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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

The church of the Décollation-de-Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Traves, located in the department of Haute-Saône, was built between 1746 and 1749 under the impulse of the parish priest Pierre Nicolas Humbert, member of the community of missionary priests of Beaupré. Its construction was made possible by the sale of communal timber, authorized by the Council of State in 1745, and the award of work to the bisontin entrepreneur Pierre Joseph Amodru for 16,000 pounds. The land was acquired from the Marquis Louis Bénigne de Bauffremont, and the first stone was laid on 13 May 1746. Although the architect remains unknown, the plan centered in the Greek cross and the dome probably inspires the drawings of Nicolas Nicole, a collaborator of the parish priest Humbert.

The construction mobilized the inhabitants of Traves and Bucey-lès-Traves, with additional financing from a second sale of wood in January 1746. The church was blessed on November 8, 1747, but the work of the presbytery continued until 1749. Despite the departure of Humbert in 1748, he supervised at a distance the interior decoration, including the altarpieces carved by Claude Charles Garnier (1720–76) and installed in 1760. The furniture, statues and ironworks of the eighteenth century, as well as the dome painted by Joseph Garret in 1880, bear witness to this preserved Baroque heritage.

Ranked a historic monument in 1998, the church underwent notable restorations: the addition of a lantern to the bell tower by Louis Moreau in 1829, the enhancement of interior gilding and painting under the direction of architects Lebeuffe and Renahy in 1840, and the complete renovation of the structure and roof by Richard Duplat between 2011 and 2012. His bold plan, rare in Franche-Comté, and his history of royal forest management under Colbert made him a unique witness to the religious art of the Enlightenment.

The building, owned by the municipality, houses an adjoining cemetery and preserves a bell tower typical of the area. Its furniture, inscribed in historical monuments since 1959, and its centered architecture make it an emblematic place of the Haut-Saône heritage, studied in particular by historian Jean-Louis Langrognet in the framework of the Archaeological Congress of France (2020).

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