Autun is a French commune in the Saône-et-Loire department in the
Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region, located in the Morvan regional
natural park.
Sub-prefecture of Saône-et-Loire since 1790,
the city had 13,290 inhabitants (Autunois and Autunoises) in the
2017 census, at the heart of an intercommunal grouping together
around 40,000 inhabitants.
Founded by the Romans as
Augustodunum, sister and emulator of Rome at the beginning of the
reign of Emperor Augustus, Gallo-Roman capital of the Aedui to
replace Bibracte, bishopric since Antiquity, Autun was until the end
of the fifteenth century a prosperous city and an influential
cultural center, despite looting and invasions. Its geographic
isolation and increasing competition from Dijon, Chalon-sur-Saône
and later Le Creusot contributed to its decline over the following
centuries. Difficult to convert to industry in the nineteenth
century (exploitation of oil shale and fluorite), Autun experienced
a revival in the twentieth century which made it the headquarters of
several national companies (Dim, Nexans) and one of the six French
military high schools. The city retains a rich heritage of its
ancient and medieval past which also makes it an important tourist
site in the heart of Burgundy.
Autun is a large town of history which has preserved many ancient
or medieval traces. The city was one of the Roman Christian
capitals.
Augustodunum, Roman city
It was under the reign
of the Roman Emperor Augustus (-27/14) that the city of Autun was
founded: its ancient name, Augustodunum, means the fortress of
Augustus. Augustus had the will to create a great city in Gaul which
would show the Roman power. Augustodunum was therefore endowed with
monuments which still make it famous today.
The city is
quickly equipping:
an enclosure about 6 km long and enclosing an
area of 200 ha, with many towers. It was pierced by four doors -
two of which, the doors of Saint-André and Arroux, remain - at the
ends of the two main streets which intersected at right angles
(cardo maximus and decumanus maximus);
a Roman theater that can
hold up to 20,000 people, the largest in capacity in the western
part of the Roman Empire;
an amphitheater which has now
disappeared, located next to the theater;
the so-called “Janus”
temple, outside the ramparts. If this temple was wrongly attributed
to the Roman deity Janus, archaeologists do not know which deity was
worshiped there. We can read on an explanatory plaque near the
temple of Janus:
“To the north-west of the ancient city, on the
right bank of the Arroux, was developing a district of which the
only visible vestige, the so-called“ Janus ”temple emphasizes its
religious vocation. […] The particular form of this temple, known as
fanum, is in the Gallic tradition although its construction
technique, dating from the 1st century AD is Roman. The name of
Janus was wrongly associated with it in the sixteenth century by the
historian Pierre de Saint-Julien de Balleure, who thus interpreted
the name of the sector where it stands: La Genetoye. This term
actually designates a place where broom grows. The deity worshiped
here remains totally unknown. […] "
In 1976, following the
great drought, the aerial prospecting of René Goguey finally allowed
after 13 years to highlight a whole set including a large theater
150 meters north-west of the temple of Janus, whose surveys of 1977
revealed curved and radiating walls of the cavea built on the walls
of an important previous building. Its diameter of 120 meters
exceeding the semi-circle, it belongs to the series of Gallo-Roman
theaters associated with temples.
the pyramid of Couhard,
which stands near an ancient necropolis, the “Field of the Urns”, is
said to be the burial place of the Aeduan druid Diviciacos, friend
of Cicero and Caesar, or even of an ancient vergobret. However, its
exact destination, tomb or cenotaph has given rise to questions.
The creation of Autun attracted the surrounding populations and in
particular the inhabitants of Bibracte, the Aeduan oppidum, which
gradually fell into oblivion.
Autun was famous for its school
of rhetoric, the first to bring letters to Trier were the
panegyrists, rhetoric teachers from the schools of Autun, Bordeaux,
Rome and even Trier. Among the speeches written from 197 to 312,
five were composed in Autun. Already in 107 this Autun school of
philosophy and rhetoric attracted students from all over the Empire.
A poem of 148 hexameters was written by a rhetorician of the famous
school of rhetoric which flourished in Autun at the time of
Constantine.
Taken by Julius Sacrovir in the year 21, Autun
was the center of the Sacrovir revolt led by this Gaul and Julius
Florus. Beaten by the legions that arrived to restore order, Julius
Sacrovir ends up committing suicide in one of his villas on the
outskirts of the city. In the third century, it was besieged for
seven months, taken and destroyed by the usurper Victorinus in 270;
then rebuilt in the following century by Constantine.
At the
beginning of 2010, during the construction of housing near the Porte
d'Arroux, the work revealed an ancient district as well as more than
100,000 bronze coins dating from the third century.
Middle
Ages
Léger (born around 616 - died in 678), was bishop of Autun.
He was tortured in Lucheux (Somme) on the order of the mayor of the
Ébroïn palace, who then had him assassinated. He chaired around 670
the second Council of Autun (after that of 599 convened by Bishop
Syagre).
The city was sacked by the Saracens of General
Ambiza on August 22, 725. Following this disaster, a few years later
in 733, Charles Martel entrusted it to Theodoric I (708-755?),
Grandson of Bernarius, founder of the line of Thierry, counts of
Autun, of which Thierry II of Autun (748-804) is brother of the
famous Guillaume de Gellone (751-28 May 812).
It was sacked
again by the Normans in 888. In the tenth century it became the
capital of a county dependent on the Duchy of Burgundy.
In the Middle Ages, the city became an important place of
pilgrimage, and was given a new cathedral in addition to the
Saint-Nazaire cathedral in Autun. People came to venerate the
supposed relics of Lazarus of Aix, not those of Saint Lazarus of
Bethany, that of the Bible, but those of a bishop of Aix-en-Provence
from the fifth century; the latter had participated in the
evangelization of Provence and had been beheaded during the reign of
Domitian, in the year 94. The cult of Lazare d'Aix, also called
Saint Lazare at Autun in the twelfth century, certainly responded to
that of Mary -Madeleine present in Vézelay. The Saint-Lazare
cathedral (1120), a Romanesque church of the Cluniac type, is famous
in particular for its tympanum, carved with many details
representing the Last Judgment and signed by the artist Gislebert.
This magnificent portal owes its exceptional preservation to the
canons of Autun, despite the destruction of medieval works committed
in the 18th century.
The causes of appeal from the court of
the Duke of Burgundy, recognize that the abbey of Saint-Martin
d'Autun, has seniority, high, medium and low justice on the land of
Chanchauvain, today Champ-Chanoux , and which also belonged to the
priory of Chanchanoux, to the finage of Saint-Eugène.
It was
on July 13, 1463, that the inhabitants of Saint-Martin and
Saint-Pantaléon received their letters of emancipation from the
abbot of the abbey of Saint-Martin d'Autun.
Modern times
In 1788, Talleyrand became bishop of Autun. He was elected deputy of
the clergy for the States General (France) of 1789. He delivered a
vibrant speech in 1789 to make himself known, because he had only
come once before.
In 1790, Autun was chosen to be the capital
of one of the seven districts of the brand new department of
Saône-et-Loire.
During the revolutionary period of the
National Convention (1792-1795), the town provisionally bore the
name of Bibracte.
The seventeenth-century lycée holds an
important place in the history of the city and even of France since
Napoleon Bonaparte, who gave it its current name, as well as his
brothers Joseph and Lucien were educated there. This school
continues to operate today. You can admire the wrought iron gates
erected in 1772, the subjects taught in this place are indicated by
various representations of objects along the top of these gates.
The former hotel of the Marquis de Fussey located rue de
l'Arquebuse, built in 1782, became the seat of the sub-prefecture in
1820. During the Franco-Prussian war, Garibaldi made it his
headquarters at the end of 1870 and the beginning of 1871.
The city leans on the southern edge of a depression
called Autun basin dated from the Permian which includes the
Autunian stratotype forming the Autunois. It is surrounded to the
north by bocage meadows (wide-mesh bocage), to the west by the
Morvan massif, and to the south by deciduous forests (Planoise
national forest) covering a sandstone plateau.
The Autunois
region is made up of sixty-four municipalities grouped into seven
cantons. The following municipalities are found in the cantons of
Autun-Nord and Autun-Sud: Antully, Auxy, Curgy, Dracy-Saint-Loup,
Monthelon, Saint-Forgeot, Saint-Pantaléon (a town campaigning for
its demerger) and Tavernay .