Notre Dâme des Cèdres was the church for the residents of Ifrane in the late colonial period. The Christian community in Ifrane quickly outgrew the small wooden chapel that served it in the 1930s. Construction on the church began in the late 1930s and although it held services in the decade and a half that followed, the building was never completed. 

This exhibit looks at the history of the building using items from the M6L Archives & Special Collections as well as those from the Centre d’archives d’architecture contemporaine in Paris, France. 

Notre Dame des Cèdres Today

Today, what remains of the Notre Dame des Cèdres lies hidden behind a thick row of trees and a parking lot. Many visitors to the city (and even some residents) are entirely unaware that the structure there used to be a church.

An Unexpected Architectural Legacy

There are two surprising elements about the architectural history of Notre Dame des Cèdres. The first is the architect who designed it and the second is the radically different designs proposed by that architect for its form.

Paul Tournon (1881-1964), Architect of the Notre Dame des Cèdres

Notre Dame des Cèdres was one of four churches designed for Morocco by the French architect Paul Tournon (1881-1964). Originally from Marseille, Tournon was trained at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. Tournon was well known for his work in France, perhaps most famously for his design of a Parisian church today known as the Église du Saint-Esprit de Paris.

Tournon rose to prominence in an era of French imperialism, during which the colonial project was for many tied to Christian missionary activity. As conservator Meriem Simon has noted, he was “[l]oyal to the universalist vocation of Catholicism… [and] had a missionary conception of his role as architect, elaborating as many projects for foreign [religious] Missions as for the perimeter of the the [French] capital.” Alongside his projects in France and Morocco, his designs included churches destined for colonies including Laos, Lebanon, and Madagascar. It was only those in Morocco, however, that would be constructed.²

Tournon designed two other churches in Morocco besides the Notre Dame des Cèdres, both of which are well-known today to Morocco’s urban residents. The first was Saint Joseph de l’Océan (today known as the Centre Culturel Ben Barka) in Rabat, constructed between 1927-1935. The second was the well-known Church of the Sacred Heart of Casablanca (Église du Sacré-Cœur de Casablanca), located in the heart of the city, which was constructed between 1930-1946.

The design and construction of Notre Dame des Cèdres immediately followed the church in Rabat and would represent an architectural style that departed from the rest of Tournon’s repertoire.

Architectural Drawings

The original architectural drawings for the church, today housed in the  Centre d’archives d’architecture contemporaine in Paris, are dated 1939. Tournon’s files relating to Ifrane contain two radically different designs. The first (1935) was for a church with a tall spire, which was much closer to Tournon’s style of buildings in France. The second design was drawn a few years later (1939), suggesting his earlier design was not accepted and he was asked to propose something else. Unsurprisingly, the choice was made to follow the second design, which better suited the red-tiled roofs of the resort town.

Remembering Notre Dame des Cèdres & Everyday Life in Ifrane

From its construction until Moroccan independence in 1956, the unfinished church was used by the town’s Christian community. This included both permanent French residents, who operated the towns hotels, restaurants, and camps, as well as visitors and pilgrims. The images here on display show the place of the church in the everyday life of colonial-era French.

As Khadija Mamouni has noted, Notre Dame des Cèdres is one of several important sites of memory for former colonial-era residents of Ifrane, representing a key node in what she calls “Digital Networks of Colonial Nostalgia“. The church appeared frequently on online message boards, where the history of its construction was debated by those who remembered it from their childhoods spent in Ifrane. ⁵

This article from Maroc-matin (19 March 1948) was written by the priest (curé) of Ifrane, Joseph Meurisse, who would several years later become priest of the Église des Saints-Martyrs in Marrakesh.⁶ Meurisse notes that the church was to date still incomplete and proposes that its walls should bear the names of the French soldiers who died during World War II. Meurisse had himself served in the war and a website devoted to his squadron’s memory notes that after the war ended, he continued “to fight, in Morocco, to finish his church of Ifrane”.⁷ The article is soliciting donations to fund the church’s completion, include the purchase of a bell for the tower.

A few years earlier, a concert had been held in Ifrane’s Hotel Balima to raise money for that same cause. The program from that concert is now part of the M6L Archives and Special Collections (see above). The war appears to have been one of the main reasons why the church was not completed under Meurisse’s predecessor, Father Raphaël Carpentier.⁸

Postcards of Artists’ Drawings of Notre Dame des Cèdres

Gallery of Images relating to the Ifrane Church

Notes

1. Document AR-21-02-10-34. Part of an online collections from Centre d’archives
   d’architecture contemporaine. Online at: https://archiwebture.citedelarchitecture.fr/ark:/43435/1013327 ↩︎
2. Miriam Simon, « Paul Tournon (1881 – 1964), un architecte catholique », Livraisons de l’histoire de
   l’architecture [En ligne], 27 | 2014, mis en ligne le 10 juin 2016, consulté le 30 avril 2019. URL : http://
   journals.openedition.org/lha/366 ; DOI : 10.4000/lha.366 ↩︎
3. Postcard image from: https://www.delcampe.net/en_GB/collectables/postcards/morocco/rabat/maroc-rabat-eglise-saint-joseph-de-locean-cachet-centre-organisation-de-la-sante-correspondance-291179081.html ↩︎
4. Postcard image from: https://www.delcampe.net/fr/collections/cartes-postales/maroc/casablanca/maroc-casablanca-l-eglise-du-sacre-coeur-au-clair-de-lune-colorise-carte-postale-ancienne-1906715793.html ↩︎
5. Khadija Mamouni, “‘Who Remembers the Ifrane Lion? Digital Networks of Colonial Nostalgia” (Undergraduate Thesis, School of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, 2024). ↩︎
6. His name appears as priest of the church there in 1952: https://fr.geneawiki.com/wiki/Maroc_-_Marrakech. ↩︎
7. “Histoire de l’AAAGL” (9 June 2009). Accessed 6 October online at : https://halifax346et347.canalblog.com/archives/2009/06/09/14017396.html ↩︎
8. Mamouni, “‘Who Remembers the Ifrane Lion?”, 23. ↩︎