Calais

• 1. Introduction

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  Calais sits at the narrowest pinch point of the English Channel, just 34 kilometers from the White Cliffs of Dover, close enough that you can see England on a clear day. That proximity has shaped nearly everything about this French port city: its wars, its wealth, its identity, and its 21st-century struggles.

  For over two centuries, Calais was English. Its wool trade revenues at times funded a third of the English crown's income. Then, in 1558, France took it back in a matter of days, and the loss reportedly broke the heart of Queen Mary I of England. Today, more than 10 million people pass through Calais annually. What does it mean to be the world's most-crossed strait? And what happens to a city that stands forever at the hinge between two countries?

• 2. A Name Across Languages

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  The name Calais first surfaces in written records late in the twelfth century, in a mention by Count Gerard of Guelders of a charter by his father Matthew of Alsace. The roots run deeper still. The Latin name Calesium traces back to Caletum, itself derived from the Belgic or Gallic tribe called the Caletes, who lived in what is now Normandy. Their Gaulish name, Caletoi, literally means "the hard ones" or "the tough."

  In early French documents alone, the name appears in forms ranging from Kaleeis to Kalais to Calays. The modern French spelling did not settle until 1331. English writers were no more consistent. Shakespeare himself used the spelling Callice. One old sarcastic rhyme about "a knight of Cales" caused confusion for centuries: the Cales in that rhyme meant Cadiz in Spain, not Calais in France.

  The story of how English speakers say the name traces its own arc. For much of the 19th century, the pronunciation KAL-iss, with a hard s, was the prescribed standard. By the century's end it was fading. Robert Browning rhymed Calais with malice in a poem from 1855, showing the older sound still alive. By the early twentieth century, KAL-ay had taken firm hold. The old pronunciation survived in American towns named after the city, including Calais, Maine and Calais, Vermont.

• 3. The English Crown Jewel

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  Edward III of England captured Calais in 1347 after a siege that tested his patience and his temper. The town's citizens had held out so stubbornly that the English king demanded the population be executed as punishment. He relented only when six leading citizens, bareheaded and barefooted and with ropes around their necks, offered their lives to spare the rest. Edward ordered their execution, but his queen, Philippa of Hainault, begged him to spare them. He did. Auguste Rodin later immortalized those six men in his sculpture Les Bourgeois de Calais, erected in front of the town hall in 1895.

  Edward drove out most of the French inhabitants and resettled the town with English people. In 1360, the Treaty of Brétigny formally assigned Calais, along with Guines and Marck, to English rule in perpetuity. Three years later, on the 9th of February 1363, the town became an English staple port, a designated gateway for controlled trade.

  The revenues from that trade were extraordinary. The customs income from Calais at times amounted to a third of the English government's total revenue, with wool by far the dominant commodity. Of a population of about 12,000 people, as many as 5,400 had documented connections to the wool trade. The famous Dick Whittington held both the office of Lord Mayor of the City of London and Mayor of the Calais Staple simultaneously in 1407.

  Calais was never considered fully English territory until the reign of Henry VIII, when the Pale of Calais gained the right to send two members to the English Parliament. Henry VIII visited in 1532, and his officials calculated the town then had about 2,400 beds and stabling for some 2,000 horses. British historian Geoffrey Elton later delivered a famously blunt verdict: "Calais -- expensive and useless -- was better lost than kept."

• 4. Loss and Reconquest

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  On the 7th of January 1558, King Henry II of France sent forces led by Francis, Duke of Guise, to retake Calais. The French were able to surprise the English garrison at the critical strongpoint of Fort Nieulay. The sluice gates, which could have flooded the attackers, were never opened. The town fell quickly after holding out for over two hundred years.

  Queen Mary I of England, who received the news, reportedly said: "When I am dead and opened, you shall find 'Philip' and 'Calais' lying in my heart." The name Philip referred to her husband, Philip II of Spain. Six years later, in the 1564 Treaty of Troyes, Queen Elizabeth I formally accepted that France would keep Calais, in exchange for a payment of 120,000 crowns.

  Historian David J. Wildman describes the loss of Calais as a Tudor Brexit. His argument is that it had the unintended consequence of redirecting English ambition toward the New World. The region around Calais was renamed the Pays Reconquis, meaning Reconquered Country. The term echoes the Spanish Reconquista, and since the war involved Philip II of Spain, the French choice of language may have been a deliberate provocation.

  Calais did not stay French for long. On the 24th of April 1596, Spanish forces from the nearby Spanish Netherlands, led by Archduke Albert of Austria, captured the town. It was returned to France two years later under the Treaty of Vervins in May 1598.

• 5. World War II: Siege and Ruin

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  In May 1940, Calais became one of the last defensive positions before the catastrophe of Dunkirk. A force of 3,000 British and 800 French troops, supported by Royal Navy warships, held out from the 22nd to the 27th of May 1940 against the German 10th Panzer Division. The town was flattened by artillery and precision dive bombing. Of the 3,800-strong defending force, only 30 were evacuated before the town fell.

  That resistance may have mattered enormously. The 10th Panzer Division, occupied at Calais, was unavailable for the Dunkirk perimeter. Between the 26th of May and the 4th of June 1940, some 330,000 Allied troops escaped from the Germans at Dunkirk.

  During the German occupation, Calais became the command post for German forces across the Pas-de-Calais and Flanders region. The Germans were convinced the Allies would invade there, and they fortified accordingly. In 1943 they built massive bunkers along the coast in preparation for launching missiles on southeast England. The city was used as a launch site for V1 flying bombs. The Allies deliberately bombed and shelled Calais to reinforce German expectations about where the invasion would land. The actual invasion, on D-Day, took place in Normandy, well to the west.

  Calais was eventually liberated by General Daniel Spry's 3rd Canadian Infantry Division between the 25th of September and the 1st of October 1944. The city's ordeal was not quite over. On the 27th of February 1945, Royal Air Force bombers mistook Calais for Dunkirk and carried out one final raid on their own ally's territory. After the war, historic rebuilding was largely bypassed and most buildings that rose were modern ones.

  Today the World War II museum in Calais occupies a former Nazi bunker built by the Todt Organisation in 1941. The 194-meter structure contains twenty rooms of relics and photographs.

• 6. The Landmarks That Survived

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  The Tour du Guet, or Watch Tower, is one of the few buildings in Calais that predates the Second World War. Philip I, Count of Boulogne, built the fortifications it stood within in 1229, and the oldest surviving traces of the tower itself date to 1302. An earthquake in 1580 split the tower in two. It was repaired in 1606. In 1658, a young stable boy set fire to it while it was temporarily serving as royal stables during a visit of Louis XIV. The tower was not repaired for roughly thirty years after that.

  In 1816, Abraham Chappe, a brother of Ignace Chappe, installed a telegraph office in the tower. That office operated for 32 years, and it was through this installation that the death of Napoleon I was announced to the French public in 1821. The tower also served as a lighthouse with a rotating oil-fuelled beacon from 1818 until a new lighthouse replaced it on the 15th of October 1848. The Calais Lighthouse built that year stands 55 meters tall, has 271 steps, was electrified in 1883, and was automated in 1992.

  The church of Notre-Dame holds one of Calais's stranger distinctions: it is arguably the only church in France built in the English perpendicular style. Much of the current building dates to the years 1631-1635. The organ was built at Canterbury around 1700. The grand altar, dating to 1628, was carved from Carrara marble that had wrecked on the coast during transit from Genoa to Antwerp. The altarpiece was long attributed to Anthony van Dyck but is actually by Gerard Seghers. On the 6th of April 1921, Charles de Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux in this church.

  The town hall, built in Flemish Renaissance style between 1911 and 1925, commemorates the 1885 unification of the cities of Calais and Saint Pierre. Its clock tower rises 74 meters and has been protected by UNESCO since 2005 as part of a series of belfries across the region.

• 7. The Calais Jungle

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  Since 1999 or earlier, an increasingly large number of people seeking entry to the United Kingdom began gathering in and around Calais. They lived in makeshift camps that became known by the nickname the Calais jungle. The people came from Darfur, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Eritrea, and other conflict-stricken or underdeveloped regions in Africa and Asia. Some were asylum seekers; others were economic migrants. They attempted to enter Britain by stowing away on lorries, ferries, cars, and trains passing through the Port of Calais or the Eurotunnel terminal.

  By the summer of 2015, the crisis had escalated into an open diplomatic dispute between the United Kingdom and France. British Prime Minister David Cameron issued a statement declaring that illegal immigrants who reached Britain would be removed. The UK supplied fencing to be installed around the Eurotunnel complex at Calais to discourage people from jumping onto train shuttles.

  On the 26th of October 2016, French authorities announced the main camp had been cleared. By January 2017, between 500 and 1,000 migrants, most of them unaccompanied minors, had returned to living rough in Calais. A presence has remained ever since. The lace factories and ferry terminals still operate beside these camps, in a city of 67,585 people that remains, as it has for eight centuries, the closest French town to England.