Saint-Quentin (French: [sɛ̃ kɑ̃tɛ̃] ; Picard: Saint-Kintin; older Dutch: Sint-Kwintens [sɪnt ˈkʋɪntəns]) is a city in the Aisne department, Hauts-de-France, northern France. It has been identified as the Augusta Veromanduorum of antiquity. It is named after Saint Quentin of Amiens, who is said to have been martyred there in the 3rd century.
Contents
Administration
Saint-Quentin is a sub-prefecture of Aisne. Although Saint-Quentin is by far the largest city in Aisne, the capital is the third-largest city, Laon.
Mayors
The mayor of Saint-Quentin is Frédérique Macarez, a member of the centre-right LR Party.
History
The city was founded by the Romans, in the Augustean period, to replace the oppidum of Vermand (11 km away) as the capital of Viromandui (Celtic Belgian people who occupied the region). It received the name "Augusta Viromanduorum", Augusta of the Viromandui, in honor of the emperor Augustus. The site is that of a ford across the River Somme. During the late Roman period, it is possible that the civitas capital was transferred back to Vermand (whose name comes from Veromandis); almost nothing relating to the fourth century has been found in Saint-Quentin.
During the early Middle Ages, a major monastery, now the Basilica of Saint-Quentin, developed, based on pilgrimage to the tomb of Quentin, a Roman Christian who came to evangelize the region and was martyred in Augusta, giving rise to a new town which was named after him.
From the 9th century, Saint-Quentin was the capital of Vermandois County. From the 10th century, the counts of Vermandois (descendants of the Carolingian, then Capetian families) were very powerful. The city grew rapidly: the "bourgeois" organized themselves and obtained, in the second half of the 12th century (a very early date), a municipal charter, which guaranteed their commune a large degree of autonomy.
At the beginning of the 13th century, Saint-Quentin entered the royal domain. At that time, it was a thriving city, based on its wool textile industry (city "drapante"). It was also a centre of commerce boosted by its position on the border of the kingdom of France, between the Champagne fairs and the cities of Flanders (wine exportation, etc.): it had an important annual fair. It also benefited from its location in the heart of a rich agricultural region (trade of grain and "guède" (woad), a high-value blue dye).
From the 14th century, Saint-Quentin suffered from this strategic position: it endured the French-English wars (Hundred Years' War). In the 15th century, the city was disputed between the king of France and the dukes of Burgundy (it is one of the "cities of the Somme"). Ravaged by the plague on several occasions, its population decreased, while its economy was in crisis: its fair was increasingly irrelevant, and agricultural production diminished. The declining textile industry turned to the production of linen canvas. Meanwhile, the city faced major expenses to maintain its fortifications and armed troops.
Culture
Monuments
Basilica of Saint-Quentin, built in the 12th–15th century. Heavily damaged in World War I, the vaults, windows and roofs have been restored.
Hôtel de Ville (town hall), built between 1331 and 1509 in a gothic style. L'hôtel de ville of Saint-Quentin is famous for its peal of 37 bells. It was modified in the 19th century and heavily restored in 1926 in Art Déco style.
The municipal theatre Jean-Vilar, built in 1844.
The city has several beguinages, dating from the middle ages.
The Fervaques Palace: built between 1897 and 1911, it is the home of the High Court.
The Porte des Canonniers, a 17th-century city gate
Museums
Butterflies' Museum which has a collection of more than 600,000 insects, displaying 20,000 of them
Antoine Lecuyer Museum which owns the largest collection of Maurice Quentin de La Tour's pastels
Academic Society, archaeologic museum Société Académique de Saint-Quentin
Transport
The Gare de Saint-Quentin is the railway station, offering connections to Paris, Reims, Amiens, Lille and several regional destinations. The A26 motorway connects Saint-Quentin with Reims and Calais, the A29 with Amiens.
Personalities
Viviane Adjutor, basketball player
Alexandre Avez (1858–1896), politician
François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797), known as Gracchus Babeuf, political agitator and journalist of the revolutionary period
Quentin-Claude Bendier (died 1677), scholar and bibliophile
Anthony Benezet, American abolitionist
Xavier Bertrand (born 1965), former Minister of Labour, Social Relations, Family and Solidarity in François Fillon's second government, conservative
Charles de Bouelles (1479–1567), philosopher, mathematician and linguist
Édouard Lucien Briquet (1854–1905) (engineer, left Paris under siege, going to work on the construction of the Trans-Saharan Railroad, in the 1870s. He moved to Brazil in 1883, working on several railroads in the interior of the country.
William Cliff, inventor of machine-woven tulle
Félix Davin (1807–1836), poet and journalist
Marc Delmas (1885–1931), Expressionist composer and biographer
Dudo of Saint-Quentin (born c.965), historian
Antoine Francisque (c.1570–1605), lutenist and composer
Jules Gallay (1822–1897), lawyer and music historian
Rudy Gobert (born 1992), professional basketball player for the Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA; 4x Defensive Player of the Year
Artists
Pierre Berton (16th century), known as "Pierre de Saint-Quentin", stonecutter
Mathieu (de) Bléville, born in Saint-Quentin at the beginning of the 16th century, painter on glass
Ulysse Butin (1838–1883), painter
John Cross, (1819–1861), English painter who studied at the Saint-Quentin School of Design
Benoît Delépine (1958–), scriptwriter, actor
Michel Dorigny (1617–1665), painter and printmaker, professor at the Painting Academy of Paris
Delphine Gleize (1973–), film director
Paul Guiramand, (1926–2007), painter and winner of the grand prix de Rome in 1953
Édouard Hippolyte Margottet (1848–1887), painter
Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788), pastellist, official portrait painter to Louis XV, benefactor of the city (founder of the Maurice Quentin de La Tour School of Design)
Arthur Midy (1887–1944), painter
Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966), leader of Purism, an avant-garde movement of the 1920s.
Jean-Christophe Paré, (1957–) dancer and teacher
Julie-Marie Parmentier (1981–), actress
Maurice Pillard dit Verneuil, (1869–1942), Art Nouveau illustrator
French sartorial heritage
The city was a pivotal centre of mulquinerie.
Incidents
On 30 March 2013 five children between the ages of two and ten, were killed in a house fire in the city.
Their parents had recently separated and their father was hosting the children at his new home for the first time for the weekend, as they had been spending most of their time with their mother. At 10:30pm local time on Saturday 30 March the fire started via an unknown cause. The children's father, alongside neighbours, made desperate attempts to save the children, but by the time the emergency services arrived, it was too late. The building was considered "too dangerous to enter" and the bodies of the five children were discovered once the fire was extinguished.
The children's father was seriously burned in a failed attempt to save his children's lives and jumped through a window to safety. He was hospitalised and wasn't informed until later on Sunday that his children had died. [1][2]
Twin towns and sister cities
Saint-Quentin is twinned with:
Kaiserslautern, Germany
Rotherham, Yorkshire, England
San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain
Tongzhou (Beijing), China