Contemporary life found in medieval city
Market day in Rennes, featuring farm and sea, worth the train ride from Paris
If you’re planning a trip to Rennes, in the heart of France’s Brittany region, make sure your stay includes a Saturday.
That’s when the weekly farmers market, the Marché de Lices, takes over the city’s central square. From early morning to midday, it’s packed with locals buying products straight from the farm and the sea — depending on the season, things like fresh scallops, white asparagus and fat strawberries.
All that bounty is sure to kick your appetite into high gear, so do what the residents of Rennes do — stop at one of the food trucks at the back of the market and snack on the local specialty, a galette-saucisse (a buckwheat crepe wrapped around a grilled sausage). Wash it down with a glass of locally made cider for a truly Breton experience.
Rennes, just two hours by highspeed train from Paris, is a walkable city of about 210,000 that feels both contemporary and ancient. Take the market — it’s been running in the same spot for almost 500 years on what, in medieval times, was prime turf for jousting.
Rennes is perhaps best known for its distinctive half-timbered houses, dating from the 15th to the 18th century. Cross-hatched with wood beams and often painted in distinctive colours, many appear to be leaning on one another as if they were weary from centuries of people treading their staircases and floorboards.
Today, cafés and shops are on the ground floor of many of those houses in the city centre. Some of the apartments above them, once home to knights and noblemen, are now occupied by a lucky few of the 60,000-plus students who study in one of the city’s several colleges and universities.
Rennes has a complicated history. It was the capital of the independent Duchy of Brittany until 1491, when the duchy became a part of France. Its continued importance within the region was recognized in the mid1500s when King Henry II (king of England and France at the time) established a provincial court there.
A dedicated courthouse, known as the Parlement of Brittany, was built in the mid-1600s and continued to be decorated until the early 1700s. You can take a tour of the Parlement, still a working courthouse, and see why it took so long — the ornately carved and painted detail in several of the rooms rivals the decorations at Versailles.
The courthouse was also the stage for a couple of the most sensational trials in French history — the controversial court-martial of French officer Alfred Dreyfus that was steeped in anti-Semitism, and the trial of Hélène Jégado, a servant turned serial killer believed to have murdered as many as 36 people.
Her weapon of choice was thought to be arsenic, which she sometimes baked into a cake. A local baker and chocolate maker, Durand, now makes a cake that bears her name — without the arsenic. They also make another Breton specialty, kouignamann, a decadent, buttery concoction with a caramelized crust that is hard to resist.
From Rennes, it’s only an hour drive to Mont Saint-Michel, an island monastery and abbey in the 8th century that is now one of France’s top tourist attractions. Round out your day trip with a stop in Saint-Malo, a charming walled city with a Canadian connection. Jacques Cartier, who explored the St. Lawrence and claimed Canada for France in the mid-1500s, was born in the town and is buried there.