The Port of The Moon
Reflections on the City of Bordeaux
For almost exactly three hundred years, from the marriage of the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II Plantagenet in 1152, to the end of the Hundred Year’s War in 1453, the Duchy of Aquitaine and its capital Bordeaux were English. Positioned on the wide river Garonne, just upstream of where it is joined by the Dordogne to become the massive Gironde estuary, Bordeaux’s strategic position, important for both land and sea powers, has been fought over for centuries. The Romans, Gauls, Franks, Umayyads, Norman, Vikings, Basques, and French have all surveyed the city with envious eyes. But it was the English who took the city to its first great flourish of prosperity, as the world capital of wine.
In this region the Garonne and the Dordogne flow with wine. The word Bordeaux itself is synonymous in English with the velvet red liquid and claret, which was amongst the most popular Victorian tipples, is simply an anglo-mispronunciation of the French grape variety clarinet. Still today the vineyards besiege the city, running down both banks of the Gironde for miles, stretching inland, turning the ancient town of Saint Emilion into an island above the undulating, regimented, waves of vines. The transportation and export of wine established the foundations of Bordeaux and it still runs through the veins of the modern city.
It must surely be because of this history that the Bordelais retain a certain affection(?), maybe that's too strong, a greater tolerance for Britain than one might find in the other metropolitan centres of France. There are more British ‘pubs’ here than in any other European city I’ve visited, they outnumber the usually more ubiquitous Irish ones by three to one, and have names which range from the traditional (The Cock & Bull), to the twee (The Dick Turpin), to the borderline offensive (The HMS Victory). Poking my nose into a small establishment called The Oxford Arms revealed an unexpectedly accurate and subtle recreation of a traditional British urban pub.
Residents speak English well, readily, and willingly, without the air of contempt that one receives in Paris, but only as long as you’re British. Overhearing interactions in bars and restaurants, the Gallic haughtiness is still on offer if you display an American accent. It's the wine that brings the elderly American to Bordeaux, third on their itinerary after the lights of Paris and the beaches of Normandy. As I sit writing this outside the Café Le Dijeaux, two old American ladies, baffled by European café culture, are causing chaos. Making not even the most basic attempt to speak the language, they have moved tables four times now, complaining loudly to each other about aspects of each, and now one asks the waiter whether the Steak Haché is “like a quarter-pounder” causing him to blink back with an expression which has only ever known the gram and kilogram. When they behave like this one can understand the hostility.
The majority of Bordeaux’s virtually unspoilt cityscape is thanks to the city’s second golden age, the 18th Century, and the density of handsome pale-stone merchants’ houses with mansard roofs has gained the city UNESCO world heritage status. During this time, wine was joined by cotton, sugar and cocoa on the quaysides of the sweeping crescent curve in the river known as The Port of the Moon. Today those cargoes ring alarm bells, they are the bounty of the transatlantic slave trade. Bordeaux was the Bristol of France, and indeed the legacy of the triangular trade is why the two cities are twinned today. Around the impressive Place de la Bourse the rusticated arches on the ground floor are surmounted by carved faces. Nymphs, river gods, and grotesques are, at intervals, interrupted by the occasional African face, standing as a reminder of lives and liberties on which the grandeur of this prosperity was built.
This architecture, combining a network of boulevards and squares with more narrow, winding streets, gives Bordeaux the atmosphere of less neurotic Paris, the vibe of Le Marais but extended across the city. This is not entirely a coincidence, the infamous Baron Haussmann, responsible for the rebuilding of Paris into the city we know today, had been Prefect of Bordeaux before he moved north, and based many of his designs for the capital on his memory of Bordeaux. The people are equally as stylish but less frantic and hurried in their business around the streets. This is especially evident in the cyclists, who glide around the city in their hundreds with seamless ease. Streets shared by pedestrians, trams, and cyclists cause no issue whatsoever, with each courteously giving way to the other without the need for aggressive signage, segregation, or even aggravated bellringing. The two-wheeled inhabitants of Amsterdam or Paris could learn from their southern counterparts.
The thread which connects all quarters of the city centre is the Rue Ste Catherine, part of the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago and today the longest pedestrianised street in France, its bisects the town parallel to the river connecting the main food market and university campus, via the cathedral, to the Grand Théâtre and the Place des Quinconces, variously described as the biggest or one of the biggest civic squares in Europe. It's certainly huge, and the open gravel in the centre is only interrupted by a tall memorial column at one end to remember local victims of Robespierre’’s reign of terror. Besides this there are just two statues in the massive space, of Bordeaux’s favourite sons, the inventor of the essay and once, reluctantly, mayor of the city, Michel de Montaigne, and opposite him Montesquieu, judge and political philosopher credited with the idea of the Separation of Powers and as such responsible for generations of political chaos on both sides of the Atlantic. Around the edge of the square there are deep groves of plane trees, planted in regimented lines and creating beautiful shady alleyways, through which the trams silently slither.
The city boasts a number of interesting and notable churches, the main draw being the cathedral church of St Andrew. Its twin spires, positioned unusually on the end of one transept, are visible across the city thanks to the distinct lack of any high-rise buildings. The rest of the building is a strange but attractive combination of eras and styles. Very early Romanesque fragments abut elaborate renaissance screens and baroque tombs for cardinals. The nave is long and, as it notably lacks any aisles, very wide and light, with the clerestory uninterrupted by piers. Then at the crossing things get tall, dark, and gothic, and the entire east end follows much the same pattern of other French cathedrals with little of particular note other than a choir organ built into the elaborate curved choir stalls, so the pipes sit right behind the backs of the singers. Next door is a freestanding medieval bell tower, even taller than the cathedral spires which, due to cost, war, and revolution, was without actual bells until the mid-nineteenth century. It is surmounted by a rather podgily proportioned gold-plated statue of the Virgin and Child.
A short distance away is another freestanding gothic bell tower, currently ensconced in impressively elaborate scaffolding. This, the tallest structure in town, is the spire of St Micheal’s basilica, which runs the cathedral close for being the largest church in the city. Again, tall and gothic, it is beautiful if unremarkable aside from some impressive modern stained-glass and one side altar of bizarre renaissance design, holding in its heart several panels of medieval Nottingham alabaster showing the seven sorrows of the Virgin.
This end of town, around the basilica, is a little more easy-going, scruffy, and artistic. Between the alternating vegetable and flea markets that gather weekly in the shadow of the spire, down to the Marché des Capuchins, the city’s legendary but surprisingly modern food market, you could believe you’re in Marseille or the left bank of Paris before the tourists. Many of the immigrant population live and work in this quarter, and the cultures of north Africa and the middle east mix here with the local student populace, the market traders, and the performers from the theatre and music schools. There seems to be an almost permanent atmosphere of Sunday morning about this area.
This chilled feeling is in part thanks to the almost complete banishment of cars from the city centre. Without enforced pedestrianisation, the maze of narrow streets and inner-ring roads are contrived in such a way to deter all but the most essential traffic, and as such the streets are filled with the noise of conversation, restaurants, music, and trams, rather than clunky French diesel engines. It is really the trams that make this possible. Bordeaux once had an elaborate tram system which, along with most short-sighted cities across Europe, was entirely pulled up in the mid-twentieth century. Where Bordeaux differs is how they put it back, an early re-adopter around the new millennium, they had to face some unusual challenges. The UNESCO listing of much of the city centre meant that a web of overhead cables, obscuring the view of the facades above, was impossible. Instead, an ingenious system developed where the stylish silver trams switch seamlessly between cables where they’re allowed and a ground level feed when not. This ground feed, a kind of bronze tape that runs in the middle of the rails, is clearly visible, but one can step on it, cycle across it, even walk along it without fear of electrocution. A system in the trams makes sure it's only when a tram is over the top of a segment of rail that it becomes electrified. Clearly there is complete trust in this system as people walk over the line all the time without a second thought and there has seemingly never been a problem.
Whilst Bordeaux might show off its impressive modern technology on the streets, underneath them there is something altogether more ancient. At the church of St Severinus, on the edge of the city centre, there is a wonderful secret. Beneath the floor of the nave there is a crypt that dates back to the 5th century, and in it lie the stone sarcophagi of some of the earliest Christians to inhabit this corner of Europe. When St Andre and St Severinus came to convert the people of the wild south west of Occitania in the 5th century, they soon realised that the Muslim caliphates just across the Pyrenees meant that the churches and tombs of the Christians in that region were under threat from the invading armies of the ‘infidel’. So they collected as many of these ancient tombs as they could and brought them to the relative safety of Bordeaux and the crypt of this church where they have remained ever since.
The low ceilinged room, with heavy arches and columns made up of spolia from Roman ruins, houses maybe fifteen sarcophagi, including those which claim to be the tombs of Saints Veronica, Fort, and Andre. Some are very plain, but others are elaborately hand-carved with symbolic trees, vines, birds and fruits which would make William Morris envious. Running my hand over these cold stone sigils, on the nameless tomb of some forgotten early Christian, whose resting place was so carefully protected, and now who has been laid here under the streets of Bordeaux for centuries, feels like getting close to touching the deep buried roots of the city. These tombs were here when Charlemagne passed through with his armies, they were here when Richard II was baptised in the cathedral, they were here when the English were driven out, and when the news of revolution arrived from Paris. They lay silently in the dark when the first and last slave trader lived on the quayside, whilst the Nazis U-Boats came and went from the docks, and during the construction of the new tramways.
Almost all cities in Europe live today on top of the collected detritus of past centuries. In some places, London or Rome, it's obvious at every turn, but in other cities that have been rebuilt wholly in times of prosperity or after the ravages of war, Paris or Berlin, the layers of time can be harder to make contact with. Bordeaux sits somewhere between the two, the charm of the modern city in old French clothing can make you forget the deeper lore of the land, but it's always worth seeking out, if you can, those buried roots, if you want to truly tap into the soul of a city.
Thank you for reading these brief thoughts, scribbled down in my notebook sat outside a café whilst on holiday, then refined a little on the flight home. If you like to read more of my travel writing then look for the ‘Walking The Thames’ tab on my page, where you can find all 14 chapters of my epic trudge along England’s second longest river.
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Thank you for this fascinating view of Bordeaux. I visited the city some years ago and after reading your post am now eager to return.