Tourist information -
Clermont Ferrand
Clermont-Ferrand lies at the northern tip of the Massif Central.
Although its situation is magnificent, almost encircled by the wooded
and grassy volcanoes of the Monts-Dômes , it has for a century
been a typical smokestack industrial centre, the home base of Michelin
tyres, which makes it a rather incongruous capital for the rustic,
even backward province of the Auvergne.
Its roots, both as a spa and a communications and trading centre,
go back to Roman times. It was just outside the town, on the plateau
of Gergovia to the south, that the Gauls under the leadership of
Vercingétorix won their only, albeit indecisive, victory
against Julius Cæsar's invading Romans. In the Middle Ages,
the two towns of Clermont and Montferrand were divided by commercial
and political rivalry and ruled respectively by a bishop and the
count of Auvergne. Louis XIII united them administratively in 1630,
but it was not until the rapid industrial expansion of the late
nineteenth century that the two really became indistinguishable.
Indeed, it was Clermont that took the ascendancy, relegating Montferrand
to a suburban backwater.
Michelin came into being thanks to the inventions of Charles Mackintosh,
the Scotsman of raincoat fame. His niece married Édouard
Daubrée, a Clermont sugar manufacturer, and brought with
her some ideas about making rubber goods that she had learnt from
her uncle. In 1889, the company became Michelin and Co, just in
time to catch the development of the automobile and the World War
I aircraft industry. The family ruled the town and employed 30,000
of its citizens until the early 1980s, when the industry went into
decline. In the years since, the workforce has been halved, causing
rippling unemployment throughout Clermont's economy. Many of those
who have lost their jobs are Portuguese immigrants, imported over
the last thirty years to fill the labour vacuum and well integrated
with the local population.
As in many other traditional industrial towns hit by recession
and changing global patterns of trade, Clermont has had to struggle
to reorientate itself, turning to service industries and the creation
of a university of 34,000 students. Nonetheless, many people have
moved elsewhere in search of work, reducing the population by nearly
a tenth. The town has changed physically, too, as many of the old
factories have been demolished
The most dramatic and flattering approach to Clermont is from the
Aubusson road or along the scenic rail line from Le Mont-Dore ,
both of which cross the chain of the Monts-Dômes just north
of the Puy de Dôme. This way you descend through the leafy
western suburbs with marvellous views over the town, dominated by
the black towers of the cathedral sitting atop the volcanic stump
that forms the hub of the old town.
Clermont's reputation as a ville noire becomes immediately understandable
when you enter the city's appealing medieval quarter, clustered
in characteristic medieval muddle around the cathedral - it is due
not to industrial pollution but to the black volcanic rock used
in the construction of many of its buildings. The Cathédrale
Notre-Dame stands at the centre and highest point of the old town;
Freda White evocatively described its sombre grey-black-stone lava
from the quarries at nearby Volvic as "like the darkest shade
of a pigeon's wing". Begun in the mid-thirteenth century, it
was not finished until the nineteenth, under the direction of Viollet-le-Duc,
who was the architect of the west front and those typically Gothic
crocketed spires, whose too methodically cut stonework at close
range betrays the work of the machine rather than the mason's hand.
The interior is swaddled in gloom, illuminated all the more startlingly
by the brilliant colours of the rose windows in the transept and
the stained-glass windows in the choir, most dating back to the
fourteenth century. Remnants of medieval frescoes survive, too:
a particularly beautiful Virgin and Child adorns the right wall
of the Chapelle Ste-Madeleine and an animated battle scene between
the crusaders and Saracens unfolds on the central wall of the Chapelle
St-Georges.
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