Roanne

The museum in Roanne

Coat of arms

Roanne

Location within Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region

Roanne

Coordinates: 46°02′12″N 4°04′08″E / 46.0367°N 4.0689°ECoordinates: 46°02′12″N 4°04′08″E / 46.0367°N 4.0689°E

Country

Grand Roanne

Government

• Mayor (2014-2020)

Yves Nicolin (UMP)

Area¹

16.12 km² (6.22 sq mi)

Population (2012)²

45,105

• Density

2,800/km² (7,200/sq mi)

Time zone

CET (UTC+1)

• Summer (DST)

CEST (UTC+2)

INSEE/Postal code

42187 / 42300

Elevation

257–304 m (843–997 ft)
(avg. 279 m or 915 ft)

Website

www.roanne.fr

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

²Population without double counting: residents of multiple communes (e.g., students and military personnel) only counted once.

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

Roanne (French pronunciation: [ʁɔan] ; Rouana in Arpitan) is a commune in the Loire department in central France.

It is located 90 km (56 mi) northwest of Lyon on the Loire River. It has an important Museum, the , with many Egyptian artifacts.

Roanne is known for gastronomy (largely because of the famous Troisgros family), textiles, agriculture and manufacturing tanks.

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).

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Wikipedia