Jewel on the Rhône

“Land of contrasts,” the old travelogues inevitably said, but nowhere does the venerable formula apply more perfectly than to Avignon, a Provençal jewel tucked into a bend on the left bank of the Rhône.

Historically it is both saintly and wildly secular. There’s the savage wind of a winter’s day and the crystalline blue skies of the very next one. There’s the confused jumble of medieval streets and the stately beauty of the mansions piled into them. There’s the quiet of the little squares that dot the ancient city and the raucousness of the Place de l’Horloge. There’s also the grandeur of its walls, the elegance of its 16th- and 17th-century facades, and the incredible banality of recent construction.

Avignon has been my big city in Provence for more than 25 years, since we have a house in the countryside not far away, and my feelings about it are also a study in contrasts. For as much charm as the city holds, there’s also the baking heat of a midsummer day and the vast frustration of driving to it and into it. My own voice of experience about driving says try not to. Take the train. And if you are driving, head directly for the parking garage underneath the Palais des Papes and leave your car there. Part of the city’s appeal is that the vieille ville inside the ancient ramparts is comfortably walkable. And it’s the only part of Avignon that’s really interesting.

High on the list of contrasts is the Papal Palace itself, the largest single medieval structure in France. I like to imagine the impact the building would have had on travelers who had left their hovels elsewhere and come on pilgrimage. With no experience of any building larger than their village church, they would certainly have been stunned by the enormity of the château-fortress palace.

It still makes an impression, seven hundred years after the popes installed the Holy See in Provence in 1309, the beginning of the papal period that eventually led to competing popes during Western Christianity’s Great Schism, which finally ended in the early 15th century. But for seven papal reigns over seven decades, Avignon was the center of the Christian world.

The Avignon papacy had its origins in the days of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Rome and all of northern Italy had become treacherous for the pope, with his authority challenged by the Holy Roman Emperor. Another protracted fight over money pitted the pope, Boniface VIII, against the French king Philippe IV. Known as Philip the Fair, he was a handsome devil, but much more devil than handsome. To pay for his war against England he first seized the assets of the Jews and expelled them from France, and then he went after the church’s wealth too. But Boniface was also an alpha male, so the Church excommunicated Philippe—who responded by sending a mission to Rome to arrest the pope and depose him. The effort failed, and the pope died.

In an attempt to put this fight behind them, the cardinals chose a Frenchman, the archbishop of Bordeaux, as the next pope. Ruling as Clement V, he acceded to Philippe’s encouragement to establish a permanent seat for the papacy away from Rome.

A territory east of the Rhône, known as the Comtat Venaissin, was already papal property, ceded to the church in 1274 by the Counts of Toulouse, the rulers of Provence, to atone for their support of the Cathars, or Albigensian heretics. (Except for brief periods later, Avignon and the Comtat remained papal property until the French Revolution.)

So, in 1309, Clement V set up near the Comtat town of Carpentras. His successor, John XXII, a former archbishop of Avignon, preferred his old episcopal residence, and that is how the little city on the Rhône became the center of the Western world. Next in line, Pope Benedict XII began construction of a new residence, and his successor Clement VI expanded it into the immense edifice that remains today.

If you do park underneath the Papal Palace, when you climb the stairs to exit you’ll emerge into the vast Place that faces the Palace. Pause to grasp the massive scale, and go inside for a tour now or later. The building itself is mostly what you’ll see—all 3.7 acres of it, divided into Benedict’s Palais Vieux and Clement’s Palais Neuf.

By the clock

My starting point for wandering around the city is the Place de l’Horloge, the site of the old Roman Forum and still the vital center of the city. The Banque de France sits as sentinel at the upper edge, and along the right-hand side other official buildings line up monumentally—city hall, the municipal theater. But a colorful old merry-go-round lightens the atmosphere and suggests that there’s fun to be had, not just a history lesson.

If you have time and inclination, pick a café and order an express. Sit with your guidebooks, get oriented, and enjoy the passing scene. The people-watching is rewarding, especially on a sunny day. (The cafés zip themselves up inside transparent plastic wrap when it’s drizzling or the sharp mistral wind whips down the Rhône and lays a Siberian chill over the Provençal plain.)

The 14th-century clock tower that gives the Place de l’Horloge its name is now part of the Hôtel de Ville, which was once a cardinal’s residence. The long noisy square and the showcase rue de la République that leads directly into it offer a kind of natural divide between workaday Avignon in a welter of streets to the east, and the antique and specialty shops to the west. Don’t miss either section as you wander.

Leading west from the Place, you’ll find the rue Molière and the rue Corneille—statues of those great playwrights in front of the theater serve as effective street markers, guiding you to the city’s elegant antique shops, high-end boutiques, intimate restaurants, grand hotels and two of the city’s most important museums—the Musée Calvet and the Lambert Collection of contemporary art.

East of the Place de l’Horloge, a tangle of streets not sorted out since the days of the popes leads mazelike toward the Place des Carmes, the sumptuous houses off the rue Banasterie, the Place Pie and the central market with its strange, plant-covered vegetal wall. If your wanderings are truly rewarded, you’ll happen upon the quiet, sun-dappled rue des Teinturiers. Lined with plane trees, it’s only a few blocks long, and the abandoned boutiques and restaurants speak sadly of ideas that didn’t quite work.

The rue des Teinturiers was once awash in dye works and textile manufacture. It parallels a short stretch of the Sorgue, the river that now runs mostly underneath the city before flowing into the Rhône. Its water now serves chiefly to keep the ancient plane trees vibrant, but once upon a time the river powered the textile mills. Four paddle wheels, rusty in their decrepitude, are vestiges of the score of print works that once brought wealth to factory owners and jobs to the working class.

The factories were known as “les indienneurs,” and the fabric they printed as “les indiennes”. The textiles were developed to satisfy the demand for the intricate prints once imported from India and then banned in an 18th-century protectionist act. The Provençal fabrics that now bear such labels as Souleiado and Les Olivades are other vestiges of that once potent industry.

Cardinal points

The Holy See brought many princes of the Church to Avignon, and each acquired a palace for himself. Later, opponents of Avignon as the Church’s HQ blamed the proximity of France as a corrupting influence because it made cardinals imitate the royal court in displays of wealth and grandeur.

None of the cardinals’ mansions were as grand as the Papal Palace, but many were grand indeed. In French they are called “livrées cardinalices“—and there’s a choice of explanations for the term. Perhaps it was used because in the beginning the mansions were “liberated” from their owners. Or because they were livrée—delivered—to cardinals by supplicants in an early example of lobbying. Or—still another explanation, one with great metonymic flourish—because their servants were in livrée, or livery, the whole ensemble came to be known as livrées. Whatever the explanation, today’s McMansions don’t hold a votive candle to them.

The most striking of the residences and the most accessible is the Petit Palais, an expansive building situated next to the Papal Palace and now Avignon’s major museum. Among its best treasures is an important collection of 13th- to 16th-century French and Italian paintings and sculpture.

The Hôtel de Ville was another of the livrées. You can walk inside during office hours and read the historical explanations, but it’s just City Hall now and it gives no sense of medieval splendor. Any of the popular tourist guides can take you to other livrées that are still standing, like the Livrée Ceccano, which now houses a médiathèque, or multipurpose media library. Facing it, the Musée Angladon offers a collection that includes Manet, Cézanne, Derain, Picasso and Les Wagons de Chemin de Fer, the only Van Gogh left in Provence. Like other significant sites, these are marked and well explained, in French, by signs posted all over town.

Eventually the opulence and corruption of the cardinals and the papal court led opponents to refer to the Avignon period as the “second Babylonian captivity”. Even after Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1376, two successive “anti-popes” tried to hold out in Avignon, causing the Great Schism of Western Christianity, a dramatic conflict that was not without bloody battle before it finally ended with the Council of Constance in the early 15th century.

Song and dance

Nowadays Avignon knows a less combative kind of drama through its famous summer theater festival. For three weeks each July the city is chockablock with spectators and spectacle for what is touted as the world’s biggest and most important theater festival.

Throughout the rest of the year, the colorful murals that adorn many walls around town bear witness both to famous theatrical performances of the past and the contemporary event that Avignon is best known for. Looking down on the street, the actors are locked forever in a single pose in their trompe l’oeil role playing, which takes fantasy to a high level indeed.

But for a lot of us, more than the Papal Palace and more than the theater festival, it’s a song that underlies Avignon’s reputation. A song, and the famous bridge, where “l’on y danse, l’on y danse”. For centuries the Pont Saint Bénezet has been the archetypical bridge to nowhere, reaching only half way out toward the bucolic Ile de la Barthelasse in the middle of the Rhône.

Once upon a time, before a flood swept away all but four of its original 22 arches, the Pont Saint Bénezet spanned the entire Rhône and led to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. It was once an international crossing, from papal Avignon to Philip the Fair’s France. The tower where the bridge ended still bears Philip’s name. He built the tower, according to legend, as a fortress to keep an eye on the goings-on at the Papal Palace.

The song gets it wrong, by the way. Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse tout en rond — or so we sing. But it wasn’t on the bridge, or sur, but under the bridge, sous, that the dancing took place. Under the bridge and on Barthelasse, once known for its guinguettes, or outdoor taverns with music for warm weather dancing.

Do pay the fee and walk out onto the bridge, or dance out if you want—chances are you won’t be the only one—just to be able to look back at the medieval skyline imposed by the big palace, the little one, and of course the ramparts. As far as the eye can see it’s all battle-worthy crenellations and towers, incongruously topped off by the golden statue of the Virgin above Notre Dame des Doms, the cathedral adjoining the palace complex.

Aside from the palace, the ramparts are Avignon’s most visible and striking feature, and one of the best examples of medieval fortification in existence. There were walls when the popes arrived in the early 14th century, but the papacy’s presence led to urban sprawl, and the new areas built outside the old walls were under frequent threat from marauding thieves.

So the popes built new walls, and those are basically what encircles Avignon today—stone walls 2.5 miles long and 30 feet high, with ports of entry in a number of the square towers. Originally there were 35 tall towers and 50 smaller ones, with a dozen gates. But restoration projects over the centuries have demolished towers and built new ones, and pierced new entries too. The moats that once provided additional security have long since been filled in, although there is a proposal to reconstruct them—a project that won’t cheer anyone looking for a space in the extra-muros parking lots surrounding the city.

Although there’s now a charge for the Pont Bénezet, most of the visual pleasure of Avignon requires no entrance fee. In our early visits we locked our eyes on a map and tried to know where we were and where we were going. Soon we learned that inside those ramparts the city is too small for anyone to get seriously lost. That makes map-free wandering all the more pleasurable. Turn a corner and discover a significant ruin, or an opulent facade rich in intricate stonework, or a peek into an ancient, well-tended garden.

I think of Avignon as Venice without water. The streets are as tangled and meandering as Venice’s calle, and little leafy squares relieve the traffic. In your wanderings don’t miss the Promenade des Papes, which circles the palace and leads through the Place Maria Casarès. There in a building known as the Manutention—which once supplied food and medicine for a military barracks nearby—a sort of artisans’ colony has sprung up, with ateliers for an art restorer, a glass engraver, a sculptor and a photographer. A movie theater in the square specializes in foreign films, all presented in their original languages. And there’s a café, of course, with the golden image of the Virgin hovering high above.

AVIGNON NOTEBOOK

Office de Tourisme 41 Cours Jean Jaurès, 04.32.74.32.74. Maps, guided tours and recorded guides. website

Palais des Papes Place du Palais des Papes. You can’t miss it. website

Pont Saint Bénezet Below the papal palace just outside the ramparts. website

Musée du Petit Palais Place du Palais des Papes. website

Musée Calvet 65 rue Joseph Vernet. website

Musée Angladon 5 rue Laboureur. website

Hotels

La Mirande 4 pl de la Mirande, 04.90.14.20.20. Extravagant teatime spread in the salon, and one of Avignon’s best restaurants. website

Hotel d’Europe 12 pl Crillon, 04.90.14.76.76. Have a glass of wine under the magnificent plane trees in the garden, just as Henry James did. website

Restaurants

Restaurant Christian Etienne 10 rue de Mons, 04.90.86.16.50. One of Avignon’s best grand restaurants. In summer Chef Etienne’s all-tomato menu is magnificent. website

La Fourchette 17 rue Racine, 04.90.85.20.93. A long-time favorite bistrot surrounded by antique shops and boutiques.

Le Grand Café 4 rue des Escaliers Sainte Anne (Place Maria Casarès), 04.90.86.86.77. Cheap and cheerful, another happy find.

Originally published in the June 2009 issue of France Today; updated in January 2011