French cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 5 learning regions, matching the rounds on the France guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 17 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Paris

The city inside the ring road is only about 105 square kilometers and holds two million people; the built-up area around it holds ten million more. Its twenty arrondissements spiral outward clockwise from the middle, which is why the numbering looks arbitrary on a map and makes sense on a snail.

Marseille

Greeks from Phocaea founded it as Massalia around 600 BC, which makes it the oldest city in France by about five hundred years. It is the second largest and the country’s biggest port, and its old harbor is still where the city meets in the evening. The calanques east of it are limestone inlets you can only reach on foot or by boat.

Lyon

Rome founded Lugdunum here in 43 BC and made it the capital of the Gauls; the emperor Claudius was born in it. The Rhône and the Saône meet at the southern tip of the old center, and the peninsula between them is the shape the city grew along. It is where French cooking is generally agreed to be at its most serious.

Toulouse

It is called la ville rose for the fired clay everything old in it is built of, there being no good building stone nearby. Airbus assembles its largest aircraft here, and the town has been the center of European aerospace since the airmail pilots of the 1920s flew the route south from it to Dakar and on to Santiago.

Nice

Nice was Savoyard and then Italian, and only voted to join France in 1860. Its seafront is called the Promenade des Anglais because the English built it: they had been wintering here since the 1820s, and it was an English clergyman who paid for the first path along the shore in 1822.

Nantes

Nantes was the capital of Brittany, and the Edict of Nantes, signed here in 1598, gave French Protestants the right to worship until Louis XIV revoked it in 1685. It grew rich in the eighteenth century on the slave trade, handling more of it than any other French port, and it says so on the memorial along the quay.

Strasbourg

Its cathedral was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874, at 142 meters, and it is a single tower because they never built the second one. The city has held the Council of Europe since 1949 and the European Parliament since 1979, on the argument that a border that changed hands four times in seventy years is the right place for it.

Bordeaux

The eighteenth-century waterfront curves for more than a kilometer along the Garonne, which is why the city is called the port of the moon. The vineyards around it cover something like 110,000 hectares and are divided into more than sixty appellations, an arrangement the English wine trade largely invented and has been arguing about ever since.

Lille

Lille was Flemish before it was French, and the built-up area it sits in runs across the border into Belgium and holds about two million people between them. It was a coal and textile town, and the high-speed line that put it an hour from Paris and ninety minutes from London is what it rebuilt itself around.

Rennes

Rennes is the capital of Brittany and sits inland, which is unusual for a Breton town of any size. Most of the old wooden center burned in a fire in December 1720 that ran for six days, so what stands there now is the grey granite and slate the rebuilding was done in.

Brest

Brest has one of the best natural harbors in Europe, a roadstead of 150 square kilometers entered through a strait under two kilometers wide, and has been a naval base since Richelieu. The Germans built a submarine pen here that Allied bombing could not break, so they flattened the town around it instead: almost nothing survived 1944.

Le Havre

It was bombed flat in September 1944 and rebuilt by Auguste Perret on a grid in reinforced concrete, which is why it is the only twentieth-century city center in France on the UNESCO list. François I founded it in 1517 because the older ports on this coast were silting up.

Reims

French kings were crowned in its cathedral for about eight hundred years, which is what Joan of Arc marched Charles VII there to do in 1429. The German surrender was signed in a schoolhouse in Reims on 7 May 1945. The champagne houses store their bottles in chalk pits the Romans cut, which sit at a steady ten degrees.

Grenoble

Grenoble is on a flat valley floor at about 215 meters with three mountain ranges closing around it, which is why it is often called the flattest city in France and always photographed with a wall of rock behind it. It hosted the Winter Olympics in 1968 and is the main research town of the French Alps.

Clermont-Ferrand

The Puy de Dôme stands 1,465 meters above the city at the north end of a chain of about eighty volcanic cones. Michelin was founded here in 1889 and still is here, and the guide it publishes began as a book of road advice given away to sell tires to the very small number of people who then owned a car.

Perpignan

Perpignan was the mainland capital of the Kingdom of Majorca in the fourteenth century and stayed Spanish until 1659. Catalan is still spoken in the villages around it, and the town keeps the Catalan colors on its buildings. The Pyrenees drop into the sea about thirty kilometers south of it.

Ajaccio

Napoleon was born here on 15 August 1769, in a house that is now a museum, a year after Genoa sold the island to France. It is the largest town on Corsica with about 70,000 people, which is well under the cut every other dot on this map had to clear, and it is here so that the island is not a shape with nothing on it.

How this one works

The other maps of France

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the France atlas page, the country itself on the France guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.