Rochefort, France: the country's most coherent city?

I'd just come from Angoulême, all hilly and with medieval curves and streets that seem to have found their way downhill over centuries.

Rochefort was utterly different: its streets were straight, meeting at right angles and laid out with precision, almost as though one were in a modern city.

The only curve I found was on the street leading from my hotel to the restaurant...

I was very curious as to why.

A city drawn on a blank page

Most French cities grew the way cities do: a settlement here, a market there, a defensive wall or rampart when things got dangerous, maybe a boulevard when a 19th-century mayor decided to modernize.

Not Rochefort – it didn't grow at all, it was designed from scratch and built by decree.

In the early 1660s, Louis XIV and his minister Colbert decided France needed a major Atlantic naval arsenal. To find the ideal location, they sent a four-man commission to walk the entire coastline from Dunkirk to Bayonne.

• Le Havre was too close to England. 
• Brest seemed too exposed. 
• Bordeaux and Nantes were eliminated because navigating the river was too difficult. 

Until the Charente coast. It had what the others lacked: the islands of Ré, Oléron and Aix formed a natural barrier, a river ran far enough inland to protect the shipyards from enemy ships, and hostile marshland on all sides that made a land attack almost impossible.

The site on which the arsenal would be built belonged to a minor Protestant noble named Jacques-Henri de Cheusses, who had no powerful friends at Versailles. Meantime, the families upstream and downstream were too well-connected to displace. You can guess whose land was chosen, although there doesn't seem to be a record of whether de Cheusses was ever paid for it.

Before its official founding in 1666, Rochefort had been a sleepy hamlet of roughly a 100 people, with a ruined medieval castle and a 12th-century parish church.

Within a generation, it would become one of France's most important military-industrial sites, laid out on a grid drawn with pen and paper by a military engineer.

That street with the slight curve? It follows a trace that predates 1666 – one of the very few remnants of what was here before the planners arrived.

Walking those straight streets today, it's easy to forget what they represent.

The city doesn't feel military, and the River Charente meanders quietly past the old arsenal grounds. Place Colbert, which was meant to have an equestrian statue of Louis XIV before the money ran out, is a pleasant square for a coffee. 

Walking around it, I half-expected Catherine Deneuve to come dancing around the corner － the square has exactly the sun-drenched, unhurried quality that Demy captured in the film.

I loved Rochefort more than I expected to － ordered and agreeable, so full of history it was hard to pull away.

Colbert Fountain on Place Colbert in Rochefort ©GFreihalter, CC BY-SA 4.0

Look closely. The buildings have an unmistakenly military architecture, and the grid, designed for control rather than elegance, allowed troops to move quickly and enemies be seen in an age when surveillance relied on human eyes, not technology.

But Rochefort doesn't feel regimented at all — the pace is easy, and the city is genuinely agreeable, ordered without being stern, full of history without being weighed down by it, and delightfully walkable.

By the early 20th century, the river that had made Rochefort defensible in 1666 had become its undoing.

As warships grew larger, the Charente — too shallow, too winding, too prone to silting — could no longer accommodate them. The arsenal tried to adapt, specializing in smaller vessels, but it was fighting geography.

In 1927 it closed permanently.

The military didn't vanish entirely. An air base still operates nearby, and the gendarmerie school occupies some of the old arsenal buildings, but the industrial machine that had filled the streets with workers and sailors for three centuries simply stopped. What remained was the grid and the architecture of a city built for a purpose that no longer existed.

Most French cities are the collective result of many decisions made over many centuries.

Rochefort, on the other hand, is the result of one decision, made in one year.

That's what makes it coherent: you can tell it is a city whose original logic is still visible in every street and building.

The Corderie Royale

First to be built in the new arsenal was the Corderie Royale, the royal rope factory, begun in 1666.

The Corderie Royal - I couldn't fit its entire length into the frame ©OffbeatFrance

Rope was as essential to a sailing warship as timber – a single vessel needed hundreds of meters of it, in dozens of weights, and it had to be manufactured in long uninterrupted sections.

A special building was needed, which ended up measuring 374 meters (1,227 ft) in length, set along the Charente, its façade decorated to impress ships arriving from the sea. At the time, this was France's longest building.

Although the arsenal was essentially a giant shipyard, Louis XIV wanted it to project royal power as well as military might. That's why the Corderie and other buildings are so monumental rather than purely functional. 

Part of the rope-making arsenal of the Corderie Royale ©OffbeatFrance

The entire building rests on a raft of oak beams sunk into marsh mud － there was no solid ground － and it started leaning within a decade anyway; the 11 buttresses added to correct it are still there.

The gardens along the Charente are free to walk and worth an hour of anyone's time, whatever the season. The view of the Corderie is even more impressive from a distance...

The people who built Rochefort, France

A city has to be populated, and Rochefort filled up quickly: engineers, craftsmen, administrators, merchants and surgeons, and the traders who followed all of them.

The Musée Hèbre, now the city's main history museum, was once the townhouse of Pierre-André Hèbre de Saint-Clément, a merchant who made his fortune supplying the arsenal and trading with the Caribbean colonies.

Only the 18th-century façade survives, however. The interior was completely rebuilt as a contemporary museum while preserving the original exterior.

Maritime life had such a grim reputation of disease and brutal conditions at sea that the French navy could never fill its ships through voluntary recruitment alone － and not everyone who ended up in Rochefort had chosen to be there.

The answer was the presse, a system of forced conscription that operated along the entire Atlantic coast. Guards moved through port towns seizing men they deemed suitable, and some of those men woke up already on the water with no clear idea of where they were going. Convicts worked the arsenal itself, in chains.

A single warship leaving Rochefort might carry 800 men or more, packed into a hull with designated spaces for livestock, ammunition and crew — and disease killed more of those men than combat ever did.

The sailors who climbed the masts to handle the sails in storms, working high above the deck with no safety equipment as the ship pitched in Atlantic swells, were among the most skilled men aboard and among the most exposed to injury and death.

Rochefort sent thousands of men to sea and mostly didn't record their names. The one it  remembers most is the one who kept coming back and writing it all down.

The heritage of Pierre Loti

Rochefort's most unlikely export was a novelist: Pierre Loti, born here in 1850, who became one of the most widely read French writers of the late 19th century and spent his life trying to see every corner of the world his navy could reach.

I read Pierre Loti when I was young. Madame Chrysanthème, Aziyadé — novels soaked in far-off places, written by a French naval officer who spent his life traveling the world and couldn't stop writing about it. He was one of the reasons I wanted to go everywhere and part of my own lifelong wanderlust can be laid at his feet...

The house on the street that bears his name looks like a solid bourgeois townhouse from the outside. Inside — so I'm told, since I didn't get in — he spent decades transforming room after room into elaborate recreations of places his naval career had taken him: a Turkish salon, a Gothic hall, a Chinese room, a mosque. 

On my next visit, for sure!

Where Jules Verne's Nautilus began

In the late 1850s, two engineers at Rochefort, Captain Siméon Bourgeois and naval constructor Charles Brun, began building France's first mechanically propelled submarine.

The Plongeur, launched in 1863, was about 43 meters (141 ft) long and powered by compressed air; it was the largest submarine yet built anywhere.

But its performance was mixed and it was decommissioned after four years.

A scale model was prepared for the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where Jules Verne saw and studied it. A few years later, while living in Amiens, he published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. That original exhibition model is now in the Musée national de la Marine in Rochefort. Think of it: the same object Verne stood in front of in Paris, returned to the city where the submarine was built. 

More things to see in Rochefort

The main sites are spread across the arsenal quarter and the town center, all within comfortable walking or cycling distance.

Musée national de la Marine

The Musée national de la Marine is one of several branches of France's national naval museum, but the Rochefort collection reflects the city's specific history.

The centerpiece is a teaching model of an 18th-century warship nearly 5 meters (16 ft) long, one side finished, the other opened up to show the internal structure of the hull and holds. 

This was not built as a museum piece but was designed to teach and prepare officers for their commission. It showed how space on board was organized, and where livestock would be stored, along with the ropes controlling the sails.

Looking at the cutaway side, with its massive wooden ribs and cramped interior spaces, our guide hinted that officers who had seen it  might well have turned and run home.

Warship training model for naval officers ©OffbeatFrance

Nearby stands a full-size capstan from a ship built at Rochefort in 1770 — the rotating drum that teams of around 40 sailors used to raise anchors, pushing long wooden bars around the mechanism while the ship pitched in heavy seas, the anchor cable soaked and the weight enormous. It is a large, handsome piece of wood and iron, and standing next to it makes the physical demands of 18th-century naval life suddenly concrete.

The Plongeur model is here too, along with navigational instruments, figureheads and a collection that moves chronologically from the age of sail through the ironclad era and into the 20th century.

Ancienne école de médecine navale

Founded in 1722, the naval medical school is famous for having been the first of its kind in the world.

I have to admit this was one I skipped － I don't do well in medical museums but I'm told it's quite worth a visit.

For more than 240 years it trained the surgeons who sailed on French warships, treating sailors under difficult conditions, healing them and returning them to work since they had no way of going home.

Naval surgeons weren't trained only to treat sailors. They were also expected to bring back  natural specimens from overseas, helping turn Rochefort into an important centre of scientific research.

The museum that now occupies the building holds 25,000 volumes (roughly 40% not recorded anywhere else), around 600 surgical instruments, anatomical specimens and ethnographic objects gathered during expeditions across the globe.

Guided visits only — reserve in advance (visits are in French). Not wheelchair accessible. The Jardin d'Utopies outside, planted with medicinal and aromatic species, is free to enter without a ticket.

Musée Hèbre

The first (and quite remarkable) item to look at in this museum is on the ground floor: the Rochefort plan relief, the scale model that instantly explains the city's military logic.

Plan-relief, or scale model, of Rochefort on the ground floor of the Musée Hèbre ©Office de Tourisme Rochefort Océan/S.David

Upstairs, there's an unexpected collection of Aboriginal Australian art and Oceanic ethnographic material, directly connected to the exploration voyages that left from this port － one of the stronger collections of its kind in France for a city of 25,000 people.

The pont transbordeur

Have you ever seen a transporter bridge?

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it, a tall metal frame spanning the Charente with what appeared to be a platform hanging from it on cables.

Transporter bridge in Rochefort just leaving the shore ©OffbeatFrance

The transporter bridge in action ©Office de Tourisme Rochefort Océan/Les Coflocs

Built in 1900, it's the last transporter bridge in France. It doesn't work like a conventional bridge. A gondola suspended from the fixed structure above carries passengers, cyclists and other non-motorized vehicles across the Charente while the bridge itself stays in place — slow, slightly surreal, and entirely worth the crossing. The Maison du Transbordeur next to the bridge covers the engineering history if you want the full story.

Jacques Demy used it as the opening shot of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort in 1967, which starred Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac and Gene Kelly.

The film transformed how the French think about the city, which organizes regular events connected to the film, especially around anniversaries, and the whole town joins in. It's a strange contrast with Rochefort's origins as a military-industrial project, and the city seems entirely at ease with it. It has even printed a brochure (in French) that retraces the places of interest featured in the film.

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