Angoulême: From Medieval Stronghold To France's Capital Of Comics

A city of medieval counts and kings

Angoulême has been occupied since antiquity, but it came into its own during the Middle Ages. Built high up on a limestone plateau overlooking the Charente valley, it was easy to defend.

Take a stroll along the former ramparts and you'll understand immediately why medieval rulers chose this site. You'll also get a sense of the views, which stretch across the valley in every direction.

Today, the fortifications have mostly disappeared, but the medieval city remains, with its narrow, twisting streets that open onto small squares before disappearing.

Long before François I became one of France's most famous Renaissance kings, he was simply François d'Angoulême. The city likes to remind visitors of that connection.

His sister, Marguerite d'Angoulême, was born here and became one of the leading intellectual figures of the French Renaissance. Patron and protector of reformist thinkers and a writer in her own right, she is still one of the city's most celebrated historical figures, her statue standing prominently next to the Hôtel de Ville.

The Hôtel de Ville, or city hall, deserves a look. It was built in the 19th century by architect Paul Abadie, who became one of France's leading restoration architects and is best known for designing the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur in Paris.

The building incorporates the surviving towers of the medieval château of the Counts of Angoulême, which makes it one of France's most unusual town halls: part medieval fortress, part 19th-century civic monument.

Like his contemporary Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Abadie believed restoration sometimes meant reimagining what a monument should have been rather than preserving exactly what survived. Not everyone agrees...

Top: fortress towers with the city hall build among them. Above: city hall's inside courtyard. ©OffbeatFrance

Guided tours of City Hall (run by the city, in summer) sometimes include access to the towers, with some of the best views across the city.

DID YOU KNOW?

In 1524, the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed into the bay that would eventually become New York Harbor.

Sponsored by François I, he named the territory Nouvelle-Angoulême in honor of the king, who had once been Count of Angoulême.

The name did not survive. Dutch settlers later renamed the colony New Amsterdam, and the English eventually changed it to New York. But for a brief moment, one of the world's most famous cities carried the name of this hilltop town in southwestern France.

The cathedral everyone photographs

The city's most impressive monument is undoubtedly Saint-Pierre Cathedral, visible from pretty much everywhere in the historic center.

The site it is built on has been used for worship for well over a thousand years and may have been sacred even before Christianity arrived. As for the cathedral, it mostly dates from the 12th century and is the fourth cathedral built here. This is the one that survived. 

Its extraordinary Romanesque façade is covered with sculptures of biblical scenes and saints, especially the Last Judgement, and attracts architecture enthusiasts from across Europe.

Even among France's many Romanesque churches, it stands out.

It harks back to a period when Angoulême was an important religious center as well as a political one.

The cathedral stands on the highest part of the old city, only a few minutes' walk from the Hôtel de Ville and the covered market. Even if you know nothing about Romanesque architecture, it will stop you in your tracks. It looks almost embroidered with sculpture.

Step inside and instead of soaring Gothic vaults, you'll find a succession of domes inspired by a more southern architecture, giving the cathedral a surprisingly spacious feel.

Don't miss the treasury

Most visitors admire the cathedral's façade, step inside briefly and then leave. Yet hidden inside the cathedral is one of Angoulême's most surprising attractions:  Saint-Pierre's Cathedral Treasury.

The treasury occupies the space left vacant when Protestant forces destroyed one of the cathedral's bell towers during the Wars of Religion in 1568. In fact, from the outside, you'll notice the building seems a bit lopsided because of the missing tower...

Unlike many more sober cathedral treasuries, this one is a work of art, not an exhibition space. It was made over by contemporary French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel into, according to the literature, "an immersive installation that evolves in beauty with every room".

The treasures themselves mostly date from the 19th century, since the earlier items were destroyed during the French Revolution. Bishop Cousseau, who led the diocese during the 19th-century Catholic revival, set out to rebuild it. His goal was simple: to create a treasury that would inspire wonder and demonstrate the renewed prestige of the Church.

Walking through an unpretentious door leads to a room filled with blue light. Here, thousands of Murano glass beads shimmer overhead beneath a vast stained-glass window made up of some 10,000 individual pieces. Othoniel used  traditional Christian symbolism throughout the installation, with blue for the Virgin Mary and gold for the sacred.

The treasure also contains a modern reliquary with a relic of Saint Pierre Aumaître, a Charentais missionary who was martyred in Korea during the 19th century and later canonized by Pope John Paul II.

Just a few of the spectacular sights of the Cathedral Treasury ©OffbeatFrance

It's quite the amazing mix? Part museum, part chapel and part contemporary artwork, bringing together a 12th-century cathedral, 19th-century treasures and 21st-century art in a single space.

Even visitors with little interest in religion may well catch their breath. It is one of the most unusual heritage experiences in Angoulême and one of the easiest to miss, because you can only visit on a guided tour.

Religion, rebellion and John Calvin

Like much of France, Angoulême was swept up in the religious turmoil of the 16th century, the Catholic town being captured by Protestant forces during the Wars of Religion.

The fighting left visible scars, including the destruction of the cathedral's original bell tower.

John Calvin himself is believed to have taken refuge in Angoulême in 1534 while fleeing persecution. A plaque in the old town marks the house where he reportedly stayed, and the street is still called Rue de Genève, a reminder of Calvin's later association with the Swiss city that became the center of Protestantism.

Clearly, Angoulême occasionally found itself at the center of events far larger than the city itself.

When paper ruled Angoulême

The Middle Ages made Angoulême politically important but paper made it rich.

The first documented paper mill in Charente dates to 1516, during the reign of François I, though papermaking in the region is thought to go back to the 14th century. By Louis XIV's time, a century later, nearly 70 mills operated along the waterways around Angoulême. By the 18th century the industry had become one of the most significant in France.

For centuries, paper was made entirely by hand. Old linen sheets and worn clothing were shredded into pulp, shaped into individual sheets and dried one by one. It was slow, labor-intensive work.

Then came the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, with its new papermaking machines that transformed Angoulême from a collection of small mills into one of France's leading paper-producing centers.

Factories popped up along the river and at its peak, the industry employed close to 10,000 people, making paper one of the pillars of the local economy.

Many of the buildings still visible along the Charente today owe their existence to that industrial boom.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Angoulême had become the cigarette-paper capital of France, and the former Le Nil factory employed nearly 900 people.

Cigarette papers bearing the Le Nil elephant logo were sold around the world. The company even opened a branch in Australia. 

Paper-making seemed to touch every fact of life:

• local foundries built papermaking machinery that was exported as far as North and South America
• women assembled notebooks and cigarette-paper booklets by hand
• manufacturers produced envelopes, luxury writing paper, school exercise books and the famous vellum-like vélin d'Angoulême
• the Lacroix, Brousseau and Weiller dynasties built fortunes from the industry and became some of the region's most influential employers, creating such amenities as mutual aid societies, and retirement funds decades before these were mainstream. Former workers still speak about these families with surprising affection.

But like much of France's manufacturing sector, the industry declined after World War II. By the 1970s, most of the mills had closed, victims of international competition and changing markets.

Today, the Musée du Papier, or Paper Museum, occupies the former Le Nil factory beside the Charente River and is one of the best places to understand how deeply the paper industry affected local life.

As museum director Florent Gaillard put it, the museum was created not only to preserve an industry but to "repair a wounded memory". When the paper mills shut down, thousands of jobs disappeared. The museum became a way of remembering what had built the city in the first place.

Standing inside the old factory, it becomes easier to make sense of the rise and fall of paper. Once the industry disappeared, however, Angoulême needed a new identity.

It found one, but in the most unexpected way.

A comic book destiny

Inspired in part by the pioneering festival in Lucca, Italy, in 1974 a handful of comic book enthusiasts launched a festival devoted to the bande dessinée, or BD as it is called in France – the comic strip. 

Festival, yes. But no one expected it to transform the city.

One of the pavilions at the Angoulême Comics Festival. Photo: Office de tourisme Pays d'Angoulême - SN

Within a few years, the event had become the most important comic book festival in the French-speaking world, attracting enthusiasts and professionals  from across Europe and beyond.

The timing could not have been better.

When I asked whether Angoulême's papermaking heritage naturally led to comics, I expected a logical, resounding YES.

"Not really," said Jean Philippe Martin, an executive of the Musée de la BD, the Comic Strip Museum. "The comic-book festival arrived because a handful of enthusiasts wanted to recreate something they had seen in Italy. At the same time, the city happened to be losing its paper industry."

Only later did people realize how neatly the two stories fit together. For centuries, Angoulême had manufactured the paper on which stories were printed. Now, it was becoming a place where stories themselves were created.

Local officials recognized an opportunity and embraced it. Former industrial buildings were repurposed, and schools specializing in visual arts and animation opened. Studios followed.

Today Angoulême is home to animation studios, design schools, visual arts programs and all kinds of image-related businesses. The city likes to describe itself not simply as the capital of comics but as a capital of the image. In fact, the sprawling International Cité of Comics and Images, of which the comic museum is a part, is fully dedicated to comics and visual culture, including a library, cinema, workshops and exhibition spaces.

Even if you don't read comic books, you'll probably find something of interest.

This complex now houses the Comics Museum and other comics-related venues ©Offbeat France

In France and Belgium, in fact, comics are not just children's entertainment but a recognized art form, studied by scholars and read by adults of all ages.

The French even have a phrase for it: "le neuvième art," the ninth art. Comics are discussed alongside cinema and literature, and taken seriously as an art.

The murals of Angoulême

You don't need to enter a museum to see how deeply comics have been etched into the city.

More than two dozen giant murals – painted walls that have become one of the city's signatures – decorate buildings across town, some with famous characters, others honoring influential artists or iconic scenes from comic book history.

Following the mural or painted walls trail is one of the most enjoyable ways to explore Angoulême. Around almost every corner, another illustration appears unexpectedly above a street or staircase.

Often, they show French comic book characters you might not know, but you will inevitably see at least one familiar one: a little Gallic warrior called Asterix and his sidekick, Obelix.

The tourist office provides maps and walking routes, although half the fun is simply stumbling across them unexpectedly. One minute you're looking at an ordinary building, and the next, an entire wall has become a giant comic strip. They reminded me of the giant murals of Lyon, although they're not comic-book based...

The transformation has been so successful that Angoulême is now recognized as a UNESCO Creative City because of its concentration of artistic and visual industries.

A city that keeps reinventing itself

Angoulême isn't one of France's headline destinations. It doesn't have the fame of Bordeaux, the grandeur of Lyon or the crowds of Carcassonne. 

But few small cities have reinvented themselves as completely as Angoulême. For nearly five centuries it made the paper the world wrote and printed on. Now it makes the images.

FAQ

Before you go...

Angoulême sits in the Charente, within easy reach of the Cognac region to the west and the Périgord to the east. If you're building a longer itinerary through southwestern France, it fits naturally into a route that includes Bordeaux, the Dordogne, or Poitiers.

Paper made Angoulême rich. Comics gave it a second life. Together, they explain why this hilltop city feels unlike almost anywhere else in France.