Linkmeister

Need a clock repaired?

Oh, this is too clever and too typical of bureaucracy; there's a clock in the Pantheon, France's National Mausoleum. It hasn't worked since the 1960s. A bunch of clandestine heritage restorers snuck into the place, fixed the clock (it took a year!) and then told the authorities about it. What did the authorities do? The Center of National Monuments was not amused; it fired the guy in charge of the monument and filed charges against the group.

Here's an interview the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. did with one of the ringleaders. Move the slider to the 20:00 minute mark.

CBC's lead-in to its interview:

In this age of hypersecurity, you'd think it would be nearly impossible to sneak into a world-renowned monument at all -- let alone slip inside, set up a workshop and, right under the noses of the staff, repair an antique clock. But that's just what a group of underground "cultural guerrillas" did, not so long ago in Paris at the famous Panthéon.

Lazar Kunstmann was one of the clandestine repairman who worked on the clock. We reached him in Paris.

Cleared! The judge threw the case out on Friday. From The Guardian:

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

"When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon's officials know or not," said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. "We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.

Isn't that wonderful?

(And no, I don't know why the Guardian has his name as Klausmann and the CBC has it as Kuntzmann.)

Posted by Linkmeister at November 27, 2007 12:01 AM | TrackBack