Langres

Why go

Langres is the kind of place French people drive past on the motorway to the south, which is exactly why you should stop. The whole old town sits on a limestone spur, wrapped in ramparts you can walk all the way round, with towers built for artillery and long views over the plateau that divides the Paris basin from the Saône valley. Inside are a Romanesque-Gothic cathedral, Renaissance mansions and a museum to Denis Diderot, the town’s most famous and most unruly son.

History

The spur has been occupied since the Neolithic. In Roman times, as Andematunnum, it was the capital of the Lingones, the Gaulish people who gave the town its later name; a Gallo-Roman gate still stands in the walls. Langres became an important bishopric, and from the twelfth century its bishops were also dukes and peers of France, among the great lords of the realm.

The cathedral of Saint-Mammès, dedicated to Mammes of Caesarea, a third-century martyr, was built in the late twelfth century. At the end of the Middle Ages the kings strengthened the town as a frontier fortress: Louis XI had the Saint-Ferjeux tower built in 1472, one of the first artillery towers able to fire in every direction, and the massive Navarre tower followed in the 1510s, inaugurated by Francis I. In the Renaissance the bishops and canons commissioned tapestries and mansions, and a cutlery trade grew up in and around the town.

On 5 October 1713 Denis Diderot was born here, son of a master cutler. He left for Paris as a young man and became the driving force of the Encyclopédie. In 1884, for the centenary of his death, the town renamed his birthplace square after him and raised a bronze statue of him by Bartholdi. Another child of the town, Jeanne Mance, had left in the seventeenth century to co-found Montreal.

In the nineteenth century the army added a citadel and remodelled the walls; in 1887 France’s first rack railway was built to carry passengers up from the station to the fortress, running until 1971. Langres today is a quiet sub-prefecture, a ‘town of art and history', and the name of a pungent washed-rind cheese from the surrounding plateau.