La Rochelle

Why go

La Rochelle is a city on a human scale, built around a harbour rather than a boulevard. You can walk from the medieval towers through stone arcades to the market, then cycle out to the beaches or across the bridge to the Île de Ré. The light is Atlantic, the pace is unhurried, and the history is as dramatic as anything in Paris: a merchant republic in all but name that defied a king and a cardinal, and paid for it.

History

La Rochelle grew from a small settlement on a rocky inlet into a free port in the twelfth century, when the dukes of Aquitaine granted it a charter; Eleanor of Aquitaine confirmed its privileges. The Knights Templar made it their main base on the Atlantic, and the town grew rich on wine and salt shipped to England and northern Europe. In the fourteenth century the Saint-Nicolas and Chaîne towers were built to guard the harbour mouth, with a chain stretched between them at night.

In the sixteenth century the city’s merchants embraced the Reformation, and La Rochelle became the great Protestant stronghold of western France, almost a state within the state. Richelieu decided to break it. From September 1627 the royal army besieged the city by land, and a great sea wall was built across the bay to cut it off from English help. Under its mayor Jean Guiton, the city held out for fourteen months; when it surrendered in October 1628, famine had killed most of its people. Its walls were razed, except the harbour towers.

The port recovered by turning to the Atlantic. Ships carried settlers, soldiers and the ‘King’s Daughters’ to New France in the 1660s, and in the eighteenth century La Rochelle merchants took part in the slave trade and the sugar trade with the Caribbean, a history the city now addresses openly in its museums.

During the Second World War the Germans built a submarine base at La Pallice, and the city stayed in German hands until May 1945. Peace brought a new identity: the Francofolies music festival since 1985, the bridge to the Île de Ré in 1988, and an early, and famous, municipal scheme of free yellow bicycles in the 1970s.