Rennes, France: Brittany’s Historic Capital

Rennes, France, is a city of two faces. Walk one way from the cathedral and you are among leaning half-timbered houses whose upper floors almost touch above the lane; walk the other and you reach broad stone squares laid out by a royal architect after a great fire in 1720. Between them stands the Parliament of Brittany, for more than two centuries the seat of the province’s highest court, gutted by fire in 1994 and painstakingly restored. Rennes is the capital of the Brittany region and the place where the Breton story, so different from the Norman one, begins to come into focus. This guide covers the city’s history, the sights worth seeking out and the practical side of a visit. On our Normandy, Brittany and Channel Islands small group tour, the group reaches Rennes on the evening of Day 6, after Mont-St-Michel, and explores the historic centre with a guide on the morning of Day 7.

Rennes, France: where Normandy gives way to Brittany

The drive from Mont-St-Michel to Rennes crosses one of the oldest frontiers in France. Mont-St-Michel, the abbey island on its tidal bay, belongs to Normandy, although only just. The final stretch of the River Couesnon is traditionally the boundary between the old duchies of Normandy and Brittany, and local tradition holds that when its wandering channel settled to the south of the rock, the Mont was left on the Norman side. Bretons still quote the old rhyme that the Couesnon, in its madness, put the Mont in Normandy. Today the regional boundary lies a few kilometres west of the Mont, and Rennes, to the south, is the first Breton city on the route.

Brittany has its own history, and it was an independent duchy for centuries. The Celtic Redones gave the city its name and made it their capital. Under Rome it became a hub of communications for the province of Armorica, and in the Middle Ages it competed with Nantes to be the seat of the dukes of Brittany. The duchy’s independence began to end when the young Duchess Anne of Brittany married Charles VIII of France in 1491, and the formal union with the French crown followed in 1532. Even then Brittany kept a measure of self-government, and much of what you see in Rennes grew out of that arrangement.

Rennes is also in Upper Brittany, the eastern half of the peninsula, where the traditional speech was not Breton but Gallo, a Romance language. The old line between Breton and Gallo ran roughly from Saint-Brieuc in the north to Vannes in the south, so the Celtic language that many visitors associate with Brittany belongs more to the west. Our guide to travelling in Brittany follows that story across the whole region.

The best survivor of ducal Rennes is the Portes Mordelaises, a fifteenth-century gate with two towers that was once the main entrance to the walled city. According to Destination Rennes, the city’s tourist office, the dukes of Brittany passed through it on their way to swear their oath and be crowned in the cathedral nearby. The Cathedral of Saint-Pierre itself is largely later: it was completed in 1844, and its two west towers belong to an earlier church, and its richly gilded interior was decorated in the second half of the nineteenth century. Look in its treasury for a carved altarpiece from the late Middle Ages.

The Parliament of Brittany

After the union with France, Brittany was given its own sovereign court. Henri II created a Parliament of Brittany in the 1550s, and within about a decade it had settled in Rennes. This was not a legislature in the modern sense but the province’s supreme court of justice, which also registered royal edicts for the province, sometimes reluctantly. The tourist office dates the creation to 1554, while other accounts give 1553, a reminder that the court’s origins were gradual.

The palace that housed it was designed by Salomon de Brosse, the architect of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. Building began in the 1610s and was completed in 1655. Outside it is restrained and classical: two storeys of stone under a steep slate roof. Inside, the grandest room is the Grand’Chambre, where the court sat in full session. Its coffered ceiling, set with canvases painted by Noël Coypel to an overall scheme by Charles Errard, painter to Louis XIV, is the jewel of the building. The Parliament lost its political powers in the Revolution, and since 1804 the building has been home to the Court of Appeal, so it is still a working courthouse.

The fire of 1994 and the restoration

The building survived the great fire of 1720 but not the events of February 1994. According to Destination Rennes, a protest by fishermen in the city, timed for a visit by the Prime Minister, turned into a riot in front of the Parliament, and distress flares reached the roof. Around 12:40 am on the night of 4 to 5 February, the roof caught fire. Much of the timber roof structure burned and collapsed, and the prosecutor’s offices, the library and thousands of case files were lost.

The Grand’Chambre survived, protected by a layer of fire-resistant brick beneath the roof timbers, and furniture, paintings, tapestries and clocks were carried out of the building. Ten tapestries saved from the flames were later lost in a fire at a restoration workshop near Paris in 1997; their original designs survive in the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. Restoration took the best part of a decade. Court hearings and guided public visits resumed in 1999 while work continued, and a trace of the fire was deliberately kept as a reminder.

The fire of 1720 and royal Rennes

The fire that shaped the city most broke out on the night of 22 to 23 December 1720, probably in a shop in the centre, although the exact origin is uncertain. It burned for about a week until rain helped bring it under control. Counts vary, but Destination Rennes puts the losses at between 850 and 945 houses, nearly half the upper town north of the Vilaine, and some 8,000 people were left homeless.

Rebuilding came from Paris. After a first plan by the military engineer Isaac Robelin stalled, the king’s architect Jacques Gabriel took over and replaced the burned quarter with straight streets of stone houses and two linked squares. The Place du Parlement was laid out as a royal square in front of the palace, modelled on the Place Vendôme in Paris. Beside it, the Hôtel de Ville was begun in 1734 and completed in 1762, its curved wings and domed clock tower recalling the old belfry lost in the fire. Opposite stands the opera house of 1836, designed by Charles Millardet with curves that echo the town hall. Royal edicts after 1720 restricted building in timber, so the two halves of the centre still look quite different.

Half-timbered Rennes

The streets the fire spared hold the image most visitors take away. Destination Rennes counts about 370 half-timbered houses in the city, more than in any other Breton town it lists; Vannes, with its ramparts on the Gulf of Morbihan, has around 170 and Dinan, above the Rance, around 115. Most of those standing date from the seventeenth century, but the oldest, with deep overhangs, go back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Look for them on rue du Chapitre, rue Saint-Georges and rue des Dames near the cathedral.

The overhangs had a purpose: projecting the upper floors stiffened the structure, added space and sheltered customers at the shop fronts below. Rennes builders used irregular timbers rather than neat posts, which gives the façades their slightly unruly look, and the panels were painted with natural pigments, usually reds and yellows. The historic centre was protected from 1966, and much of the colour you see today is the result of later restoration.

Gardens, markets and museums

East of the centre, the Parc du Thabor covers nearly ten hectares on the site of the gardens of the old abbey of Saint-Melaine. It was redesigned in the nineteenth century by the landscape designer Denis Bühler and opened to the public in 1868. It combines a formal French garden, a landscape garden and a botanical garden, with an orangery and a bandstand of 1875.

On Saturday mornings the Place des Lices, a square whose name is recorded from 1337 and which has hosted a market since 1622, fills with one of the largest markets in France. The Museum of Fine Arts, whose collection dates from 1794, holds Georges de La Tour’s The Newborn and Rubens’s Tiger Hunt. Across the river, Les Champs Libres, designed by Christian de Portzamparc, houses the Musée de Bretagne, the best place to understand the region as a whole.

Is Rennes worth visiting?

Yes: Rennes is the best introduction to Brittany’s history as a separate duchy and province. In a compact centre you can see a fifteenth-century ducal gate, some of the oldest half-timbered houses in Brittany, a seventeenth-century parliament and an eighteenth-century royal square. It is a lively university city and regional capital rather than a resort, and its sights make sense of much of what follows in Brittany.

How much time do you need in Rennes?

A half-day walk with a guide covers the main historic sights of the centre, and a full day allows time for a museum or the Thabor gardens as well. The core sights, from the Portes Mordelaises and the cathedral to the Parliament and the town hall, are all within a short walk of each other. Allow longer if you want to join a guided visit inside the Parliament, which at the time of writing lasts about 90 minutes.

Can you go inside the Parliament of Brittany?

Yes, but at the time of writing only on a guided visit booked in advance through Destination Rennes, the city’s tourist office. Because the building is a working Court of Appeal, visits are subject to the court’s needs, some rooms can be closed without notice, and bladed items such as pocket knives are banned. The standard visit is given in French, so check the tourist office website for current times, languages and accessibility before you go. The exterior and the Place du Parlement can be seen at any time.

How much walking is involved in Rennes?

A moderate amount, almost all of it on foot through pedestrian streets. The historic centre is compact and the distances between sights are short, but the old lanes are cobbled and uneven, and you will be standing for much of a guided walk. The tourist office notes a free electric shuttle in the historic centre for people who find walking difficult. Comfortable shoes with a good grip are wise, since Breton weather can turn the cobbles slippery.

Rennes on Days 6 and 7 of the tour

Day 6 of the tour leaves Bayeux and explores Mont-St-Michel on the way into Brittany, walking up through the island’s winding streets to the monastery at the top. The group then continues to Rennes, arriving in time for dinner at the hotel. On the morning of Day 7, a guided tour of Rennes takes in the city’s main historic sights before the group travels on to Vannes for free time in the afternoon, then to Fouesnant on the Atlantic coast for dinner at the hotel. Later in the journey, the route returns north through Dinan and Saint-Malo before the ferry to Jersey; our Normandy, Brittany and Channel Islands itinerary sets out how the whole route fits together.

The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate: three to five hours of activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. An Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group throughout.

Rennes is where the journey stops being Norman and starts being Breton, and the city explains why that difference matters: a duchy that kept its own court, a parliament that survived one great fire and was nearly lost in another, and a skyline of timber and stone. On the Anglo French Tour: Normandy, Brittany and the Channel Islands, a small group of up to 16 travellers explores it with a guide and an Odyssey Program Leader before heading on to Vannes and the Atlantic coast.