Far less crowded than Versailles, far easier to organize than Champagne, far less tiresome than the D-Day Landing Zone, far less known of course, but an excellent choice of a day trip for the curious Paris revisitor—and with little to no planning required.

I’m talking about Rouen, a small city in Normandy that makes for an alluring, well-rounded walk-about, just 75-90-minutes by frequent, inexpensive train from Paris’ Saint Lazare Station.

By well-rounded I mean that Rouen offers the possibility to follow your nose, your interests and your appetite, all within a compact, walkable city center. Keep it leisurely, lilting and light, or go deep where you will. Will it be the Gothic cathedral whose façade inspired Monet? Will it be the history and the significance of Joan of Arc? Will it be the admirable fine arts museum or the handyman’s delight that is the wrought iron museum? Will it be the pastries, the ceramics shop, the half-timbered buildings, the 16th-century funerary complex, the 12th-century Jewish monument?

I wouldn’t dismiss Rouen for an overnight, or longer, but I had day trip in my mind when I chose Rouen for a city break on a mild midwinter weekday. You won’t—or shouldn’t try to—see it all in a single day, but there’s enough intriguing variety in the heart of this city of 116,000 to keep visitors of all ages, including solo travelers, engaged on a leisurely 10-12-hour excursion.

I did lots of backtracking through the day as I followed my nose and interests and appetite. And since I’d been to Rouen many times before, I didn’t look to (re)visit every sight and museum. So, while the footsteps of my day recounted below needn’t be yours, the variety of possibilities described here may well inspire your own well-rounded day trip Rouen.

Departing Paris

If you’re sure of your plans, go ahead and purchase your train ticket a few days in advance, otherwise you can likely decide the night before or even on a morning whim. Tickets are typically easy to come by since trains leave Paris’s Saint Lazare Station about every 30 minutes on weekday mornings, less frequently on weekends and holiday. Intent on making a full day of it, I took the 8:40am train, arriving in Rouen at 9:55am.

Rouen train station

On the right bank of the Seine River 85 miles from Paris, Rouen’s Rive-Droite train station is the first notable sight encountered on this day trip. Take a moment to admire it from within its great hall and from outside. Though inaugurated in 1928 during what is otherwise considered Art Deco period, the station’s pre-WWI design brought curves and arches associated with the late Art Nouveau period. Its architect, Adolphe Dervaux, designed the 1924 single-lamp streetlight that signals the entrance to many metro stations in Paris.

The Dungeon of Rouen Castle

It’s a straight 15-minute walk from the station to the historic heart of the city, down Rue Jeanne d’Arc, but I zigzagged my way there, beginning with a zig onto Rue du Donjon for a glimpse of the early-13th-century dungeon tower. The tower is the last remaining vestige of Rouen Castle. Joan of Arc was held prisoner in the castle for five months until her death sentence for heresy was carried out on May 30, 1431. As this day proceeds, you’ll be hearing more about la Pucelle, the Little Virgin, as Joan/Jeanne was called.

The Rouen Tourist Office

The Rouen Tourist Office currently occupies a niche at the corner of the Musée des Beaux Arts, the fine arts museum. Pick up a city map here and ask any planning questions to start you on your way. The museum had just opened for the day when I passed by, so that could have been my first stop, but I had breakfast in mind along with a desire to be out and about before taking in a museum on this day trip.

Maison Vatelier for morning pastries

Maison Vatelier won the title of Best Brioche in France in 1997 but isn’t resting on its laurels. The fluffy brick-size brioches certainly looked tempting, but too big for me on this solo excursion. I opted instead for a crescent shape to my buttery breakfast pastry, i.e. a croissant – an excellent one at that. Well, two actually since the kind saleswoman offered me the choice between one perfectly shaped crescent and, for the same price, two less shapely offerings. I chose the latter and saved the second for later. Given its imperfect shape, the croissant wasn’t Instagrammable, but as for taste, it was clear that Maison Vatelier knows how to work marvels with buttery morning fare! And the afternoon pastries certainly looked appetizing.

Aître St Maclou, unique funerary enclosure

It was common in the Middles Ages in France for a city to have an enclosure consisting of a common graveyard surrounded by funerary buildings and with an adjacent church. Just beyond the flamboyant radiating porch of Saint Maclou Church, Rouen’s aître or enclosed cemetery, was formerly a small parish cemetery, before being developed in the late Middle Ages into the large enclosure that can be visited today. The Black Plague, periodic famine and the Hundred Years’ War all contributed to the need for the expanded burial complex. Once the buried bodies of the defunct in one section had decomposed, the bones would be dug up and placed in the surrounding buildings called charnel houses. Though no longer used for burials or skeletal storage, Aître St Maclou is one of the few remaining former funerary enclosures of its kind in France.

The centuries-old spirit of the setting can be seen in the skulls, ditchdigger tools and dance macabre that decorate the wood beams and columns. The dance macabre, in which skeletons dance hand in hand with citizens of all walks of life, was a common decoration of such complexes, a reminder that our earthly party will one day end. But while we’re here… party on, especially during the Macabre Festival that’s held here for two weeks in late October/early November—that’s Halloween season for us. Goths take note.

Audio-guided and group tours of the site are available, but you can also visit on your own. Entrance to the courtyard is free. By the entrance, there’s an attractive café and restaurant named Hamlet https://www.cafe-hamlet.fr/ (“Alas, poor York…”).

One wing of the complex is occupied by the non-profit pottery workshop and ceramics shop, La Galerie des Arts du Feu www.galeriedesartsdufeu.fr. Looking for original gifts or decorative items for your own home? The shop presents attractive work from Norman artists. Some works in glass and metal are also presented here.

Musée des Beaux Arts de Rouen

Many cities throughout France have worthy fine arts museums, notable not only for their collections but for the beaux-art building themselves and the lack of crowds most days—certainly off-season. No Louvre lines here, particularly on weekdays. Entrance to Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-Arts is free, except for temporary exhibitions. (The museum is closed on Tuesday.)

Artists, students of art history and casual visitors alike will appreciate the elbow room with which to examine works, whether taking to the museum’s stately halls and rooms for 45 minutes or two hours. The casual visitor—me, for example—can take in a sweeping view of European art from the 15th century on, rushing by eras that speak less to you and slowing down in those that speak more, with the occasional eye-stopping, pondering pause along the way. For example, at the spooky-eyed scene called The Virgin among the Virgins by Gerard David (c. 1509); Diego Valasquez’s Democritus showing the viewer the boozy, ironic smile of a vagabond philosopher (c. 1630), or a wonderful self-portrait by Eugène Delacroix at about 18 (c. 1816).

Then there’s the museum’s impressive Impressionist and post-Impressionist collection thanks to the Seine Valley’s prominent place in the development of the art movement and to the donation of dozens of works by Francois Depeaux, a local industrialist and art collector of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum holds only one of Monet’s extraordinarily vibrant series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral. The one here, painted on a grey day, isn’t very pulsating on its own, yet it remains a centerpiece of the museum’s collection. More on that series when we get to the cathedral. Monet’s General View of Rouen is also in the permanent collection.

The current temporary exhibition at the museum, In the Rain: Painting, Living and Dreaming, focuses on the painting of rain and rainy scenes. Showing until September 20, 2026, entrance to the exhibition costs 12€, free for those under 18.

I was visiting the museum on an exceptionally calm day when it was possible to sit quietly in the museum’s atrium café and take part in the endearing scene of the image below. A fellow in the painting leaned out from the left to look wearily back—weary from drink, sun and a brother’s speech.

Lunch at In Situ

A leisurely day trip—along with the painting above—invites a leisurely lunch, even if a working lunch, as mine was when I met here with an official from the tourist office.

Across the street from the Beaux-Arts Museum, the brasserie In Situ looked rather ordinary from the outside, since no tables were out there during my January day trip. The spacious interior exuded no Old-World charm either, but we’d come to the right place for a tasty, congenial, inexpensive lunch. Owner-chef Laurent Blanchard is a passionate culinary raconteur of traditional bistro fare made personal. We tasted it on the plate and later heard it in his childhood memories of our main courses, a cassoulet and a shredded duck parmentier. And just look at his contagious smile here. We sensed that in each dish as well. Several doors down the wide alley, his wife Patricia prooses the simpler lunchtime and take-out dishes at In Fine. Both are closed on Sunday.

As noted earlier, I’m not asking you to follow in my precise footsteps on your day in Rouen. There are numerous appetizing and inviting lunch options in the city center. As to well-known restaurants, La Couronne, which dates itself to 1345 and claims to be the oldest existing inn in France, often appears on the list of American gastronomes. It was here that Julia Child experienced her culinary awakening regarding the pleasures of traditional, hearty French cuisine. L’Odas, by the cathedral, sports a Michelin star for those looking for a more prolonged and refined meal. Not to discourage anyone from a meal at either, but as much as I enjoy a leisurely lunch on a day trip, I’d rather not spend the afternoon over a meal—unless, of course, the meal is the purpose of the day trip. Numerous other pleasing options can be found in the city center without advance planning.

Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, the wrought iron museum

Wrought—the very word appeals to me for the way it fuses together notions of ornamentation, hammering, manufacturing and stirred emotions. Add iron to that and you get a wide array of decorative and practical objects at once heavy, intricate and refined. Gather together a collection of them (as a certain Le Secq and his son did in the 19th century) and place them in a Gothic former church, and you get the makings of one of my favorite sites in Rouen, a handyman’s delight, its wrought iron museum. Entrance is free. Open 2-6pm, closed Tuesday.

The Sublime House

“May this house be sublime…” That’s one of many Biblical, along with non-Biblical, inscriptions and graffiti in Hebrew on this exceptional and unique site, dated to around the year 1100.

After centuries of burial, it was rediscovered in 1976 during the final phase of restauration of the Palais de Justice (courthouse complex), when the complex’s courtyard was being prepared for repaving. A track shovel hit on something hard that turned out to be a mysterious building from the time that the level of the city in this area was about eight feet below today’s courtyard.

The area is known to have been the Jewish quarter prior to the expulsion of Jews from France in 1306, when Jewish property was confiscated. And the name of the street running alongside the courtyard is Rue aux Juifs or Jewish Street/Street of the Jews. Those were already indications that the discovered building had been Jewish-owned, but confirmation came only with the discovery during the excavation of the inscriptions in Hebrew.

Nearly all Jewish-owned buildings from the Middle Ages were destroyed in Europe as Jews were expelled from one kingdom and region after another, making this a unique archeological find. This is the oldest known building belonging to Jews in France and among the oldest in Western Europe. Jews were expelled from France by order of King Philippe le Bel in 1306. In 1307 the city purchased confiscated property from the king. The upper floors of the structure were then torn down in 15th or 16th centuries, at the latest in 1550, when the neighboring building of what was then Parliament of Normandy was extended, forming what is now the courthouse complex.

Evidence of a fire on one side of the Sublime House likely dates to 1116 when a fire tore through the Jewish neighborhood. That helped hone in on the date of construction to about 1100, a particularly rich period for Normandy, including for Norman Jews, following the conquest of England in 1066 by William, Duke of Normandy. The building was presumably in use for two centuries, until the expulsion of Jews from Rouen.

Hebrew inscriptions on its walls clearly indicate that this was a Jewish-owned building, but of what sort? A mystery remains as to the actual purpose of the Sublime House. One hypothesis is that it served as a yeshiva or Jewish institute of learning. Another, that it was a synagogue. And it may have been the home of a wealthy merchant, perhaps one who had made his fortune during the Norman Conquest, before bequeathing it to become a synagogue and/or a yeshiva.

Subsequent to the excavation of the Sublime House, other remnants of the neighborhood from the same era have been discovered nearby. A more detailed summary of the Sublime House can be read here.

I’d visited the Sublime House on a previous visit to Rouen, so I didn’t include it in my day trip this time. I’d had the honor of visiting with Jacques Tanguy, a historian specialized in Rouen who was present during the original excavation. Descending into the ruin requires advance planning since the site is generally only opened on Saturday for a up to 18 visitors for 1-hour guided tours at 10:30am and 2:30pm. Additional tours are possible on Tuesday and Thursdays at 2:30pm during French school vacations. The tour is in French only, though group visits in English may be possible upon request. For those who are interested in the site, it’s worthwhile descending beneath the courtyard and going inside the building even without understanding the full tour in French. See here for details about making a reservation.

Viewing the courthouse complex by walking around its perimeter is itself worthwhile. Evidence of the impacts of bombs from WWII can be seen as permanent scars on the building, particularly on the northwestern corner that faces Place Foch.

Notre-Dame Cathedral

Rouen’s Notre-Dame is not the country’s most beautiful, impressive or photogenic, yet Monet found it worth transcribing numerous times onto canvas in 1892 and 1893, and that is part of its claim to fame today.

See the website of the diocese of Rouen for a glimpse of 28 paintings Monet made of the façade, arranged by the time of day that each represents, along with much other information about the cathedral.

Monet, who spent most of his life in Normandy and whose brother lived in Rouen, would visit the town from his home in Giverny, 37 miles away. Here, he would set up his easel at several spots on the second floor of the buildings across the square. He would then finish his Rouen Cathedral paintings in his studio back home.

Viewing several of these paintings together, as at the Orsay Museum in Paris, is the best way to understand the connection between Monet’s eye, hand and palate. As noted earlier, only one of the series, painted on a grey day, is in Rouen’s Beaux-Arts Museum.

Yet today’s façade is not exactly as Monet saw it. Construction of the Gothic cathedral that more or less exists today was begun after a fire in 1200 destroyed an earlier edifice of the 10th and 11th century. The cathedral was subsequently scarred or ravaged at various times over the centuries, by civil unrest, lightning and war. The main damage that has intervened since Monet’s time is that of Allied bombing in the spring of 1944. Those bombing raids took place in preparation for the D-Day Landings. Looking to the right when facing the cathedral’s façade, you’ll notice post-war buildings. They reflect reconstruction of the section of the city along and near the river (just a few blocks away in that direction) that was irreparably damaged during those bombings, whose primary intent was to destroy docks and infrastructure in the area. The colorful array of half-timbered buildings in other parts of center city, particularly when walking behind the cathedral, attest to the fact the bombing was relatively focused along the river.

Joan of Arc – Historial Jeanne d’Arc

Born in northeastern France in 1412, Jeanne d’Arc / Joan of Arc accomplished and accompanied much during her brief time of living fame. Barely one year into her task of restoring France and its king to rightful power, she was captured, sold to the English, tried by the Church for heresy and burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431. Rehabilitated by the Church in 1456 (many of the players of her original trial were still alive), beatified in 1909, canonized in 1920, the Catholic Church places Joan, along the Teresa of Lisieux, just one rung below Mary in national patron sainthood.

Joan—la Pucelle or Little Virgin—is a major historical figure associated with Rouen and France as a whole. While admired by Catholics, her place in French history extends beyond her halo.

I’m a bit disturbed by this Joan of Arc business. The city that watched her burn, with toothless glee or awe or fascination, I imagine, now proudly uses her for promotional purposes. A visitor can dedicate a day to Joan alone. We can see where she was held prisoner, where she was judged, where she was burned, where her ashes were thrown into the river to prevent a cult from forming around them. Businesses and a candy bear her name.

Yet, it is a great story! I can understand spending a day learning it. Much about the gal is verifiable fact. And once you start learning about “the little virgin” and her brief appearance on the stage of France during the Hundred Years’ War with the English, you’re forced to wonder about how the stories—symbolic, actual, political, religious—of a single life persist in time when the stars align.

The Historial Jeanne d’Arc is an excellent place to start. It’s located just behind the cathedral in the episcopal palace that was the site of the trial that condemned her to be death as a heretic and the site of portions of the trial that rehabilitated her good name. Visitors walk through rooms viewing videos and holograms of various participants in the trials as they tell her story. The audio in your headset can be set to play in English. The Historial lays the foundation for understanding why Joan has gone down in French and Catholic history as the woman who victoriously led French troops against English invaders, gave courage to a diminished king, and was instrumental in turning the tide of the Hundred Years’ War—and, equally importantly, how her story has been used and reinterpreted for political purposes over the past two hundred years.

Time slots at the Historial can fill, particularly on weekends and in heavier tourist seasons, so you may wish to reserve in a day or two in advance. Or come by the morning of your day trip to reserve a slot for later in the day. Open 10am-7pm, closed Monday. A virtual visit of the site can be viewed here.

Rue du Gros Horloge – Big Clock Street

The commercial street leading from the cathedral to Place du Vieux Marché, site of Jean’s public execution, passes beneath the Grosse Horloge, the Big Clock. (The clock tower can be visited, with a panoramic view at the top.) Beyond it, chocolate specialist Auzou presents its sweet and crunchy creation of 1992 called the Larmes de Jeanne d’Arc, Jeanne of Arc’s tears. Auzou’s tears are grilled and caramelized almonds that have been given a thin ganache coating and finished with powdered chocolate. I bought some as a gift while saving my own appetite for afternoon sweetness for a pastry shop on the square.

Place du Vieux Marché – The Old Market Square

The charm of this market square was squandered in the 1970s with the construction of Saint Joan of Arc Church at its center. Then again, if you imagine it as a sea dragon lurking by the smoking site of Jeanne’s martyrdom, it can be thought-provoking.

I don’t know if the 16th-century church that stood on the square prior to the bombing of May 1944 was more appealing, but you may want to enter Saint Joan of Arc Church to see some of the stained glass of that former church that was presciently removed at the start of the war. Another highlight on the square, particularly for foodie Americans, is La Couronne, which calls itself the oldest inn in France (1345). It’s there that Julia Child claimed to have had the culinary epiphany that led her to becoming the high priestess of French cuisine in the United States.

As I say, I’d been to Rouen many times before and knew what to expect, so neither the church nor La Couronne held my interest. What did was a mirliton, a traditional pastry from Rouen that’s been around for centuries. It was especially for a mirliton that I’d come to the square. Specifically, to Christrophe Cressent’s Ma Boulangerie. (Closed Monday.)

A mirliton is made of egg, butter, sugar, almond powder and vanilla in a thin puff pastry, so what’s not to like? Christophe Cressent also makes an apple version. I bought the plain version with the intent of enjoying it in a nearby café, but by the time I checked out the nearby food market by the church I’d finished my mirliton. Good thing I got this beauty shot before going too far.

Though the pastry was gone, it was coffee, tea, perhaps wine time. When on an excursion, finding the right sat in the right setting is more important to me than the drink itself. I lucked upon the window seat at the cozy brasserie Mamie on the square. It was a fine seat from which to while away an hour and write up my excursion notes.

Final steps

The midwinter sun had long set by the time I returned to the cobblestones. I could see calling it a Rouen day at that point then making my way back to the station for the 6pm or 7pm train and returning to Paris at a reasonable time for dinner. But even in winter I don’t like to rush at the end of a city excursion. There’s always another café, bar, bistro or brasserie to stop into, or, weather permitting, a garden or park or riverside to visit.

I pursued my leisurely zigzagging in the town center. I looked in as some of the wine and cocktails bars in the Antique Dealers’ Quarter. Eventually, I made my way to the station area 45 minutes in advance of the 8:02pm train. It was inadvertently perfect timing for a pre-train glass of Normandy hard cider at Le Metropole (111 rue Jeanne d’Arc), a 1930 café-bar 100 yards from the station. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would meet here in the 1930s, early in their couplehood. She was teaching at a high school in Rouen, he at a high school in Le Havre.

Return to Paris: So I took the 8:02, arriving in Paris at 9:20pm. I’d picked up an apple from a small grocer passed on the way to the station. I still had my misshapen gift croissant from the morning. They would suffice for dinner. Or might have had I not also opened the bag of Joan’s tears that I’d intended as a gift. And they were gift—as gift, as had been the entire day, to myself.

Thus ends a day trip to Rouen—mine, not necessarily yours. I leave it to you to create your own well-rounded, informative, tasty Rouen city-center walk-about. Or to join me on another one.

© 2026, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Rouen, Normandy: An Alluring, Well-Rounded Day Trip from Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

It gives me a cheap thrill to think that you’d start reading this article in order to discover—with admiration or contempt—which towns and cities in France limit their cooperation with the national government in enforcing immigration laws. You might be imaging a bistro where lawless lefties confront national thugs. Or a wine region where baguette-wielding winegrowers are protecting grape-picking Syrians and Somalis against soldiers in riot gear. Would you then be inclined to visit such a place? Or would you immediately despise it?

How exciting to think that a travel article of mine could be read with admiration or contempt. But at the risk of disappointing anyone, and of ruining my chances of this piece launching a lengthy Reddit thread, let’s have another look at that title.

Villes Sanctuaires en France, the network in question, translates as Sanctuary Cities in France. The words align. But the concept does not. There are no trumped-up stand-offs in these towns and cities. French authorities have indeed stepped up operations to net undocumented migrants and would-be immigrants who’ve overstayed their visa, including a few gently reminded post-Brexit Brits. But round-ups, deportation and resistance are unlikely to occur in the peaceable destinations in France’s Villes Sanctuaires network. What makes them like-minded is a different kind of sanctuary.

Here, sanctuaire refers to a sanctuary in the sense of a shrine, “a place in which devotion is paid to a saint or deity,” to quote Merriam-Webster. Villes Sanctuaires en France therefore brings together villages, towns and cities in France that have shrines—Catholic, at that—that can be visited by the general public.

But wait, wait!

Before clicking away because candle-lighting pilgrims are less Instagrammable than baguette-wielding winegrowers, let me tell you one of my favorite aspects of travel in the secular nation in France: You can just as easily visit these sanctuaries and shrines for the heck, the fun, or the creepiness of it—I do—as you can out of a sense of spirituality, hope or devotion—others do. You can visit them, as I do, out of pure curiosity, out of an in interest in history or architecture, and to observe how people visit shrines. Or don’t visit the shrine at all when in these sanctuary cities, because the municipalities mentioned here also pay tribute to the gods of beauty, construction, gastronomy, wine, nature, even meaning, whatever that may mean. And here’s the best part: respectful as we must be when visiting a shrine that doesn’t speak to us spiritually, we don’t have to fake adoration, because blasphemy is not a crime in France. Praise be!

For the 18 municipalities within the Villes Sanctuaires network, the shrine or sanctuary is only half the picture. The site’s pious handlers work in tandem with local tourist officials, who also seek to promote other aspects of tourism within the municipality and in the surrounding region. Each member-municipality tells a different story in which the spiritual retreat or Catholic pilgrimage site or otherwise sanctified structure can lead to explorations regarding other heritage sites, gastronomy, wine, hiking, and nature—or vice versa.

France today is a secular state not a Christian or Catholic country. Its culture is a mixed bag that doesn’t stem from the history of a once-dominant religion. Yet the history of Christian, particularly Catholic, dominance in France has left major physical markers. Among them, a fascinating, photogenic and/or curious variety of heritage sites that the traveler is invited to encounter. Christianity’s religious and political history in France also includes a record of harms, dangers and abuses that are also worth examining. Thankfully, one is no longer forced to or expected to honor religiously inspired historical sites or the shrines of these sanctuary cities in specific ways, yet all are accessible to visitors whatever one’s views. By contrast, travelers are highly unlikely to visit a synagogue or mosque or temple if they don’t identify with the associated religion. Even travelers who do identify rarely visit those, whereas the vast majority of non-Catholics visitors to France will enter a church. Think Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral.

Pilgrims and wayfarers, reverent and irreverent

For the purposes of this article, let’s use both portions of Merriam-Webster’s definition of a pilgrim: 1: one who journeys in foreign lands: wayfarer. 2: one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee.

The Villes Sanctuaires en France network was created in 1994, not as a direct promotional tool so much as a way for municipal tourist officials and overseers of shrines and sanctuaries to exchange information and learn from each other regarding the welcoming of religious and non-religious pilgrims. Only recently, in December 2025, did the association hold its first organized press workshop.

The event took place in Paris at the religious guest house attached to Sacré Coeur Basilica in Montmartre. Entrance to the hotel is from behind the basilica on a street named for the Chevalier de la Barre. The chevalier was a nobleman who was arrested then tortured and executed in 1766, at the age of 20, because he vandalized a wooden crucifix and failed to take his hat off when a religious procession went by, along with other impious, blasphemous acts. He immediately came to be seen as a secular martyr for the Enlightenment against the dangers of religious intolerance of Church and its bedmate State. Laws today sanction those who incite hate and violence, whether with respect to religion or other matters, while the Chevalier de la Barre remains a symbol of the right to irreverence with respect to something some consider sacred.

It isn’t at all ironic that the street near the Catholic holy site is named after the ill-fated young fellow. Instead, the street was baptized in honor of la Barre at a time when Sacré Coeur was under construction, during the political tug-of-war between Catholic and anticlerical forces in France. While the church rose with one vision of French society, the naming of the street and a statue to la Barre (located in what is now a dog park nearby) were intentional reminders of changing social priorities.

Together, the street and the church, the young nobleman and the devout pilgrim, the charming grey cobblestones and the massive white dome, coexist today as attractive reminders of how travelers—whatever kind of pilgrim they may be, whatever reverent or irreverent thoughts they may have—can experience, learn from and share it all.

The Sanctuary Cities network naturally plays the spiritual card in promoting tourism—unless it’s the tourist card in promoting spirituality—but these villages, towns and cities needn’t be seen as religious destinations alone. Whether you consider yourself a religious pilgrim or a wayfarer in a foreign land, or both at once, or sometimes one, sometimes another; whether you’re a theist (aficionado of a god that does or doesn’t act on human affairs) or a nontheist; whether you go in for blasphemy, heresy, dogma, or the smell of incense; whether you consider yourself spiritual or not; whether you wish that this article had been about deportation or resistance, now that you’ve come this far in, stay with me as I present the 18 current members of the network of Sanctuary Cities in France.

Municipalities in the Sanctuary Cities network vary from world-renown destinations to little-known village.

Among the most famous of these Sanctuary Cities is Lourdes, a town of 13,800 whose shrines attract 3 million visitors per year. Lourdes is primarily known as a spiritual destination relative to sainted Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879), who is said to have had 18 sightings of Mary from February to July 1858. Personally, I’ve little curiosity about Bernadette herself, but the spirit moves me to visit Lourdes soon so as to witness the Bernadette phenomenon up close and because Lourdes makes for an excellent starting point for exploration in the Pyrenees. There’s a visitable fortress just above the town. A funicular goes to the summit of the Pic du Jer. Further from town, another funicular goes to the even more impressive summit of the Pic du Midi, and there are numerous trails for hiking expeditions in the region. (Stay tuned for my 2026 Lourdes article.)

The photogenic tidal island of Mont Saint Michel is another major destination among these Sanctuary Cities.

While you don’t need to carry an all-knowing deity in your thoughts to be curious about the place, I encourage all travels to delve into the fascinating religious, architectural, technological and geopolitical history of the site, whether through reading or by hiring a specialized local guide, even if only to understand the successive eras of construction on the mount, culminating with the 13th-century portion known as “the Marvel.” I suspect that, unlike visitors to Lourdes, only a small percentage of the millions who come each year to Mont Saint Michel is aware that the mount maintains an active Catholic community—the men and women of the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem. In the village and hard to spot among the souvenir shops and pricey omelets, the House of Pilgrims is a sanctuary for visitors who seek churchly hospitality.

Nevers, population 33,000, is located on the edge of two major travel and touring routes and receives relatively few foreign visitors. It’s on the inner edge Burgundy but without vineyards to draw wine travelers, and it’s the starting point for the 415-mile Loire by Bike route but cyclists largely pedal along paths further downstream. Religious pilgrims, however, know Nevers as the place to marvel at the body of Bernadette of Lourdes. Why aren’t her remains in Lourdes to greet the 3 million visitors there? Because Bernadette of Lourdes joined the Sisters of Charity and lived her short life as a nun in Nevers, where she died at the age of 35. Personally, I’m not planning a trip to Nevers just for that, though I do soon expect to take in the embalmed sight. I’ll also check out the Ducal Palace, have a peek in at the earthenware museum, find a potter to visit, and seek out a lively bistro or good restaurant. I enjoy the sense of discovery of exploring a bypassed town with an eclectic mix of offerings with an eye to encountering something or someone that sparks my interest. (Again, stay tuned for an upcoming article.)

Further south in Burgundy, Paray-le-Monial’s Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart) Basilica represents Romanesque architectural splendor to Catholic and non-Catholic visitors alike. The former may specifically come to embrace their sense of the Sacred Heart. It was in this town that Margaret-Marie Alacoque claimed to have had three visitations from Jesus from 1673 to 1675, revealing his heart and its meaning to her on the third. The basilica therefore welcomes a significant influx of religious pilgrims. They may or may not also be gastronomic pilgrims, interested in Charolais beef. Charolais is common in much of France but the massive Charolais breed of cattle has its origins in this region and is named for the town of Charolles, eight miles east.

Spirituality needn’t be the main draw of a town or city in the sanctuary network. Wine can be the magnet, at least it is for me when I think of Cahors, which stands out in the wine world as the primary home for malbec in France. Whether you prefer your wine blended, blessed or 100% malbec, or don’t drink at all, no visitor venturing this deep into the country would skip the city’s key heritage sight: the 900-year-old Saint Etienne (Saint Stephen) Cathedral. Within the bowels of the cathedral awaits the Holy Headdress, venerated as the supposed head covering placed on Jesus as he was wrapped in a shroud for burial. Some will stand before it in awe and adoration. Others will raise an eyebrow, shake their head, and think “Oh, the things that people will believe.” But all visitors check it out. Beyond the malbec, the cathedral and the old town, it is the House of Pilgrims at the convent of Vaylats that gives Cahors sanctuary status and provides hospitality for hikers on the Way of Saint James of Compostela.

Sometimes the distinction between religious and non-religious pilgrim-tourists is blurred because they’re all following the same path. That’s the case at Rocamadour, one of the most visually stunning of these Villes Sanctuaires due to way the village hugs the canyon wall. Rocamodour is just over an hour’s drive north of Cahors or east of Sarlat. Visitors of all stripe climb the 216 steps to the sanctuary, then gaze upon the Black Virgin, a little statue with a large reputation.

Brive-la-Gaillarde, just over an hour’s drive north of Rocamadour, is better known for its rugby team than for its caves of Saint Anthony of Padua. But there it is, a sanctuary dedicated to the patron saint of all things lost and found.

Many trains to Bayeux and the D-Day Landing Zone of Normandy stop in the sanctuary town of Lisieux. Looking out the window as the train approaches the station, you see an immense basilica on the hill, its architecture inspired by Paris’s Sacré Coeur. The basilica honors Thérèse Martin (1873-1897), better known as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I’m not suggesting that any but the most Teresian travelers take time from their brief tour of the Landing Zone to visit Lisieux, but it’s nice to know what you’re looking at as you pass by on the train.

Teresa’s sainthood marks much of the lower half of Normandy. Her devout parents, the canonized couple Louis and Zélie Martin, lived in Alençon, and their shrine there brings that town into the fold of Sanctuary Cities. Alençon is, however, better known in knitting circles for its lace-making history, as presented in its Lace Museum.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer’s annual pilgrimage in May attracts Romani from throughout Europe and tourists from far and wide into the Camargue Regional Park. Yet for most visitors, it’s the natural sensations of its marshes and bottomlands that set the Camargue apart along the Mediterranean.

Most foreign travelers would be surprised to learn that the Loire River, which evokes royal chateaux and easy-going biking along its east-west flow, starts deep in an off-track area of southern France and builds up strength on a northerly flow. Le Puy-en-Velay, population 19,000, in the Haute-Loire (Upper Loire) department, is the first city along the river’s course. Its geographical location and the presence of an ancient shrine to Mary earned it a major place on the map for medieval pilgrims arriving from the east and northeast on the Way of Saint James. Le Puy’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, its monumental statue of Notre-Dame de France, and its nearby volcanic chimney topped with a chapel round out its major Christian sights. But a foreign traveler is unlikely to come here unless interested in exploring the striking natural surroundings of this former volcanic region.

The sanctuary village of Souvigny also has a remarkable Romanesque church, along with the history of the first house of Bourbon—Bourbon as in future kings of France not corn whiskey. Souvigny is a 15-minute drive from the city of Moulins, home to the National Costume Center.

Then there are a handful of more obscure sanctuary villages and towns in the network: Lalouvesc, a remote village in Ardèche; Ars-sur-Formans, which sits quietly between the Beaujolais vineyards and Lyon; Cotignac in the backcountry of Provence; Sainte-Anne-d’Auray in Brittany; Vendeville near the northern tip of France, and La Salette, at nearly 6000 feet in the Alps. Non-religious pilgrims visiting the sanctuaries and shrines there will especially find the opportunity to commune with nature in various shapes and forms in the surrounding area.

See the official site for this network of sanctuary cities for more information about the shrines, sanctuaries, and points of interest of all kinds in and near these villages, towns and cities.

© 2025, Gary Lee Kraut

The post A Traveler’s Guide to Sanctuary Cities in France appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

If you look closely, very closely, at the masonry above the arch of the Gate of the Dead at the Roman amphitheater in Saintes, you can make out a fine line that indicates where a mason stopped his work for the day.

Unless a sign is eventually placed there, you won’t find the exact spot on your own. And even when Karine Robin, head of the archeology department for Charente-Maritime, points to and explains her discovery, I can’t be sure if I’m seeing the line or imagining it through her enthused description. I lean closer. Yes, there it is—eureka!—a trace of thrilling triviality within a Roman ruin in a bypassed town, shown by a proud and passionate archeologist. Astounding!

The minutia of the archeologist’s discovery and her vivid explanation light in my mind a spark that begins to illuminate the course of 2000 years of history, from a mason’s day in about 40 AD to the crowds who filled the amphitheater over the next four centuries or so, then the crumbling of the Roman Empire and the gradual transformation, dismantling and degradation of the amphitheater until archeologist began to study the partially buried structure in the 19th-century and now its fine-comb examination by Karine Robin and her team who have been investigating the site and restoring its remnants along with the National Institute for Preventive Archeological Research (Inrap).

That something so seemingly inconsequential in my own life—evidence of a Gallo-Roman mason leaving work for the day—should suddenly make a 3½-hour train ride from Paris feel worthwhile is in itself extraordinary. Often, the greatest reward of sightseeing isn’t a sight itself but the sparks that light in the mind when an informed person enthusiastically gives it context and teaches you how to look at it.

Would you go out of your way for that?

Probably not. You’ve already been the Colosseum in Rome, you say—impressive indeed. And to Arles and to Nimes, you say—yes, wonderful towns to visit. Me, too.

The Arena (Amphitheater)

Then what more can you find here when in fact far less remains of the cavea or seating area and far less of those wide passages that allowed for crowds to enter and exit? I scan the ruin. I listen to our guides. Those passages, we’re told, are called vomitories. Hearing that, a new spark illuminates the connection between the Latin spoken by Roman masons and emperors and the food poisoning I may have gotten from a 3-star Michelin restaurant several years ago. Like Helen Keller by the water pump and the tree, I want to the learn names of things. Those arched passageways to either end of the amphitheater are evocatively called the Gate of the Living (Porte des Vivants), on the eastern side, opening toward the city, and the Gate of the Dead (Porte des Morts), opening to the then-countryside to the west. It’s on the occasion of the restoration of the latter that Karine Robin has discerned the mason’s fine line. No, it isn’t only men who are intrigued by the history of the Roman Empire, though it could be that men are more susceptible to Roman sparks.

We’re visiting what is locally referred to as “the arena” but is technically speaking an amphitheater, i.e. a theater with seating on both sides. Not that I’ve become a connoisseur of Roman architecture in the past hour, but the traveler learns such things on site, and more: about the amphitheater’s religious, political and entertainment functions for a location population invited to witness wild animals in a hunting show in the morning, executions at noon, gladiator fights in the afternoon.

And there they are, on the theater floor today—gladiators! We go over to speak with them—well, the men in our group do. They aren’t real gladiators but strong and knowledgeable reenactors who perform here in summer. They present their shields and daggers, their metal helmets and leather padding.

There are no combats this afternoon, but we’re drawn in by their accounts of the lives of the trained fighters of ancient Rome. Today’s friendly gladiators now take evident pleasure in deflating our greatest sense of a gladiator fight: that it all ended with a life-saving thumbs-up or a deadly thumbs-down. We could have Googled “Roman hand signals” for details, but learning from reenactors who share their passion and knowledge right here on the theater floor makes think that I might have been a bit overdramatic yesterday when I complained to a friend about taking the 6:48am train from Paris.

Then, just as I’m enthralled by an account of the glamorous and dangerous life of a hall-of-fame gladiator, we’re told that (Christian) Emperor Honorius prohibited gladiator combat in the year 404.

I look around at the grassy, rocky bowl that surrounds us, not to imagine the last of the cheering crowds but take in the pleasing view of sheep grazing on slopes that once held seating for up to 15,000 spectators, the town’s entire populations, all welcome, seated according to social status. And I sense the end of this amphitheater as a venue for the thrill of executed justice and violent entertainment. I sense the dismantling of temples, the surrounding of the city by ramparts, the rise of the Visigoths, the Sack of Rome.

Would you go out of your way for that?

I didn’t think so. But if there are remnants of a Roman amphitheater there’s got to be more to see in Saintes.

The name Saintes might lead you to imagine that the presence of a mother lode of Christian relics or a history of pious devotion, perhaps some memorable martyrdom. Though a certain Saint Eutropius was (for some, is) indeed venerated here as an early Christian martyr (I’ll get to him), Saintes is instead derived from the name of the Celtic tribe that inhabited the region at the time of the Roman invasion with Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars and far before the evangelization of Gaul. They were the Santoni. Under Roman rule, the developing town was given the name Mediolanum, or Mediolanum Santonum to add the term for its inhabitants. (Similarly, the Parisii were the pre-Roman inhabitants of what would become Paris, a town the Romans called Lutetia or Lutetia Parisiorum.)

Mediolanum/Saintes developed just beyond a sharp bend in the Charente River. The town is now somewhat removed from major routes through France, hence the 3½ train from Paris with a change of trains at Angoulême. On the map below, you have to zoom in above and Bordeaux to locate Saintes along the Charente between Cognac, 17 miles to the east, and Rochefort, 24 miles northwest.

Two thousand years ago, however, Mediolanum held a proud place on the map of Gaul as capital of the large province of Aquitaine. Here, the east-west Via Agrippa, the route coming from Ludgunum (now Lyon), met the north-south route through Aquitaine, a sign of the town’s geographical and political importance.

The amphitheater is testimony to the town’s prominence early in the Roman colonization of Gaul. Completed in about 40 AD and dedicated to Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD), who had been born in Lugdunum, its construction predates that of the Colosseum of Rome by about 30 years and that of the amphitheaters of Arles and Nimes by 50 and 60 years respectively.

Bordeaux would take over as the capital of Roman Aquitaine in the 2nd century, leaving Mediolanum with a secondary role, then less so as centuries passed. Saintes is now a part of the vast region of New Aquitaine, whose capital is Bordeaux. Its current population is only 27,000 (56,000 with the metropolitan area), less than double what it was 2000 years ago. Its inhabitants are called the Saintais and Santaises.

The Arch of Germanicus

Even before the construction of the amphitheater, Mediolanum bore the proud markers of a Roman town.

Its first aqueduct was already supplying water, and a second would soon be added to provide a more abundant supply to the growing provincial capital. Remnants of these can be seen at their sources in the countryside 6-7 miles outside of town. Fascinating as they may be, it’s likely that only a diehard explorer of antiquity with a vehicle will inquire the route at the tourist office to seek them out.

Every visitor to Saintes, however, takes a walk along the river to see the Arch of Germanicus, built about 18-19AD. (Also, the tourist office is close by.) Originally constructed at the point of arrival of the Via Agrippa, the arch was the entrance gate to the bridge crossing the Charente into the heart of Mediolanum. The double-arch gate honors Emperor Tiberius, his son Druus and his adoptive son Germanicus, yet Germanicus gets sole reverence today since his name is the most legible of those inscribed along the arch’s crown.

In 1843, the arch was displaced 150 yards from its original position as the bridge and waterfront were modified. So it now stands isolated and out of context, diminishing some of its aura. Nevertheless, as we stand by the river with a full view of the arch and learn from Cécile Trébuchet, a dynamic local guide, how to interpret its blocks and inscriptions, visiting Saintes feels less like a detour and more like an arrival. It also inspires a wiki read about Tiberius and the imperial gang of 2000 years ago that later sends me down the rabbit hole of Roman history from which I eventually emerge with the sense that the same gang is at it today.

A visit to the town’s Archeology Museum, right nearby, seems like the natural next step. Unless it’s mealtime, in which case consider the restaurant barge La Batiâ that’s docked by the arch.

Would you go out of your way for that?

Unlikely. Maybe a medieval monument or two will tilt the balance. Three medieval bell towers stand out above the pale red tile roofs of Saintes, those of the Abbaye aux Dames (the Ladies’ Abbey), of Saint Pierre (St. Peter) Cathedral and of Saint Eutrope (Eutropius) Basilica.

The Tomb and Crypt of Saint Eutropius

Saintes’s most unique medieval sight is the basilica’s crypt, a subterranean church containing the tomb on the early Christian missionary and lapidated martyr Saint Eutropius. A site of devotion since the mid-500s, the presence of the saint’s tomb later earned Saintes a stop on the Way of Saint James to Compostella, Spain. The tomb now lies in dramatic simplicity in the heart of a vast crypt of the 11th century. The light, the chill and the musty smell there create a spectacular and eerie atmosphere that flirts between virtuous intimacy and the possibility of eternal damnation, as the most titillating flirts do. It’s open to the public, if you dare enter the gaping mouth of the entrance to the great below. The leafy decorations of its column capitals provide touches of charm that partially alleviate the sense that the end is nigh. But be forewarned: Stand inside alone for more than a few minutes and you’ll either fall to your knees in a desperate plea to be saved or run out in a panic to save yourself. I chose the latter.

The Ladies’ Abbey: Hotel, Church, Music Conservatory

You’d be hard pressed to find a tourist trap in Saintes considering how few foreign tourists venture this way. That point alone can be the attraction as an overnight for the wayward traveler, or for someone suddenly struck with wanderlust, or for a cyclist on the easy-going Rochefort-Cognac leg of the Flow Vélo route. Consider then a peaceful night at the Abbey aux Dames, the Ladies’ Abbey, which is also a highlight for the day visitor.

Founded in 1047, the Ladies’ Abbey, is a successful contemporary example of ways in which heritage sights can be rehabilitated to the benefit of local life, local economy, culture, and visitors. While one portion of the complex is now used for social housing, the central portion houses a music conservatory, an auditorium and a hotel, along with the abbey church. The complex also has an information desk, a boutique, a café and a strange playable musical tent of sorts.

The abbey church remains the medieval centerpiece. Though the Benedictines nuns were sent packing during the Revolution, the Romanesque church was later reconsecrated and continues to hold Catholic service. Fires in 1608 and 1648 led to the rebuilding of the convent buildings in the 17th century. From the Revolution until just after the First World War, the site served as military barracks, housing about 2000 men. Audio guides are available to explore the thousand-year history of the site and to appreciate its recent musical vocation.

In 1972, the tired complex was given new life when it became the venue for a Classical music festival. The former abbey now hosts musical programs throughout the year, culminating in the annual Festival de Saintes. In 2025, nearly 12,000 people attended the 29 concerts performed over 8 days in July at the abbey and elsewhere in Saintes.

Situated between the station and the river, the abbey hotel is conveniently situated for lodging train travelers and bikers.

The 33 bedrooms occupy the former cells of nuns along a hallway on the second floor of the main convent building. Only several of the rooms have en suite bathrooms. Most share bathrooms on the hallway (bathrobes and slippers are provided). That will be off-putting for some, but will add a sense of community to others.

The hotel is not for ladies only, and this is not roughing it. The rooms are comfortable. The architecture itself is the primary décor. The quiet of the immediate surroundings, the history of the place, and the arched stone-and-brick ceiling of the bedrooms inspire guests to sleep the sleep of nuns or soldiers or Classical musicians or tired tourists, depending on what dreams, nightmares or fantasies overcome you. About 100€ per room per night is a reasonable price to find out. The complex is open year-round, however the hotel section primarily operates April to September. The rest of the year it opens only for groups reserving 10 rooms or more.

Other nice lodging options for train travelers or cyclists include Hotel des Messageries, a 3-star by the river and the town center, and La Porte Rouge – The Red Door Inn, a charming B&B in the center. Those traveling by car may also consider Relais du Bois Saint Georges, a 4-star on the edge of town.

The Dupuy-Mestreau Museum

It’s from a side street that we enter this handsome private mansion of the 18th century that otherwise faces the Charente River. In the 19th century the mansion was purchased by Abel Mestreau (1855-1939), a wealthy Cognac merchant and a collector of regional folklore, curiosities and apparently whatever struck his fantasy. He never actually lived here. The Dupuy-Museum Museum is so scarcely visited and the discolored collection is so eclectic that that itself may appeal to those who like feeling that they’ve left main-road travelers way behind.

As much as I appreciate having our guide explain the interest of the various costumes, clothing, regional headdresses (coiffes), paintings, regional artefacts, furnishings, knick-knacks, pottery, jewelry, and what-the-heck-is-thats, I also enjoy wandering around on my own so as to make up stories about various objects, e.g. this gal with the racket; I call her the goddess of tennis. Not unlike visiting Saint Eutropius’s crypt, eclectic regional museums such as this inspire in me a mix of intense curiosity and a desire to flee.

Curiosity got the better of us all. We hung around long enough to see the royalist treasure among the footwear display: a cute pair of slipper-shoes said to have been worn by deposed king Louis XVI during his imprisonment, as he awaited the trial that would eventually lead to his execution. I’m glad I saw them, because that gives me a reason to tell you a Saintes fun fact: Saintes was the birthplace in 1738 of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin whose name lives on in the term for the machine for humane and expedient execution that he championed: the guillotine. An etching of the fellow is among the collection.

Would I advise you to go out of you way for that or does this sound like a far way to go for yet another quaint small town in France?

Still wondering.

Cognac Grosperrin

After all of the vestiges and artefacts that we’ve encountered through the day, we air out our dusty minds with a stroll along the river. It leads us to the offices and cellars of Saintes’s last remaining Cognac broker. As we approach, we imagine barges docked nearby to load casks for shipping when these cellars were first operational in 1851.

Cognac, the town that gave its name to the world-renown double-distilled brandy, is 17 miles upriver, to the east, yet Saintes lies within the cognac grape-growing zone. While most of the major players in the Cognac market are in and around Cognac, the Grosperrin Cognac house, located here, is increasingly known to connoisseurs. Since 1999, first under Jean Grosperrin then, beginning in 2004, under his son Guilhem, Cognac Grosperrin has made a name for itself by purchasing from a variety of sources single-terroir and vintage Cognacs in oak casks, which it then continues to age before bottling and selling at what it deems the appropriate time.

The main cellar, with its old casks and demijohns, most of which are dated and authenticated with official sealing, is an impressive sight in its own right when one thinks of the history (your own, France’s, the world’s) that the dates represent. Then comes the tasting.

I will admit here that among French brandies I never had a taste for Cognac, finding it too harsh for my palate. Before now, that is. Turns out that my impression was based on middling or young Cognacs, the kind best reserved for cocktails or give-me-anything-that-burns digestives. When well-selected fruit is well-distilled and well-aged, it’s an entirely different experience. The same can be said for Calvados (apple) and Armagnac (grape), the two other internationally known French brandies, but I’ve generally been more forgiving when sipping middling versions of those, on the one hand because I’m a frequent visitor to the Calvados region of Normandy and accept that apple brandy is a unpretentious spirit, and on the other because the Armagnac-producing region of southwest France is so enchantingly rural. One reason that I didn’t write about the town of Cognac after a quick visit there ten years ago was that I couldn’t quite wrap my tongue around its namesake brandy. I now realize that I need to go back and try again, because one sip—one spark—of a vintage offered by out tasting guide Maxence le Moulec at Grosperrin and I find myself wondering where I can buy a nice set of crystal brandy glasses. A sip of another and I’m thinking of purchasing a set of leather armchairs. One more and I’m considering looking for an apartment with a working fireplace.

Grosperrin isn’t only a connoisseur’s Cognac. It can also be a Cognac for infrequently imbibing non-connoisseurs who would enjoy splurging for a quality bottle that will last a while, or for someone who already owns a set of leather chairs and crystal tumblers but not the brandy to go with it, or, finally, someone who may never buy a bottle Cognac but wants a sip of local heritage excellence while traveling in the region. Even a sniff-swirl-and-spit tasting may suffice to understand the meaning of carpe diem, as the Roman poet sang. Let’s take this opportunity to recall what the Roman playwright said: “Moderation in all things is the best policy.”

For 7€, visitors are welcome for a tour and tasting. More intense and in-depth tasting tours can be reserved for 45€ and 150€. Advance booking is advised. Grosperrin isn’t the only merchant to go for quality in the Cognac-producing region, but I give them their due for sparking my interest in Cognac.

Is Cognac too harsh for you? Try Pineau des Charentes when in the region. Pineau is a fortified wine of about 17% in which grape juice (white, red or rosé) and Cognac are mixed and aged on oak barrels to create a sweet aperitif, served chilled. Don’t drink? Savor the food stands at the Saint Pierre Market on Wednesday and Saturday mornings.

So would I recommend that you go out of the way for Saintes?

I thought about the question on the long train ride back to Paris. How could I possibly give a generic answer? To each his or her own sparks, interests, imagination and cheap thrills. But don’t readers deserve an answer, a proverbial thumbs-up or thumbs-down or an algorithmic 1 to 5 stars? Was there something special here or was this just another quaint old French town? And if the latter, isn’t that enough?

I thought of all I’d done: I’d met archeologists and gladiators, learned history and words, descended into an eerie crypt, slept in a nunnery, wandered around a bizarre museum, nipped Cognac. Then suddenly, in a spark, I imagined Julius Ceasar, pleased, contemplative and exhausted on his way home from the Gallic Wars that would change the course of history all along this train route. I felt just like that. I came, I saw, I conked out.

© 2025, Gary Lee Kraut

Read about two other towns in the department of Charente-Maritime in New Aquitaine, Rochefort and La Rochelle.

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For most of my life in France, Paris was my compass. I taught at the Nouvelle Sorbonne and Sciences Po and lived just outside the city, close enough to feel its constant pulse. I drew energy from its rhythm, its lectures and cafés, its insistence on momentum. Which is why it still surprises me that my husband Pierre and I left that all behind for a 17th-century château in the Loire Valley. In Paris, my mind was always moving ahead, cataloguing lectures, meetings, errands, and ideas I wanted to explore. Here, there was nothing pressing, nothing urgent, and that empty space made me notice how I thought. Thoughts that normally skittered past caught themselves mid-flight, lingering long enough for me to consider them: memories of my childhood in Australia, music I had been playing, questions about the life we were beginning in this new place. It was strange, unsettling, and quietly exhilarating to feel my mind slowing, stretching, and expanding in ways I hadn’t realized it could.

I became aware of the rhythm of my breathing, of the subtle warmth of the stone under my hands, of the almost imperceptible shifts in light across the château walls. I noticed the crunch of my footsteps on the gravel, the whisper of the wind through the trees. For the first time in years, I could feel the shape of my thoughts as they moved, how they curved and bent around the silence instead of rushing past it. I realized I was paying attention not just to the world outside, but to the inner world that had been quieted by the constant pace of the city.

It was in that stillness that the château first revealed itself—not just its history, its stones, or its chapel, but the way it invited observation, reflection, and imagination. Every carved cross, every moss-softened stone, every mark etched by centuries of hands waited to be noticed. And when I finally looked up from my own thoughts, the fields blurred in the sun, the air thick with the scent of dry grass, the trees alive with birdsong. The silence remained, but it was no longer empty—it was full of possibilities I hadn’t seen before.

What drew us to Détilly wasn’t grandeur but the odd, intimate details that made the place human. The medieval chapel, dedicated to Notre-Dame de la Pitié and Saint Marc, bears crosses carved by the Knights Templar, reminders that this stretch of the Vienne River was once more frontier than refuge. I don’t consider myself mystical, but stepping into that space, I felt its weight. The chapel isn’t solemn so much as steady, a sanctuary where centuries and everyday life meet.

That same sense of continuity shaped how we saw our role here. From the start, we never felt like owners. We are caretakers—of leaking roofs, moss-softened stones, and a story that began long before us. Our Irish wolfhounds seem to know this better than anyone. Ramsès roams the grounds like a watchman, while his son, Aramis Destilly, lingers by the chapel door as if tuned to something the rest of us only half-hear.

Of course, history here isn’t just romance—it’s cracked stone, doors that stick, and roofs that groan under winter rain. Preservation is rarely dramatic; it’s patience, repetition, and learning to live with the slow, uneven tempo of a place that’s seen far more seasons than we have.

At Détilly, imagination rises differently. One afternoon I sat watching light shift across the west-facing chapel door, and from that stillness a scene for a novel took shape—something I never would have found in Paris’s constant rush. Guests at our summer writers’ retreat often feel it too. One, standing beneath the old arch, said she felt “history leaning close, but kindly.” Another, after an evening in the garden, told me she had “heard my thoughts for the first time in months.” I know what they mean. The château doesn’t just provide a backdrop—it participates.

And yet, the château’s voice is just as present in the mundane. The real surprise isn’t that we moved here, but that we’ve come to love the small, daily negotiations: coaxing life from a sulky boiler, finding warmth in stone that holds the cold, and tackling repairs that never quite end. None of this was in our plan, and maybe that’s why it feels so alive. There’s something steadying in that work, a quiet satisfaction that comes from tending to the place rather than simply fixing it. It isn’t about efficiency anymore, but about learning to move in step with the château’s slower rhythm, letting its needs shape the pace of our days—and, eventually, shape us.

Living at Détilly keeps us asking: What does it mean to dwell inside history? How do you make a life in walls that have already sheltered so many others? We don’t have the answers. For now, we walk the grounds with the dogs, patch the roof when it leaks, welcome guests when the season allows, and watch evening light pour through the chapel door.

Maybe that’s enough—to live alongside the past, not only to look at it, with all its imperfections, its demands, and the quiet rewards that come when you stop trying to shape a place and let it shape you.

Château de Détilly, 18 Rue des Fromentaux, 37420 Beaumont-en-Véron, is located near where the Vienne River joins the Loire, 5 miles from Chinon.

© 2025, Grahame Elliott

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As a child during the Second World War, Alice Evleth read Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, a fantasy account of the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. Rereading the novella this summer, she had a sudden urge, a need even, to visit Dunkirk for the first time, though she’s lived in Paris for over 50 years. That visit in September resulted in her memoir vignette titled The Snow Goose Returns to Dunkirk, published in the Impressions section of France Revisited.

Alice’s vignette in turn inspired me to visit Dunkirk for the first time, though I’ve lived in Paris for over 35 years. My goal was above all pragmatic since I sought to complement The Snow Goose Returns to Dunkirk with practical information for those interested in visiting Dunkirk to learn more about the wartime evacuation on site. Anyway, I’m always up for an excursion of discovery—all the better when planned just several days in advance with an eye to the weather report: a mild, mostly sunny October weekday.

Americans don’t generally venture much north of the Paris region. Hauts-de-France (Upper France), the region that tends toward the Belgian border, is typically off radar unless one’s heading south by car from Belgium. British travelers naturally have more of a historical connection to Dunkirk and closer proximity. Dover is 50 miles away by sea, and there remains the national memory of the important and terrible events of the spring of 1940, when, as France was falling to Germany, 338,000 soldiers were successfully evacuated from Dunkirk Harbor and the nearby beaches. From May 26th to June 4th 1940, as the German jaw closed in, 198,000 British and 140,000 Allied soldiers, mostly French, were evacuated to England. They managed to escape on British cruisers and destroyers and other military craft for the most part as well as from hundreds of “little ships.” Some 12,000 soldiers died during the evacuation, including 5000 at sea.

Dunkirk (Dunkerque in French) is just 8 miles from the Belgium border. It’s a 30-35-minute train ride from Lille and less than an hour by car from Bruges (Belgium). It’s also easy enough to set out from Paris, as I did, 2-2½ hours by train.

The video below presents a summary of my day trip to Dunkirk. Leaving early from Paris and returning late, I had adequate time to see what I’d come to see, yet other approaches are certainly possible, and an overnight would loosen the timetable.

Three zones of highlights

If willing to walk four or five miles over the course of the day, Dunkirk can be considered walkable. Meanwhile, city buses are free and so can serve as hop-on-hop-off transportation along the way. It’s also possible to rent a bike for the day and include in plans a 30-minute ride along cycling paths to the Belgian border then back.

Generally speaking, there are three major zones to explore during a short visit.

1. The town center: Belfries, Saint Eloi Church and Jean Bart

About 85 percent of Dunkirk was destroyed during the war, yet several important historical remnants can still be seen. It’s a 15-minute walk from the train station to the 15th-century Saint Eloi Belfry that can be climbed for a panoramic view over this town of just over 80,000 inhabitants. That’s a good place to start since the Dunkirk Tourist Office is on the ground floor. Though an elevator leads partway up the 190-foot belfry, you have to earn the view by then ducking your head to take the 65 steep, narrow steps to the top for the panoramic view. The chimes still sound in the belfry, and some of the 50 bells that comprise the carillon can be seen as you climb.

The belfry was once attached to Church Saint Eloi, but a French invasion of this border territory in 1558 damaged the church. Rebuilt, but never completed according to its original plans, the late Gothic church is now separated by a street from the belfry.

In its choir, by the altar, lies the tomb of Jean Bart (1650-1702), the town’s favorite son and one of France’s most famous privateers thanks to his swashbuckling service to the kingdom during Louis XIV’s numerous mid-reign wars. Among other heroics that contributed to Bart’s renown were his actions in keeping 120 boatloads of food supplies imported from Norway from falling into the hands of the Dutch, France’s then-enemy, at a time when France was in danger of falling into famine. That a swashbuckler should eventually earn the honor of such a distinguished place of burial is a clear sign of his reputation. Bart’s tomb is often covered by a rug but his tombstone is visible to the left of the choir. A statue (1845) of Jean Bart by David d’Angers, a major sculptor of the era, stands on the large square nearby.

The statue’s left cheek bears the wound of wartime gunshot from 1945. The edge of the sword was dented by shrapnel in 1940. An outline of Bart’s exploits can be read here, in French.

Several blocks away, on the way to the Dunkirk 1940 Museum and the beach district Malo-les-Bains, Dunkirk City Hall also sports an impressive belfry, a common feature of city halls in northern France.

2. The Dunkirk 1940 – Operation Dynamo Museum

Open daily, the museum is a 20-minute walk, just under one mile, from the belfry. (Again, there are free buses throughout the town.)

During my short visit, Emmanuel Clermont, a guide with the tourist office, provided excellent guidance throughout the afternoon, as well as pleasing company. Arranging in advance at the tourist office for Emmanuel or another available guide for several hours or for the day would certainly allow for an edifying visit. With or without a guide, the informative and clearly presented now old-fashion Dunkirk 1940 Museum is the place to start learning on site about the town’s war history. It’s located within the curtain walls of a bastion dating from 1874 that served as headquarters for the defense of Dunkirk during the evacuation. The presentation begins with the 12-minute video that explains how Dunkirk came to be the evacuation point following the German blitzkrieg of the spring of 1940 and about Operation Dynamo, the wartime code for the evacuation itself. The museum then presents the timeline of the battle through models of the beaches and harbor, uniforms, weaponry and vehicles, and also tells of Dunkirk through the war.

3. Malo-les-Bains: La digue, historic villas and the beach

Beyond the old bastion and the harbor, the resort area of Malo-les-Bains, where soldiers were able to board the smaller craft during the evacuation, was distinct from Dunkirk until the two merged in 1970. It was and remains a well-known seaside destination for the inhabitants of Lille and the department of Nord (North) in which Dunkirk located.

A 10-minute walk from the museum, at the western end of Malo and the start of the digue, as the seaside embankment and promenade is called, there stands a block-like monument that pays tribute “to the glorious memory of the airmen, sailors and soldiers of the French and allied armies who gave their lives in the Battle of Dunkirk May June 1940.” Oddly to me, accustomed as I am to seeing bilingual war memorials in the Normandy Landing Zone, the wording on this monument is only in French, though there are British poppy wreaths attached to an anchor on the side. It appears that the British and the French see the evacuation of Dunkirk from different angles. Initially, Churchill ordered only the evacuation of British soldier before beginning the transportation of French as well, leading to German and Vichy French propaganda that the Britain had abandoned its allies. From the monument, it’s possible to walk out to the start of the pier from which so many soldier were evacuated. (I leave it to readers to delve deeper into the subject of Operation Dynamo on site or from home.)

The sea was relatively calm and the sky clear during much of the evacuation of the spring 1940, which contributed to its success. Similar conditions accompanied my October excursion. Be forewarned, however, that the coastline of northern France is known to have weather that can go through four seasons in a single day.

While a visit to Malo invariable involves a stroll along the digue, also have a meander a block or two inland to see some of the restored or copied early 20th-century villas. Malo’s wartime destruction at 65% means that it was slightly less damaged than Dunkirk and its harbor.

About three-quarters of a mile along the digue from the monument, you’ll come upon a cluster of local hotspots for coffee, a drink or a meal: Le Tchin-Tchin, Le Red Rock Café and Le Cactuscafé.

Beer is the alcoholic beverage of choice in Upper France thanks to its numerous breweries. (What few vineyards exist in the region, in its southernmost tip, nevertheless come with high pedigree as they lie within the champagne grape-growing area.) One of the breweries (brasseries) of Upper France with the best reputation is Brasseries du Pays Flamand in Blaringhem. Their Anosteké was named world’s best pale beer at the World Beer Awards in London in 2021. Their Bracine was named world’s best triple in 2023.

Having mentioned regional beer, I ought to mention a regional dish that can go with it: waterzooi, a creamy Flemish fish stew that’s served in Belgium and in this border region of France. It’s what I enjoyed for lunch, after a dozen escargot-style mussels. I ate not along the digue, but at the stew’s namesake restaurant Aux Wrterzooi, 82 quai des Hollandais, located between City Hall and the Dunkirk 1940 Museum.

Celebrations

During the chill of winter, Dunkirk keeps warm on weekends by organizing shoulder-to-shoulder festivities throughout the Carnival season, culminating in Mardi Gras week celebrations that include the annual herring throw (yes, herring is thrown down onto an impatient, costumed crowd from the balcony at City Hall) and weekend balls. See here for more details.

Each year, Dunkirk also commemorates the events of the 1940 evacuation, highlighted by more extensive commemorations every five years. In May 2025, Dunkirk will celebrate the 85th anniversary with a major gathering of the surviving (and much restored) little ships that took part in Operation Dynamo. One of those ships—not so little after all—is docked year-round in Dunkirk. It’s the Princess Elizabeth, a British paddle steamer that made four crossing to evacuate British and French soldier in 1940. Built in 1926 and named after the infant princess who would become queen, it is docked in the port area near the Mercure hotel (see below), a 10-minute walk from the train station. It’s now a restaurant, tea room and bar.

Three 4-star hotels in Dunkirk

The overnight visitor arriving by train might stay either by the station (e.g. at the Mercure) or in Malo (e.g. the Radisson Blue or the Merveilleux). If arriving by car, staying in Malo would be the more attractive choice, though there’s parking by the Mercure as well. Or perhaps you plan to bike through Dunkirk at the start or finish of the Vélo Martime cycling route that extends over 900 miles from the Belgian border to Roscoff, near the tip of Brittany. In that case, any of these hotels can provide bike parking.

Mercure Dunkerque Centre Gare, 81 rue Florence Arthaud. The Mercure (Accor) chain has an 89-room 4-star outlet, conveniently located for train travelers just 500 yards from the station and by the pleasure port. There are port views from some of its family and “premium” rooms, all of decent size. From here it’s a 10-minute walk to the belfry and surroundings at the center of town. Parking across the street. The above-mentioned Princess Elizabeth is close by.

Radisson Blu Grand Hotel & Spa, 4-8 rue Marcel Sailly. Like the Mercure but with more amenities, this is a well-situated recent 4-star hotel (2022) from a major chain. The majority of its 110 rooms are 23m2 (230 sq. ft.), meaning sufficiently large by French standards. Many have sea views (the image above and the one the top of this article were taken from the hotel) with balcony or terrace, including family rooms. The hotel is situated at the start of the western end of the beach of Malo, a 10-minute walk from the Dunkirk 1940 Museum. The hotel’s indoor swimming pool is free to guest 7-10am and 8-10pm, otherwise it’s part of the paid spa area. The hotel has some private parking spaces.

Le Merveilleux Malo, 77 Digue de Mer. About three-quarters of a mile further along the digue (the seaside promenade), this is a 20-room 4-star family-run hotel with cozy smaller rooms, sea views from the front, and seaside eating and drinking establishments right nearby. Some private parking spaces. The same family owns Aux Waterzooi, where I had lunch.

See the official site of the Dunkirk Tourist Office for further information about the town and its surroundings, including other sights and museums related to the area’s military and maritime histories.

© 2024, Gary Lee Kraut

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My parents were both great readers. In the family room, my father had built wall-to-ceiling shelves that my parents then filled with books. These were mostly adult books, poetry for my mother, fiction for my father. As I grew up, I came to enjoy his favorite authors: Mark Twain, with “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” of course, but also the less well known “Life on the Mississippi,” “Innocents Abroad,” and “Puddn’head Wilson,” a detective story.

They passed their love of reading on to me. I had my own large Philippine mahogany bookcase in my bedroom. It held, among others, the Oz stories, but I was a purist. I had only the original ones, those written by L. Frank Baum himself. The Oz books written by a successor after he died were just not the same. I also had a large collection of fairy tale books, notably the “color” series by Andrew Lang.

My father, an engineer working for a large oil company, was often gone on business, especially during World War II, which America joined after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when I was six years old. My father did not fight in the war as a soldier. He was an engineer, and the military draft authorities considered him more important in that role. Still, Papa would be away for weeks at a time, in the Pacific Northwest and Canada where there were oil deposits. He would send me postcards, including a humorous one showing a giant mosquito carrying off a deer. They were fun, but it wasn’t the same as having him there, reading me grownup stories like “The Count of Monte Cristo” instead of just the Mother Westwind stories Mama read to me about animals named Jimmy Skunk, Jerry Muskrat and Joe Otter.

I was bored staying home with Mama alone while my father was away. Luckily, I was saved by the neighbors. My father was often transferred because of his work, so we rented a lot of the time rather than buy a home. In 1942, we moved to Hillsborough, California. The Hammonds, our landlords, lived next door. They were not demanding or oppressive, the way landlords are often portrayed. They were open and friendly. Mrs. Hammond was particularly kind to me. One day she gave me a great gift in the form of an invitation. “I know how much you love our old house,” she said to me. “Our doors are never locked, you can come in whenever you want.” This was an unusual invitation, but for me, Mrs. Hammond was an unusual person because so unlike Mama. Her dress style was a great contrast to Mama’s. Instead of straight skirts and crisply ironed white blouses topped by cardigan sweaters, Mrs. Hammond’s home attire was faded blue jeans. They were perfect for the gardening she loved. During the war the Hammonds had a vegetable garden, a “Victory Garden” as they were called, the idea being that by growing a part of our own food, we were helping the war effort. I followed their example, and was proud of the carrots, beets, peas and string beans that I eventually provided for our dinner table.

I took advantage of Mrs. Hammond’s offer to visit next door whenever I wanted and I’d wander around the house, a big Victorian that had been in the family for generations. I mostly stayed in the downstairs rooms, which had the most character, where I would soak up the atmosphere of warmth and kindness I felt there. Especially, I’d visit her daughters Kate and Jane. Kate was six months older than I, and Jane, six months younger. They were my best friends. We played together almost every day, always at their house. Sometimes we went up to the attic, which had a trunk full of old clothes we could dress up in.

The Hammonds had only one bookcase, kept in what they called “the music room” because there was an upright piano against one wall. There, I often joined Kate and Jane to practice our scales. Music lessons were a must for nice upper middle-class girls like the three of us, the piano being the most popular instrument.

One day, when it was not my turn on the piano, I drifted over to the bookshelf across the room and explored its small collection. There were mostly medical textbooks left over from Mrs. Hammond’s time as a nurse before her marriage. But I also discovered a slim volume called “The Snow Goose” by the American writer Paul Gallico. It is a tale deriving from a real event of the Second World War, prior to the entry of the United States. It recounts the desperate sea evacuation of mostly British along with French soldiers trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk in northern France in 1940, using many small non-military ships and craft along with British destroyers and other military vessels. In the story, a large Canada goose plays a role in the rescue. “If you saw the goose,” one of the story’s fictional survivors says, “you were eventually saved.”

I read “The Snow Goose” for the first time right there on the floor in the Hammonds’ music room. It is a beautiful story, about a hunchbacked painter, an orphan girl, and a Canada goose, but because the painter dies during the evacuation it is very sad. It made me weep. Kate and Jane, busy working on a duet at the piano, did not notice my tears.

I continued to find “The Snow Goose” compelling. Seated on the floor in the Hammonds’ music room, I read it over and over. I kept rereading it until my father was transferred to Texas in 1948 and we moved away, when I was 13. Before we moved, I thought, briefly, of stealing “The Snow Goose”, carrying it off with me, but I could not do such a thing to the Hammonds, who had been such good friends to me. I left it where it was.

Years passed before I saw another copy of “The Snow Goose.” I came across it in a used bookstore in Montreal, when my late husband Earl and I were on vacation in Canada. This lovely book would be all mine, forever. It is a nicer copy than the one the Hammonds had, a special edition with four full-page color illustrations: one of the orphan girl with the goose in her arms, two of geese flying over the old lighthouse where the painter lived, and one of the Snow Goose alone in flight.

In my home in Paris where I now live, I have a bookshelf holding books that have special meaning for me. Occasionally, I’ll pick one up just to hold it in my hands or to flip through its pages or to reread it. Recently, for no conscious reason, I found myself drawn to my old and beautiful copy of the “The Snow Goose.” I reread it that afternoon and I loved it just as much as ever. I felt a connection with my six-year-old self sitting on the floor in the Hammonds’ music room. Though I hadn’t picked it up in many years, I realized that the book had been a part of my life for more than 80 years. Yet in the decades that I’ve lived in Paris, I had never been to Dunkirk, even though it’s only about 180 miles northwest of the city. I felt a sudden desire—no, a need—to go there.

I made plans to go on my own for one week this past September. I took the train to Dunkirk, a 2½-hour ride from Paris’s Gare du Nord. My daughter had reserved for me a nice hotel near the beach in Malo-les-Bains, once a distinct seaside resort, now fully a part of Dunkirk. It was from Malo that much of the beach evacuation took place in 1940.

My first day there produced typical Northern France weather, a sky like homogenous gray soup threatening rain, and a brisk wind. Reluctantly, I postponed my plan to stroll by the beach. I settled for visiting the nearby Dunkirk War Museum, Musée Dunkerque 1940 – Opération Dynamo. Operation Dynamo was the codename for the wartime evacuation. Visiting the informative museum was well worth my time. While many of the displays and photos naturally tell about the war, the evacuation and its aftermath, I was intrigued by two photos of Dunkirk and Malo before the war, before they were pounded into rubble by German bombings. In the few hours I’d been in Dunkirk, I could already see that most of what now stands has been built since the war. Always a book lover, I bought two books, one in French, one in English, both titled “Operation Dynamo.”

The following day the weather began to clear. I went for a walk on the paved promenade, what the locals call la digue (the dike), that runs the full length of the beach. I could see far out across the water, beyond the low dunes with gray-green marsh grass growing in the sand. This was one of the sites of the evacuation. There was still wind, but not so strong, and it didn’t buffet the numerous small white sailboats I saw. In a trick of the mind, I imagined that they were part of the flotilla of small craft arriving to carry the stranded soldiers away to safety to the larger ships waiting farther out, to take them on to safety in England.

The next day, I returned to the path along the beach, now with “The Snow Goose” in my purse. It wasn’t the beautiful copy I had at home, but a pocket-size edition that a friend whom I had told about this touching story and about my plan to visit Dunkirk had kindly sent me from England. I found a wooden bench where, under blue skies with powder puff white clouds, I sat and began to read. From time to time, I looked along the beaches around me where the men had awaited rescue and out to the sea before me. I noticed how shallow the water was for a good distance out. For the first time, I truly understood the need for small boats to evacuate the soldiers. The larger boats that had tried to come in to pick up the stranded soldiers could not, because there was not enough depth. Thus hindered, they made easy targets for the German planes overhead, diving and strafing. Still, the little boats were not spared.

I reread the “The Snow Goose” entirely that afternoon, occasionally pausing to contemplate my surroundings. In my mind’s eye I could see those little boats trying to dart away from the diving planes. Some got through. Others did not. The little boat in “The Snow Goose” was one of the latter. For the lonely painter and the orphan girl who had come to love him, there was only loss. Although I usually prefer happy endings, such an ending would never have touched me the way this sad one has. I was moved in an unusual way, not to tears for a beautiful tale, but by the realization of how very close this evacuation, a “non-victory” as Churchill put it, came to becoming a resounding defeat. Yet in the final accounting, 340,000 British and French troops were successfully evacuated. They formed the nucleus of an army which would fight again, and, four years later, with Americans now on their side, return to the shores of France to eventually defeat Germany.

Though this was my first time in Dunkirk, being there was like visiting my own past. I thought of the kindness of the Hammonds and our peaceable lives in California. I thought about the effects of World War II on the American home front, with our sense of a just and necessary war, and the effort to engage ordinary civilians, women and even children like me, through Victory Gardens and War Bond drives, events that marked my childhood and have stayed with me as “The Snow Goose” has for over 80 years. As I sat there, watching families now walking peacefully in the sunshine along the beach and looking out to the calm waters and little sailboats sliding on the sea, I realized that I am now old enough to remember a time that fewer and fewer do. I realized this not with sadness or even nostalgia, but with a sense of privilege at having been a part of those heroic times.

© 2024, Alice Evleth

Read the accompanying article Dunkirk 1940, Dunkirk Today: Advice for a Day Trip or an Overnight by Gary Lee Kraut.

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The curators of France have sports on the brain. I imagine hundreds of them gathering in a post-Covid funk at a convention at the Louvre two or three years back, trying to come up with ways to attract visitors to their museums. Suddenly, a specialist in, say, 18th-century stockings, a graduate of the class of 2008 at the Institut National du Patrimoine, stands up and shouts, “Eureka! Forget about the 150th anniversary of Impressionism in 2024, let’s all plan shows about sports to coincide with the Paris Olympics!” There follows a standing ovation and a buzz that spills over to the Champagne reception and evolves into an orgy of ideas for the Olympic crossover into cultural exhibitions in museums and other venues. Now, 2, 3 years later, dozens of sports-related exhibitions have blossomed throughout France. And you can visit all of them for less than the cost a nosebleed seat at a second-round match of beach volleyball at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

The official map of Olympic and Paralympic sporting venues also presents sports-related cultural and event locations throughout France.

Here is a selection of major and minor exhibitions in Paris and various regions of France during this Olympic year.

A Selection from France’s Cultural Olympiad

Paris’s fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, gets into the act with Fashion on the Move #2, presenting 300 items that “explore the role of special clothing in physical and sports activities as well as the sociological factors reflected in its development.” From horseback riding to tennis to golf to bicycling, along with much sea bathing and swimming, visitors can examine “the gradual specialization of sports garments and the arrival of sportswear in people’s ordinary everyday wardrobe.” This exhibition, running until Jan. 5, 2025, follows on the heels of the first Fashion on the Move show, which pranced along similar ground.

The Pantheon in Paris, that impressive and vital church-cum-monument-to-the-ideals-of-the-French-Republic, hosts until September 29 the exhibition Paralympic History: From Integration in Sport to Social Inclusion, 1948-2024.

The Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris presents the 1930s work of André Steiner. See the video below for a brief description and glimpse of André Steiner: The Body, from Desire to Transcendence, showing until September 22.

Also in Paris, sport and urban cultures form the raison d’être of Spot 24, a temporary exhibition space and Olympics shop located a 10-minute walk west of the Eiffel Tower. In a series of corporate-hip displays, the exhibition showcases six new or recent Olympic disciplines: BMX freestyle, skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing, 3×3 basketball and breaking. Until Dec. 31.

The National Sport Museum in the Allianz Riviera Stadium in Nice needs no Olympic theme to work up a sweat. Still, it would be remiss in not mounting an Olympic-related temporary exhibition. The result is Les Elles des jeux, which examines the place of women in the Olympics over the past 130 years. It runs until September 22.

In Lyon during the month of August, the regional CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) presents at the Parc de la Tête d’Or an exhibition called Sport et Science: L’union fait la force (strength through unity), examining, among other aspects, how science benefits professional and amateur athletes.

In Burgundy, the MuséoParc Alésia looks at the Olympic Games of Antiquity in Ô Sport, des Jeux pour des dieux (the Games for the gods) https://www.alesia.com/o-sport-des-jeux-pour-des-dieux/, along with a separate exhibition titled Archeology and Sport, both until November 30. The museum-park, created at the site of a major battle between Roman legions and the Celtic tribes that inhabited Gaul prior to the Roman conquest, is located 35 miles northwest of Dijon by car (or a quick side-trip while biking along the Canal de Bourgogne).

In Toulouse, the southwestern city known as “the European capital of aeronautics and space,” the title of the exhibition at the Cité de l’Espace (Space City) is unsurprisingly Space and Sport. Showing until the end of the year, it highlights the similarities between top-level athletes and astronauts.

Bordeaux naturally sought a wine angle. Whether its convincing or not (haven’t been), the Cité du Vin has mounted an exhibition that finds a connection between life in the stadium and work in the vineyards and the common challenges facing both athletes and winegrowers. Whatever. Showing until September 29.

In the Alsatian city of Sélestat, the Humanist Library, which hosts notable exhibitions related to its extensive collection of medieval manuscripts and 15th- and 16th-century printed books, presents En garde ! L’escrime, entre fiction littéraire et réalité historique (fencing, between literary fiction and historical reality). June 27 to November 10.

In addition to being well off the radar of most travelers, the Centre Historique Minier, a museum about the history of mining built on the site of an old mine in Lewarde (Upper France), 27 miles south of Lille, would appear to have a tough time finding a sporting angle. It nevertheless manages to jump on the Olympic bandwagon by exploring how mine owners, beginning in the mid-19th century, saw sports and sporting clubs as a way of structuring the free time of their employers and families with activities and a social framework that could be beneficial for their cohesion and physical fitness. The sporting exhibition continues until May 4, 2025.

La Fabrique des Savoirs, the Knowledge Factory, in Elbeuf (Normandy) is an eclectic museum dedicated to all kinds of knowledge and know-how, particularly relative to nature, archeology and industry in and around the loop in the Seine upstream from Rouen. Sports enters mix this summer with the exhibition De l’usine au stade (from the factory to the stadium), June 21 to Sept. 29, which tells about the development of sports and sporting facilities in the area from 1870 to today.

(Contemporary) Art & Sport

Art & Sport is the unambiguous heading for 13 exhibitions of contemporary art taking place at various times from May to November in 13 cities representing the 13 regions of metropolitan France.

Considering what are often thought of as two distinct audiences—the artistic and museum-going public on the one hand and the sporting and sport-going public on the other, the former considered elitist in opposition to the latter often seen as “the people”—the national cultural organization GrandPalaisRMN is supporting an array of exhibitions intended to bring contemporary art to those who don’t usually enter museums. The venues for these exhibitions are therefore sports facilities and outdoor event spaces.

A good example of the concept is an exhibition that recently closed in Nevers (Burgundy) titled Hand in Hand in Hand. Taking place at a local sports center used by the Nevers handball team, the show considered the place of the hand and the sense of touch in contemporary art. A handball stadium may seem like an unlikely place to draw a substantial audience until you consider that handball is a major sport in France. In fact, in a rare Olympic double, France’s men’s and women’s handball teams both won gold three years ago at the Tokyo Olympics.

Through to the end of June in Mulhouse (Alsace), the theme of color in contemporary art is examined at an exhibition titled Pop Up Play Polychrome, showing at the Mulhouse Climbing Center. Why there? As an echo to the colors of the climbing walls.

In Pau (New Aquitaine), in June and July, the city’s aquatic center houses the exhibition How to Whisper to the Ocean. Water is naturally the common element in works that explore with drama, poetry and humor the concept of voyages to places foreign, unknown and/or subject to climate change.

In Le Mans (Western Loire), time is the theme of the works presented at the track of the 24 Hours of Le Mans races. It’s a short exhibition, lasting only June 11 to 16, the week of the Hypercar race.

The theme of the storm will draw the eyes of visitors at the Old Port in Marseilles from June 30 to July 3.

From July 5 to September 2, the impressive equestrian center in Saint Lô (Normandy) is the venue for works on the theme of animals, with an African proverb leading the way: If an animal tells you he can speak, he’s probably lying.

The works presented from September 7 to 29 at Nîmes‘s skate park, France’s largest, will explore street life.

In Paris, from July 12 to September 9, multiculturalism is the umbrella theme at the Maison de la Conversation in the 18th arrondissement. What does conversation have to do with sport? Well, as anyone who has taken part in café culture in Paris well knows, conversation is the primary sport in the capital city, though dodging cyclists is well on its way to overtaking it. Furthermore, one of the main conversations among Parisians for many months now has been Olympic fatigue, even before the Games begin.

For the full schedule and description of (contemporary) Art & Sport exhibitions, see here.

© 2024, Gary Lee Kraut

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On the triple occasion of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, an exhibition of Ian Patrick’s portraits of Normandy veterans at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris, and the publication of the expanded second edition of D-Day Portraits: Héros Anonymes – Anonymous Heroes, his collection of portraits and first-hand accounts of veterans of the Invasion of Normandy who have returned over the years, I sat down with Ian to discuss his relationship with Normandy, with WWII veterans, and with the veteran who first awakened his interest in the “anonymous heroes” of the invasion that changed the course of the war: his father.

Ian Patrick is an American-born photographer, now a dual citizen, who moved to Paris in 1979 after launching a successful career as a portraitist in New York, where he photographed such well-known cultural figures of the time as Bob Marley and Andy Warhol, among others. It wasn’t until Ian was living in France that his father, William Patrick, when visiting, told him that he had taken part in the Invasion of Normandy 1944. Together, in 1980, they visited Utah Beach, where his father had landed six days after D-Day. Since then, Ian has returned frequently to the D-Day Landing Zone to photograph veterans of the Invasion of Normandy. With the disappearance of the generation that fought in the Second World War, his 44-year project of photographing veterans is coming to an end.

What do you remember of the first time you visited the D-Day Landing Zone?

It was 1979. I’d done a photography job in La Rochelle, and since my assistant and I weren’t in a rush to get the car back to Paris, we drove up the Atlantic coast and cut across to Normandy. I remember seeing the sign for Omaha Beach and driving down to the beach and saying, “Well, there’s nothing here!” We drove up and down the beach a couple times, unimpressed, and then went up to the cemetery where we got the jaw-drop view of the tombs and the channel beyond the cliff. But we didn’t spend much time in the area because we had to get back to Paris.

Then the next time you went back was with your father?

Yes. In 1980. My father flew over on a military plane, which he could do for free as a career military man. He flew from California to Dover, Delaware, from Dover to the Azores, from the Azores to Ramstein, Germany. Then he took the train to Paris, Gare de l’Est, and walked over to our apartment by the canal [Saint-Martin]. Sometimes he’d just show up, without letting us know he was coming. But this time we knew he was coming because he wanted to meet Véronique, my fiancée at the time, before we got married.

After a few days in Paris, he was bored and he said, “How about taking me up to Normandy?” And I said, “Sure, Dad, but if it’s Calvados [apple brandy] you want we can get it in Paris.” And he said, “Yeh, I’d like some Calvados, too, but I’d like to visit Normandy because I was there in the war.” I said, “You never told me about that.” He said, “Well, let’s go up there and I’ll tell you all about it.”

At the time I had a “Quatrelle,” one of those funky little Renault cars, that wasn’t exactly a bomb on the road. Dad didn’t want to go on the freeway but on the smaller national roads because he figured he’d recognize all kinds of stuff. As soon as we got into Normandy, which you do fairly quickly from Paris, he started noticing signs for Calvados and he asked me why were there so many of them. I told him that there are lots of farmers who make and sell Calvados. He said, “Let’s go get some.” We were still two hours from the beach. We went into one, where I introduced my father and told the farmer that he wanted to try some Calvados. The farmer said, “Here’s 7 years, 10 years, 15 years.” My father said, “Let’s start with the 10 years.” He tasted it and he said, “My god, this is so much better than the stuff we had during the war. Get three bottles of that.” I said, “Three bottles, Dad?” He said, “Yeh, one for you, one for me, and one for right now.”

So we started drinking it at 9 o’clock in the morning and by the time we got to Utah Beach, we were feeling “in our cups,” as they used to say, and he started talking to me about his time in the war. He landed at Utah Beach on June 12, so the beach had been won by then, of course, but there were still corpses around. My father had started off the war as a pilot but blew his eardrums out, so they put him on the ground, which he was really disappointed about. He was an armorer, making sure that guns were perfectly in alignment and worked and the bombs properly place, anything to do with ammunition. They had a special place on the airstrip where they could lift the tail up and fire at targets to make sure that the guns were aligned correctly. What’s incredible is that they actually had gun cameras on those machine guns and rockets so that same evening the films were developed and they would project them in the barn of the farm where they were staying and write down what needed to be done. And they saw the carnage they were creating for the Germans.

When he arrived on the 12th, the airstrip where he was assigned, which was just behind Sainte Mère Eglise, was still being finished by the Corps of Engineers. It was being made so that their P47s wouldn’t have to go back to England to refuel and rearm. He was there until the end of August, after the Germans had been hammered in the Falaise Gap. From there he went to Le Mans, then Nancy, then Saint Dizier, and also provided support for the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. They put special pouches under the wings to drop ammunition and supplies to the men who were stuck in the Hürtgen Forest. They then moved into Germany.

I knew practically nothing of this before going to Normandy with him. I knew that he was in the war but he never talked about it. He was a career army man but he never talked about the war. I lived on army bases as a kid and saw army stuff all the time. When you’re a little kid you play army but you don’t necessarily ask your father if he ever killed any Germans or stuff like that. It was with our trip to Normandy that he started talking about it.

Why do you think it took your father so long after the war to come to Normandy given that returning there came to mean so much to him?

My parents came to Paris in 1950 on their honeymoon from Austria, where my father was stationed. My mother was already pregnant with me. I have photographs of him in his uniform at the Eiffel Tower—in those days you had to wear your uniform when you traveled. They also went to Nice. After I was born, we lived in Austria and later we lived in Germany. We’d go on vacation to the French Riviera or the Italian Riviera. They liked going to Vienna as well. But Dad never talked about the war. After we moved to the U.S., they loved coming back to Europe because they lived a long time here. But Normandy wouldn’t have been a place that he would think of going with my mother. So when he came to visit alone that time, it was an opportunity for him to go and for me to go with him. My mother had no interest in the war. But when she came with him later, she realized the effort and the massiveness of the invasion and… you can’t help, even if you’re opposed to the military and to war, you can’t help but take your hat off to those people who were a part of it and who lived through it. My parents returned may times, especially my father.

That trip with your father, to whom you dedicate “Anonymous Heroes,” your book of veterans’ portraits and their first-hand accounts, must have been the spark to your interest in photographing veterans.

Yes. We drove up and down the Utah Beach that first time. He showed me certain bunkers where he would tell me what kind of shell had hit it to make the hole or the mark on it, using all this military jargon. He was into ammunition because that was his job. Then he wanted to find the farm where the airstrip had been. Of course, the strip was no longer there, and there was no sign marking where it had been. Also, most farmers in the area didn’t want visitors. But we drove into one farm in my “Quatrelle,” where we met a lady named Alice. It was lunchtime, and she and the family came out with their napkins in their hands. “Oui, Monsieur?” she said to me. “Excusez-nous,” I said, “Mon papa est vétéran…” and right away she said to him, “Entrez, monsieur.” So we went in and they brought out two plates and we sat down to eat with them. My father was in tears, he couldn’t believe it. Their welcome was so sweet. At the end of the meal, the farmer went out to the barn, or wherever he went, and he comes back with a half-full dirty old bottle of dark alcohol, and written in chalk on the bottle was “1944.” He gave us each a little snort of it. It was absolutely delicious and my father started crying again. He said, “This isn’t the kind of stuff that we had in 1944. What we had was green rotgut, whatever we could find that the Germans left behind.” From there we went into Sainte Mère Eglise and we meet other people who then invited us in for coffee. My father couldn’t believe the welcome we were receiving. I took some pictures of him on the beach and in different places.

After that I decided to go up there every year on the sixth of June, and I would take pictures. Many times, there were no veterans at all. I would go each year, whether my father would come to France or not. Years later, I went to a fair in a hotel in Paris promoting Normandy for the upcoming 50th anniversary [1994]. By that time I’d already done a number of photographs. I met the secretary of the Comité du Débarquement [Landing Committee] and showed her some pictures. She said, “Oh c’est bien!” Then she explained that not only was she a part of the Landing Committee but she was also the director of the Musée de la Tapisserie in Bayeux, and she invited me to show my work in the Salle du Chevalier, which is the vaulted hall that later became the giftshop of the museum. So that was the first exhibition of my Normandy work, which I’d been taking just out of my own interest until then. From then on, she would send me an official invitation to the June 6th ceremonies every year so that I had actual credentials to go wherever I wanted to photograph veterans.

I also then started to interview the veterans, usually calling them on the phone after meeting them since there was no time to interview them during the ceremonies. On the phone, they would speak differently, more freely, as though to themselves, since they were alone and weren’t perturbed by my presence. Sometimes they’d go off track and I’d bring them back with another question. I asked them to tell me about their experience, whatever was bizarre or sad or happy that they wanted to recall. Most of them didn’t talk about terrible stuff. Some of the ones who landed on Omaha Beach did, in a very cold manner. A lot of them didn’t want to talk at all. I just tried to let them tell me what they wanted to tell me.

I wasn’t necessarily meeting them at the ceremonies. I would attend the big ceremonies, and I might come upon a smaller one here and there that I only learned about when I got there. Nine times out of ten it was just serendipity that brought me in contact with a veteran. I have photographed veterans I happened to come upon in the cemeteries while they’re paying homage to a particular person. I got the shot of Major Howard at Pegasus Bridge because the owner of the B&B where we were staying during the anniversary that year [1993] told us about an event that was taking place there on June 5th. So we immediately went there, and there they were, Major Howard and a few men popping Champagne. There weren’t that many people. There were no guys dressed up as paratroopers as you’d see more recently. There was just Madame Gondrée at the café by the bridge when I was in there talking with Bill Millin. Some years when there were few veterans, I would do landscapes, which is why there are some landscapes in the show and in the book, photographs of ceremonies and of places that reek with history.

In my first show for the 50th anniversary there was very little text next to the portraits. Just who they are, were they are, basic facts. Then little by little, as I took more portraits and gathered more stories, I realized that I had material for a book, which I put together with the backing of the Military Museum at the Invalides [in Paris] for the 65th anniversary in 2009. That year I also had exhibitions of my work at the Invalides and at the Museum of the Battle of Normandy in Bayeux, near the British Cemetery. That’s the first time that I put together the photos with the text [first-hand accounts] at an exhibition as well as putting them in the book.

After that first edition I continued to meet veterans, and even since completing the new edition last year I’ve met others. For example, I recently met some Belgian soldiers who managed to get to England during the war and joined up with a brigade that took part in the Invasion of Normandy under British command.

How often did your father return after that first visit?

He would come every two or every five years. He would come for the big ceremonies and some little ones as well. Even if it wasn’t the sixth of June, whenever my parents would come to France they would usually drive to Normandy, even without me.

In the early years of his visits, my father and I would be at Sainte Mère Eglise and school children would come up to him and ask him for his autograph. My father said, “Why do they want an autograph from me? I’m just an old veteran.” I had to bug him to put on his medals. He didn’t want to wear them, it embarrassed him because he thought it would be showing off. He didn’t even bring them for the 65th [2009] though I thought he might. I hadn’t told him in advance, but he was going to get the Legion of Honor at the Invalides that year along with 50 other veterans. I didn’t want to tell him before he got to France because I knew that he would be angry about getting a medal now. Finally, I told him about it when he got to France. He was kind of embarrassed. He hadn’t brought his medals, so I called my sister and asked her to dig through the drawers in his bedroom to find them and to send them asap. She did, and the day of the ceremony I pinned them on him. He complained, “Where the hell did you get those?” But he was enthralled by the whole thing, a big ceremony—he thought it was incredible. Then we all went to Normandy for the 65th anniversary commemorations. They reserved a train for the veterans, red carpet at the station, the band of the Garde Républicaine playing Glen Miller, wine and foie gras on the train. Then a bus took us from Caen to the American Cemetery. My father sat with all of the veterans on the podium, where they all shook Obama’s hand and Sarkozy’s hand. Then we all went back to Paris, exhausted.

He and my mother both passed away a year later, in 2010. They wanted their ashes spread together at Utah Beach, which we did.

Why did you want to put together a new edition of your book?

Because this could be the der des ders, the last flame. There are at least 25 additional veterans in this edition. I’ve met a lot more British and Americans but especially British through British families who live or have vacation homes in Normandy. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in Normandy over the years. The British and the Dutch get together a lot, say for a drink on a Thursday or Friday evening, and a lot of them have fathers who were veterans. So I’d meet the fathers when they came over. Many of them have become part of the Deep Respect Association, with which I’m involved. [Editor’s note: Created in 2010, Deep Respect is a Normandy-based non-profit whose mission is to preserve and transmit the memory of veterans of the Second World War who contributed to the success of Operation Overload and to help veterans who participated in the Battle of Normandy visit the region.] We take around the veterans when they visit and it’s super interesting listening to them talk about their battles.

A series of your portraits and stories from the book are now on permanent display at the Overlord Museum Ohama Beach that’s located at the round-about where one turns to enter the Normandy American Cemetery. How did that come about?

The museum houses a tremendous collection of war materials—tanks, artillery, much more—started in the 1970s by Michel Leloup. He presented some of it in a museum in Falaise but as he grew the collection he began looking for more space and for a location with potential to draw a wider audience. He died before the project to move it to the site near the American Cemetery was completed. It was opened in 2013 by his son Nicolas.

For the 70th anniversary, in 2014, I had an exhibition at the round-about at Omaha Beach where the big monuments are located. Nicolas saw the exhibition and asked if he could buy some of the photos. I said, “Sure.” He bought about five. Since the veterans in the some of the photographs were at the event, we got pictures of them with the photographs, which they signed, which helped promote the museum. Over the next few years, the museum really took off, so Nicolas decided to expand the museum to show more of the collection, and in part of it he’s now consecrated one long corridor to presenting about 70 of my photographs—a lot of which he bought and some of which I donated—along with the text of the stories the veterans told me. My daughter Leah did the scenography and the soundtrack of 40s music and various sounds (waves, planes, bombs) for the exhibition.

You’ve now been photographing veterans for 44 years. With so few Normandy veterans still with us, and very few able or willing to travel, where does your project go from here?

I’ll still see some veterans this year and possibly next. But since I am basically a portraitist, there will soon no longer be men to photograph. That means that the project is now passing into the archival stage. It’s important to show them. I want to help maintain through the show at the Invalides, the permanent exhibition at the museum and the book the memory of those who are or will soon no longer be around to share their stories first-hand. The portraits are a way of people getting to know these veterans as they were as young men and as they were when I met them.

Where to see Ian Patrick’s photographic work

– His personal website Ian Patrick Photographer.
– Permanent exhibition at the Overlord Museum, near the entrance to the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer.
– The book: Héros Anonymes – Anonymous Heroes: D-Day Portraits. The captions and first-hand accounts of veterans are in both English and French. The book is available at major museums in the Normandy Landing Zone—the Overlord Museum, the Airborne Museum in Sainte Mère Eglise, the Arromanches Museum, the Utah Beach Museum and the Pegasus Bridge Museum—as well as at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris. It can also be ordered directly from the author by contacting him at ianpatrickphoto@gmail.com.
– Temporary exhibition at the Army Museum at the Invalides, June 1 to August 26, 2024. The exhibition is presented under the arcades surrounding the main courtyard. Entrance is free as it isn’t necessary to purchase to museum ticket in order to enter the courtyard. 129 rue de Grenelle, Paris.

© 2024. Interview conducted by Gary Lee Kraut.
All photos © Ian Patrick.

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On our visit to Lyon, my husband and I stayed in the city center, Presqu’ile (the Peninsula), where we walked narrow, cobbled streets enjoying intriguing shops and wonderful restaurants. Crossing the Saône on a pedestrian bridge, we explored the remarkably preserved Roman ruins at Lugdunum, part of the UNESCO World Heritage site and wandered through Vieux-Lyon (Old Lyon). It is among the most beautifully preserved Renaissance districts in Europe thanks to the intervention in 1962 by Minister of Culture, André Malraux, who saved it from destruction and made it the first “secteur sauvegardé”—protected zone—in France.

Yet I was drawn to the CHRD, across the Rhône, because of my enduring desire to understand how ordinary citizens muster the will to resist, sacrifice and survive in the face of inhumane and repressive treatment. In visiting the CHRD, I hoped to gain insight into WW II beyond dates, battles, and distinguished names from history books.

By coincidence, we were in Lyon on Victory in Europe Day which commemorates the unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allies on the 8th of May 1945. President Emmanuel Macron was there to pay tribute to the Resistance and to the memory of Jean Moulin, but public transportation was disrupted and gatherings to the parade were discouraged, so we watched the ceremony on television. We were touched by its solemnity and by conversations we had with people during the day. Memories of war endure in the collective consciousness of France, and Lyon is a particular reminder of that period as it was both a center for Nazi forces and a stronghold of the French Resistance.

Jean Moulin, who unified disparate resistance fighters throughout France and served as the first President of the National Council of the Resistance until his torture and subsequent death in 1943, is revered throughout France. In 1964, during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, he received France’s greatest posthumous honor when his remains were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris

The day after the May 8th commemoration of Victory in Europe, we walked from our hotel, near the bank of the Saône, toward the Rhône as we headed to the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation. Along the way, we encountered striking public monuments to suffering and sacrifice during World War II in France and to injustices to humanity in other parts of the world. After traversing Place Bellecour, kilometer 0 in Lyon and the third largest square in France, we came upon a solemn and stunning permanent exhibit memorializing the Armenian Massacre of 1915, considered the first genocide of the 20th century. Installed on Place Antonin Poncet, adjacent to Bellecour, it beckons passersby with a series of 36 white columns made from Armenian stone on which are inscribed poems by Armenian poet Kostan Zarian. The site is bordered by large, evocative photographs of people and sites associated with the massacre.

On the other side of Place Bellecour, in front of what was a café during the war, stands a looming statue called Veilleur de Pierre (Stone Watchman), erected where five resistance fighters were murdered by Nazis in July 1944. An inscription entreats, “Passant va dire au monde, qu’ils sont morts pour la liberté” (Passerby tell the world that they died for freedom). The passionate simplicity of that voice through time touched us deeply.

We crossed the Rhône on Pont de l’Université, itself a vestige of the war; as were 22 other bridges in Lyon, it was destroyed by the Germans on September 2, 1944 in order to slow the American advance as German forces fled north. The bridge reopened in 1947 with the original stone piers supporting the rebuilt arches that span the river.

Entering the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation, we were welcomed by attentive staffers who spoke little English but were helpful when we plunged ahead with our less than perfect French. The headsets with English audio that we were given worked intermittently, but during our visit we encountered empathetic visitors, who, upon hearing our English, offered translations without being asked. And the artifacts and photographs in the CHRD convey powerful commentary without requiring words.

We were encouraged to start our visit with a film about Klaus Barbie. Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon, was known as the Butcher of Lyon because of his brutality toward prisoners, primarily Jews and members of the Resistance. In addition to ordering the torture and execution of thousands of prisoners, Barbie personally tortured those he interrogated in savage ways, often for days on end, using devices such as spiked balls and hot needles, along with causing near drowning and trauma to open wounds to maximize pain. After the war, Britain and later America recruited him to help with intelligence to infiltrate Communist cells. In 1950 the United States helped him assume a new identity and relocate to South America, where he remained as an agent of the Americans while maintaining his Nazi ideology. In 1983 the Bolivian government arrested and deported him to France. That same year, the United States officially apologized to France for helping Barbie escape justice for 33 years.

Barbie’s trial was held in Lyon between May and July 1987. The Barbie Trial, Justice for Memory and History, produced by legal journalist Paul Lefèvre, highlights witnesses who endured Barbie’s physical and psychological torture. The film has English subtitles, so we understood the compelling accounts of those who had been brutally interrogated by Barbie or had relatives tortured and killed by him. Included in the film is testimony by Sabine Zlatin, founder of a children’s home in Izieu, a small village in the hills outside of Lyon which for two years served as a refuge mostly for Jewish children. In April 1944, 44 children, all under the age of 14, and their caregivers were arrested and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz. In her emotional statement against Barbie, who had signed the order to seize the children, she addressed the court in a broken, emotional cry: “The children, 44 children. What were they supposed to be? Members of the Resistance? They were innocents.” We were riveted by the voices of witnesses and repulsed by the smiling, arrogant Barbie. The documentary lacks artifice; it is humanity in the raw. Following the film, the audience in the small theater exited in silence. (Barbie was sentenced to life in prison. He died of cancer in prison four years later, at the age of 77.)

The light of the museum lobby and the sound of voices breaking the silence brought relief from the weightiness of the film. We were instructed to go to the second floor to begin the self-guided tour which starts with the history of the building.

The main gallery is composed of a series of exhibits that provide information about the complex and dangerous workings of the Resistance as well as insight into daily life under the occupation. A visitor may choose to follow the order of the displays, which contain primary source material such as newspapers, identity cards, ration books, photographs and posters, as well as hardware used for communication and intelligence, thus building a chronological background of the period. Others may prefer to focus on exhibits that target personal interests, pausing to contemplate or make connections with other visual and written information.

On display are materials created by the Resistance as well as those used to propagandize against it. Posters and leaflets recruiting support for the Resistance are presented next to posters hailing the Vichy government and promoting the vilest of Nazi ideology. Communications equipment, clothing worn by its members, the parachute Jean Moulin used to reenter France after meeting with de Gaulle in London in 1942, and photographs from the period create not only vivid images of war but a history of individual and collective sacrifice. It is particularly touching to see handwritten diaries and letters belonging to members of the Resistance and citizens of Lyon.

Prominent among exhibits are newspapers, flyers, and other print material effectively used by the Resistance to inspire confidence in eventual victory, to convey important information about the effort to subvert occupation, and to disseminate information to Resistance members. Compared to today’s complex telecommunication systems that instantly provide information and propaganda, this use of printed language on paper may seem simplistic. Its effectiveness, however, is evidenced by the ability of the Resistance to transmit intelligence and perform acts of sabotage while maintaining a constant presence in the public mind. Likewise, the handguns and rifles on display seem so basic compared to modern lethal technology; they support the image of the intrepid Resistance fighter as a confident armed man with a cigarette in hand. The real men, women, and youths resisting occupation and conquest, however, lived dangerous clandestine lives among the populace and assumed many responsibilities. Some fed people, hid them, and transported weapons where needed; others planned and conducted subversive attacks on German interests or dispatched information. Since there were collaborators within the population, the Resistance relied on the integrity of individuals and on munitions obtained clandestinely.

The vital role of women, accounting for between 12 and 25 percent of Resistance members, was not fully recognized until decades after the war. Women did what was needed, including transporting arms, relaying information, and hiding Jewish children. In some cases, they also took part in acts of sabotage. Because women were not as readily suspect as men, they were effective in avoiding Nazi scrutiny. I was not surprised by the suppression of the contributions of woman, but, as always, when reading history that is revised to include truth as well as popular myth, I empathized with the invisibility of such sacrifice. It is suggested that the contribution of women to the Resistance influenced Charles de Gaulle’s government in exile to grant women the right to vote in 1944.

Photographs and audiovisual testimonies add human dimension to dates, statistics, and information. The dedication of men and women who risked everything to oppose tyranny is made palpable by valuable equipment like the “Minerve” printing press clandestinely operated in Nazi-occupied Lyon to produce communiques, coded messages, and information for the populace. Likewise, guns carried by members of the Resistance underscore their constant proximity to death. The lives of those who committed themselves to saving France and to the post-war future is both inspirational and challenging. I wondered if I could have measured up to their sense of duty and courage? If needed, could I stand up to dangers threatening the world today? I found myself reading names of those captured, tortured and in many instances killed and whispering them under my breath to honor them: “Marc Bloch, Marie Besson, Daniel Cordier, Pierre Poncet.”

The historical narrative moves from the Resistance into a space that focuses on the capture and deportation of Jews, immediately made real by the display of the authentic striped flannel suit of a deportee interned in a concentration camp. It was donated by Jacques Micolo who kept the clothing after his liberation from captivity. Further exploration discloses detail about the Jews of Lyon and the indignities suffered as they were identified, captured, and deported to camps. Quite poignant is a series of drawings of the Ravensbrück concentration camp by Nina Jirsikova who survived and was liberated in 1945. The images depict women enduring a claustrophobic and humiliating existence, overseen in some cases by the contemptuous scrutiny of their guards. Barefoot, often naked, the women initially appear devoid of expression, but a closer look reveals identity and individuality seeking survival amid extreme depravation.

Exhibited documents include forged identity papers, leaflets announcing the roundup of Jews, a yellow Star of David declaring “Juif” (Jewish), and photographs of children and adults sent to concentration camps. Particularly poignant are objects from Ravensbrück made by captives that testify to their will to survive and reflect aspects of life in civil society. Mittens, for instance, made from a camp blanket elicit a momentary smile because they appear so child-like. Documentation on the CHRD website states they were made by an inmate as a present. How generous of the resourceful tailor to create cheerful warmth for a friend amid shared deprivation and imprisonment. Also from Ravensbrück is a multicolored deck of playing cards made by Yvonne Rochette who survived captivity.

As in the section concerning the Resistance, there are audiovisual testimonies of Jews of Lyon who were targeted by Nazis. Time spent in this sad gallery infuses painful reality into what could tragically become just a chapter in history were it not for artifacts collected and people remembered.

This section of the museum does not lend itself to random wanderings; the exhibit about the Jews of Lyon leads to a beautifully detailed dining room from Lyon in the 1940s complete with period furniture, tableware, and a radio broadcasting events of the day. We felt as if we had gone back in time to a modest apartment belonging to a family wary of every announcement over the wire and every noise from the street. There is a certain warmth because it is so homelike—despite the portrait of WWI hero then collaborator Maréchal Pétain—but it is accompanied by feelings of dread culled from the collective experience of witnessing the horror of the Barbie trial, the urgency of the Resistance, and the road to death for Jews.

This feeling was heightened when we walked down a dimly lit industrial stairwell to an austere stone basement. The effect of introducing a visitor to the fear of those captured and descending in the dark to interrogation and torture is powerful. At the bottom of the stairs, we sat on bench seats, saw a short film about the Resistance, and learned how even as individuals and groups worked against Nazis and collaborators, the leadership was documenting and formally writing concrete goals and organizational structure for a post-war government. Members of the Resistance were among the factions that helped develop the constitution and government of the Fourth Republic, which governed France beginning in 1946.

Before we left the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation, we stopped to explore a special exhibit dedicated to Madeleine Riffaud who, when only 18 years old, joined the Resistance and functioned as a liaison between units of partisan fighters. Now 99, she is one of the last surviving members of the Resistance. She famously killed a German officer in broad daylight in Paris. Riffaud was captured and tortured but upon release rejoined the Resistance. After the war she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and later become a journalist who focused on human rights. She traveled widely, reported from Algeria, and lived with the North Vietnamese resistance for seven years. She is also an author, poet, and the subject as well as coauthor of two graphic novels that tell her story, “Madeleine Riffaud, Résistante.” The CHRD used the title of her book as the name for its exhibit. Although the exhibition closed in June 2023, all past exhibits, including this one, can be explored on the CHRD’s excellent website.

As my husband and I walked away from the CHRD in the late afternoon, we commented on the incisive and highly effective planning behind the exhibits. Informed by personal histories and primary source materials, we emerged with a picture of a dark and dangerous time in which individual citizens from every segment of society—shopkeepers, professionals, students—came together to be part of a local and national alliance to resist Nazi terror and help defeat it. Likewise, the horror confronting the Jews of Lyon was made real, as was their resolve to survive and maintain moral integrity.

I was drawn to 14 Avenue Berthelot because of its connection to the ascent of evil and to evil’s eventual defeat. Witnessing the Barbie trial in the place where he made decisions that destroyed so many lives reveals the long, traumatic arc of that rise and fall. Likewise, seeing the faces and names of people who recognized evil in their own time and in their own city speaks to the importance of the courageous choices they made to combat occupation and barbarism. It also reinforces the implied mission of the CHRD as stated on their website— “History, Essential to the Present.”

I am not certain that my experience enabled me to understand how people muster the courage to sacrifice and survive, but I do recognize the strength and integrity of the individual who decides that he or she can make a difference. I believe the curators of the CHRD want visitors to appreciate how defying tyranny at the grassroots level impacted the events of the war and how it led to freedom in France and the Western world. The courage and sacrifice of men and women in combatting barbarism remains with me in the faces and names I encountered in the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation.

© 2024, Elizabeth Esris. Cover image by Michael Esris.

Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation(CHRD), 14 avenue Berthelot, 7th arr. Lyon.

Jean Moulin, the Children of Izieu, French resistance fighters and many others were tortured or otherwise held prior to execution or deportation at the Prison of Montluc, about one mile from the CHRD. The site is now the Mémorial National de la prison de Montluc (National Memorial Prison of Monluc), which pays homage to resistant fighters, Jews and hostages who were victims of the Nazis and of France’s Vichy government, while also examining the politics of repression and persecution from 1940 to 1944. 4 rue Jeanne Hachette, 3rd arr. Lyon.

Lyon Tourist Office, Place Bellecour, Lyon.

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France, it appears, is in the midst of a “sexual recession.” Or is it a depression given that the decline in sexuality activity has been going on for nearly two decades now?

The country’s major opinion polling company Ifop (Institut français d’opinion publique) leads off the summary of its recent findings by stating: “The proportion of French who’ve had sexual relations over the past 12 months hasn’t been so low in 50 years: on average 76%, i.e. a decrease of 15 points since 2006 (CSF study).”*

If true, that places the annual rate of sexual activity of those 18 and over at a lower level than during the pill-fueled sexual revolution. The Simon Report of 1970 places the figure at a then-rising 82%.

The study further found that the so-called sexual recession is particularly marked for 18-24-year-olds, among whom 28% of those filling out the questionnaire who had declared themselves to be “sexually initiated” stated that they had not had relations in the previous year. That compares with only 5% saying so in 2006. It could be that early gen y’ers were more likely to lie on questionnaires than gen z’ers, that is if you consider sexual activity once per year to be brag-worthy. How about once per week? The study found that 43% of respondents declared having sexual activity on average once per week. In 2009 that figure was 59%.

The study sees increasing screen time as one cause of the decline. Indeed, when was the time you used the term “digital” to refer to anything but electronics?

The increased awareness of the notion of consent in physical relations is also presented as playing a part in the reported decrease of sexual activity. In that respect, the poll notably found that among women 18-49 years old, 52% stated that they sometimes made love without desiring to do so, compared with 76% in 1981.

“After years of hypersexuality,” the study concludes in its summary, “the decades of 2010/2020 mark the start of a new cycle” with less of a cultural emphasis on “active sexuality [as] an essential component of a successful life or, in any case, of a harmonious couple.” Many women, in particular, don’t feel “obligated to respond to the sexual desire of their partner” and fewer men now see “a strong libido [as] an essential element of their masculinity.”

Before you change your travel plans to pursue your erotic dream vacation in, say, Italy instead France, note that this so-called sexual recession is not a phenomenon specific to France as it has been found in studies elsewhere in Europe and in the United States.

A full report of the study, in French, can be found here. The Ifop study was based on a sample of 1911 people representing the population of metropolitan France 18 and older.

*Translation of quotes from the study are by Gary Lee Kraut as is the image above.

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