Note sull'episodio
Mont-Saint-Michel began about 525 million years ago as Cambrian magma cooling into hard leucogranite, left as a 92 meter spike when softer rock eroded. Its bay off Normandy has tides of 14 meters, about 46 feet, that Victor Hugo said came in like a galloping horse, leaving quicksand at low water and earning the name Saint Michael in peril of the sea. Legend says that in 708 the Archangel Michael told Aubert, bishop of Avranches, to build a church there and burned a hole in his skull when he hesitated. In the 11th century William of Volpiano set the abbey's crossing on the summit and wrapped the peak in crypts to carry the load. After Guy of Thouars burned the village and abbey roofs, King Philip Augustus funded the Gothic complex called La Merveille.
William Longsword annexed the mount to Normandy in 933, and the embroidered Bayeux cloth commemorating 1066 shows Harold rescuing Norman knights from its quicksand. Through the Hundred Years War the English never took it, and after a failed 1433 siege they abandoned their bombards in the mud in 1434. The revolution turned the abbey into a prison known as the Bastille of the Sea until a campaign championed by Victor Hugo closed it in 1863. On August 1, 1944, it was liberated by American private Freeman Brower and two British reporters. A causeway built in 1879 let the bay silt up, so a 200 million euro project begun in 2006 added a dam on the Couesnon and, in 2014, a light bridge on pillars. About 23 residents now host some three million visitors a year.
- How quicksand forms when trapped water pushes sand grains apart and grips a trapped leg
- English cannons left behind in 1434 still on display near the outer walls
- Private Brower invited to sign the island's golden book of visiting nobility
- A dam that stores the incoming tide and releases it to flush silt, and a 2015 supertide that covered the bridge
- La Mère Poulard's omelets, salt meadow lamb, and dolphins that follow the currents into the bay