Notre-Dame du Raincy and the Great War

The relative inconspicuousness of war-related symbols at Notre-Dame du Raincy belies the origin story of this church. It might never have been executed, in fact, without a sizable donation from an anonymous parishioner in memory of his son who died on the front lines.¹¹ Yet the French public eventually associated Notre-Dame du Raincy not with this tragic story, but rather with an uplifting event that occurred during the war. The church was to occupy a lot in the center of Le Raincy, site of the wartime headquarters of French generals Joseph Joffre and Michel-Joseph Maunoury.¹² Here, in the early days of the conflict, these officers had devised a strategy to keep Paris from falling into enemy hands. With the German army speeding toward the French capital, Joffre and Maunoury requisitioned Parisian taxicabs to move fresh troops for a planned counterattack. About six hundred taxis were assembled on 6 and 7 September near Le Raincy. They carried between three thousand and five thousand soldiers to the front lines, about 40 kilometers east. The subsequent Battle of the Ourcq marked the start of the First Battle of the Marne, which effectively stopped the German advance and kept Paris from falling.¹³ Recent research has questioned the magnitude of the taxi operation's impact, but the event became legendary nonetheless—a symbol of civilian participation and Allied resolve.¹⁴ 

Father Nègre, the priest of Le Raincy who received the anonymous benefactor's gift, decided early on that the new church would pay tribute to the taxi story and to the historical significance of the building site. In 1922, he asked General Maunoury to serve on the patronage committee backing the project, and the general agreed.¹⁵ Throughout construction and after—the bishop of Versailles consecrated the building on 17 June 1923—French newspapers trumpeted how Notre-Dame du Raincy commemorated the taxis and the Battle of the Ourcq. While some journalists dubbed the church “Notre-Dame de la Consolation,” others called it “Notre-Dame de l'Ourcq,” “Notre-Dame de la Marne,” or even “Saint-Taxi.”¹⁶ 

Denis's stained glass window depicts the start of the Battle of the Ourcq, with blue-uniformed poilus (French soldiers) lining up to board civilian taxis as the Virgin Mary hovers overhead (Figure 3). On the left side of the image, the faces of Generals Maunoury and Joffre are recognizable as Joffre points imperiously toward the cars. In both content and form, this scene celebrates the union sacrée that predominantly held firm in France throughout the war, as private citizens, the Catholic Church, and the state put aside their political and ideological differences and collaborated to protect their homeland from invasion.¹⁷ Denis's window effectively conveys respect for the union sacrée while reifying the popular view of this church's connection to Le Raincy's contribution to the war effort.

Nearby within the church, the chapel of the dead is housed in a low cubic volume abutting the south side of the bell tower. An octagonal turret caps this volume. Apart from a statue of a knight and a sculpture of a dove representing the Holy Spirit, the chapel is empty (Figure 4).¹⁸ Green marble plaques hanging on the concrete walls list the names of Le Raincy's war dead. Duplicating the shape of the turret, an octagonal pattern of black lines is etched into the concrete floor. This pattern—four triangles converging to create a Maltese cross traversed by two swords—corresponds to the croix de guerre that sculptor Albert Bartholomé designed in 1915 for a French military medal commending acts of exceptional valor.¹⁹ On the chapel's floor, this cross is surrounded by an inscription in Latin: “In sanguine eorum, justitia et pax osculatae” (In their blood, justice and peace meet). With its statue, its military insignia, its names of the dead, and this consoling message, the chapel adheres closely to the basic template for French municipal Great War monuments built from 1918 onward.²⁰ Historian Antoine Prost notes that the “idea of raising monuments to the dead did not originate with World War I, but no other war spawned so many.…The proliferation of monuments reflected the depth of the nation's trauma.”²¹ On 25 October 1919, the French government passed a law that encouraged the construction of such monuments, providing subsidies to towns that did so. “Most village monuments were inaugurated before 1922,” writes Prost, “as each township vied with its neighbors.”²² Le Raincy's chapel allowed the town's citizens to boast of their own monument, albeit one located inside a church rather than in a public square.²³ Notre-Dame du Raincy thus joined a plethora of similar newly minted works utilizing approved signs of mourning to honor dead soldiers. Like these others, the church artfully promoted the idea that the soldiers' sacrifices were not in vain.²⁴ 

There is a third element in Notre-Dame du Raincy that acknowledges the war, and it is easily overlooked. An article of 1924, published in La Construction moderne, notes that the topmost pier of the bell tower is comparable to a historic type of French structure known as the lanterne des morts (lantern of the dead).²⁵ Paul Jamot, an art critic and curator who knew the Perrets well, supported this comparison. In his 1927 monograph on the brothers, Jamot states that the “crowning cap” of the tower of Notre-Dame du Raincy “acknowledges the votive meaning of the church and recalls the souls of those who died for the salvation of France: the uppermost motif of the steeple, the last pole that surpasses all of the other ones, was inspired by those little monuments that one finds in several provinces and which are called ‘lanterns of the dead.’ ”²⁶ Jamot cites an entry in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XI^e au XVI^e siècle describing lanterns of the dead as medieval structures found in French cemeteries, likely having evolved from earlier pagan traditions.²⁷ These masonry towers culminated in small chambers pierced by openings that framed lamps whose flames were once continuously lit (Figure 5). Not only would these elevated lights signal the locations of cemeteries at night, but they would also ward off evil spirits while honoring the deceased. The tower at Le Raincy is not illuminated, but its top is punctured by openings through which the sky can be dimly perceived (see Figure 1). According to Jamot, this upper element is analogous to the elevated chambers found in lanterns of the dead. Further, because it is formally disengaged from the nave, the tower is highly evocative of these earlier structures.

By the early 1920s, a growing number of French Great War cemeteries included such lanterns.²⁸ In July 1919, an entry titled Lanterne des Morts won an honorable mention in the competition for a monument to residents of Nice killed in the war.²⁹ Louis-Marie Cordonnier's plan for the monument at Notre-Dame de Lorette, a 76-meter-high lantern of the dead beside the new basilica he designed, fueled the trend (Figure 6).³⁰ This project, sited in a field of French soldiers' graves near Lens, in the Pas-de-Calais, was widely exhibited and publicized after September 1920. Newspaper articles praising it noted the suitability of reviving a long-lost French building type to commemorate the Great War. Critics viewed the solemnness of this ancient memorial type, and the symbolism of its eternal flame, as a fitting response to modern needs. Commenting on Cordonnier's project in a front-page article of 1921, a writer for Le Figaro proclaimed that “a ‘lantern of the dead’ should shine forever, in the nights of France, from the Yser to the forests of the Vosges, [as a] symbol of fidelity, gratitude, and faith.”³¹ French veterans' associations, meanwhile, backed a grandiose proposal to erect a chain of lantern towers, spaced some distance apart at regular intervals, to illuminate the full extent of the former front lines, from the North Sea to the Swiss border.³² 

In the fall of 1922, while the church at Le Raincy was rising, a major competition was held for an ossuary and monument to be located in the battlefield of Douaumont, near Verdun, in memory of the 170,000 French soldiers who died there. The competition program required that the design of each entry incorporate a lantern of the dead.³³ Léon Azéma's winning entry placed the tower at the center of a stocky, vaulted ossuary, its crowning room lit from inside at night (Figure 7).³⁴ A similar competition was held two years earlier for the war memorial at Dormans, marking the First Battle of the Marne.³⁵ Though this competition had not mandated a lantern of the dead, the winning entry—a neo-Romanesque design by Alexandre Marcel and Georges Closson—did include one (Figure 8).³⁶ On 7 September 1922, the art critic Abel Fabre (writing under his pen name A. Fulcran) proclaimed in La Croix that Notre-Dame du Raincy would eventually “be the counterpart of the chapel of Dormans, on the Marne.”³⁷ Offering a stylized modern take on the medieval lantern of the dead, the Perrets' bell tower nodded to similar memorials rising at Dormans and elsewhere in France during those years.

The revival of the lantern of the dead in French Great War memorial designs corresponded with visions of a unified, homogeneous nation whose roots could be traced back to the Middle Ages. Such imagery appealed to French citizens as they struggled to situate their staggering wartime losses within the context of a long and illustrious national history.³⁸ Notre-Dame du Raincy contributed to this discourse by interpreting an ancient type in modern form. With its stained glass and its bell tower's stepped masses, its articulated, pier-like columns, and its tracery-like concrete block construction, the building does resemble northern French churches of the medieval era—however modern its interpretation of these elements. Notre-Dame du Raincy was part of a contemporaneous neomedieval revival that, in the wake of a brutal war, resonated with prevalent conceptions of French national identity.

The stained glass window representing the Battle of the Ourcq, the chapel of the dead, the bell tower modeled on medieval lanterns of the dead—these features catapulted Notre-Dame du Raincy into a wider conversation, pervasive in 1920s France, regarding the roles of art and architecture in commemorating the war. All of these elements aligned with then-widespread views about how best to address the challenge of commemoration. However, the church diverged significantly from most contemporary French war memorials in its use of materials, in particular its honest, modern display of unclad and untreated concrete. Yet this, too, was part of the conversation about how to commemorate the war through architecture.

Designers of French monuments to the Great War typically preferred traditional prestige materials such as marble or limestone; even when using less expensive structural materials—rubble stone walls, brick, reinforced concrete, metal armatures—they hid these beneath more elegant stone claddings. Marcel and Closson's memorial at Dormans, for example, is wrapped in a pale, creamy stone excavated from quarries in the Meuse and northern France.³⁹ Azéma's monument at Douaumont has a concrete structure, but it is masked beneath a thin layer of ashen limestone.⁴⁰ Cordonnier selected a pierre bleu de Givet stone from the Ardennes for Notre-Dame de Lorette.⁴¹ These buildings followed a long tradition of luxurious stone surfaces in French monumental architecture.

Notre-Dame du Raincy's small budget precluded the use of such materials. Nor was the budget large enough to allow for the laborious finishing work (to improve the concrete's appearance) that the Perrets later employed on other projects.⁴² Rather than masking Le Raincy's rough cast concrete surfaces with plaster or paint, the builders left them as they appeared when the formwork was removed.⁴³ Visitors can plainly see the pockets caused by trapped air and the lumps of cement or pebbles on the thin, fluted columns. Ragged edges mark the building's right angles (Figure 9). Joints between formwork planks left inconsistent, partially frayed ridges of cement on the rectangular piers along the church's perimeter. The nave's vaulted ceiling is riddled with irregularities that echo the linear grain of the wooden formwork (Figure 10). Conspicuous dark stains are evident where larger formwork panels once abutted one another (Figure 11).

These rough surfaces exhibit an aesthetic rawness that departs significantly from the smoothness and finishes typical of most contemporary French monuments or churches. Yet two other war memorials, both conceived before 1922 by architect André Ventre, took a similar tack in showcasing their rough concrete structures.⁴⁴ A 1923 article in L'Intransigeant states that Notre-Dame du Raincy was “built by the Perrets, those innovative architects who, like a few others including the architect Ventre, constructor of the monument on the Pointe de la Grave, dream of creating a style of reinforced cement.”⁴⁵ In fact, Ventre's Monument aux Américains at the Pointe de la Grave (along the Atlantic seaboard of southwestern France) was then but a proposal for a still-unbuilt memorial.⁴⁶ French president Raymond Poincaré had originally charged Bartholomé with the project, but in 1922 Bourdelle and Ventre joined the design team.⁴⁷ Their reworked, collaborative project was publicized the following year, along with the claim that it would be built of unclad concrete (Figure 12).⁴⁸ 

By 1920, Ventre had completed another war memorial that candidly displayed its concrete structure: the Tranchée des Baïonnettes memorial at Douaumont, just meters away from the future site of Azéma's ossuary.⁴⁹ Built to commemorate an explosion that killed an entire company of French soldiers in 1916, Ventre's low, stocky monument spans the burial trench with a massive horizontal roof supported by thick, drum-shaped columns (Figure 13). Gritty gray concrete is visible everywhere, inside and out. As with the vaults of Notre-Dame du Raincy, the huge pillars and slightly sagging surfaces of the ceiling retain the bumpy, striated imprint of the timber formwork (Figure 14). Surprisingly, perhaps, French critics lauded Ventre's decision to leave such shoddy-looking surfaces on a war memorial while shunning more lavish decorations. As one wrote:

According to this author, the bare concrete of the Tranchée des Baïonnettes memorial was justified not only by the poverty and suffering experienced by local civilians during the war but also by soldiers' military uses of the same material.

Indeed, during World War I, concrete construction proliferated along the western front at a rapid pace. Short on wood and metal, armies on both sides relied on this alternative material for building defensive bunkers and fortifying trenches.⁵¹ The Germans built temporary concrete shelters in 1915, and Allied armies soon followed suit.⁵² By the time the war ended, rugged cast concrete was a common sight on the front lines. Thus, it later seemed a fitting material for honoring soldiers who had served on those lines. Concrete—a drab, practical material, the “color of war”—became imbued with symbolic potential.⁵³ Concrete military shelters on the front lines may have even inspired the bunker-like appearance of Ventre's Tranchée des Baïonnettes memorial. Traveling in 1917 through battered parts of the Aisne region, an area that enemy forces had just relinquished after occupying it since 1914, Ventre was struck by the monumental aesthetics of German concrete bunkers. Filling several large sheets of paper, he meticulously traced their heavy, horizontal forms and bumpy, cratered surfaces (Figure 15).⁵⁴ Just three years later, he deployed an analogous set of forms and surfaces in his design for a memorial to French soldiers killed by the Germans.

Unlike Ventre's low, bulky Tranchée des Baïonnettes, the church at Le Raincy is soaring and delicate. Yet both memorials feature unrefined cast-in-place concrete and rough textures. Describing the Perrets' church in the Manchester Guardian in 1926, journalist Muriel Harris stated that “the great concrete monument at Verdun over the Tranchée des baïonnettes is an attempt to realize the part played by concrete during the war.”⁵⁵ She reiterated this point a month later in her review of Notre-Dame du Raincy for the New York Times Magazine: “Perhaps the first idea that concrete of all things expressed the war, with its huge stimulation of effort, both for good and for bad, appeared in the memorial over the ‘Tranchée des baïonnettes’ at Verdun.”⁵⁶ As Harris saw it, the unclad concrete surfaces of Notre-Dame du Raincy and the Tranchée des Baïonnettes memorial deliberately echoed the prominence of concrete on the western front.⁵⁷ Moreover, she suggested, rough concrete could speak to civilians who had never seen the front lines. Although wartime disruptions brought most civilian building projects to a halt, some did proceed, and they relied heavily on concrete.⁵⁸ Many were industrial in nature, directed toward the production of goods to support the army and the war effort. Designers of these structures turned to concrete for the same reasons that military engineers did: concrete was less expensive and more widely available than competing materials. From 1914 to 1918, concrete warehouses multiplied in low-density suburbs across France.⁵⁹ Thus, citizens could indeed associate bare concrete skeletons—similar to the one at Notre-Dame du Raincy—with memories of the war.

In fact, Le Raincy was itself a working-class suburb that had experienced a boom in the construction of concrete warehouses during the war years. As Karla Britton notes, in 1923, Notre-Dame du Raincy's concrete surfaces echoed recent additions to the local built environment: during the war, the previously sleepy, traditional village was disrupted by the intrusion of concrete hangars devoted to manufacturing.⁶⁰ The Perrets' church thus brought the rough industrial aesthetics of utilitarian concrete construction into the heart of the town, and into the realm of art. Britton further argues that Notre-Dame du Raincy's rough concrete conveys “a poignant restraint that reflected the lean circumstances caused by the war,” again linking the edifice to the wartime experience of the population it served.⁶¹ The same conditions that rendered building materials pricey and scarce during the war also triggered a shortage of food and everyday necessities.⁶² Therefore, the church's concrete, in addition to borrowing a wartime aesthetic of bunkers and warehouses, could be seen as a comment on the French public's wartime privations.

Wood was another basic commodity that became rare in France during World War I.⁶³ Unable to obtain firewood or coal for cooking and heating, French citizens of modest means resorted to burning furniture, trash, and anything else they could find during the harsh winters of 1914–15 and 1916–17.⁶⁴ After the war and amid the reconstruction of the 1920s, wood remained expensive.⁶⁵ Like concrete, it became evocative of wartime conditions. Maintaining traces of the timber formwork that gave it shape, the exposed concrete of Notre-Dame du Raincy speaks to the place of wood in wartime and postwar France. These traces, and the absence of the forms that made them, evoke the scarcity and effective disappearance of this basic resource during a period of strife (Figure 16).⁶⁶ 

Notre-Dame du Raincy's materials can thus be seen to harbor several references to the war. The church's raw concrete connects it to Ventre's contemporaneous designs for concrete war memorials, to the battlefield bunkers that dotted the front lines, and to the industrial concrete sheds around Le Raincy and other French towns during the war. The material's rough treatment further evokes the dismal conditions of wartime living and the dearth of wood during those years. Yet the Perrets' design recalls the war not only through its imagery and materials. To complete the church within budget, the builders took advantage of construction methods developed in response to the war's humanitarian challenges and crippling material shortages. After the war, these methods were advanced to meet the pressing need to replace churches and houses destroyed by the fighting.

The Great War reduced hundreds of French and Belgian towns and cities to shambles. The loss of life and habitat, along with the destruction of cultural heritage, preoccupied people around the world.⁶⁷ Medieval churches were especially hard-hit. In September 1914, German bombs struck the Gothic cathedral of Reims, provoking outrage among the Allies.⁶⁸ Much of the building survived intact, and plans for its rebuilding quickly took hold, but many smaller village churches on the western front were damaged beyond repair. Others were converted by the German army into military strongholds, their interiors fortified with concrete.⁶⁹ German forces toppled the towers of some churches, either to prevent the Allies from using their steeples as landmarks or to damage French morale.⁷⁰ Thus, like the millions of dead and wounded civilians and soldiers, towns and buildings were victims of the war.

In the fall of 1914, French pundits debated how best to deal with the loss of built heritage—in particular, the loss of places of worship.⁷¹ The fate of Reims Cathedral became an especially fraught and widespread topic.⁷² Auguste Perret sided neither with those who thought it should be fully restored to its former state nor with those who insisted that it be abandoned as a ruin to forever signal the war's barbarism and the damage done by the German bombs.⁷³ He believed that the cathedral should be made usable again, but that it should be left as a partial ruin.⁷⁴ Catholic and traditionalist factions, meanwhile, argued that new churches should be built as soon as possible for the war-stricken populations in northeastern France. One organization dedicated to this effort was the Société de Saint-Jean, a Catholic group concerned with renewing religious art in France.⁷⁵ Denis belonged to this group, as did Fabre. In early 1916, the society sponsored a competition for the design of temporary churches for war-torn regions.⁷⁶ Auguste and Gustave Perret submitted an understated gabled project, cruciform in plan, wrapped in the double walls typical of portable wooden huts and clad with sheets of fiber cement (Figure 17).⁷⁷ Only the altar inside and a small cross above the front door marked the building as a church.

A few months after this competition, the Société de Saint-Jean participated in a large exhibition titled La cité reconstituée, which was held in the Tuileries gardens of Paris. The exhibition's purpose was to present remedies for the wartime destruction of France's built environment.⁷⁸ Some of the displays presented long-range plans to reconstruct and enlarge existing French towns, but most of the exhibition focused on short-term solutions. Full-size mock-ups of demountable huts were built to demonstrate how inexpensive temporary shelters could be provided for families returning to villages flattened by the fighting, dwellings in which they could await the building of more permanent structures. For its contribution to La cité reconstituée, the Société de Saint-Jean asked the architect Placide Thomas to oversee the construction in the Tuileries of a temporary kit-of-parts church based on his entry to the 1916 competition sponsored by the society. Like other demountable huts of the time, Thomas's Chapelle de Saint-Jean was made of modular wooden panels slotted into a wooden frame (Figure 18).⁷⁹ These components could be mass-produced and shipped in compact parcels to any town that needed them.⁸⁰ For the chapel's interior, Maurice Denis produced twelve framed paintings depicting the martyrdom of Christ.⁸¹ 

Unlike Thomas's church, the skeletal structure of Notre-Dame du Raincy was permanently cast in place and not intended to be disassembled. Yet the Perrets relied on a logic of modular components similar to that seen in Thomas's design. Thomas utilized a repeating set of square glazed wooden frames partitioned by Greek crosses and inscribed with smaller circles. This presaged the Perrets' system of modular and geometric concrete blocks for the envelope of Notre-Dame du Raincy. Much as Thomas had aligned several of these wooden frames to form the banister separating the choir from the nave in his exhibition church, the Perrets, six years later, used perforated concrete blocks matching those on Notre-Dame du Raincy's façade to create a low guardrail around the church's altar (Figure 19).

In the spring of 1916, Auguste Perret declined to participate in La cité reconstituée, which he dismissed as a needless event with little potential to bring his firm commissions.⁸² His brother Gustave, however, contributed to the design of a demountable wooden hut displayed there: the Adrian barrack.⁸³ After joining the French army engineering corps in the fall of 1914, Gustave had teamed up with the polytechnicien Louis Adrian to develop a functional hut suitable for military operations.⁸⁴ Critic Pierre Vago, a friend of the Perrets, reported in 1932 that Gustave played a major role in the project, “which is, in large part, his work.”⁸⁵ Thus, it comes as no surprise that the wooden frame of the Adrian barrack—characterized by diagonal struts bisecting the lateral walls to anchor the roof to the ground (Figure 20)—resembles the frame of the temporary church design the Perrets submitted to the Société de Saint-Jean competition (see Figure 17).

Though neither the Perrets' cement church nor Thomas's wooden one was built across the war zone as intended, the French army produced about 100,000 Adrian barracks during World War I.⁸⁶ Other Allies, notably the British and American armies, likewise developed systems for producing quick, cheap, simple buildings made of standardized parts that could be sent to remote locations and assembled by small teams of unskilled workers.⁸⁷ Most such buildings were made of wood, but wartime shortages compelled the British to use metal instead for their Nissen huts. Hundreds of thousands of these structures, made of corrugated metal sheets curved around semicircular metal frames, were manufactured and distributed throughout France during the war.⁸⁸ Armies on both sides built huts for use as cantonments for soldiers, hospital wards, storage sheds, and emergency housing for refugees and prisoners. After the war ended in November 1918, some of these huts were used as municipal buildings or as temporary residences for French and Belgian citizens returning to regions ravaged by war.⁸⁹ Postcards of the time show Adrian barracks and Nissen huts converted into makeshift churches for towns such as Soyécourt, Brie, Fonches, Estrées-Deniécourt, Lihons, Chaulnes (all in the Somme), and Neuville-Vitasse (in the Pas-de-Calais) (Figure 21). Churches made of recycled Nissen huts featured clerestories that allowed natural light to trickle in from the center of their barrel vaults. Wooden crosses and stout steeples with bells were added to advertise the religious function of these otherwise anonymous, industrial-looking buildings.

To meet their budget for Notre-Dame du Raincy, the Perrets employed building practices identical to those the Allied armies had used during the war. They reduced costs significantly by having the church's perforated concrete blocks prefabricated in large batches. As the French building industry struggled with the skyrocketing material and labor costs triggered by the war, such mass-production and prefabrication construction practices became widespread. Notions of efficient industrial manufacturing caught on as the need to generate ever greater quantities of war supplies rose in France, and as new machines and systems allowed. Réjean Legault argues that Notre-Dame du Raincy demonstrates the Perrets' appropriation of wartime and postwar emphases on faster, more streamlined, cheaper methods of production.⁹⁰ Frederick Taylor's ideas on the scientific organization of labor (or, as translated by the chemist Henri Le Châtelier, the organisation scientifique du travail) made significant inroads in France during the war years.⁹¹ 

The Perret archives contain limited information about Notre-Dame du Raincy's construction, but they do reveal the involvement of a company called Les Chantiers de Villemonble, headquartered near Le Raincy. The Perrets subcontracted the task of manufacturing the perforated concrete blocks to this company.⁹² On its letterhead, Les Chantiers de Villemonble touted its services as enabling the “rapid and economical reconstruction of the devastated regions,” expanses of which stood just east and northeast of the company's offices. It specialized in manufacturing component pieces for construction, including pipes and cladding tiles made of matières agglomérées—that is, glued and pressed materials of cement and other powderlike substances.⁹³ Thus, the methods and materials used for the Perrets' church were the same as those used for many buildings in the war zone.

Notre-Dame du Raincy, though not located in an area wracked by war, was nonetheless loosely affiliated with a set of projects designed for those regions.⁹⁴ Those projects included the Perrets' fiber-cement church for the 1916 Société de Saint-Jean competition, Thomas's wooden kit-of-parts church for La cité reconstituée, the temporary churches made of former military huts, and buildings—such as those from Les Chantiers de Villemonble—made of mass-produced parts and dependent on the latest construction techniques. Thus, in addition to commemorating the war and its toll, Notre-Dame du Raincy was directly associated with a range of lightweight, industrialized designs and practices developed to help wage that war as well as to rebuild those edifices it had destroyed.

Notre-Dame du Raincy's chapel of the dead and its stained glass window representing the Taxis of the Marne are its two most explicit references to the war, but these hint at other links on which observers in the 1920s often commented. Jamot saw a deliberate reference to medieval French lanterns of the dead in the belfry's massing. Another writer noted that “the church of Le Raincy commemorates the victory of Ourcq and some people say: ‘her steeple recalls anti-aircraft canons!’ ”⁹⁵ Neither Auguste nor Gustave Perret fought on the front lines, though both designed temporary structures for the war zone. Technical innovations developed for those buildings found their way into the design of Notre-Dame du Raincy. In sum, many connections to World War I appeared within the iconography, materials, and building methods that formed this project.

A sharp distinction nonetheless separates the building's explicit war references from its more indirect or unintentional ones. While the chapel of the dead, Denis's window, and the lantern of the dead-cum-bell tower align with conservative French notions of commemoration, the materials, finishes (or lack thereof), and building processes used here do not. This discrepancy echoes disagreements in 1920s France about the consequences and meanings of the war.

Historians have shown how reactionary ideologies made significant inroads in France (and other parts of Europe) following World War I, as chauvinistic eulogies to dead soldiers were accompanied by a resurgence in traditional notions of value and order.⁹⁶ Art was not impervious to this trend. French artists who, prior to the war, had pioneered groundbreaking and controversial forms of representation suddenly pivoted away from these during the late 1910s and early 1920s, embracing in their stead a return to figural representation and overtures to the classical past.⁹⁷ Patriotism, nationalism, and a disdain for the disruptions of modernity lurked beneath the surface of such work, which heeded poet Jean Cocteau's call for an aesthetic rappel à l'ordre (return to order).⁹⁸ In its more overt symbolism, Notre-Dame du Raincy was part of this trend. Its war-themed imagery affirmed mainstream views of the period, asserting France's status as a superior, singular culture with a long history deserving of revival and respect.⁹⁹ 

Yet the church contains two features widely viewed as a threat to French conservatism, both outgrowths of the war, both widespread in its wake: its concrete construction and its standardized, mass-produced components. During the war, many French citizens viewed these as necessary evils justified by extenuating circumstances. Like the war itself, raw concrete buildings and industrialized construction processes were widely understood as exceptional, not normal, occurrences.¹⁰⁰ With the armistice, progressive reformers (including technocrats such as Raoul Dautry, Louis Loucheur, and Édouard Herriot) expressed support for these innovations as necessary for the modernization of architecture and construction.¹⁰¹ They met stiff resistance from opponents who heaped scorn on standardized modular construction and on reinforced concrete's use for significant architecture, seeing both as incongruous with French values.¹⁰² Their adoption, it was feared, would displace traditional materials and procedures regarded by many as integral to French architectural culture and identity.¹⁰³ In short, Notre-Dame du Raincy's materials and means of construction endeared the church to those who embraced novelty over tradition.¹⁰⁴ 

Reform-minded French progressives were also forced to contend with the fact that many of their compatriots associated reinforced concrete and standardization with Germany, whose people the French had often branded as mechanistic, ruthless, and uncivilized.¹⁰⁵ After the war, there was little sympathy in France for ideas perceived as German. Auguste Perret and other champions of concrete architecture sought to bypass this bias by insisting that reinforced concrete was a French invention.¹⁰⁶ The truth, however, is more complex. Various kinds of concrete or cement strengthened with metal emerged in several places—including France—around the middle of the nineteenth century, and German engineers and builders made significant contributions to these developments.¹⁰⁷ The Great War triggered further advances in concrete construction on both sides of the front, and French military engineers in particular learned much from the successes of their rivals. Thus, although Notre-Dame du Raincy honors French losses through imagery rife with nationalistic overtones, the church is constituted of a material and mode of construction emblematic of France's technical debt to Germany and other foreign countries.

The church therefore straddled both sides of a debate that coursed through 1920s France, epitomizing its citizens' failure to agree on how best to conceptualize and represent the war and its consequences. On the one hand, Notre-Dame du Raincy's iconography aligned with jingoistic popular ideologies that cast the war as a justified and ultimately triumphant fight waged by good against evil. On the other, the church's more oblique references to the war conveyed its darker legacies, such as the scarcity of resources, as well as its technological innovations. The latter cut across state boundaries and challenged the then-conventional view that France could heal properly only by casting off foreign influence and the war's unsettling technical by-products. By having a foot on each side of the debate, Notre-Dame du Raincy called both into question.