In 2020, the new mayor Michaël Delafosse confirmed his ambition to enter the race for UNESCO World Heritage. Three years later, the file was refocused on the international “Memory of the World” register. For the moment.
It’s done. After a long, very long process, marked by a first failure in 2018, the city of Nîmes has just obtained the UNESCO World Heritage listing of its Maison Carrée, an exceptional testimony to the relationship between power of Rome and the colony of Nemausus. A recognition which should allow the Gard prefecture to boost its tourist numbers very quickly.
The richness of documentary heritage
About sixty kilometers away, the mayor of Montpellier Michaël Delafosse harbored a similar ambition the day after his election in 2020. “We must put Montpellier on the map on a world scale,” he affirmed to Midi Libre, at time to discuss his project revealed during the campaign, to launch the city in the race for World Heritage. The idea was to carry a file around the history of medical education in Montpellier. The elected official then imagined working on a perimeter which included, in the Ecusson, “the former faculty of medicine, the botanical garden as well as the public spaces around”.
Three years later, and while the neighbors of Nîmes have reached the goal, the objective has been reworked. “The City and the University of Montpellier have initiated work to submit an application for the registration of documentary collections linked to medical sciences in the international register of the Memory of the World of UNESCO Memory of the World”, we are told. one in the mayor’s entourage, asked to provide an update on the file. Created in 1992 under the aegis of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this program aims to raise awareness among the international community of the richness of documentary heritage and the need to ensure its conservation for future generations and to make it accessible to a wide audience. With 64 new registrations in 2023, there are now 494 collections registered.
Library, drugstore, herbarium…
To submit its future application file, Montpellier intends to rely on an old and precious scientific documentary heritage including: the library of the faculty of medicine; drawings and other artistic works from the Atger Museum; casts and other anatomical collections; the druggist and the medicine jars; the herbarium, one of the oldest in the world, which lists three million plants and plants collected over more than three centuries. “Important work on the inventory of collections and heritage has just been started by the University: it will make it possible to precisely identify in the coming months the elements likely to be valued and protected within the framework of this application” , we are still told at the town hall.
If UNESCO registers the Montpellier collections in the Memory of the World register, they would join prestigious documents. For example, to cite only those submitted by France and already registered, the declaration of human and citizen rights, the Lumière films, the appeal of June 18, 1940, the archives of Louis Pasteur or even the Mappa Mundi from Albi.
A first step…
However, this inscription would not have the same significance – symbolic as economic – as recognition as a World Heritage Site. Ambitions revised downwards? On the contrary, we are assured at the City. “This application for the Unesco Memory of the World label will aim to demonstrate the exceptional character of the Montpellier experience around the art of healing, which has its roots in the teaching of Hippocrates, and has been deployed over more than eight centuries. At the same time, major restoration work (Jardin des Plantes, university collections, etc.) is being carried out as part of the 2021-2026 State-Region plan contract and this will make it possible to prepare the candidacy for World Heritage status and to give him his best chance.” A first step therefore. The beautification of the city center and its extension must also be part of this movement.
The Nîmes experience, with an objective assumed from the first election of Jean-Paul Fournier in 2001 for registration 22 years later, shows that the race for World Heritage of Humanity is a very long-term ordeal. Montpellier seems to have learned its lesson.
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