Roanne

Roanne
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roanne".

Coordinates: 46°02′12″N 4°04′08″E / 46.0366666667, 4.06888888889

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Commune of Roanne

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Coat of arms

Location

Administration

Loire (sous-préfecture)

Arrondissement

Roanne

Canton

Chief town of 2 cantons

Intercommunality

Communauté d'agglomération le Grand Roanne

Mayor

Laure Déroche (PS)

Statistics

Elevation

257 m–304 m
(avg. 279 m)

Land area^¹

16.12 km²

Population^²
(1999)

38,896

- Density

2,412.9/km² (1999)

Miscellaneous

INSEE/Postal code

42187/ 42300

¹ French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries.

² Population sans doubles comptes: residents of multiple communes (e.g. students and military personnel) only counted once.

Roanne (Rouana in Arpitan) is a town and commune in central France in the Loire département, about 90 km north-west of Lyon. It lies along the Loire River.

1 Economy
2 History
3 Miscellaneous
- 3.1 Births
- 3.2 Twin towns
4 References
5 External links

Economy

Roanne is known for gastronomy, textiles, agriculture and manufacturing tanks.

History

The toponomy is Gaulish, Rod-Onna ("flowing water") which became Rodumna, then Rouhanne and Roanne. The town was sited at a strategic point, the head of navigation on the Loire, below its narrow gorges. As a trans-shipping point, its importance declined with the collapse of long-distance trade after the fourth century. In the twelfth century, the site passed to the comte du Forez, under whose care it began to recover. An overland route led to Lyon and the Rhône, thus Roanne developed as a transshipping point between Paris and the Mediterranean in early modern France, when waterways were at least as important as roads.

The renewed navigation on the Loire encouraged the export of local products— wines, including casks of Beaujolais that had been shipped overland, ceramics, textiles—and after 1785, coal from Saint-Étienne, which had formerly been onloaded upstream at Saint-Rambert, since river improvements at the beginning of the century. Sturdy goods were rafted downriver on sapinières that were dismantled after use. Half the population of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Roanne depended in some way on this transportation economy: merchants and factors, carriers, carpenters and coopers, master-boatmen and their journeymen and oarsmen, and waterfront laborers (Braudel p360f).

Roanne was one of the first towns served by railroad, with the opening, 15 March 1833, of the terminal on the right bank at the port of Varennes of the third line, from Andrézieux. Following came the opening of the canal from Roanne to Digoin (1838), which placed the city in the forefront of the French Industrial Revolution.

In 1917 the arsenal was established at Roanne, and from 1940 a new industry developed, producing rayon and other new fibers. In the post-industrial phase that set in during the 1970s, Roanne struggled to find new industry and attract tourism.