The Bayeux Tapestry and the quest for Europe

Many of France’s cultural custodians have warned that, by loaning the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum, the authorities are committing a ‘true heritage crime’, with the potential for irreparable damage to one of the world’s oldest and most famous embroideries. Yet the tapestry, originally commissioned as propaganda to legitimise William the Conqueror’s reign as England’s first Norman king, has long been politicised, its story marked by frequent ‘heritage crimes’. 

In 2023, a missing fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry was discovered in the State Archives of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, over 80 years after it was stolen by Nazi researchers from occupied France during the Second World War. Following negotiations between French and German officials, the stolen fragment was repatriated to the city of Bayeux in Normandy earlier this year. 

The discovery reveals that the Normans were not the only group who sought to project power through this medieval artwork. For Heinrich Himmler, the past was fertile terrain for myth-making. This approach was institutionalised through the Ahnenerbe, the Himmler-led SS research institute for ‘ancestral heritage’, whose mission was to collect, study and reinterpret cultural artefacts to support Nazi ideology on racial hierarchy and historical destiny. These were the intellectual foundations for the Nazi’s distorted and nightmarish vision of Europe’s future, summed up in the eerie and prophetic call for Germans to embrace their role in a Schicksalsgemeinschaft (‘community of fate’).

Projects that retroactively placed ‘Aryans’ at the centre of European history were varied. Archaeologists were, for instance, sent to occupied Poland to find material ‘evidence’ of ancient Germanic presence, relying on selective interpretation of ceramics and burial customs. This revision of early Slavic history included the use of a second-century funerary urn, which bore a swastika-like symbol, discovered in a grave field in the village of Biala, to assert the Germanic origins of Polish lands and justify Nazi annexation. All were guided by Himmler’s underlying logic: the deeper into history they reached, the greater the legitimacy they conferred.

The Sonderauftrag Bayeux (Special Operation Bayeux) was another central project. Himmler was drawn to the Bayeux Tapestry because it chronicled something the Nazis hoped to emulate: a successful invasion of England. Yet his interest went deeper than this. The Nazis regarded this 11th-century tale of Norman conquest not just as inspiration but as existing evidence of their own supremacy, that of an ‘Aryan’ race. The Normans who conquered England were of Viking – and by extension Germanic – descent, making them, in the Nazi view, the ancestors of modern German ‘Aryans’. When the tapestry fell into Nazi hands during the four-year occupation of France, it was reappropriated to support Hitler’s ideas about the ‘Aryan’ race’s once and future dominance.

There is a potent historical irony that this thread-by-thread account of the Norman conquest of England was hailed as proof of ‘Aryan’ military prowess. After all, the Anglo-Saxons, as the name implies, were themselves a Germanic people, who settled in England in the fifth century, and Harold Godwinson, the tapestry’s fallen Anglo-Saxon king, was of Scandinavian descent, through his mother, Gytha, a Danish noblewoman. 

Unfazed by this historical inconsistency, in 1941, the Ahnenerbe commissioned teams of German archaeologists and academics to travel to occupied France to study the tapestry, where it was stored in a concrete shelter beneath Bayeux’s Hôtel du Doyen to protect it from British bombing raids. The team undertook detailed analysis: for instance, they compared objects featured within it to Viking artefacts, noting the supposed similarity between the Norman ships and Viking longboats. Herbert Jeschke, an artist from Berlin, was also commissioned to create full-size drawings of the Tapestry.

At some point during this study, a member of the team removed a small section of the underside of the tapestry and brought it back to Germany, where it remained hidden for decades. The fragment recently discovered in Schleswig-Holstein came from the estate of Karl Schlabow, a German textile specialist who had participated in the 1941 research project. 

The stolen fragment contains no imagery, just inner fabric. It was not just the tapestry’s battle scenes that held propaganda value. Though the Nazis knew even less than we do today about the tapestry’s exact creators, even its weaving technique and linen quality were invoked as evidence of Aryan technical and cultural sophistication. Most experts now agree that it was produced in Norman England, probably by Anglo-Saxon nuns in Canterbury, renowned for their skill in embroidering large, complex textiles.

Though small, the rediscovered fragment is significant in so far as it provides further concrete evidence of direct Nazi interaction with the tapestry. In June 1944, as Allied forces advanced following the D-Day landings, the Nazis brought the Bayeux Tapestry by van to Paris where it was held deep underground in the Louvre’s cellars for safekeeping. On 18 August 1944, days before the liberation of Paris, Himmler sent an urgent coded message – intercepted by British codebreakers at Bletchley – to the commander of Nazi-occupied Paris: ‘Do not forget to bring the Bayeux Tapestry to a place of safety’, widely understood as Berlin. Fortunately, any plan to transport the precious artwork to Germany was thwarted by the rapid pace of the Allied advance. Before German forces could follow through on Himmler’s orders, the Louvre was once again in French hands.

The Nazis were not the first to be drawn to the tapestry’s symbolic power. A century and a half earlier, the would-be master of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte, invoked it as a statement of French military genius and cultural preeminence. In 1803, he had the tapestry sent from Bayeux by horse-drawn carriage for an exhibition at the Louvre, then renamed the Musée Napoleon, in a bid to draw parallels between the 1066 invasion of England and his own campaigns across Europe. 

The tapestry’s narrative – which presented William’s conquest as lawful and justified by Harold’s oath-breaking – was convenient. It allowed Napoleon to frame his own imperial ambitions as rightful succession, and part of a longer historical continuum. In this respect, there are overlaps in the ways Napoleon and the Nazis used history to legitimise their rule. The latter sought to reconstruct history entirely to frame their rule as racial destiny. Napoleon, on the other hand, attempted to position himself within a line of great conquerors – whether by casting his planned invasion of Britain as a second Norman Conquest, or by presenting his empire as a revival of Charlemagne’s (‘In me you see Charlemagne. I am Charlemagne, me!’). Yet both linked their rule to a grand past, framing their power as a natural continuation of history. The symbolic authority of artefacts like the Bayeux Tapestry made those narratives more tangible. 

While Napoleon’s display of the tapestry at the Louvre was a shrewd exercise in drumming up public enthusiasm for his military designs, the exhibition provoked fury across the Channel. A letter published in the Gentleman’s Magazine at the time stated that England would survive ‘in spite of the vain, inglorious tauntings of the ambitiously mad Corsican tyrant, with all his host of myrmidons at his heels’. Fortunately for Britons, the letter proved prescient. Napoleon’s dreams of emulating William the Conqueror’s historic victory were soon dashed and the tapestry, having lost its immediate propagandistic value, was returned to Bayeux shortly after.

That this medieval masterpiece survived long enough to be commandeered by either Napoleon or, over a century later, the Nazis, is a feat in and of itself. It might easily have failed to outlive the French Revolution – a time when vast numbers of objects were destroyed across the country in an effort to erase all symbols of monarchy and the Catholic Church.

The Bayeux Tapestry is infused with religious symbolism. William the Conqueror was a devout Christian, loyal to the Pope, who secured papal blessing for his invasion of England. Midway through the tapestry, a scene depicts a messenger delivering him a papal banner, sent by Pope Alexander II to endorse his claim to the English throne. This banner is one of the tapestry’s richest symbolic moments, signalling that William’s campaign was divinely sanctioned. His victory was presented as a demonstration of God’s judgment, and, implicitly, a testament to the authority of the Church.

Revolutionary crowds did consider cutting the tapestry up amid the iconoclastic fervour of 1792. It was saved by a local lawyer, Léonard Lambert‑Leforestier, who hid it away in his own home. Ultimately, the tapestry survived because local antiquarians emphasised that it was of historical, not religious, importance. After the Reign of Terror, it was recognised by the authorities as part of France’s emerging patrimoine and brought under state protection.

While the tapestry has made several journeys of note within France, it has never returned to Britain since it was created nearly 1,000 years ago. Despite having been transported through a war zone and having survived Napoleonic-era carriage rides, the French authorities are not taking any chances today. To ensure a safe passage to Britain, a ‘dry run’ with a full-size copy of the 68-metre-long tapestry was even conducted in March, equipped with sensors to measure any potential damage from vibrations along the planned route to the British Museum. 

When we consider the physical fragility of the Bayeux Tapestry, alongside its history of near-thefts and destruction, it is unsurprising that French heritage experts remain fiercely protective. Yet the widespread fascination with this medieval embroidery has kept it safe throughout the tides of history. For various actors, the destruction of the tapestry would have meant the loss of a valuable opportunity to project power through it. It endures, remarkably, because successive audiences have sought to bend its story and make it their own.