Olivier
DE MONICAULT
Lion-sur-mer
Olivier de Monicault, grandson of Marguerite de Blagny, the strong woman of the Château
Let me introduce myself, Olivier de Monicault. I was born in Prague in Czechoslovakia, but I'm not Czech by any stretch of the imagination, my father was a diplomat living abroad at the time. I was born just before the last world war, in 1935.
The château, a temporary hospital during the Great War
The château was occupied by German soldiers.
On 30 May, 6 days before the landings, Marshal Rommel came to Lion-sur-Mer. He was in command of the whole area. He came to make an inspection.
In the days leading up to D-Day, German soldiers were no longer in the château. They were all on alert in the bunkers.
My grandmother stayed behind, we left her a small part of the château and she looked after it throughout the war.
The disembarkation takes place, she's woken up at 5am by the noise and she thought to herself, ‘What's going on?’
She didn't understand anything at first. She thought there was a lot of noise. And everyone was a bit panicky. And she realised at the end of the day that it wasn't Germans, it was English.
She saw all the people from the village (Haut Lion) arrive and take shelter in the cellar, because we're the only place where there's a big cellar.
For weeks, the cellar here was occupied by a large number of people seeking shelter.
They had to be fed. They killed a pig. They managed to live together because there were so many of them.
As the château was occupied by the Germans, the English considered it to be a military objective, a barracks for German soldiers.
In the morning cannonade, they aimed to demolish the château.
There was major material damage, but the château itself was only slightly affected. It was riddled with shrapnel, and everything was rebuilt after the war, but it survived well.
The fighting didn't stop on 6 June at Lion-sur-Mer, it went on. You will of course have heard about the Cities, where a shell or a bomb fell on a shelter just next to the church, killing the doctor, the Mayor and their whole family. Two families were decimated, the Opoix family and the Corbin family. And it happened in the first few days of July.
May 1945, exactly one year after D-Day, my parents arrived in the spring of 1945 to see the extent of the damage. There was a lot of damage.
I have a very vivid memory: we crossed France in a gas truck, from Roanne to here. And by the end of the day we'd driven through Falaise and Caen... It was amazing. Everything was razed to the ground, the crossing, it was hallucinating.
We forget a little about the extraordinary sacrifice made by the Americans. The British, of course, but they were defending their own territory 400km (248 Milles) from here.
It is perhaps this that needs to be conveyed as a priority, rather than the tour de force of the landings.
For centuries in France we had a hereditary enemy, England. And then, since 1870, we've had a hereditary enemy in Germany, and well... we have to turn the page.
© 2025 | Transmissus
