Bernard Plossu. Le Mont-Saint-Michel

This book looks at the extraordinary destiny of this site and examines the spell it exerts on the millions of tourists and pilgrims who pass through it every year. Mont-Saint-Michel also raises questions about our history, our roots and our future: what does this building have to say to us a thousand years on? What remains of its sacred dimension? How do we unravel the threads of history? This book does not pretend to answer all the questions, whether collective or personal, but rather to offer the reader a journey based on a previously unpublished set of photographs by Bernard Plossu taken on a single day in 2012, on overcast and rainy days, creating the special atmosphere that the photographer is so fond of.

This set of photographs shows their peregrination towards the church crowning the mountain. The monument appeared to him as the symbol of "a metaphysical truth" so hard to find in our world. During a stop at the summit, the sun shone down on a flooded terrace that had become a mirror. Plossu remembers a suspended moment, a kind of unreal escape that seemed to last an hour or two, even though they had been there all day. "Just a few hours, but the need to immortalise them was obvious. Even the most famous places always have something that magically reveals itself when you visit them. More than any other, Mont-Saint-Michel is one of them.

A commemorative book as much as an interior journey, it is accompanied by texts by art historian Damien Sausset.