Historic Site of Lyon

Lyon began as a rescue plan. In 43 BC a group of Roman settlers who had been driven out of the Gallic town of Vienne asked the Senate for somewhere new to live, and the general Lucius Munatius Plancus marked out a colony on the hill of Fourvière, above the meeting point of the Rhône and the Saône. Rome had bigger ambitions for the spot than a refuge. The new city of Lugdunum sat where the great routes of Gaul converged, and the statesman Agrippa laid out roads fanning from it towards the Rhine, the Channel, the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean. By 12 BC the city was hosting an annual gathering at which delegates from some sixty Gallic peoples came to honour Rome and Augustus at an altar on the slopes of the Croix-Rousse, which made Lugdunum the capital of the Three Gauls. Emperor Claudius was born here, and in 48 AD he stood before the Senate in Rome and argued that Gallic nobles deserved a seat among them. Disaster struck in 64 AD, when fire swept through the city. The philosopher Seneca remarked that a single night had separated a great city from nothing at all, and Emperor Nero is said to have sent four million sesterces to help rebuild, repaying a gift Lyon had sent to Rome after its own fire. Lyon recovered, and was still important enough in 197 AD for two rivals for the imperial throne, Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus, to settle the matter in a battle on the plain just outside it. As Roman power faded, the population drifted downhill, probably because the aqueducts that fed the hilltop town fell out of use, and settled along the Saône instead. That riverbank became the core of medieval Lyon, governed by archbishops who held their authority from the Holy Roman Emperor. The city passed to the French crown in 1312. The Church put it on the European map: in 1245 Pope Innocent IV, who had taken refuge in Lyon, used a general council held at Saint-Jean cathedral to declare the Emperor Frederick II deposed, and a second council in 1274 attempted to reunite the Latin and Greek churches. The city's real golden age was a commercial one. In 1463 Louis XI granted Lyon fairs that drew merchants from across Europe, and Italian bankers, many of them from Florence, moved in. They built tall townhouses in Vieux Lyon with spiral staircases and shaded courtyards, and the traboules, passages that tunnelled through blocks so goods could travel from the Saône quays to the streets without leaving shelter. Printing arrived in 1473, and Lyon became one of Europe's great publishing centres. François Rabelais worked as a doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu and published Pantagruel here, and in 1600 Henri IV married the Florentine Marie de' Medici in Saint-Jean cathedral. Silk turned a trading city into a workshop. Weaving was authorised in 1536, and in time thousands of looms filled the slopes of the Croix-Rousse, where weavers known as canuts lived in tall apartment blocks built around the machines. A weaver's son from Lyon, Joseph Marie Jacquard, perfected a loom in 1804 that was controlled by punched cards, a system often cited as an ancestor of computer programming. The work itself was precarious. When employers drove prices down, the canuts rose in 1831 under a black banner promising to live by working or die fighting, held the city for several days, and were put down by troops. A second revolt in 1834 ended the same way. The Revolution was harder still on Lyon. In 1793 the city rebelled against the government in Paris, endured a siege of about two months, and was punished afterwards with the loss of its name: for a time it was officially Commune-Affranchie, the Freed Commune. Recovery came with the nineteenth century, and so did rebuilding. In the 1850s and 1860s the prefect Claude-Marius Vaïsse cut broad new streets through the Presqu'île in the spirit of Haussmann's Paris, among them the one now called rue de la République. On Fourvière, a white basilica rose between 1872 and 1884, built on a promise the city's people made in 1870 to raise a church if Lyon was spared during the war with Prussia. The twentieth century brought invention and harder years. The Lumière brothers developed the Cinématographe at their family's photographic plate works in Lyon and patented it in 1895. During the Second World War the city became a centre of the French Resistance, and the traboules gave fighters ways to slip across the city out of sight. After the war the crumbling Vieux Lyon was in real danger of being lost to redevelopment until campaigners and the new Malraux law rescued it, and in 1964 it became one of the first protected heritage districts in France. UNESCO inscribed the Historic Site of Lyon on 5 December 1998. What persuaded the inspectors was continuity. Lyon grew steadily eastwards across the Presqu'île and over the Rhône rather than flattening its centre to start again, so every era stayed where it was built: the Roman hillside, the medieval riverbank, the Renaissance courtyards, the silk workers' blocks. The same stubborn habit of keeping things shows up in the city's festivals. A flood on the Saône delayed the inauguration of a statue of the Virgin Mary on Fourvière until 8 December 1852, and when the evening came, residents put candles in their windows to mark it. Every 8 December since, small glass candle holders still appear on windowsills across Vieux Lyon and the slopes of the Croix-Rousse.