Lyon

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Lyon sits at the precise point where two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, run together before continuing south toward the Mediterranean. That confluence is not just a geographical fact. It is the reason this city exists at all. Two thousand years of continuous urban settlement have grown from that single meeting of waters, and the story of Lyon is in many ways the story of what a strategically placed city can become over two millennia.

  At the January 2022 census, the city proper held 520,774 people within a compact 48 square kilometres. Draw the boundary wider to include the full metropolitan area and you are looking at more than 2.3 million. That makes Lyon the second-largest metropolitan area in France. Yet population figures barely hint at what the city contains.

  Two Roman emperors were born here. The Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph here in 1895. Food critics have called it the gastronomic capital of the world. A light festival that begins every the 8th of December draws visitors from across Europe. And the districts of Old Lyon, the Fourvière hill, the Presqu'île, and the slopes of Croix-Rousse all carry UNESCO World Heritage designation.

  The questions worth sitting with are these: how does a city founded as a camp for Roman refugees become the economic counting house of France during the Renaissance, then a centre of silk production, then a cradle of cinema, and now a hub for pharmaceutical and biotech industries? And what does it mean that the name of this city may originally have meant, simply, 'shining hill'?

• 2. A Name with Many Meanings

  ›

  The name Lugdunum, the Latin form from which Lyon descends, is built from two older words. The second element, dunos, meant fortress or hill, which is straightforward enough. The first element has kept scholars occupied for a long time. It may refer to Lug, a Celtic god associated with order and law, which would make the name 'hill of the god Lug'. It may derive from lugon, meaning crow, since the crow was understood as Lug's messenger, giving 'hill of the crows'. A third possibility traces the root to a word for 'light', producing 'shining hill'.

  Julius Pokorny offered a different path entirely, connecting the first element to the Indo-European root meaning dark, black, or swamp. That same root underlies the name of Lusatia in Germany and several places in the Czech Republic.

  During the revolutionary period, the city was stripped of its name by government decree. On the 12th of October 1793, the Convention Nationale renamed it Commune-Affranchie, meaning Emancipated Commune. A plaque was erected declaring that Lyon had made war on Liberty and therefore no longer existed. The city recovered its name in 1794 after the end of the Terror.

  In Roman times the city was also called Caput Galliae, meaning capital of the Gauls. That title proved more durable than the revolutionary one. The Archbishop of Lyon still carries the title Primate of the Gauls today, a direct echo of Rome's administrative geography.

• 3. Rome's Footprint

  ›

  In 43 BC, according to the historian Dio Cassius, the Roman Senate ordered a settlement to be built for Roman refugees who had been expelled from the nearby city of Vienne during conflict with the Allobroges people. The refugees were encamped at the confluence of the Saône and Rhône when the order came through. The foundation rose on Fourvière hill and was given the formal name Colonia Copia Felix Munatia, a name invoking both prosperity and divine blessing.

  Rome understood immediately what the site was worth. Two navigable rivers made Lugdunum a natural communications hub, and the city became the starting point of the main Roman road network in the region. It quickly became the capital of the province Gallia Lugdunensis.

  Two emperors were born in the city: Claudius, whose speech defending the nomination of Gallic senators survives on the so-called Lyon Tablet, and Caracalla. Early Christian communities in the city faced violent persecution under several emperors, most notably under Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus. Among those martyred were Blandina, Pothinus, and Epipodius. The Greek Irenaeus served as the second bishop of Lyon during the latter part of the second century.

  By the 5th century the city had passed out of Roman hands. Burgundians fleeing the destruction of Worms by the Huns in 437 were resettled in eastern Gaul, and in 461 Lugdunum became the capital of the Kingdom of the Burgundians. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 assigned the city to the Holy Roman Emperor Lothair I. Lyon would not pass under French control until the 14th century.

• 4. Silk, Books, and Banking

  ›

  The historian Fernand Braudel described what he called a constant structural tension in French development: the bi-polarity between Paris and Lyon stretching from the late Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. That tension was productive. In the late 15th century, Italian merchants brought their fairs to Lyon and the city became, in Braudel's phrase, the economic counting house of France. The Bourse, built in 1749, operated more like an open-air bazaar than a formal exchange. When international banking eventually migrated first to Genoa and then to Amsterdam, Lyon held on as the banking centre of France.

  The Renaissance accelerated this prominence. The silk trade tied Lyon closely to Italy, and that relationship left its mark on architecture that is still visible in historic buildings today. The late 1400s and 1500s also saw the city become a key centre of book publishing and literary activity. Writers working in Lyon during this period included Maurice Scève, Antoine Héroet, and Louise Labé among the French, alongside Italian exiles such as Luigi Alamanni and Gian Giorgio Trissino.

  In 1831 and 1834, the canuts, the city's silk workers, staged two major uprisings demanding better pay and conditions. The word canut lodged itself permanently in Lyonnais culture. The neighbourhood of Croix-Rousse, historically home to the small workshops where silk was woven, is still called 'the hill that works'. A cheese spread called cervelle de canut, literally 'silk worker's brains', made from fromage blanc seasoned with herbs, shallots, and vinegar, carries the memory of that labour into the culinary tradition.

  The first of Lyon's funicular railways began operation in 1862, connecting the city's hills to its lower districts.

• 5. Revolution and Resistance

  ›

  In 1572, Lyon was a site of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when Catholics carried out mass violence against Protestant Huguenots. Two centuries later the city faced a different kind of upheaval. When the citizenry rose up against the National Convention and backed the Girondins during the French Revolution, Revolutionary armies besieged Lyon for more than two months before it surrendered in October 1793. Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois and Joseph Fouché oversaw the execution of more than 2,000 people. Much of the Place Bellecour was destroyed. A decade later Napoleon ordered the reconstruction of the demolished buildings.

  During the German occupation in World War II, Lyon became a centre of Nazi administration, associated above all with Klaus Barbie, who became known as the Butcher of Lyon. The city was at the same time a stronghold of the French Resistance. The narrow passageways known as traboules, running through buildings and linking streets on either side, gave people practical routes to evade Gestapo raids. On the 3rd of September 1944, Lyon was liberated by the 1st Free French Division together with the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur.

  The traboules were not invented by the Resistance. The first examples are thought to have been built in Lyon in the 4th century. They originally served the canuts on Croix-Rousse hill, giving them a direct path from their workshops to the textile merchants below. Their repurposing as escape routes during the occupation is one of the more striking instances of old urban infrastructure finding a new and urgent use.

  The Centre d'histoire de la résistance et de la déportation, housed in a building strongly associated with Klaus Barbie, now documents that period through a series of mini-biographies of the individuals involved.

• 6. The Lumières and Cinema

  ›

  Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinematograph in Lyon, and 1895 is the year the city's role in the birth of cinema crystallised. The Institut Lumière was built as Auguste Lumière's house and holds many of their first inventions alongside early cinematic and photographic artefacts.

  The building itself is described as a fascinating piece of architecture in its own right, making the Institut something more than a repository. It is a place where the domestic and the inventive overlap, a house from which one of the most consequential technologies of the modern era emerged.

  Lyon's film connection runs forward as well. The city's economy now contains a significant software industry with a particular focus on video games, with studios including Arkane Studios, Ivory Tower, Eden Games, EA France, and Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe all present in the city.

• 7. Food, Light, and Celebration

  ›

  The food critic Curnonsky called Lyon the gastronomic capital of the world, and later writers including Bill Buford repeated the claim. The specific culinary tradition centred on the bouchon, a type of restaurant serving local fare: sausages, duck pâté, roast pork, and local wines. The Beaujolais region lies to the north of the city and the Côtes du Rhône region to the south, placing Lyon between two of France's best-known wine-growing areas.

  Michelin three-star chefs Marie Bourgeois and Eugénie Brazier developed Lyonnaise cuisine into something favoured by the French elite. Paul Bocuse carried that tradition to a worldwide audience. The mâchon, a late-morning meal of local charcuterie accompanied by Beaujolais red wine, was the customary meal of the canuts after their factory shifts ended.

  French tacos appears to have been invented in the early 2000s in Vaulx-en-Velin, a Lyon suburb, though a nearby city also has a claim. From the Lyon region, this street food spread across France and eventually to a worldwide audience.

  The Fête des lumières, the Festival of Lights, begins every the 8th of December and lasts four days. Its origins are religious: it began as a celebration of thanks to the Virgin Mary, who was said to have saved the city from a deadly plague in the Middle Ages. During the festival, residents place small candles called luminions at their windows, while the city projects large-scale light shows onto important monuments such as the medieval Cathédrale St-Jean. The festival has earned Lyon the title Capital of Lights, and it is among the most important events drawing tourists to the city each year.

• 8. Sport and the Modern City

  ›

  Olympique Lyonnais, the city's football club, won the top division championship seven consecutive times from 2002 to 2008. The men's team played until December 2015 at the 43,000-seat Stade de Gerland, which also hosted matches of the 1998 FIFA World Cup. Since 2016 they have played at the Parc Olympique Lyonnais, a 59,000-seat stadium in the eastern suburb of Décines-Charpieu.

  The women's team, OL Lyonnes, has a record that runs well beyond the men's. They won fourteen consecutive top-flight championships between 2007 and 2020. They have also won the UEFA Women's Champions League eight times, including five consecutive editions from 2016 to 2020. The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup final was held on the 7th of July at Stade de Lyon.

  The Patinoire Charlemagne is home to the Club des Sports de Glace de Lyon, which produced Olympic ice dancing champions Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, as well as world champions Isabelle Delobel and Olivier Shoenfelder. Lyon is tentatively set to host the ice events at the 2030 Winter Olympics following a decision to move those events out of Nice.

  The GDP of Lyon reached 124 billion US dollars in 2019, placing it second among French cities after Paris. The city is home to the international headquarters of Interpol, located in the Cité Internationale district alongside the Parc de la Tête d'Or, and to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Nearly 200,000 students are enrolled within the Metropolis of Lyon, making it the second-largest student city in France.