Orléans has thanked Joan of Arc every May since 1432
On 8 May 1429 Joan of Arc broke the English siege of Orléans at the fortified gatehouse guarding its bridge. Three years later the city began an annual festival in her honour, and it has held one every first week of May ever since. The Loire city's story, though, starts far earlier, with Gaulish Druids.
Before the Romans, the site was Cenabum, a stronghold of the Carnutes, the Gaulish tribe in whose territory the Druids held their yearly assembly. Julius Caesar destroyed it in 52 BCE. By the late 3rd century it had been renamed the city of the Aurelians, perhaps after one of several emperors carrying that family name, and the label slowly wore down into Orléans. In 442 the Roman general Flavius Aetius invited Goar, leader of the Alans, an Iranian people, to settle there, and place names such as Allaines still recall them.
Geography made the city rich. It sits where the Loire bends furthest north, the river's closest point to Paris, and it had one of the few bridges over that dangerous stream. With Paris and Rouen it ranked among medieval France's three wealthiest cities. Under the Merovingians it was a royal capital, and in 1108 Louis VI was crowned in its cathedral, one of the rare French kings crowned outside Reims. Pope Clement V founded a university there in 1306; its law school hosted John Calvin and briefly Molière, who was thrown out for going to a carnival.
River trade kept shaping the economy. In the 17th century Caribbean sugar shipped up from Nantes made Orléans a refining centre, feeding chocolate makers and wrapping-paper mills, and by the 18th century it was known for vinegar. Flat-bottomed boats with folding masts slipped under the bridges. Today large ships reach only about as far as Nantes, and a submerged dike splits the Loire at Orléans into a northern and a southern channel.
The city had 116,357 residents in 2023 and sits about 120 kilometres southwest of Paris, in a stretch of the Loire Valley listed by UNESCO in 2000. Its name travelled across the Atlantic: New Orleans honoured the Duke of Orléans, regent for Louis XV, and places in Quebec, Ontario and Massachusetts share it.
Source: Orléans
