The doomed generation memorial

The Memorial of Sainte-Anne-d'Auray is a war memorial in a small village in Brittany. But this is not just any memorial. It was built not to remember a battle or a hero, but to remember a generation. The memorial was designed by René Ménard, an architect from Nantes, and took from 1922 to 1932 to build. It stands 52 meters tall and 12 meters in diameter. The mandatory inscription in 2016 called it 'a monument of extraordinary grandeur.'

The memorial is a rotunda, topped by a dome and a tower with a rounded top. Inside, five chapels are arranged by five dioceses of Brittany. The central mausoleum is dedicated to all the war dead.

The memorial's official name is 'Mémorial de Sainte-Anne-d'Auray.' The inscription in 1914 reads: 'La Bretagne à ses Enfants.'

At its inauguration in 1932, attended by 150,000 people, the benediction was carried out by Mgr Maglione. Five years later, the memorial stands as a testament to a lost generation: the 240,000 Breton soldiers who died in World War I, but only 8,000 names are inscribed on the memorial.

The memorial was built for those 240,000 soldiers, to remember 'the innumerable and nameless victims of the war,' as one inscription put it. But it was built too late. By the time it was completed, the great war was over, and a new, even more devastating war was about to break out.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons