10 largest cities in France
Paris
Marseilles
Lyon
Toulouse
Nice
Nantes
Strasbourg
Orleans
Reims
Avignon
Lille is a city in northern France, prefecture of the Nord
department and capital of the Hauts-de-France region. With 232,787
intramural inhabitants at the last census in 2017, Lille is the
tenth most populous municipality in France, but also the main
municipality of the European metropolis of Lille, which brings
together 94 other municipalities including Roubaix, Tourcoing and
Villeneuve-d ' Ascq and has nearly 1.2 million inhabitants.
In its French part, its urban unit and its 1,037,939 inhabitants
make Lille the fourth largest agglomeration in France behind Paris,
Lyon and Marseille, while the 1,182,127 inhabitants of its urban
area make it the sixth in the country behind these same cities. , as
well as Toulouse and Bordeaux. More broadly, it belongs to a vast
conurbation formed with the Belgian cities of Mouscron, Kortrijk,
Tournai and Menin, which in January 2008 gave birth to the
Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai Eurometropolis, the first European Grouping
of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), which totals more than 2.1
million inhabitants. It also exerts an important influence on a
territory of more than 3.8 million inhabitants called “metropolitan
area of Lille”, highly urbanized and dense, including in
particular the old mining basin of Nord-Pas-de-Calais and the
agglomerations. from Arras and Cambrai.
Important cultural
center at the crossroads of Picardy and Flemish areas, its name in
Old French (L'Isle) and in Latin (Insula) comes from its supposed
primitive location near an island in the marshes of the Deûle valley
where it was founded. The origin of its name in French Flemish, and
in West Flemish would follow from the translation of the Latin name
Insula in Middle Dutch ter ijs (s) el. The name Rijsel is only used
in the Flemish region of Belgium, the Dutch using the name “Lille”.
Even today in France nicknamed the “Capital of Flanders”, Lille
and its surroundings belong to the historic region of Romanesque
Flanders, a former territory of the county of Flanders not forming
part of the linguistic area of West Flemish. A garrison town (as
evidenced by its Citadel), Lille has had an eventful history from
the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. Very often besieged during
its history, it belonged successively to the kingdom of France, the
Burgundian state, the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Netherlands
before being definitively attached to the France of Louis XIV at the
following the war of succession of Spain at the same time as all the
territory composing the historic province of French Flanders. Lille
was still besieged in 1792 during the Franco-Austrian war, in 1914
and in 1940. It was severely tested by the two world wars of the
twentieth century during which it was occupied and suffered
destruction.
Merchant city since its origins, manufacturing
since the sixteenth century, the industrial revolution made it a
great industrial capital, mainly around the textile and mechanical
industries. Their decline, from the 1960s onwards, opened up a long
period of crisis and it was not until the 1990s that the conversion
to the tertiary sector and the rehabilitation of disaster areas gave
the city another face. The creation of the automatic metro in 1983,
the construction of the new Euralille business district from 1988
(today the 3rd in France behind La Défense and Lyon Part-Dieu), the
arrival of the TGV in 1993 and the Eurostar in 1994 placing Lille at
the heart of the great European capitals, the development of its
international airport, annual events such as the Braderie de Lille
which takes place at the beginning of September (two to three
million visitors), the development of a student and university
center (today, with more than 110,000 students, the 3rd in France
behind Paris and Lyon), the City of Art and History ranking in 2004
and the events in Lille 2004 (European capital of culture) and Lille
3000 are the main symbols of this renewal. In 2020, the European
Metropolis of Lille will be “the world capital of design”.