Département: Loire-Atlantique
The old Breton port of Nantes, chief town of the département of Loire-Atlantique, the see of a bishop and a university town, lies at the junction of the Erdre (flowing underground for the last part of its course) with the Loire, here divided into a
number of arms and navigable, which 50km/30mi farther downstream flows into the Atlantic at St-Nazaire. The port of St-Nazaire, the first port in France to be entirely electronically controlled, has a turnover of 23 million tons.
Nantes was the birthplace of the writer Jules Verne (1828-1905).
Nantes, under the name of Condevincum, was the capital of a Gallic tribe, the Namnetae. Then and subsequently, down to the end of the 15th C, the town fought to maintain its independence against the Romans, the Normans, the English and the French. In the Middle Ages Nantes was for a time capital of the Duchy of Brittany, which fell to the French crown in 1532. In 1598 Henry IV signed here the famous Edict of Nantes, which granted freedom of religious belief to Protestants.
Thanks to its port Nantes developed into a flourishing commercial town by the 16th C. In the 19th C its trade declined, since the larger vessels then coming into service could not sail up the Loire, so that it became necessary to build an outer harbor at St-Nazaire and develop new industries in Nantes.
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