Saint-Malo

Why go

Saint-Malo is a city that answers to the sea, not to Paris: its proud old motto declared it neither French nor Breton, but Malouin. Walk the ramparts right round the old town and watch the tide, which can rise and fall by well over ten metres, swallow the beaches and then hand back causeways to island forts and a writer’s grave. The granite town you see was largely rebuilt after 1944, with real care, and that story is part of its power.

History

The first town here was Alet, on the headland now inside Saint-Servan. Tradition says that in the sixth century a monk from what is now Wales, Malo, joined a hermit named Aaron on a rocky island nearby; the island took the saint’s name and, as raids made Alet unsafe, slowly became the real town, walled and almost entirely surrounded by water. In 1145 the bishops’ seat moved there from Alet.

Saint-Malo always guarded its independence. During the Wars of Religion its notables threw out the royal governor in March 1590 and ran the town as a self-governing republic until 1594; from that episode comes the motto ‘Ni Français, ni Breton, Malouin suis'. Its sailors went everywhere: Jacques Cartier, born here in 1491, sailed from Saint-Malo in the 1530s to explore the Saint Lawrence, and settlers from the port gave the Falkland Islands their French name, the Malouines.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the age of the corsairs, licensed privateers such as Duguay-Trouin and later Surcouf who preyed on enemy shipping, and of rich shipowners who built country houses called malouinières. That wealth had a darker source too: Saint-Malo was France’s fifth-largest slave-trading port, and an estimated 80,000 enslaved Africans were carried on ships fitted out here. Vauban’s engineers strengthened the defences, building Fort National in 1689. François-René de Chateaubriand was born in the town in 1768.

In August 1944 German forces held out in the walled city and American bombardment almost totally destroyed it; the ramparts survived. The town was rebuilt inside them over the following decades, not stone for stone but in the old style, with some buildings reassembled from numbered stones. Today the port runs ferries to Britain and the Channel Islands, and every four years the Route du Rhum yacht race sets off from here for Guadeloupe.