Auxonne

• 1. Introduction

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  Auxonne sits on the eastern bank of the Saône river in Burgundy, about 30 kilometres south-east of Dijon, and for most of its history that location was not a convenience but a liability. To stand at Auxonne was to stand on the fault line between two worlds: the Duchy of Burgundy to the west and the County of Burgundy to the east, between French royal authority and the reach of the Holy Roman Empire. Every army that moved through eastern France sooner or later appeared at its walls. The town's name itself carries a hidden argument about identity. Medieval copyists replaced the double-s spelling with a cross that looked like an x, and by the 18th century French speakers had started pronouncing that x as the Greek letter would demand, with a hard ks sound. Today the town's own residents are divided: local elected officials and railway announcements use the ks pronunciation, while others preserve the older ss sound. Even the name of Auxonne is a contested border. What made this small commune worth fighting over for eight centuries, and what finally brought a young artillery lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte to spend three formative years inside its walls?

• 2. A Town Built on a Seam

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  The first reliable documents placing Auxonne by name date from 1172, 1173, and 1178. Two of those early records concern Count Stephen II of Auxonne, who died in 1173, and the third is a papal bull issued by Pope Alexander III. Before those dates, the town's origins are disputed. Historians have long doubted the claims in the Chronicle of Saint-Pierre de Bèze, which placed a settlement called Assona in the first half of the 7th century. A more cautious account traces Auxonne's germ to the monks of Saint-Vivant, who cleared land along the Saône around 870 and installed fishermen's huts there. When Normans from Hastings invaded Burgundy and destroyed the original monastery, Count Manassès built a replacement around 895-896 at Vergy, far from the river. The monks, worried about losing their riverside lands to encroachment, eventually subordinated them to a feudal lord, and it is from that arrangement that historians derive one hypothesis for how a proper town grew around those huts. The critical shift came in 1237. On the 15th of June that year, at an exchange concluded at Saint-Jean-de-Losne, John Count of Chalon transferred the town of Auxonne and all the possessions of Stephen III in the Saône basin to Hugh IV, Duke of Burgundy. In return, Burgundy handed over the Barony of Salins and ten strategic positions. That single transaction pulled Auxonne out of the Holy Roman Empire's orbit and planted it firmly in the Duchy of Burgundy, making it a French bridgehead on what remained imperial soil.

• 3. Walls and Fires

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  Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, described Auxonne in letters patent dated the 23rd of December 1424 as "beautiful, strong, and well closed with walls and ditches." That pride was earned at considerable cost. The medieval ramparts, which eventually enclosed a perimeter of 2,600 metres and included 23 towers, turrets, and a fortified bridge, were not standing at the duchy's pleasure; they were built under constant threat. In the first half of the 14th century, the population sacrificed heavily to replace simple earthen ramparts with stone walls. The front overlooking the Saône was particularly difficult and was not completed until work began in 1411. The 15th century brought no respite. Between 1434 and 1444, roaming bands of soldiers called Ecorcheurs, named for their habit of stripping everything they found, ravaged the surrounding countryside. The people of Auxonne kept watch on the ramparts as these bands moved through. Two fires within five years made the hardship worse: on the 7th of March 1419 and on the 15th of September 1424, flames tore through the city. A period of relative peace did not arrive until 1444, and it lasted only until Charles the Bold came to power in 1467. When Charles died on the 5th of January 1477 and Louis XI seized the duchy, the royal army reached Dijon by the 1st of February. Auxonne itself held out through a siege commanded by Charles d'Amboise before opening its gates on the 4th of June 1477, having resisted for twelve days.

• 4. Defiance and the Lèse-Majesté Letters

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  On the 2nd of April 1585, King Henry III sent the people of Auxonne a letter instructing them not to receive the Duke of Mayenne, who was using the religious wars to build his own political power in Burgundy. Jean de Saulx-Tavannes, born in 1555 and serving as governor of the town and chateau, at first followed the royal orders. Then, suspecting the inhabitants of planning to betray the castle to Mayenne, he secretly reinforced the garrison. The magistrates, advised by Joachim de Rochefort, Baron of Pluvault, decided to act first. They arrested Tavannes on Saints' Day 1585 while he was at his devotions in the church. The Count of Charny endorsed this act of loyalty to the crown. But the king, caught between the townspeople and the Catholic League, equivocated. By the Treaty of Nemours on the 7th of July 1585, he was forced to name Claude de Bauffremont, known for his Mayenne sympathies, as the new governor. The people of Auxonne refused him and demanded Pluvault instead. New royal orders arrived in January 1586 expressing the king's dissatisfaction. On the 25th of January 1586, the future Henri IV, then at Montauban, sent the town a letter of encouragement. On the 10th of February 1586, Tavannes, having escaped from Charny's castle at Pagny, appeared before the walls with two hundred men at arms in an attempt to retake Auxonne by surprise. He failed. By letters patent of the 1st of May 1586, Henry III declared the Auxonnais guilty of lèse-majesté. Negotiations followed and an accord was signed on the 15th of August 1586 at Tillenay. That treaty revoked the charges, exempted Auxonne from taxation for nine years, and granted Pluvault 90,000 francs. The Baron of Sennecey was finally installed as governor on the 25th of August 1586, received, as the record notes, with the greatest distrust.

• 5. Vauban and the Final Fortifications

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  After the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, the strategic calculus around Auxonne shifted. Louis XIV's conquest of the County of Burgundy meant the town was no longer a contested border post. But the king still valued it enough to commission serious military engineering. In 1673 François de la Motte-Villebret, Count of Apremont, arrived from Tours to oversee new defences. He demolished nearly all of the medieval walls to build a Vauban-style defence system. Apremont died in 1678 and the engineer Vauban himself took over. Vauban raised what the sources describe as a magnificent project to complement Apremont's work, but with the signing of the Treaty of Nijmegen he lost interest and the full project was never completed. Vauban did finish the Royal Gate, which had been started to replace the old Flammerans Portal when fortifications were strengthened from 1673 onward. Apremont had originally entrusted the gate to the architect and royal building contractor Philippe Anglart, but on his return Apremont was unsatisfied and the work started again. After Apremont's death in 1678, Vauban completed it in 1699. The central pavilion above the gate was added in 1717. He also built the Arsenal between 1689 and 1693, originally used to manufacture gun carriages, which has preserved its original three-building plan. Today the Chateau d'Auxonne, built under Louis XI and completed by his successors, is the only one of the three castles he ordered after defeating Charles the Bold still standing. Its tower of Notre-Dame stands 22 metres high with walls six metres thick at the base.

• 6. Napoleon's Artillery School

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  Jean-Louis Lombard, who lived from 1723 to 1794, taught mathematics at the Royal School of Artillery at Auxonne. Among his students was Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte was stationed at Auxonne as a lieutenant, auditing classes from 1788 to 1791, and the town holds onto the memory of that period with considerable care. A bronze statue of the young lieutenant, made by François Jouffroy, was unveiled in December 1857 in the centre of the Place d'Armes. It shows Bonaparte with a youthful face in an artillery officer's uniform; the base carries four relief panels depicting him at the Chapel of the Levée, at the Battle of Arcole, at his coronation ceremony, and at a meeting of the Council of State. The Bonaparte district preserves the room he occupied during one of his stays, and the barracks where he lived successively in two bedrooms are made of pink Moissey stone. A small museum in a tower of the Chateau d'Auxonne displays his set square, his fencing foil, and objects he left behind. Claude-Xavier Girault, born in Auxonne on the 5th of April 1764, was almost exactly the same age as Bonaparte, and the two were acquainted; they discussed history together. When Bonaparte became First Consul, he appointed Girault mayor of Auxonne in 1801. Girault served for four years and his administration earned unanimous formal thanks from the town council. Another notable Auxonnais, Claude-Antoine Prieur-Duvernois, born there on the 2nd of December 1763, worked alongside Monge and Carnot to found the École Polytechnique and produced the work that created France's uniform system of weights and measures. Prieur died in Dijon on the 11th of August 1832, having lived long enough to write his memoirs on the Committee of Public Safety.

• 7. What the Town Still Holds

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  The Church of Notre-Dame in Auxonne was begun in 1200 with the nave, followed by the choir, apse, and chapels between 1200 and 1250. The portal construction started in the 14th century, the side chapels were raised in the 14th and 15th centuries, and in 1516 the architect Master Loys, who also designed the church of Saint-Michel de Dijon, began a portal surmounted by two towers of unequal heights. Inside the church, a pulpit dated 1556 and a lectern from 1562 survive, along with an organ platform from the 17th century and an instrumental organ section installed in 1789. A Jacquemart was placed in the tower in 1525 but has since disappeared. In 1858, under the architect Phal Blando, a crooked spire was added: slender, octagonal, pyramidal, and slightly twisted, made from slate, rising 33 metres above its platform, 11 metres taller than what it replaced. Along the Saône, a barrage dam built in 1840 operated for 170 years before being replaced in April 2011 by a modern needle dam with inflatable mechanical shutters. The new dam runs more than 200 metres, divided into four sections of 50 metres each, with 1,040 needles to adjust depending on water levels. Claude Noisot, born in Auxonne in 1757 and dying in 1861, was a veteran of Napoleon's Old Guard who went on to found the Musée et Parc Noisot at Fixin, not far away, where he continued to honour the emperor he had followed across Europe.