On the first photo, the sea of ice meanders, abundant, under Mont-Blanc around 1885. One hundred and thirty years later, another photo shows a thin white carpet and a lot of exposed rock. In Paris, the Librairie des Alpes bears witness to the impact of global warming on the mountains.
Opened in 1933 near the banks of the Seine, the narrow blue-fronted shop has long been the haunt of mountaineers in the French capital. Its founder, André Wahl, was himself a mountain enthusiast. Its collection of books gave pride of place to the history of the massifs and their conquest by man.
Among the works still available for sale today is a volume by Jean-Jacques Rousseau entitled Letter of two lovers, inhabitants of a small town at the foot of the Alps, published in 1761, before a reform of French grammar.
Between the Assault of Mount Everest (1922), Carnet du vertigo, about the ascent of Annapurna (1950) or even The Conquest of K2 (1954), the visitor discovers how much mountain adventurers were mythologized in the 20th century. And how much their image could be political. In The Three Last Problems of the Alps, the German Anderl Heckmair recounts his ascent of the north face of the Eiger (Switzerland), in 1938. At the end of the book, a photo, captioned “The most beautiful reward”, shows him pose with Hitler.
In this mixture of history and expedition, one element has long remained absent: global warming. “With our parents, we never talked about it. It was at best: “It’s hot this summer”, or “what snow this winter!” Says Jean-Louis Vibert-Guigue, the owner of the bookstore, which his mother Elise, a mountain dweller and sister-in-law of the founder, ran before him for 40 years… until she was 85. Same for literature. Nor Roger Frison-Roche, whose novel Premier de cordée was a worldwide success and to whom several shelves are devoted, than his contemporaries treated, according to the bookseller, of global warming, “a very recent concern”.
The dozens of photos on display bear witness to the harsh impact of the weather, and the heat, on the mountain, which previously “was quite white, including summer”, but “today is much darker, because it there’s just no more snow,” he notes.
His earliest photograph, taken around 1865 and yellowed with albumen, shows three men, sticks in hand, climbing near a sculptural mound of snow, carved by the wind. “I climbed quite a bit on glaciers. I’ve never seen the mountain like this, never,” insists Jean-Louis Vibert-Guigue, 74. “The seracs, the frozen snow bridges, with some exceptions, you see it much less (in the Alps), because for it to last, it has to become very hard, due to the accumulation of snow and cold. , he said again. Now they are rounder, less tall and less sculptural.”
Rocks, affected by strong heat much earlier than before, sometimes implode. “The mountain is hot, it creaks, it speaks, it shouts. She is hurt. Unfortunately, she needs a good cold snap to get better,” observes the artist and photographer Nicolas Seurot, met at the bookstore, where his book Les visions passéistes: en haut is sold. Italian mountaineer Alessandro Sigismondi witnessed a dramatic manifestation of global warming in his country on July 3. When he arrives at the bookstore, he immediately asks for photos of the Marmolada glacier. Last year, he was climbing a wall facing him when a huge block broke off, killing eleven. The year 2022, very hot, had accelerated the melting of European glaciers. It was 10°C the day before the disaster at the top of the Marmolada.
“I see the changes taking place. They’re amazing and they’re fast,” he observes. And to cite the Gran Sasso massif, in the Apennines, in central Italy, where a glacier “has completely retreated” and has “now been downgraded to a category called snowfield”.
Pierre Chassagne, a 25-year-old carpenter, says he doesn’t feel nostalgic for “something that (he hasn’t) known”. Hence the valuable role of the Librairie des Alpes. “When you see covers of old books, you have the impression that you are seeing a mountain that no longer exists.”
