Normandy is a region in northwestern France. It has a long coastline
to the north on the English Channel and is bordered by the regions of
Hauts-de-France and Île-de-France to the east, Centre-Val de Loire and
Pays de la Loire to the south and Brittany to the south-west.
From 911 to 1469, Normandy was a county or duchy that was feudally
dependent on the kingdom of France. His aristocracy came from
Scandinavia and was known as the Normans (i.e. "Nord-Manns"). Before
that, there had been numerous Viking raids on northern France since the
middle of the 9th century. To put an end to this, the West Frankish King
Charles III. (the simpleton) in the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte gave
the area later called Normandy to the Viking leader Rollo, who settled
down permanently with his men, accepted Christianity and became a count
(Jarl) and thus a liege man of the French king . However, the majority
of the population was most likely not of Scandinavian origin, but the
name of the ruling class that had immigrated from the north was
transferred to the country and its people. In 996, the county of
Normandy became a duchy.
In 1066, the Normans under William I
(the Conqueror) conquered England. In the period that followed, a Norman
upper class took over control of England, whose culture, language, law
and administration were then strongly influenced by the Normans. England
and Normandy were then ruled in personal union, which resulted in a
complicated situation: as king of England, the respective monarch was
the equal of the French king, but as duke of Normandy he was his liege.
Because of this conflict, a war broke out in 1194-1204 between the
French King Philip II Augustus and the English King Richard the
Lionheart or his brother and successor John of Plantagenet (later known
as John the Landless). Philip accused John of breaking his fealty,
stripped Normandy from him and added it to the crown domain after his
victory. The Duchy of Normandy continued to exist pro forma, but in fact
the area became an integral part of the Kingdom of France, which was
administered more and more centrally. In 1469, Louis XI. smashed the
ducal ring on an anvil, finally ending the duchy. From then on, Normandy
was only a French province. However, the Queen of England still claims
the title of Duchess of Normandy to this day.
During the Second
World War, Normandy was occupied by the German Wehrmacht, and cities
such as Cherbourg and Le Havre were subsequently built as fortresses as
part of the "Atlantic Wall". On June 6, 1944, the so-called D-Day, the
Allies landed on the coast between Ste-Maire-Eglise and Ouistreham. The
war ended for Normandy on August 22, 1944. On August 25, 1944 Paris was
liberated. As a result of the fighting almost all cities in Normandy
were bombed, the street fighting did the rest. Cities like Caen, Le
Havre, Cherbourg, Saint-Lô and Évreux were almost completely destroyed.
The military cemeteries in the region still commemorate the many fallen
soldiers. Many civilians also fell victim to the bombardments and street
fighting.
From 1956 to 2015, Normandy was divided into the two
administrative regions of Lower Normandy (Calvados, Manche and Orne
departments; capital Caen) and Upper Normandy (Eure and Seine-Maritime;
capital Rouen). On January 1, 2016, the two were united.
Rouen
Bayeux
Caen
Cherbourg-Octeville
Dieppe
Honfleur
Le Havre
Other destinations
French; English e.g. in the larger and heavily touristed cities, especially in the area of the D-Day coast.
By plane
There is no major airport in the region itself, but
arrival can be via Paris Charles de Gaulle or Orly airports, from where
it is not far to south-east Normandy (e.g. 110 km from Orly to Évreux;
140 km from CDG to Rouen). Even closer to Normandy is Beauvais-Tillé
Airport, which is served by low-cost airlines (especially Ryanair);
however, at the moment (as of March 2016) not from the German-speaking
area. Rouen is 85 km from Beauvais.
In Normandy itself there are
only smaller regional airports, the most notable of which are Caen and
Deauville. Those wishing to go to south-west Normandy may consider using
Rennes Airport or Dinard/Saint-Malo Airport in eastern Brittany (e.g.
60km from Dinard to Mont-Saint-Michel).
By train
From
Paris-St-Lazare there are direct trains (known as Krono+ in Normandy)
every 1-2 hours to Le Havre via Rouen, Yvetot and Breuté/Beuzeville.
Also every 1-2 hours there are direct trains from Paris-St-Lazare to
Caen, most of which continue to Cherbourg via Bayeux, Carentan and
Valognes. There are also quite frequent connections from Paris-St-Lazare
to Lisieux and Trouville-Deauville with stops in Évreux and Bernay.
About five daily direct trains run through the south of the region from
Paris-Montparnasse to Granville, with stops e.g. in L'Aigle, Argentan,
Flers and Vire. The fastest trains from Paris to Rouen take 1:20 hours,
to Caen 2:00 hours, to Le Havre 2:10 hours, to Cherbourg 3:15 hours.
Connections from German-speaking countries usually go via Paris,
whereby the station has to be changed. The fastest connection from
Cologne to Rouen, for example, takes 5:15 hours and from Frankfurt am
Main six hours.
By bus
On the one hand there are long-distance
bus connections from the provider BlaBlaCar, which sometimes offers
several connections daily from bus stations in Paris (including Bercy,
La Defense) to Rouen, Caen, La Havre or Honfleur. On the other hand,
there are other long-distance bus connections from the provider Flixbus,
which also offers connections to Caen or Le Havre from several bus
stations in Paris (including Bercy, Pont de Levallois / Metro 3). The
travel times of both providers are mostly between 3 and 4 hours.
On the street
The A 13 motorway leads from the greater Paris area to
Normandy (past Rouen to Caen). The A 28 and A 29 provide cross
connections from Picardy (Amiens) and the extreme north (Calais) and the
Pays de la Loire (Le Mans) to Normandy. The A 84 connects Normandy with
Brittany (Rennes–Caen).
If you drive to Normandy from Germany, it
can be a good idea to drive around the greater Paris area and approach
the region from the east on the A 29; this is especially true if the
destination is in the east of Normandy anyway.
By boat
It is
possible to arrive by car ferry from England and Ireland. Ferry ports in
the region are (from east to west):
Dieppe – Ferry from Newhaven
(East Sussex)
Le Havre - Ferry from Portsmouth
Cabourg (Calvados)
Ouistreham (17 km north of Caen) - Ferry from Portsmouth
Cherbourg-Octeville - Ferry from Portsmouth, Poole, Rosslare and Dublin
In Brittany, but not far from the western edge of Normandy, is the ferry
port of Saint-Malo
By bicycle
The European long-distance cycle
route EuroVelo 4 leads through the region. B. from Calais, Bruges,
Düsseldorf, the Middle Rhine or Frankfurt am Main. From the Paris area,
you can take the avenue verte (or cycle path V33) parallel to the Seine
to upper Normandy (Dieppe or Rouen/Le Havre) or take the V40 to
south-western Normandy (Alençon, Mont-Saint-Michel).
On foot
On the European long-distance path E9 you can hike from Belgium, the
Netherlands and Germany along the North Sea and English Channel coasts
or in the other direction from western France and from the Iberian
Peninsula on the Atlantic coast to Normandy.
By car
In Normandy, the car is recommended as a means of travel.
The distances to the various places and sights are not very far (from Le
Havre to Cherbourg almost 200 km) and the larger cities can also be
reached quickly via the motorway or via feeder roads. You can also enjoy
the extremely beautiful and green landscape of this region, stop as you
wish and visit the wonderful smaller towns of Normandy.
By train
Normandy has its own railway network, the hubs of which are Caen and
Rouen. Most routes operate almost every hour in the morning and late
afternoon/early evening, but there are larger gaps between departures
during the day. Only a few trains a day run on the branch lines. The
timetables for the TER trains can be found under "Se deplacér -> Fiches
Horaires".
By bus
The bus network in Normandy, marketed under
the "Nomad" name, offers a basic range of connections between the larger
towns and cities away from the railway lines. However, there are often
only individual connections in the morning, at noon and in the late
afternoon or early evening, with which a half-day or day trip to the
next town can be planned. Around Caen, where there are three tram lines
in addition to many city bus lines in the "twisto" urban line network,
the line network is more densely developed. There are regular daily
connections to Ouistreham, Courseulles-sur-Mer, Dives, Deauville or
Honfleur, among others. Many towns, including smaller ones, have their
own network of routes, with bus lines running mostly on Mondays and
Saturdays with single trips or at frequent intervals. The fares are very
cheap overall, a trip with the regional bus sometimes costs less than 3
€, the ride on some city bus lines is free or a ticket costs e.g. B.
€1.50 (as of 2022).
Links to all regional and city bus companies
can be found on this Normandy information website.
By bicycle
Important cycling routes from city to city are the already mentioned
EuroVelo 4 along the coast (Mont-Saint-Michel - Avranches - Saint-Lô -
Cherbourg - D-Day landing coast at Bayeux - Ouistreham near Caen - Le
Havre - Fécamp - Dieppe) , the avenue verte (Paris - Gisors - Pays de
Bray - Dieppe, possibly future EuroVelo 16 to London), the Seine cycle
route (V33: Giverny - Vernon - Elbeuf - Rouen - Le Havre), the V40
through the sparsely populated south of the Region (Nogent-le-Rotrou -
Perche - Alençon - Domfront - Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët -
Mont-Saint-Michel), the V43 cross-connects the sea to the interior
(Ouistreham - Caen - Flers - Domfront - Mayenne) .
The 'landmarks' of Norman cuisine are the three famous 'C's - cider,
camembert and calvados.
Cider, sparkling wine made from apples.
Calvaldos, cider brandy from the Calvados region
Cow's milk cheeses,
such as Camembert, Pont-l'Évêque and Livarot
Norman sauce Light sauce
for fish
Tripes à la mode de Caen Traditional tripe dish
lots of
seafood like mussels, oysters or lobster (due to the location on the
English Channel)
Normandy lies mainly in the Paris Basin. However, western Normandy is
part of the Armorican massif.
The geology of Normandy ranges from
the Paleoproterozoic to the Quaternary. The oldest rocks in France are
exposed in Jobourg. These gneisses, which are more than two billion
years old, can also be found in the Bailiwick of Guernsey. The Roche
d'Oëtre is one of the most picturesque landscapes of the Armorican
massif. The landscapes in the Armorican massif or in the Paris basin are
different. At the boundary between both geological units, at
Laize-la-Ville near Caen, two unconformities can be observed: the
Cadomian and the Variscan unconformity. Numerous fossils can be found in
the Paris Basin. Bayeux takes its name from Bajocium. The cliffs of les
Vaches Noires are known for their fossils.
Normandy is crossed by the Paris-Saint-Lazare-Rouen-Le Havre, Paris-Saint-Lazare-Caen-Cherbourg railway lines and also by the Paris-Montparnasse-Argentan-Granville railway line. The Lison-Lamballe railway line connects Caen to Rennes, and thus Normandy to Brittany. The A13 motorway connects Paris to Caen via Rouen.
Between 58 and 51 BC Gaius Iulius Caesar conquered the region and
named the area Lugdunensis secunda. The first cities to emerge were
Constantia, Augusta and Rotomagus. From the late 4th century, the
fortified towns and forts on the coast belonged to the Limes of the
so-called Saxony Coast, whose garrisons were under the command of a Dux
tractus Armoricani et Nervicani. Gregory of Tours mentions the
settlement of Saxony around Augustodurum in today's Normandy for the
second half of the 5th century. In 486/87 the Franks, under the
Merovingian Clovis, defeated the last Gallo-Roman general, Syagrius, and
occupied the Gallic areas north of the Loire. Clovis founded a bishopric
in Rouen. In the 7th and 8th centuries, monasteries were founded in
Jumièges, St. Quen and St. Wandrille. In 709 the Bishop of Avranches
founded the monastery on Mont-Saint-Michel.
In 841 Rouen was
sacked by the Normans. In 911, the West Frankish king Charles the Simple
entrusted the Norman Rollo with the county of Rouen, which became the
nucleus of a largely independent duchy.
Normandy got its current
name in the Middle Ages as the home of the Normans, who had formed as a
tribe of local "French" residents and Vikings who had joined them.
According to language and place name research, the majority of the
Vikings who settled came from Denmark, a smaller number from Norway. It
can be assumed that their wives almost all came from the local
indigenous population. The history of the Duchy of Normandy began when
the Viking Jarl Rollo (Gånge Rolf), who probably came from Norway and
who had devastated the area of the Seine around Paris, was granted
Normandy as a fief by Charles the Simple in the Treaty of
Saint-Clair-sur-Epte (911). He was thus incorporated into the West
Frankish 'state' and tasked with defending Normandy (shifting his
attention from inland to coast) against further incursions from foreign
Vikings.
Rollo's descendant William, Duke of Normandy, conquered
England in 1066, earning him the nickname "the Conqueror". He then had
himself crowned King of England. The dukes of Normandy stayed until 1087
and were also kings of England from 1106 to 1144 and from 1154 before
Normandy was conquered by the French king Philip II in 1204 during a
war. During the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) it was occupied by
English troops from 1346 to 1360 and again from 1415 to 1450.
During World War II, Normandy was occupied by the German Wehrmacht. The
coast of Lower Normandy served as a landing zone for the Western Allies
for the long-planned opening of the second front against Nazi Germany.
The invasion that followed, Operation Overlord, began on the night of
June 6, 1944 with a sizeable army of all three naval, army and air
forces. Caen in particular suffered greatly from the fighting. After the
United States Army, the British, Canadians, Poles and French troops had
laboriously pushed the German units away from the coast and inland for a
month and a half in order to be able to destroy them in the Falaise
pocket, the remnants of the defeated German armies broke on April 25.
July 1944 out of the boiler east towards Paris. In the course of
advancing Allied troops, the liberation of Paris (August 25, 1944)
finally became possible 30 days later and, after nine months, finally
all of Western Europe.
William the Conqueror is said to have received a flag from Pope
Alexander II. It is found on the Bayeux Tapestry. It was intended to be
a sign of papal protection and was not attached to either the duke or
the duchy. However, it is believed that William the Conqueror actually
used a flag. It is said to have been white with a gold cross bordered in
blue.
A coat of arms for Normandy was not introduced until the
time of the Crusades and the rule of the Plantagenêt. This crest was
originally a blue shield with six golden leopards. It was changed to a
red shield with three golden leopards, the coat of arms of Richard the
Lionheart. After 1204 the leopards were reduced to two, and this
remained the coat of arms of Normandy for six centuries, until the
coming 1000th anniversary of Normandy, when what became known as the
"Leopard Controversy" ignited.
The leopard fight
Many local
poets and some historians, but especially local patriots, saw the shield
with three leopards as the true coat of arms of Normandy. It was the
coat of arms also in use in Guernsey and Jersey. This should also tie in
with the Anglo-Norman dukes and kings as the creators of modern England.
They saw the coat of arms with only two leopards as a consequence of the
conquest of Normandy by the central power in Paris. The three leopards
were undeniably an expression of pride and a desire for autonomy.
Currently, this version is preferred in the area of the Cotentin
Peninsula. The dispute over the number of leopards petered out in the
course of the 20th century.
The 1920 flag proposal
To avoid
the dispute over the number of leopards, local patriots launched a
campaign for a separate Norman flag. It began in the 1920s with an
article in the Bulletin des Normands de Paris. Professor Jean Adigard
Des Gautries, an expert in onomastics for Scandinavia and Normandy,
advocated a special flag, since the coat of arms and the flag had
different functions. The three leopards should only be used as a banner.
The proposal did not gain widespread support as the Patriots were too
attached to the Leopards. The discussion came up again in 1954. This
time it was young people around the magazine Viking, which was published
from 1949 to 1958. There the different flags of the Normandy regiments
in the Ancien Régime with different color combinations around a white
cross were pointed out, but these could not be continued because of the
monarchical tendency and the lack of acceptance among the people.
The first proposal was a red flag with a yellow Scandinavian cross
and two or three leopards on the reverse. It was shown in Cherbourg
during the Viking week of 1955, and even flown on top of the town hall.
But it did not prevail, despite the Viking newspaper's strenuous
efforts. One reason was that it resembled the "R" signal flag of the
international flag alphabet. Another reason was that this flag had been
used by the Quisling government's Norwegian 'National Collection' during
the Third Reich. The third reason was that the separatist movement that
wanted to separate Skåne from Sweden used this flag. The use of this
flag could have strained the desired good relations with the
Scandinavian countries. The fourth reason given is that this flag was
also carried by the Finnish independence movement in 1917 and was thus
linked to Finnish history.
St. Olav's flag
With this in mind,
a new flag proposal was drafted in 1974. It was designed to commemorate
Saint Olav, who was baptized in Rouen. It was the red, yellow bordered
Scandinavian cross on red cloth. It has been endorsed by the Association
française d'études Internationale de vexillologie and has been included
in Whitney Smith's Flags Through the Ages and Across the World (1975)
and Alfred Znamierowski's World Encyclopedia of Flags (1999), among
other numerous vexillological treatises . However, some patriots did not
want to let go of the leopards and put them in the upper leech. It is
also common in this form, especially on stickers. The city of Falaise
uses it as a flag. However, this flag never became official.