A guide from Concarneau’s own heritage service walks the Ville-Close, the historic heart of the town. The route traces its maritime history, then its civil and its military past, so that the medieval walled town is read closely instead of simply crossed. The service that leads it carries the Ville d’Art et Histoire label, and the Maison du Patrimoine takes the bookings. The visit takes thirty-five people at most.
Tag: military-history
Pouldu blockhouse, an Atlantic Wall visit
The Clohars-Carnoët Memory and Heritage Association opens a 775 m3 casemate of the Atlantic Wall above Grands Sables beach at Le Pouldu. Inside the restored artillery hall, the troop shelter and the rear firing post, panels and period weapons and uniforms set out the Breton Resistance, the fighting of the Lorient Pocket and the Laïta Front. A guide leads the round, or it can be walked alone. A booklet on the blockhouse is on sale at the door.
Montluçon’s Wartime History Guided Tour
Montluçon Tourisme leads a guided walk about the town’s experience of the Second World War. The route follows traces of the local Resistance and introduces the historical context of the wartime town. Advance booking is required and the visit runs with a minimum of four participants; children under five can attend free of charge.
The Resistance in Vichy: Guided Tour
The guided tour La Résistance à Vichy examines who joined the Resistance and what motivated them. It considers how the internal Resistance organised and the part it played in liberation and reconstruction. The discussion also addresses its contribution to the Allied victory and the debates that continue to surround this history.
Guided Visits at Mémorial de la Résistance en Vercors
A guide leads visitors through the first part of the Mémorial de la Résistance en Vercors. Weather permitting, an outdoor introduction connects the Resistance story with the distinctive mountain landscape. The tour also considers the building’s architecture before continuing inside. Visitors explore the final section independently with headphones and an audio guide.
Lyon dans la Résistance
Lyon dans la Résistance traces the clandestine networks of the Presqu’île and Croix-Rousse. Guides explain Jean Moulin’s role and the work of underground newspapers and printers, alongside resistance within political, military and religious circles. Accounts of rationing, curfews, anti-Jewish laws and roundups show the conditions in which Lyon’s inhabitants lived and resisted.
Sepmes: Village History and a Wartime Fire Engine
Sepmes’s monuments and former seigneuries provide the thread for a guided walk through the village’s history. The route places its buildings within the older pattern of local estates and authority. An accompanying display introduces a different chapter: an old fire engine that took part in the Normandy landings, linking the village programme with wartime memory.
La confrontation de la correspondance de Maurice Dupin par
Didier Dubant brings Maurice Dupin’s correspondence into dialogue with archaeological findings from the Camp de Boulogne in Pas-de-Calais. The surviving corpus comprises thirty-three letters, preserved at Paris City Hall and transcribed by INRAP researcher Frédéric Lemaire, that have never been published in full. Their military and personal testimony gains a material counterpart through the excavated camp. George Sand included parts of these letters in Histoire de ma vie, but shortened, rewrote and recomposed them for her autobiography. By comparing manuscript testimony, archaeology and Sand’s revisions, the conference reveals how family memory becomes literature. The letters themselves accompany the presentation, allowing audiences to examine the documents behind both the historical argument and Sand’s reconstruction of her father’s voice.
Exhibition in Dinard: German Coastal Defenses
Les défenses côtières allemandes de Dinard studies the bunkers and coastal defences built around Dinard during the Second World War. Organised with Histoire et Patrimoine du Pays de Dinard, the town and the Brittany region, the exhibition places wartime architecture inside a local landscape. Parc de Port Breton gives the subject a public setting where military history and seaside heritage can be read together.