Cluny: The Greatest Church of the West, the Eight Per Cent That Is Left, and Napoleon's Stud

Required Activities

• Stand under the clocher de l'Eau-Bénite on the surviving south arm of the great transept — one arm of one transept, as long on its own as a small cathedral — then walk the line of the vanished nave to the stumps of the Barabans towers that framed the great portal, blown up on 8 May 1810, and work out from the 187 m marked on the ground how much of the biggest church in the West the eight per cent you are standing in actually is

• Take the guided visit of the Haras national — opened by Napoleon in 1807 as a stallion depot with about fifty horses, first stabled in the abbey's own Saint-Hugues buildings — and find the proof of where the stone came from: the stables put up between 1814 and 1880 are built on the abbey's foundations out of the material of its demolition, so look for carved abbey stone reused in the walls and the collection of carriages inside

• Find the street the demolition men cut straight through the nave in 1801 to make the destruction irreversible, then walk the old town looking for abbey stone in the house fronts — the church was a quarry for the village until 1813 — and climb the tour des Fromages for the view down onto what is left; the monastery buildings behind have held an Arts et Métiers engineering school since 1901

• Work out the sequence of the destruction on the site: the church sold to a Mâcon speculators' ring and demolition begun in July 1798, Alexandre Lenoir arriving in August 1800 and getting a minister to order it stopped that November, and the demolishers ignoring the order and carrying on anyway — then find the one surviving tower and decide whether Lenoir saved anything at all