Le Mans

The whole world knows the name. Almost nobody knows the city. Le Mans is one of the great hidden histories of France, and this is the book that finally tells it.

Every June, hundreds of thousands of people descend on Le Mans for the most famous motor race in the world. They park in fields, watch cars blur past at night, and leave without ever climbing the steps from the river. Behind them, on a limestone promontory above the Sarthe, sits one of the finest medieval cities in Europe: two thousand years of continuous history, Roman walls unique in the empire, a cathedral that contains the whole story of French Gothic architecture, and a dynastic connection to England that shaped the English-speaking world. Almost none of it appears in any English-language book.

Helen and David Oldham, two British writers living in the Loire Valley, discovered this city by accident, arriving to visit a local office and stumbling upon a perfectly preserved medieval quarter they had never known existed, despite living an hour and a half away. That moment of astonishment became this book.

What you will find in Le Mans: The City Behind the Circuit

The Plantagenet dynasty was born here in 1133. Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine's great husband and Thomas Becket's great enemy, was a Le Mans man. He watched his own birthplace burn from the Roman walls in 1189, cursing God, before fleeing south to die. His son Richard the Lionheart was conceived here. Richard's widow, Queen Berengaria, governed the city for thirty years and lies buried in its abbey still, the only English queen interred on French soil, her name almost entirely unknown to the nation whose crown she bore.

The Roman walls that Henry defended remain standing. They are faced with polychrome chevrons and diamonds in red brick, white limestone, and dark schist, a decorative scheme found nowhere else in the Roman Empire. They glow above an almost always empty riverside path, one of the finest and least-visited sights in France.

The cathedral of Saint-Julien holds a Romanesque nave of cave-like weight and authority, and, sixty metres further on, a Gothic choir of such luminous height that walking between them feels like passing from one century to another, from one theology to another, in a single stride.

The bell-founding Bollée family, Le Mans citizens, built the world's first true passenger-carrying steam carriage in 1873 and drove it to Paris, collecting seventy-five speeding fines on the way. Their workshops later hosted Wilbur Wright, who made the first aeroplane flights in Europe in the fields outside the city in 1908. The 24 Hours of Le Mans was born from this same culture of mechanical audacity.

A parricide case in 1933 brought Le Mans briefly and notoriously to the world's attention, inspiring works by Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jacques Lacan. The city shrugs it off, as it shrugs off most of what the world thinks it knows.

Each chapter in this book combines narrative history with a practical walking route, placing the reader on the actual streets, courts, and riverbanks where these events unfolded. The authors have walked every route themselves, repeatedly, and write with the confidence of people who know a place rather than merely researching it.

This is the first English-language book about Le Mans the city. It is a work of popular history, a walking companion, and an extended argument that one of the most famous place-names in the world is also one of the most thoroughly unexamined.

For readers who love hidden histories of France, the Plantagenet world, medieval architecture, or simply the pleasure of knowing something that almost nobody else knows, Le Mans: The City Behind the Circuit is the essential companion, whether you are planning a visit, attending the race, or travelling from the comfort of your own armchair.