Rochers sculptés de Rothéneuf

Adolphe Julien Fouéré was born in Saint-Thual, between Rennes and Dinan, in 1839. He was ordained on December 19, 1863, under the name Adolphe Fouré. In 1894, after 31 years as a curate and rector, he lost his parish at Langouët. Accounts of why differ, and his parishioners petitioned to keep him.

In October 1894, at 55, he retired to Rothéneuf, a village of fishermen and vegetable growers then in the commune of Paramé, where he assisted the parish priest. He told a journalist that this was hardly enough to do. "I had the idea of going out onto the cliff, face to face with the sea, my old friend," he said, "and every day I set to cutting stone." The village children, encouraged by their parents, came at night with hammers, he said, and broke what he had carved the day before.

The two points

He began on the Pointe du Christ, where a mission cross has stood since 1951. Most of the work is on the Pointe de la Haie, where Le Télégramme counted about 300 figures over nearly 500 square meters in 2022. Fouré described his method to visitors. He looked at a heap of granite for a long time while the sea "made its great voice heard," until he saw a subject in the stone, and then he started cutting.

He named two guiding lines, patriotic history and religious history, and he read the newspapers Le Salut and L'Ouest-Éclair. The rocks hold Saint Budoc twice, Saint Yves, Jacques Cartier, Gargantua, la Mère Michel and her cat, an oyster seller, and a seal. A scene from the Boer War shows President Paul Kruger and Colonel de Villebois-Mareuil. A line of five men named Jean runs from Jean I, cabin boy to Jacques Cartier, through a fisherman, an astronomer, and an idler, to Jean V, who defends his wife against the sea.

He painted them. His own guest book lists blue, light yellow, garnet, and chocolate brown, in a lime-based paint, and after each winter he cleaned the figures and repainted them for the summer visitors.

The hermitage

In the village, Fouré filled a house called Haute-Folie, later the Ermitage, with carved wood. Spencer Musson, an English travel writer, saw it as a museum in 1912: painted granite and carved tree roots crowded the courtyard, and inside were pictures framed with broken crockery set in cement and "dolls with spiteful heads of lobster claws." None of the wood survives. SPACES, an archive of art environments in California, says the cabin disappeared during World War II, and no source fixes when the wooden figures went.

A tramway line opened in 1896 to carry summer crowds to Rothéneuf. Fouré posed for photographs, sold postcards of his rocks by the thousand, signed autographs, and set out boxes for donations to the poor. He stopped carving in 1907 and died at Rothéneuf on February 10, 1910. He is buried in the Rothéneuf cemetery. By 1925, more than 80,000 people a year were coming to see the rocks, according to a figure reprinted by the local paper Le Pays malouin in 2012.

The Rothéneuf family

The tourist office's listing says the 300 figures represent "the legend of the Rothéneuf family, corsairs and pirates until the Revolution." Fuller versions, retold by travel sites in 2026, make the family fishermen who turned to theft and smuggling and ran down ships offshore in fast boats. They grow rich, side with the royalist Chouans in the Revolution, and are massacred by their neighbors. In these versions, a sea monster on the rocks holds the last of the Rothéneufs, a man in a Breton hat, under one paw. The Ryo audio guide places the family in the 16th century, and Futura, in July 2026, in the 17th. One written telling is Henri Brébion's 1948 booklet, La légende des rochers sculptés de Rothéneuf.

No account of the legend cites a parish register, a court case, or a ship. Fouré's figures once carried painted labels, and the names recorded include La Haie, La Goule, Grand Chevreuil, Petit Chevreuil, Bas-Plat, and L'Ours. La Haie is the point itself. Grand Chevreuil is the rocky island at the mouth of Rothéneuf's bay.

The Association des Amis de l'Œuvre de l'Abbé Fouré, founded by Joëlle Jouneau in 2010, works from Fouré's 1906 guest book and the old postcards. In its reading, the group known as the Rothéneuf Family has the abbé at its center, wearing a crown. The association asks whether the idea came from the collaborators his guest book mentions.

Erosion

The Pointe de la Haie is private land. In 2012, Le Pays malouin reported that the Janvier family had run it commercially for four generations. France's business register lists the operating company, Les Rochers Sculptés, with Antoine Janvier as manager. The rocks are not listed as a historic monument at either level of French protection.

On July 22, 2009, the regional conservator of historic monuments and a museums adviser from the DRAC, the state's regional cultural office, inspected the site. Their report called the condition "alarming" and said the damage "seriously compromises the legibility of the sculptures" when compared with old photographs. It blamed wind, salt, moss, and lichen, and visitors who walk on the rocks themselves, and it suggested simple markers to keep people off the carvings.

Musson had already seen the paint "almost washed away" in 1912, with "forms and faces vanishing again into the rock." In 2017, AFP reported that about three quarters of the nearly 300 figures recorded on postcards had disappeared, among them figures that had been cemented to the cliff. Jean Jéhan, a local historian, told Le Pays malouin in 2012 that the rocks would be gone within 50 years.

The association checks the moss and lichen after every winter, Jouneau told France 3 in 2025, because they are what attack the stone. With SPACES, it has petitioned for the rocks to be protected. Its interpretation center in Rothéneuf closed on September 1, 2026, until further notice, as its agreement for the building came to an end.

In October 2026, the Saint-Malo tourist office listed entry at 5 euros for adults and 3 euros for ages 10 to 17 and for groups of 10 or more. Press reports from 2012 to 2022 gave 2.50 euros, and some listings still show that figure. Cards, checks, and cash are accepted, and there is parking, a shop, and toilets.

The site is listed as open every day. Hours are 10am to 12pm and 2pm to 6pm from March through June and in September and October, 9am to 7pm in July and August, and 10am to 12pm and 2pm to 5:30pm from November through February. It closes on December 25 and from January 5 to January 31. Some older listings give a Wednesday closing.

The carvings cover steep, uneven granite, and the tourist office advises sturdy shoes. The 2009 state report named walking on the figures as one cause of their wear, so it's best practice to keep to the steps and paths cut into the rock.

The Pointe du Christ, where Fouré started, is free to visit and lies along the GR34 coastal path. The association's Centre Abbé Fouré, at 26 avenue de la Varde, ran free guided walks between the village and the rocks in 2025 and closed on September 1, 2026, until further notice.