TOULOUSE, with its beautiful
historic centre, is one of the most
vibrant and metropolitan provincial
cities in France. This is a
transformation that has come about
since the war, under the guidance of
the French state, which has poured
in money to make Toulouse the
think-tank of high-tech industry and
a sort of premier trans-national
Euroville. Always an
aviation
centre - St-Exupéry and Mermoz flew
out from here on their pioneering
airmail flights over Africa and the
Atlantic in the 1920s - Toulouse is
now home to Aérospatiale, the
driving force behind Concorde,
Airbus and the Ariane space rocket.
The national Space Centre, the
European shuttle programme, the
leading aeronautical schools, the
frontier-pushing electronics
industry... it's all happening in
Toulouse, whose 110,000 students
make it second only to Paris as a
university
centre. But it's not to the
burgeoning suburbs of factories,
labs, shopping and housing complexes
that all these people go for their
entertainment, but to the old
Ville
Rose - pink not only in its
brickwork, but also in its politics.
This is not the first flush of
pre-eminence for Toulouse. From the
tenth to the thirteenth centuries
the counts of Toulouse controlled
much of southern France. They
maintained the most resplendent
court in the land, renowned
especially for its troubadours, the
poets of courtly love, whose work
influenced Petrarch, Dante and
Chaucer and thus the whole course of
European poetry. Until, that is, the
arrival of the hungry northern
French nobles of the Albigensian
Crusade; in 1271 Toulouse became
crown property.
The City
of Toulouse
The part of the city you'll want to
see forms a rough hexagon clamped
round a bend in the wide, brown
River Garonne and contained in a
ring of inner nineteenth-century
boulevards - Strasbourg, Carnot,
Jules-Guesde and others. An outer
ring enclosing these...
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