Laon

Why go

Laon is what Paris was before it became Paris: a Carolingian royal seat, a cathedral that rivals Notre-Dame, and lanes that have barely been touched. The upper town sits on a long limestone ridge about a hundred metres above flat farmland, so every street seems to end in sky. You can walk the whole ramparts circuit in an afternoon without a single queue, and on misty mornings the cathedral floats above the fields like a ship.

History

A hill that stands alone in a flat landscape is a gift to anyone who needs to hold ground, and Laon has been fortified since antiquity. In the tenth century it became the last stronghold of the Carolingian kings: Louis IV d’Outremer, Lothair and Louis V ruled from here when their power had shrunk to little more than this ridge and its surroundings.

The dynasty ended on this hill. After Hugh Capet was chosen king in 987, the Carolingian claimant Charles of Lorraine held Laon against him, until in 991 the town’s bishop, Adalbero (also called Ascelin), delivered Charles to his rival. A royal line that had begun with Charlemagne’s family ended with a betrayal at Laon.

In the early twelfth century the townspeople formed a commune. When Bishop Gaudry went back on the agreement in 1112, the town rose and killed him; the monk Guibert de Nogent, who knew the town, wrote the vivid account, in which the bishop is dragged from a barrel in which he had hidden. Louis VI granted Laon a communal charter in 1128.

The calm that followed paid for the cathedral. Built from around the 1160s and largely finished in the 1230s, Notre-Dame de Laon became a model for early Gothic builders; the architect Villard de Honnecourt drew one of its towers. It lost its bishop at the Revolution and became a parish church. In March 1814 Blücher used the hill to beat back Napoleon, and from 1989 to 2016 a small automatic train, the Poma 2000, climbed the slope from the station.