Département: Seine-Maritime
Rouen lies northwest of Paris on the lower Seine, some 130km/80mi above its mouth. The ancient capital of Normandy, it is now chief town of the Haute-Normandie region, the see of an archbishop, France's largest river port and one of its largest seaports, situated at the
highest point on the river navigable by seagoing vessels. It is also a major center of the cotton industry.
In spite of the heavy destruction it suffered during the Second World War, Rouen is still one of the great tourist centers of northern France, with magnificent Gothic churches and richly stocked museums which fully justify its style of "museum city" (ville musée).
The dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and the novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) were born in Rouen.
The Gallic town known to the Romans as Rotomagus, capital of the Veliocasses, flourished under Roman rule and became the see of a bishop in 260. In the ninth C. it was devastated several times by Norsemen from Denmark, whose leader Rollo became the first Duke of Normandy as Robert I in 911. After Duke William of Normandy became king of England in 1066 Rouen, along with the rest of Normandy, became an English possession, and remained under English rule until 1204. During the Hundred Years' War, in 1419, it was taken by Henry V after a six months' siege. Here in 1431 Joan of Arc was tried and burned at the stake. The town was recaptured by Charles VII of France in 1449, and thereafter it prospered until the outbreak of the wars of religion. The bitter fighting between Catholics and Calvinists in the 16th and 17th centuries hampered the development of the town stimulated by the rise of the textile industry, and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 it lost more than half its population. Prosperity began to return only in the 18th C. with the revival of the textile industry.
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