Let there be lighthouses

ON Île d'Ouessant, the farthest edge of France, the rain comes horizontally off the ocean and there is nothing on the horizon except waves and lighthouses, marking the line between land and sea, sea and sky.

Built as a technical aid to sailors, their architects often unknown, France's lighthouses have increasingly become a symbol of the nature of the country, of its patrimoine, or patrimony – a word that here carries a spiritual quality of patriotism and nationhood.

It was a Frenchman, after all, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, who invented a crystal lens for lighthouses, and another who thought to rest the turning lamps on a pool of mercury, which conducts electricity and moves with the earth.

But with time, harsh weather and automation, France's lighthouses are disintegrating. Nearly all the keepers have gone. With the introduction of global positioning satellite networks, the lights are no longer as crucial to the lives of mariners or the business of the state.

But the French still do not fully trust the American GPS devices, and the law requires lighthouses and beacons. There is no requirement to save the beautiful ones – just to have a strong light, visible up to 30 miles out to sea.

For Marc Pointud, an expert in maritime treasures, the disintegration of these coastal landmarks is a sin against civilisation. He founded the National Society for the Patrimony of Lighthouses and Signals to save them. In a cover article in a recent issue of Chasse-maree, or Tide Hunter, the country's boating bible, he sounds the alarm. "The lighthouses, and especially those in the sea, nourish the collective imagination," he writes. "They bring an epic dimension that belongs to the great legends and erect a patrimony in a unique and inseparable whole."

In person, over Breton cider, Pointud is more relaxed, but still insistent. "The lighthouses are the symbol of the presence of man on the sea, and they make people dream," he says.

He recognises that an effort to save the structures far out at sea, such as Armen, La Jument and Kéréon, all now automated and without keepers, is likely to fail. "It's always a question of the budget," he says, adding that the state cares about maintaining the light rather than the elegant towers in which the bulbs reside. "Too often, for them, it's like a traffic light."

Pointud has thoughts of tourism – charging more to see the lighthouses and using the money to carry out vital repairs. But the French state is not set up for financing of this kind, and the Ministry of Culture, charged with maintaining le patrimoine, concentrates on much older, grander buildings on land.

France still has a Department of Lighthouses and Signals in its Ministry of Infrastructure, and there are perhaps 150 such towers of distinction in this maritime country, which lacks a coast only on its eastern border.

Philippe Genty, who leads the department in this part of Brittany, called Finistère – the end of the earth – is doing his best to save the famous lighthouse of Eckmühl on the mainland, built in the 1890s with a bequest from the daughter of one of Napoleon's marshals, to make up, she said, for the blood her father had spilled.

What was constructed is beautiful: a tower of local Kersanton granite 180 feet above sea level, with a curving staircase of 272 steps tiled in pale blue-green opaline glass, rising to a wood-panelled room with marble ceiling and brass finials, in which stands a statue of the marshal. Now, many of the opaline tiles – no longer made – are cracked or broken, the iron is rusting, and the panelling and the ceiling have been dismantled to replace rotten beams.

"We see the lighthouses as technical, but they are also beautiful," Genty says. "We want to maintain the patrimony, our heritage."

After pushing his department, and trying to work with the Ministry of Culture, Genty has around £120,000 to begin to caulk the granite and replace the rotting beams and rusted iron.

"What we have is sufficient to keep it functioning, so it doesn't fall down," he says. "But in 50 years, if we don't fix them, they will all fall into the sea."

Genty is working with Pierre Alexandre of the Finistère office of the Culture Ministry, who notes that the region's lighthouses, due to both their navigation and historical value, are the most important in France.

He is providing money for technical assessments of the five lighthouses here classified as historic monuments, including the oldest, Le Stiff. "At this point, we can't think about investing in the lighthouses in the high seas," Alexandre says. "It's not considered feasible."

Le Stiff, 105ft tall and on the eastern edge of the small Île d'Ouessant, has warned sailors of danger since 1699. Then, huge coal fires were built at its top; now, its rose-coloured panes are lit by a large halogen bulb, controlled by computers on the ground, and many of the rooms are shut because of rotting floors and beams.

The Créac'h lighthouse, on the island's western end, is much taller, at 180ft, but also has severe structural rot. Its wonderful staircase is closed to tourists because the banister is too low and the risk of accidents too high.

Kéréon, built at sea, is revered for its elegant shape, oak panelling and the fine marquetry of its interior, with a large central star – the symbol for the lighthouses of France – worked in ebony and mahogany on the floor. Known as "the Palace of the Seas", Kéréon has beds built into the wood-panelled walls and the two lighthouse keepers used to walk around in felt slippers to polish the floors.

But now Kéréon is empty, visited only by technicians at long intervals, its interior said to be disintegrating from humidity and water damage. Jean-Yves Berthele, 52, was one of the last keepers of Kéréon, working a shift that included weeks on end spent in the lighthouse.

It was beautiful, he says, "but also very repetitive". The two keepers had to find a way to break the routine of washing the lenses and windows and maintaining the equipment, and to get along, he adds.

Television did not come to Kéréon until the late 1980s, "so we cooked all the time," Berthele adds. "As we French say, good morale is in the plate."

Lighthouse keepers were infamous for their drinking, and the archives examined by Jean-Christophe Fichou, a local scholar, are replete with stories of crime and violence.

Berthele still works for the Department of Lighthouses and Signals on île d'Ouessant, a treeless, sheep-filled island visited by as many as 1,000 tourists a day in the summer. Like the other former keepers, he sits in an office, monitoring computers and weather reports.

Asked whether, after his time in the lighthouse, he was frustrated by everyday life in a more typical house, he thinks for a moment and then says simply, but with a great and sudden passion: "I hate curtains." sm