Étretat

Étretat was a fishing village for most of its history. Gallo-Roman remains — an aqueduct, coins, a villa and a small cremation cemetery — have been found here. In the 10th century the place belonged to the dukes of Normandy, before passing to the abbey of Fécamp, which had the church built in the 12th century. The village supplied boats to King Philip of Valois, and on 15 January 1525 it was swamped by the sea. In the 18th century oysters were refined here for Marie-Antoinette and sent overnight to Versailles; the remains of the oyster beds can still be seen at the foot of the Falaise d'Aval.

Sea bathing reached Étretat only after 1843, when roads were built to Fécamp and Le Havre. A casino of boards and slate opened in 1852, writers and painters spread its fame, and a railway arrived in 1895. Fishing declined as tourism grew, and the last professional fisherman stopped work in the 1990s.

During the First World War the town hosted the British No. 1 General Hospital and then an American base hospital, whose dead lie in the churchyard. On 8 May 1927 the biplane L'Oiseau Blanc, attempting the first non-stop flight from Paris to New York, was last seen in France over these cliffs. In the Second World War the German occupiers destroyed the casino and seafront villas to fortify the beach, and the sea front was rebuilt afterwards in concrete. The sea wall and casino were rebuilt and strengthened in the 2000s.

Étretat's fame is largely the work of painters. Courbet painted the cliffs before Monet, and Boudin and Daubigny came too. Monet stayed on this coast in 1864 and 1868–69 and returned in 1883, determined to paint the cliffs differently from Courbet; between October and December 1885 he painted nearly fifty views of the Normandy coast, among them the Manneporte and the boats leaving for the herring fishery in front of the Porte d'Aval.

Writers followed. Guy de Maupassant spent most of his childhood here and in 1883 built his own house, La Guillette, in the Grand Val, on the street since renamed after him; his story L'Anglais d'Étretat drew on his meeting with the poet Swinburne, whom he had helped save from drowning. Maurice Leblanc wrote much of the Arsène Lupin series at his home in the town, and set the 1909 novel The Hollow Needle in the Aiguille; the house is now a museum, and the town has appeared in the Lupin television series and in Luc Besson's film Lucy. The composer Jacques Offenbach had a villa here, the Villa d'Orphée, and the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure painted the cliffs as an amateur.

The look of the centre owes much to the 1920s, when the architect Émile Mauge gave it half-timbered buildings in a neo-Norman style, among them the market hall and the Manoir de la Salamandre, a reassembled old house on the main street.

Étretat had about 1,100 residents in 2023, and the number has been falling since 2000: school classes have closed and doctors' surgeries have moved to neighbouring communes. Around 44 per cent of residents are retired, and many houses are second homes — many Parisians had a holiday house here by the years between the wars. In summer the visitors far outnumber the people who live here.

Tourism is almost the whole economy. The town counts a casino, a golf course, a campsite, about 40 restaurants, 14 hotels and around twenty guest houses, and it ranks among the most visited sites in Normandy alongside the Bénédictine palace at Fécamp, Rouen Cathedral and Monet's house at Giverny. In 2015 the municipal budget of about 3 million euros came 36 per cent from car parking, 31 per cent from local taxes and 19 per cent from the casino.

The setting shapes daily life. The lower town, built in the 19th century in the mouth of the Grand Val, lies below sea level at high tide, and the sea has flooded it at times; the water supply, which dates from the 19th century, has been renovated since 2005. Managing crowds, traffic and parking, and the erosion of the cliff paths, are the town's constant concerns.

Étretat's food is that of the Norman coast. Normandy is known in France for its seafood, such as oysters, scallops and mussels, and for its apples, which go into cooking as well as into cider and Calvados, the region's brandy made from apples or pears. Moules-frites, mussels with French fries, a dish from northern France and Belgium, is a staple of seaside menus. Camembert, a soft, creamy, surface-ripened cow's-milk cheese first made in the late 18th century in the Norman village of that name, ends many meals.

The village has its own seafood history. Its fishermen once worked from the shingle, catching mackerel through the three summer months and sailing their clinker-built boats as far as Dieppe for herring in late autumn, and in the 18th century oysters were refined here for the royal table. Fishing has now ended, but fish and shellfish remain the centre of the restaurant trade along the promenade.

Fécamp, along the coast, is the home of Bénédictine, a herbal liqueur flavoured with twenty-seven flowers, berries, herbs, roots and spices, developed by the wine merchant Alexandre Le Grand in the 19th century, who marketed it with a story of monks at the town's Benedictine abbey.