11. Saint-Julien-en-Quint / Vassieux-en-Vercors (stage 11)

4 points of interest

• 

  Plateau of Vassieux

  The plateau of Vassieux-en-Vercors is an open landscape characteristic of the karstic plateaus, the surface water is almost non-existent and the soils are not thick. However, dolines, which are depressions where the clay accumulates, thus allowing the cultivation of cereals, alongside these dolines, the stones are heaped up.The ruins of two old windmills are visible in the hamlet of La Mure.

• 

  Departmental Museum of the Resistance

  The museum, which was founded by an old member of the Resistance, was renovated in its entirety in 2010. The museum tour is dotted with rich collections, connecting the revived history of the maquis and the rebuilding with the first-hand accounts of its founder. The tour is interspersed with a lavish collection of objects from the period and tactile terminals, and is structured around three themes: The Vercors before the Vercors, which presents the local and international context from 1918 to 1942; The Vercors Maquis, which contextualises the history of the Maquis from late 1942 to August 1944; and The Vercors after the Vercors, which details the post-war period, the reconstruction of the Vercors, commemorations and memorial buildings.

• 

  Vassieux church

  The church of Vassieux-en-Vercors was not spared during the bombing raids of World War II, and the bell tower is all that remains of the old building. The new church adjoining the bell tower (the only preserved edifice) was designed by the architect Pierre Myassard. The choir was reoriented to the west during the rebuilding work, and the decorative style was executed by the painters Aujame, Humblot and Borgès, the Grenoble glassmaker Montfallet and the sculptor Emile Gilioli. The painting of the choir was replaced by an altarpiece by the artist Carmelo Zagari; two stained-glass windows and the altar were designed by Jean-Marc-Cérino. The altar, which is made from Tavel stone, houses the relics of Edith Stein, a German Jew who became a Carmelite and died while being deported to Auschwitz in 1942.

• 

  Vassieux-en-Vercors

  Vassieux-en-Vercors is a place of resistance, and remains forever marked by history. Vassieux is one of the 5 towns and villages of France named after the Companions of the Liberation by General de Gaulle. The village paid a heavy tribute to the help brought by its inhabitants to the maquis of the Vercors. In fact, while the maquis were waiting for a parachute of provisions and weapons, it was the Nazis who sprang up in gliders and landed in the plain of Vassieux, on July 21, 1944. The massacre that followed sounded the end Of resistance in the Vercors. In the central square, a commemorative plaque (a martyrologist) honors the names of the inhabitants, 76 women, children and men who lost their lives on the 430 inhabitants of the village. The Memorial of the Resistance invites us to reflection and to remember. But Vassieux also retains the traces of an earlier history: that of prehistoric men, using an important deposit of flint, evoked by the Museum of Prehistory.