Carcassonne

The roofs are wrong, and they are the most famous thing about the place.

Look at any photograph of Carcassonne and you see a skyline of steep grey cones, tower after tower topped with a witch's hat. They look impeccably medieval. They are nineteenth-century, and they are the wrong shape for this part of France. Towers in the Languedoc were traditionally covered with low, flatter roofs of terracotta tile. The tall slate cones belong several hundred kilometres north, and they are there because the architect who saved the city, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, believed a restoration should return a building not to how it was but to how it ought to have been.

People have been arguing about it ever since, and both sides are right. Without him the walls would very likely have come down. With him, the most recognisable fortress in Europe is partly a nineteenth-century idea of itself.

Two Thousand Years Stacked Up

The hill sits above the valley of the Aude, on the corridor between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic side of southern France, which is why it has essentially never been empty. Sections of the inner wall are late Roman; you can spot that layer by the courses of brick laid into the stone and the rounded bases of horseshoe-shaped towers. Visigoths came after Rome, then others, then the Franks. Nobody demolished what they inherited. They built on top of it.

The city's own founding story is about a siege. A woman called Dame Carcas is said to have been holding the walls with the food almost gone, so she fed the last grain to a pig and had it thrown over the parapet. It burst on the ground, spilling wheat, and the besiegers concluded that a town wasting grain on livestock could outlast them. They left, bells rang, someone said "Carcas is ringing," and the name stuck. It is folklore rather than history — the name is on record long before the story — but a bust of her still stands by the gate, because being besieged really was this town's profession.

Cut Off From The River

In the summer of 1209 a crusading army arrived, sent south against the Cathars, a movement the church had declared heretical and which had found shelter in this region. The siege was not really a contest of walls. The water was outside them. In August heat, with refugees packed inside, the city lasted a matter of weeks. The young viscount, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, went out to negotiate and did not come back; he died in the dungeon of his own castle that November, of causes the sources disagree about.

Carcassonne passed to the French crown. Louis IX added the second, outer ring of walls, so an attacker now had to break two of them, and the corridor between the rings became a killing ground. The French name for that corridor is the lices; in peacetime it was where markets were held and horses were exercised, and it is where most visitors walk today. The same king expelled the rebellious townspeople and had them build a new town across the river, which is the flat, gridded lower Carcassonne of the present day.

Inside the walls stands the basilica of Saints Nazarius and Celsus, Romanesque at one end and Gothic at the other, holding some of the best-preserved medieval stained glass in the south of France.

Made Useless By A Treaty

What finished the fortress was not a battle but a signature. In 1659 the border between France and Spain was moved south to the Pyrenees, and Carcassonne stopped being a frontier stronghold overnight. The garrison went, maintenance stopped, stone was carried off for other buildings, and houses were built into and against the ramparts. By the middle of the nineteenth century the state had scheduled the ruin for demolition.

A local historian spent years writing letters and petitions until the government's inspector of monuments took the case up, and the demolition order was reversed. The work went to Viollet-le-Duc, who kept at it until his death in 1879, and to his successors after that.

Now

The Cité has been a World Heritage Site since 1997. There are close to three kilometres of walls and more than fifty towers. A few dozen people still live inside, though during the day the place belongs entirely to the millions of visitors who come each year.

In 2018 an artist installed yellow bands across the ramparts that resolve, from one exact viewpoint, into concentric circles. The reaction was fierce on both sides, and the work eventually came down. For a wall that has changed hands for the better part of two thousand years, it was a familiar sort of argument: who the wall belongs to now.