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Origin and history

The chapel Saint-Nicolas de Haumont-near Samogneux was built in the first half of the 20th century (between 1930 and 1934) on the site of the former parish church of the village, destroyed during the First World War. It is one of nine commemorative chapels erected in the Meusian communes declared "dead for France" after the ravages of the Battle of Verdun. These villages, located in the red zone, have never been rebuilt, but their administrative existence has been maintained as a memorial. The chapel, with an elongated plan with a flat bedside choir, is distinguished by its cut stone facades and slender roof, initially covered with concrete. Its sober architecture, marked by white minerality, dialogue with the enclosure wall of the cemetery rebuilt shortly before by architect Perceval.

Funded by the titles of war damage, the chapel perpetuates the memory of the victims and the village that has disappeared. It is surrounded by the original cemetery, whose wall in rough rubble coated with hydraulic lime has been restored. The building, owned by the commune, was inscribed in the Historical Monuments by order of 15 December 2021, protecting both the chapel, the ground of the plot and the wall of enclosure (excluding the monument to the dead). Its location, on the operating path of Flabas, recalls the old spatial organization of the village.

Haumont-près-Samogneux, like the eight other municipalities concerned (Beaumont-en-Verdunois, Bezonvaux, etc.), symbolizes the total annihilation suffered during the conflict. These chapels, conceived as places of recollection and memory, materialize the absence while honoring the disappeared. Their construction between 1930 and 1934 reflected a desire for symbolic reconstruction in a region where the land, deeply marked by war, could no longer accommodate civilian life. The architect Georges Perceval, master of the project, designed a sober building, where the verticality of the roof and the whiteness of the materials evoke both peace and irreversibility of losses.

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