Rouen

Rouen was founded by the Gaulish Veliocasses, who called it Ratumacos; the Romans knew it as Rotomagus, second city of their province after Lyon, with an amphitheatre and baths. It became a bishop's seat in the 5th century. Viking fleets came up the Seine from 841, and from 912 Rouen was the capital of the Duchy of Normandy until William the Conqueror moved his residence to Caen. In 1150 it received a charter of self-government; at that time about 6,000 Jews lived in the town, around a fifth of the population, and a 12th-century yeshiva discovered in 1976 is now a museum.

Philip Augustus entered Rouen on 24 June 1204 and annexed Normandy to France. Wool cloth and a monopoly on Seine traffic as far as Paris made it rich, though revolts in 1291 and 1389 cost it its liberties, and in 1306 its Jewish community was expelled. Henry V of England took the city after a long siege in January 1419, and on 30 May 1431 Joan of Arc was burned in the Vieux-Marché; Charles VII recaptured Rouen in 1449. It held out for the Catholic side against Henry IV in 1591–92, and in 1754 Rouen merchants owned nearly a third of the Le Havre ships fitted out for the slave trade.

The Second World War was devastating. Bombing in the spring of 1944 burned part of the cathedral, which was almost destroyed, and the quarter south of it, and the courthouse was gutted in August. The city was rebuilt, its port merged with those of Le Havre and Paris in 2021, and in 2019 a fire at the Lubrizol chemical plant sent a pollution cloud over the city. On 11 July 2024 the cathedral's spire caught fire during renovation work, but the fire was quickly brought under control.

Rouen calls itself the city of a hundred bell towers, and its Gothic churches, half-timbered houses and the rue du Gros-Horloge, the first street in France given to pedestrians in 1971, define its image. Painting gave it international fame: Claude Monet painted the cathedral's façade in a long series of canvases, some now in the Musée d'Orsay, and the Rouen collector François Depeaux gave the city a major group of Impressionist paintings in 1909. The École de Rouen of post-Impressionist painters followed, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts ranks among the foremost French museums outside Paris for Impressionism. Gustave Flaubert was born in the city, and Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant are among the writers linked with it.

Joan of Arc is the city's most powerful memory. The Vieux-Marché, where she died, is marked by the modern church built in her name in 1979, and the Historial beside the cathedral tells the story of her trial.

The calendar is full. The Foire Saint-Romain, a funfair of about a month in October and November, is the second largest in France; every four to six years the Armada brings tall ships and warships from around the world to the quays; and the city has hosted several editions of the Normandie Impressionniste festival since 2010. The Opéra de Rouen Normandie performs at the Théâtre des Arts. In sport, the Dragons de Rouen play top-flight ice hockey on the Île Lacroix, the Huskies have long dominated French baseball, and football club Quevilly-Rouen and Rouen Normandie Rugby also represent the city.

Rouen had 117,662 inhabitants in 2023, up almost 7 per cent since 2017, making it the second commune of Normandy after Le Havre. The Métropole Rouen Normandie, a grouping of 71 communes, had about 500,000 people in 2022, and the wider metropolitan area some 715,000 in 2023. Large suburbs such as Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Sotteville-lès-Rouen and the Quevillys surround the city.

As regional prefecture, Rouen houses most of the state's regional offices, and the city had about 75,700 jobs in its own boundaries. The port, part of HAROPA since 2021, the refineries and chemical works of the lower Seine, insurers such as Matmut with their headquarters here, the hospitals and the University of Rouen Normandy, with nearly 46,000 students, are the big employers.

The city is divided into twelve districts, nine on the historic right bank and three on the left bank around Saint-Sever. Contrasts are sharp: the bourgeois districts of the west and the riverside eco-district rising on old port land sit apart from the Hauts-de-Rouen, home to more than 10,000 people with a high poverty rate. The memory of the Lubrizol fire has kept industrial risk a live local issue.

Rouen's signature dish is canard à la rouennaise, also known as pressed duck or canard au sang: parts of a duck served in a sauce of its blood and bone marrow, extracted with a special press. It is a speciality of the city, and its creation is attributed to an innkeeper from Duclair. Normandy's cream and butter run through the rest of the local cooking, and the surrounding countryside supplies cheeses such as heart-shaped Neufchâtel from the Pays de Bray, as well as Camembert, Pont-l'Évêque and Livarot.

Markets are central to eating in Rouen. The covered halls beside the church of St Joan of Arc sell cheeses, meats, fish, fruit and vegetables, and the weekend market on the place Saint-Marc, with its flea market alongside, is the best known in the city. Pâtisseries and bakeries fill the streets around the Gros-Horloge, and restaurants circle the Vieux-Marché.

The drinks come from the orchard: cider, pommeau and calvados, the oak-aged apple brandy, are the regional staples, and Bénédictine, the herbal liqueur, has been made since 1863 at Fécamp on the nearby coast. Rouen's own craft is visible on the table too: the city has produced faience, tin-glazed earthenware, since at least the 1540s, and its ceramic museum displays the best of it.