Nîmes

• 1. Introduction

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  Nimes carries a nickname that stops visitors cold: "the most Roman city outside Italy." Wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and the Cévennes mountain range in Southern France, this city in the Occitanie region has been continuously inhabited for roughly six thousand years. Its ancient amphitheatre still hosts bullfights. Its Maison Carrée temple, built nearly two millennia ago, still stands intact. And the very fabric of blue jeans owes its name to Nimes. How did a Celtic hill-settlement become one of Rome's grandest provincial capitals? What forces tore it apart, and what allowed so much of it to survive? The answers reach back to a time before the city even had walls.

• 2. Before Rome

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  Serre Paradis, a Neolithic site within the Nimes area, shows that semi-nomadic cultivators were working this land between 4000 and 3500 BCE. The oldest monument in the city is not Roman at all. The menhir of Courbessac, a limestone monolith standing over two metres tall, dates to around 2500 BCE and still stands in a field near the aerodrome. By the Bronze Age, villages of huts and branches had taken hold on the site, and the population was growing. The hill of Mont Cavalier became the early oppidum, the fortified heart from which the city would grow. During the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, its inhabitants built a surrounding wall with a dry-stone tower at the summit, a tower that would later be incorporated into the structure known as the Tour Magne. The people who built it were the Volcae Arecomici, a Celtic tribe for whom a local water deity named Nemausus served as patron. That deity gave his name to the settlement, and Nemausus became Nimes. A healing spring at the site attracted people from across the region, and the Greek geographer Strabo noted that the town functioned as the regional capital for the Volcae. The most ancient indigenous sculpture found in southern Gaul, the Warrior of Grezan, comes from this period and this place. In 123 BCE, the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus launched a campaign against Gallic tribes in the area. The Volcae offered no resistance, and three years later Rome established the province of Gallia Transalpina. From 118 BCE, the Via Domitia was constructed, threading directly through the later site of the city and linking Italy to Hispania.

• 3. Rome's Chosen City

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  Veterans of Julius Caesar's Nile campaigns received plots of land on the plain of Nimes, binding the city's fortune to Rome's military ambitions. By sometime before 28 BCE, Nimes had become the Roman colony of Colonia Nemausus; the earliest coins bear the abbreviation NEM. COL. The emperor Augustus then poured resources into the city. He ordered a ring of ramparts six kilometres long, reinforced by fourteen towers, to be built around Nimes. Two of those gates survive: the Porte d'Auguste and the Porte de France. The city's interior was organized around the cardo and decumanus, the intersecting main roads, meeting at the forum. The Maison Carrée, the "Square House," rose in the late 1st century BCE as a temple dedicated to Roma and Augustus. Scholars have noted its striking resemblance to Rome's Temple of Portunus, blending Etruscan and Greek design elements into a form so durable it remains one of the finest surviving Roman temples anywhere. Water came from the hills to the north via the Nimes Aqueduct, and where that system crossed the river Gard between Uzès and Remoulins, engineers built the Pont du Gard, located roughly 20 km northeast of the city. The amphitheatre, dating from the end of the 2nd century, was one of the largest in the entire Roman Empire. The city was the birthplace of the family of Emperor Antoninus Pius, who reigned from 138 to 161. Emperor Constantine, reigning from 306 to 337, endowed Nimes with baths. The population in this era was estimated at roughly 50,000 to 60,000 people. Nimes also became the seat of the Diocesan Vicar, the chief administrative officer of southern Gaul, confirming its rank as one of the empire's major western centres. In April 2024, a collection of Roman-era glassware was discovered in the city, including strigils, ornate glass vases, ceramics, lamps, and funerary monument fragments.

• 4. Conquest and Survival

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  By the end of the 3rd century, successive barbarian invasions had slowed the city's development, and the nearby town of Arles began to outshine it. In 472, the Visigoths captured Nimes, and the city was folded into their territory even after the Frankish victory at the Battle of Vouille in 507. Much of the Roman heritage remained physically intact under Visigothic rule. By 725, the Muslim Umayyads had conquered all of Septimania, the region that included Nimes. In 736-737, Charles Martel and his brother led a military expedition into Septimania and largely destroyed the city, which was then in the hands of Umayyads allied with local Gallo-Roman and Gothic nobility. The amphitheatre suffered badly in this campaign. In 752, Pepin the Short captured Nimes and ended Muslim rule. Two years later an uprising against Carolingian authority was suppressed, and a Frank named Radulf was installed as master of the city. What remained after these cycles of conquest was a shadow of the Roman city. Local authorities moved into the ruins of the amphitheatre itself. Islamic burials discovered in Nimes confirm the layers of occupation the city absorbed. Carolingian rule brought relative peace, but feudal conflicts in the 12th century returned instability. During this period Nimes was governed jointly by a bishop and a civil authority headquartered in the old amphitheatre. The civic magistrate, the Viguier, lived there alongside his retainers, a group known as the Knights of the Arena. City consuls operated out of the Maison Carrée. It was St. Louis who finally brought the region under stable French royal authority, ending years of contested rule, and Nimes became part of the territory called Languedoc.

• 5. Wars of Faith and Cloth

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  The 14th and 15th centuries brought what the city's own records describe as an uninterrupted series of invasions through the Rhone Valley, ruining the economy and causing famine. Religious conflict then layered onto the economic misery. Nimes was one of the Protestant strongholds in France, and it felt the full weight of the Wars of Religion, including the Michelade massacre. Fratricidal confrontations continued into the middle of the 17th century, combined with periodic outbreaks of plague. Recovery, when it came, was significant. By the mid-17th century the city was expanding: slum housing was replaced, Notre-Dame-Saint-Castor was reconstructed, and the population climbed from 21,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. The Quais de la Fontaine were laid out, and the areas surrounding the Maison Carrée and the amphitheatre were cleared of encroachments. The recovery also had an unlikely global dimension. Nimes was historically known for its textiles, and one fabric produced there gave its name to an item worn across the world: denim, the material of blue jeans, derives from "Serge de Nimes." The blue dye used for it was imported via Genoa from Lahore, the capital of the Mughal Empire, threading Nimes into a supply chain that reached across continents. The White Terror following the Revolution set the city back again, producing violence until 1815. Order was eventually restored, and Nimes became the metropolis of Bas-Languedoc.

• 6. War, Legion, and Modern Life

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  Wehrmacht troops occupied Vichy France in November 1942, and Nimes was not spared. On the 22nd of April 1943, Wehrmacht soldiers executed two Maquis resistance fighters, Jean Robert and Vinicio Faita, at Nimes. On the 27th of May 1944, bombers of the United States Army Air Forces struck the Nimes marshalling yards as part of the preparations for Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing operation in the Rhone delta that began on the 15th of August 1944. In November 1983, Nimes received a permanent military garrison when the 2e Regiment Etranger d'Infanterie, the main motorised infantry regiment of the French Foreign Legion, was stationed there. The city's population in Roman times had stood at 50,000 to 60,000 people; it did not reach that figure again until the mid-19th century. Growth in the 20th century was uneven. The single largest jump in the city's modern history came in 1968, with a growth rate of 23.5 percent compared to 1962. By 2019 the commune's estimated population stood at 148,561. The Roman amphitheatre, cleared of the medieval housing that had packed its interior under Napoleon, still functions as a venue for bullfighting and concerts. Twice a year, Feria de Nimes, one of the main French bullfighting events, draws hundreds of thousands of people to the streets. In 2005, Rammstein filmed their live album Völkerball in Nimes, and Metallica recorded their live DVD Français Pour une Nuit at the Arena of Nimes on the 7th of July 2009, during the World Magnetic Tour. The asteroid 51 Nemausa, named after the ancient deity from whom the city took its name, was discovered here in 1858.

• 7. Stones and Architects

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  Norman Foster designed the Carré d'Art in 1986, a modern art museum and multimedia library that sits in direct conversation with the ancient Maison Carrée across the street. Jean Nouvel designed a post-modern residential ensemble called the Nemausus, reviving the city's oldest name in a contemporary form. The amphitheatre, the Maison Carrée, the Tour Magne, the castellum divisorium, and the Jardins de la Fontaine built around Roman thermae ruins in the 18th century all remain accessible to visitors. The Musee de la Romanite, dedicated to Roman history, stands just outside the amphitheatre. From 1810 to 1822, the mathematician Joseph Gergonne published in Nimes a scientific journal specialising in mathematics called Annales de Gergonne. The Olympic swimming champion Yannick Agnel was born in Nimes. The city hosted the opening stages of the 2017 Vuelta a Espana cycling race and has featured repeatedly as a stage city in the Tour de France. Nimes-Pont-du-Gard, the city's new TGV station located 12 km outside the centre, opened on the 15th of December 2019 alongside a new high-speed rail line connecting Nimes to Montpellier.