Mont-Saint-Michel has gone through several major transformations since Adams' time and is in the midst of another one now that will change its meaning or meanings once again. Mont-Saint-Michel has been so many different things in the course of its long life, since its founding in the early eighth century, when the Bishop of Avranches built a church dedicated to the archangel Michael on a rock of granite in the sea. The buildup had pushed its way to within two kilometers of Mont-Saint-Michel by the nineteenth century and might have reached all the way had there not been a movement to stop it and preserve the island nature of ancient church. The French central state, together with the regional governments of Normandy and Brittany and the European Union, undertook a massive and expensive renovation project budgeted at nearly $300 million. The buildup of sand, accumulating every day, at Mont-Saint-Michel is the inevitable result of the powerful force of the sea.