Guérande

• 1. Introduction

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  Guérande is a medieval town in western France whose old center is circled by a stone wall 1434 meters long. The town lies in the department of Loire-Atlantique, in the Pays de la Loire region. Its people are called Guérandais, and in Breton the town is Gwenrann.

  Beyond the wall, the land splits into two very different worlds. One is the Pays Blanc, the White Land, named for its salt marshes. The other is the Pays Noir, the Black Land, where the Brière peat bog spreads out.

  Two questions run through this place. Why did a small town on a peninsula build one of the best preserved and most complete medieval walls in France? And how did shallow pans of seawater turn the town's name into shorthand for fleur de sel, a salt used to garnish food?

  The answers involve a massacre, two treaties, a church that stayed standing through war and revolution, and a peasant who outwitted the Devil.

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• 2. Peninsula of Water

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  Water closes in the Guérande Peninsula on every side. The Atlantic Ocean lies to the west and the Brière Regional Nature Reserve to the east. The river Vilaine marks the north, and the Loire estuary opens to the south. Locals call the whole region the Presqu'île guérandaise, and Guérande sits at its heart beside La Baule, Le Croisic, Pornichet, Batz-sur-Mer, Le Pouliguen and Piriac.

  The commune is not a single cluster of streets. It counts 32 towns and villages, and the largest are Saillé, Clis, Careil and La Madeleine. Careil is known above all for its castle, while La Madeleine sits among the swamps of the Brière. Under the INSEE classification of 1999, Guérande counts as an urban district, one of nine that form the urban area of Saint-Nazaire.

  The Brière deserves its own measurements. The territory covers 490 square kilometres, and 170 of those are wetland. Its brackish core, the Grande Brière swamp, spreads over 70 square kilometres. Twenty-one municipalities share the territory, and Guérande is one of them. The regional nature reserve was created on the 16th of October 1970 and revised on the 6th of June 2001. It was among the first areas in France to be listed as a Parc Naturel Régional, also in 1970.

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• 3. Before the Walls

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  About half of the megalithic monuments that survive in Loire-Atlantique stand on this peninsula. Researchers date the structures to between 5200 and 2200 BC, which makes the area important for the study of prehistory.

  At the end of the Iron Age, two tribes shared the land. The Veneti held the north, with the Vilaine as their frontier. The Namnetes lived further south, bounded by the Loire. Water made the peninsula a crossroads. The Redones and Veneti used the Vilaine, the Namnetes and Pictones used the Loire, and the Veneti and Greek traders sailed the Atlantic.

  In 56 BC the Veneti double-crossed Caesar, and his answer was brutal. In words that Nora Chadwick cites in The Celts, he "put the whole of their senate to the sword, and sold the rest of the men as slaves." The Namnetes, a seaboard people, fared better. Their fortunes rose because they sided with Rome.

  Artifacts from the Gallo-Roman age show that many different groups made their home here. In the 3rd century, St. Clair, the first Bishop of Nantes, brought Christianity to the area. Around 848, under Nominoe, the first King of Brittany, the town became the seat of a temporary bishopric.

  Around the turn of the second millennium, a fortified town was built. The castle that already stood there made political and administrative organization possible.

  Local legend adds a story from 919. A Viking band arrived determined to pillage the town. The Guérandais took refuge in the collegiate church and prayed to St Aubin, who apparently sent a sign. The courage it gave them was enough to make them take up arms and drive the raiders out. That church, dedicated to the saint, still stands in the old town.

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• 4. War of Succession

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  In 1343, during the Breton War of Succession, Guérande fell to Breton-French troops led by Luis de la Cerda. He served Charles of Blois, and his Spanish and Genoese auxiliaries attacked the town from all sides. They gave the inhabitants no quarter and plundered in a frenzy. Five churches were desecrated and burned. Approximately 8000 people were massacred in the streets, burned in their homes, or killed in the Church of Saint Aubin.

  Charles was not impressed. Luis had exceeded the measure of his command, and twenty-four of the principal culprits were hanged on the spot.

  Peace came in 1365, on Holy Saturday, before the high altar of Saint Aubin. In this first Treaty of Guérande, Joanna of Penthièvre gave up her disputed claim to the dukedom. The title passed to John V of the House of Montfort. A modified form of Salic law was introduced in Brittany as a result.

  A second Treaty of Guérande followed in 1381, between Duke John V of Brittany and King Charles VI of France. It established Brittany's neutrality in the Anglo-French conflict.

  Back in the ruined town, Jean of Montfort, Duke of Brittany and known as John IV, had demanded proper protection. Work on the defenses began soon after and continued for more than a century, shaped by the latest ideas in siege warfare and artillery.

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• 5. Walls and Gates

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  In 1488, 145 years after the work began, the finished ramparts were inaugurated under Francis II, Duke of Brittany. He was the father of Anne of Brittany, and he died only a few months later.

  The old walled town, called the vieille ville in French, is surrounded by nearly intact ramparts. They hold ten towers and four fortified gates, along with a poterne that was opened in the 19th century. The walls were listed as a historic building in 1877. Very little has been re-engineered since the main phase of building in the 15th century, and little was restored in the 19th. For comparison, the inner wall of Carcassonne measures 1.250 km, a shorter ring than Guérande's.

  The largest gate is the Porte Saint-Michel, a 15th-century châtelet. The Porte Vannetaise dates to the 13th century and the Porte de Saillé to the 16th. The Porte Bizienne is the most recent part of the walls. A ditch runs along much of the wall, and a boulevard defends the front of the Porte Saint-Michel.

  The Porte Saint-Michel first housed the Captain of the city, who represented the authority of the Duke of Brittany. After Brittany joined the Kingdom of France in 1532, the Captain handed his authority to a French Governor. During the French Revolution, the people of Guérande removed the last Governor and put a prison in the gate.

  The building suited a prison badly, so the municipality moved city hall into it. The gate quickly proved too small for that role too. City hall moved again, and the gate became a museum for the Friends de Guérande, founded in 1928. It holds helmets, traditional costumes, an archaeological collection and the Treasury of the Collegiate Church.

  The walls also faced a test in June and July 1815, during the Chouannerie. This royalist uprising against the First Republic spread across twelve western départements, especially in Brittany and Maine. The Chouans attacked Guérande, but 150 men of the 65th line infantry regiment waited entrenched behind the ramparts. They pushed the attackers back without much difficulty.

  The town's last military chapter came in 1944 and 1945, when Guérande lay inside the Saint-Nazaire pocket.

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• 6. Saint Aubin's Church

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  The Church of Saint Aubin honors a native of the peninsula who became Bishop of Angers in the 6th century. Very little is known about the buildings that came before it. Waroch II, a prince of the Bretons of Vannes who ruled from 577 to 594, may have built the first parish. He is supposed to have created a baptistery where the choir stands today.

  In the 9th century, a chapter of canons attributed to King Salomon turned the church into a collegiate church. Salomon is credited with building a canon college that helped the city develop. The church was rebuilt around 1200, and the Romanesque pillars in the nave are evidence of that work.

  The Breton Wars of Succession left the church very badly damaged. It was restored in time for the signing of the first peace treaty in 1365. Building continued until the 18th century. The choir and chevet date to the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Baroque altarpieces and stalls to the 17th.

  The French Revolution brought little physical damage beyond the windows. Its effect was structural. In 1792 the status of collegiate church was abolished, and the canons were exiled to Spain.

  In 1840 a new national commission for historical monuments recognized the church's true value, and it was listed in 1853. The architect Bourgerel took on overly ambitious works, and the west front collapsed in 1876. Eugène Boismen was then charged with rebuilding it in the original style.

  Saint Aubin is not the oldest building in town. Notre-Dame la Blanche holds that title. It is a Gothic church built in the 14th century under Jean de Montfort and listed in 1910.

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• 7. Salt Marshes

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  In the late Middle Ages, merchants from Rouen traveled to Guérande to buy salt. The marshes that supplied them began before the 9th century and grew over several centuries. By around 1500 they had reached 80 percent of their current surface, and the last were built around 1800. Salt from Guérande was traded throughout Brittany without tax.

  Then Napoleon Bonaparte decided to tax it, and the salt trade began to slide. A gradual decline set in during the middle of the 19th century. Competition from a salt mine, falling use of salt for preserving food, and better transport by land all played a part.

  Today the salterns cover about 1700 hectares. Salt workers harvest approximately 15,000 tons of cooking salt a year and roughly 300 tons of fleur de sel, the flower of salt. A cooperative promotes quality under the French Label rouge. Around 250 workers live on the marshes.

  The method relies on the tides. Channels carry sea water into reservoirs. The water then flows through a series of dams and evaporates until only a few centimeters remain. In the last step, the salt crystallizes into fleur de sel and coarse salt.

  The marshes include two salt-producing ponds. The pond of Guérande is the biggest and best known, lying between the town and the Croisic peninsula on the Traict. The pond of Mès is smaller and lies near Mesquer.

  Several layers of protection cover the area. The marshes have been on the Ramsar Convention list of protected wetlands since 1971, and they have been a Natura site since 2000. Parts of the marshes and the Traict form a nature reserve managed by the Conservatoire du littoral, and a major stage for migratory birds. The salterns are also classified as remarkable Sites of taste.

  The workers' homes shape nearby villages. Clis, between Guérande and La Turballe, has many typical salt workers' houses, the Sainte-Catherine church built in the 15th century, and parts of an old Roman wall. Its Requer's Cross was listed in 1944. Saillé lies in the heart of the marshes and has its own salt workers' houses.

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• 8. Legend and Living Town

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  Local tradition tells of Yves Herbic, a very poor peasant who worked for his lord by day and farmed his own small plot by night. His wheat never earned enough to pay the lord's rent. He decided to build a mill but could not do it alone.

  The Devil offered a deal. He would build the mill in exchange for Yves's soul. Yves's wife disliked the bargain, but she did not know about his cunning plan. Yves watched the Devil closely as he worked. At the moment the Devil finished, Yves set a statue of the Virgin Mary on top. The Devil vanished into thin air and never returned. Yves got his mill and kept his soul. The Mill of the Devil is still counted among the sights outside the walls.

  In 1686 a new building called Les Halles rose on the Saint-Aubin public place, notable for its large auditorium. During the 17th and 18th centuries, granite bourgeois houses replaced those of the 15th and 16th centuries. Together with the mansions, they make up about 50 percent of the buildings still visible inside the walls.

  Since 2004 Guérande has belonged to the Villes et Pays d'Art et d'Histoire, a national network of 120 towns. It is twinned with Almagro in Spain, Castro Marim in Portugal, Dinkelsbühl in Germany and Dolgellau in Wales. In 2008, 2.02 percent of primary school children attended bilingual schools in French and Breton.

  Balzac set his novel Béatrix in Guérande. It follows Calyste, son of the Baron de Guenic, and his dealings with characters based on George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d'Agoult. Bernard Glotin placed a murder mystery here, The ramparts of anger: Guerande.

  Two festivals fill the calendar. Celtic Guérande takes place in early August and mixes styles of dance music and traditional singing tales. Medieval Guérande takes place in May and carries the town back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It brings an intramural market and fair, encampments, taverns, equestrian events, live music, theater, juggling and children's entertainment.

  More than 500 Guérandais volunteers dress for the occasion, and a grand costume parade sets off on the Sunday morning.

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