding around the towers caught fire, the roof timbers burned, molten lead poured from the gutters, and the great building was gutted. The destruction of Reims Cathedral became one of the war’s enduring propaganda images, proof for the Allies of German barbarism.²

The cathedral was only the most famous casualty. Over the course of the war the city was hit by well over a hundred thousand shells across, by one common reckoning, some 1,051 days of bombardment. Of a city of tens of thousands of houses, the great majority were destroyed or badly damaged; by the end only a few dozen buildings were left habitable, and Reims had become, in the phrase of one visitor in late 1918, a dead city.³

Down into the chalk

As the shelling became a fact of daily life, the surviving population moved underground. The champagne cellars were the obvious refuge: deep, cool, vaulted in solid chalk that could shrug off a direct hit far better than any house, and already fitted out with lighting, ventilation, and passageways. The great houses opened their crayères to the public, and the cellars that had aged the wine of kings became, in effect, the city itself.⁴

What grew up down there was not merely shelter but a working town. Families set up home in alcoves cut into the chalk. Schools held lessons underground so that children could keep learning without being killed on the way to a classroom. There were hospital wards for wounded soldiers, chapels where mass was said, shops, workshops, and offices. The champagne firms went on running their business from below ground, and, remarkably, went on making wine — the harvest still had to be brought in, often by women and children and the old, under fire, and the bottles still had to be turned and aged in the same galleries where people now slept.⁴

Schools, chapels, sleeping quarters, offices, packing rooms — a whole way of life sprang up underground, in the same chalk galleries that aged the champagne.On daily life in the Reims cellars during the war

Life in the cellars was safer than life above, but it was not comfortable. The chalk kept a constant, clammy cool that was ideal for wine and hard on people; the air was damp, the light was poor, and there was no privacy. Illness spread in the crowded galleries. People climbed to the surface when they dared, to salvage what they could from the ruins of their homes and to work the vines, and went back down when the guns started again, for years.

Making champagne under fire

The survival of the wine trade through all this became a point of pride and of propaganda. That champagne continued to be made and shipped from a city being pounded to rubble became part of the legend of both the wine and the region’s defiance. The houses lost buildings, stock, and workers, and the vineyards themselves were torn by trenches and shellfire, with a large share of the Champagne region’s vines destroyed over the course of the war.⁵

The cost in people was heavier still. The wider region lost a great part of its population to death and flight, and Reims itself emptied as the war ground on, its citizens killed, scattered, or finally evacuated. Those who stayed survived largely because of the chalk.³

Why the cellars, and not just any cellar

It mattered enormously that Reims happened to sit on the crayères. An ordinary town of the period had ordinary cellars — brick vaults a few feet down, useful against a near miss but not against sustained heavy artillery. The chalk pits of Reims were something else: quarried tens of metres into the rock, vast, structurally sound, and linked into a network large enough to hold much of a city’s population and its activities. The very geology that made the place great for champagne — deep, workable chalk that keeps an even temperature — is what made it survivable in a modern bombardment.¹

The chalk of Champagne is usually celebrated for what it does to wine: the drainage, the minerality, the steady cellar cool that lets champagne age slowly into something fine. For four years it did a different kind of work, sheltering the living from the shells overhead. The same ground served the wine and the people, and the two came through the war bound together in the region’s history.

Afterward

Reims was rebuilt in the two decades after the war, much of it in a confident Art Deco style, and the cathedral was slowly and painstakingly restored, aided in part by American money from the Rockefeller family. The champagne houses came back up out of the ground and rebuilt their above-ground premises, and the crayères returned to their proper business of aging wine, which they do to this day; several are now visited by tourists who walk the same galleries that once held schoolrooms and hospital beds.²

The story has become part of how Champagne understands itself: a wine of celebration made in a place that endured one of the war’s longest ordeals, in cellars that kept a city alive. The galleries have long since gone back to holding bottles rather than families, but the record of those years remains part of the region’s history, carried in the same chalk that ages the wine.

Related dates

Wine and war are old companions, and not only in the vineyard. Explore what else happened on this article’s date below.

Read more

Wine and conflict run together through history: read the full history of Champagne, the region and the wine, explore the impact of conflict on wine through the ages, see how the World Wars reshaped Burgundy, and visit Taittinger, whose Reims cellars run through the same chalk.

References

1. On the Roman origins of the Reims crayères, their expansion by the champagne houses into networked galleries, and the chalk’s even cool temperature that suits champagne aging: histories of Champagne and its cellars. ↩
2. On Reims near the front from September 1914, the 19 September 1914 bombardment and burning of Reims Cathedral, its status as a propaganda symbol, and its later restoration (with Rockefeller support): histories of Reims in the First World War. ↩
3. On the scale of the destruction — well over 100,000 shells across roughly 1,051 days of bombardment, the great majority of the city’s buildings destroyed or damaged, only a few dozen left habitable, and Reims described as a “dead city” by late 1918: accounts and figures for the bombardment of Reims. ↩
4. On the population sheltering in the champagne cellars and the underground life that developed there — homes, schools, hospital wards, chapels, shops, offices, and the continued running of the wine business: accounts of daily life in the Reims cellars during the war. ↩
5. On champagne being harvested and made under fire, the losses of buildings, stock, and workers, and the destruction of a large share of the Champagne region’s vineyards during the war: histories of Champagne in the First World War. ↩

Books worth reading

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Champagne: How the World’s Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times
Don & Petie Kladstrup
A narrative history of Champagne that includes the region’s ordeal in the First World War and life in the cellars.

Reims on Fire: War and Reconciliation Between France and Germany
Thomas W. Gaehtgens
A detailed history of the bombardment of Reims Cathedral and its long afterlife as a symbol and a restoration.