It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
Feel free to submit!
Banner of the Dauphin of France
Guy VIII, Count of Vienne, had a dolphin on his coat of arms and had been nicknamed le Dauphin. The title of Dauphin de Viennois descended in his family, the Princes of Ivetot, until 1349, when Humbert II sold his seigneurie, called the Dauphiné, to King Philippe VI on condition that the heir of France assume the title of le Dauphin. The wife of the Dauphin was known as la Dauphine.
The first French prince called le Dauphin was Charles V. The title was roughly equivalent to the English title Prince of Wales, the Portuguese title Duke of Braganza, or the Spanish title Prince of Asturias. The official style of a Dauphin of France, prior to 1461, was par la grâce de Dieu, dauphin de Viennois, comte de Valentinois et de Diois (“By the Grace of God, Dauphin of Viennois, Count of Valentinois and of Diois”). A Dauphin of France would unite the coat of arms of the Dauphiné, which featured Dolphins, with the French fleurs-de-lys, and might, where appropriate, further unite that with other arms (e.g. Francis, son of Francis I, was ruling Duke of Brittany, so united the arms of that province with the typical arms of a Dauphin of France;Francis II, while Dauphin, was also King of Scots by marriage to Mary I, and so added the arms of the Kingdom of Scotland to those of the Dauphin of France).
Originally, the Dauphin was personally responsible for the rule of the Dauphiné, which was legally part of the Holy Roman Empire, and which the Emperors, in giving the rule of the province to the French heirs, had stipulated must never be united with France. Because of this, the Dauphiné suffered from anarchy in the 14th and 15th centuries (since the Dauphins of France were frequently minors or concerned with other matters).
During his period as Dauphin, Louis, son of Charles VII, defied his father by remaining in the province longer than the King had permitted and by engaging in personal politics more beneficial to the Dauphiné than to France. For example, Louis married Charlotte of Savoy against his father’s wishes. Savoy was a traditional ally of the Dauphiné, and Louis wished to reaffirm that alliance to stamp out rebels and robbers in the province. Louis was driven out of the Dauphiné by Charles VII’s soldiers in 1456, leaving the region to fall back into disorder. After his succession as Louis XI of France in 1461, Louis united the Dauphiné with France, bringing it permanently under royal control.
Traité de blason.
Date d’édition : 1401-1500
Type : manuscrit
Langue : Français
A little moment of History.
- In few weeks, I’ll return to my beloved land, where I was born. Here is the beautiful heraldry of my city Besançon. Its ancient name is “Vesontio” and comes from the gallo-roman period. The coat of arms was attribued to the town by Charles Quint in 1537. It is made by an black eagle (former bicephalous) because my land was a part of the big Holy Roman/German Empire and not a part of French Kingdom. The two red columns symbolize the roman ruins of Vesontio. Its motto is “UTINAM” (plaise à Dieu/please to God)
- I like this strong and beautiful heraldry and I like the story behind it. I’ve been interested into my city history for a long time and would like, one day to make a short comic about it. Every City in France has a great and heavy past, not only Paris. ^3^/
I would be really interrested to see the heraldry of the city where you were born !
rebloging with my birth city Nantes :3 »
moto “Neptune favors the sailors” :D
Adding mine: Angoulême. This is the city where I live, not where I was born (I was born in Africa). The motto is: “Fortitudo mea civium fides” (Je tire ma force de la loyauté de mes citoyens) (My strength comes from the loyalty of my citizens). The old name of the city is “Engolesme”.
Cherbourg (now Cherbourg-Octeville)
The Cotentin Peninsula was the first territory conquered by the Vikings in their 9th century invasion. They developed Cherbourg as a port.
During the Seven Years’ War, the British briefly occupied the town after the Raid on Cherbourg in 1758. The British destroyed military buildings and warehouses before departing.
In the Napoleonic era, the harbour was fortified to prevent British naval incursions. Underwater obstructions were sunk at intervals across the harbour entrance, and progressively replaced with piles of masonried rubble. The works were begun in 1784 and were not concluded until 1850, long after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.
On 19 June 1864, a naval engagement between USS Kearsarge and CSS Alabama, as part of the American Civil War, took place off Cherbourg. The Alabama was hit and sank. In November 1984, the French Navy mine hunter Circé discovered a wreck under nearly 60 m (200 ft) of water off Cherbourg. The location of the wreck (WGS84) was 49°45’147N / 001°41’708W. Captain Max Guerout later confirmed the wreck to be of the Alabama.
On July 31, 1909, tsar Nicholas II and French president Armand Fallières met officially in Cherbourg to reinforce the Franco-Russian Alliance. Cherbourg was the first stop of RMS Titanic after it left Southampton, England.
During World War II, the Germans occupied the north of France and fortified the coastline against invasion. The Battle of Cherbourg, fought by the Allies in June 1944 against the Germans following the Normandy Invasion, ended with the Allies capturing the city on 30 June. The French celebrated their liberation from the German occupation.
Motto : I don’t know. I can’t find it. Probably doesn’t exist.
Thionville was settled as early as the time of the Merovingians. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was inhabited by the Germanic Alamanni. It was known in the German of that era as Theudonevilla or Totonisvilla. King Pippin had a royal palace constructed here.
The Synod of Thionville was held here beginning on February 2, 835. It reinstated Emperor Louis the Pious and reversed his former conviction on crimes — none of which he actually committed — and deposed the Archbishop of Rheims, Ebbo. The Synod was composed of 43 bishops. On February 28, 835, in Mainz, Ebbo admitted that Louis had not committed the crimes of which he had been indicted and for which he had been deposed as Holy Roman Emperor.
From the 10th century onward, the area was part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was in possession of the House of Luxembourg until 1462 and then, until 1477, of the Duke of Burgundy. From 1477 to 1643 it was Hapsburg territory.
Eskil, Archbishop of Lund, was imprisoned at Thionville (at the instigation of the Archbishop of Bremen?) upon his return from his 1153 pilgrimage to Rome.
The Siege of Thionville in June 1639 occurred as part of the Thirty Years’ War. In 1659 Diedenhofen was annexed by France. Fortifications were constructed under the direction of Sébastien de Vauban.
In 1792, Thionville was besieged by the Duke of Brunswick, who unsuccessfully sought to defeat the French Revolution and restore Louis XVI to the royal throne. The writer François-René de Chateaubriand was left for dead during Condé’s military émigré expedition against Thionville in 1792.
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the area of Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by the newly created German Empire in 1871 by the Treaty of Frankfurt and became a Reichsland. Thionville was renamed Diedenhofen and became a prosperous German city. Some large neo-Romanesque buildings typical of the German Empire were constructed in the city. The German Army decided to build a fortress line from Mulhouse to Luxembourg to protect the new Reichsland. The centerpiece of this line was the great Moselstellung, a fortress system protecting Metz and Thionville.
The fortifications around Thionville centered on three main forts: the Fort de Guentrange on the northwest side of Thionville, Fort de Koenigsmacker to the northeast, and the Fort d’Illange to the south. Each position was surrounded by several ditches, with shelters and observation cupolas. A large barbed wire belt defended by machine guns completed the defensive system.
Following the armistice with Germany ending the First World War, the French army entered Thionville in November 1918 and the city was returned to France by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
During the Second World War, the Lorraine was placed under a German civilian administration and was thus once again unofficially part of the German Reich. In 1944 US troops entered Thionville, which has belonged to France since then. In the winter of 1944-45 the Displaced Persons Camp No. 8 was established here. In the following years it was home to the thousands of former concentration camp prisoners and POWs.
After experiencing, along with all of France, an economic upswing during the postwar decades (trente glorieuses), the heavy industry of Thionville suffered setbacks beginning in the 1970s. The city and the entire region have faced hardships and structural unemployment since then.
Jean-Marie Demange, who had served as the town’s mayor for thirteen years, committed suicide in 2008 after killing his wife with two gunshots in the head.
Armorial de Revel (Charles VII and Marie of Anjou; the city of Clermont)
Around 1450 Charles I de Bourbon asked his herald of arms, Guillaume Revel to compose an armorial to list and describe the armories of the noble families of his principality. Each page was devoted to one fiefdom or family : along with the name of the fiefdom and the armories of the family was drawn the place were the family came from. It is the main originality of the document. By the exactitude and the precision of the drawing, even though it respects the convention of the time such as the oversize of the noble buildings, it is a unique document about civil, military and religious architecture at the end of the Middle Age, before their transformation during the Modern period.
The coat of arms of the city of Paris were first mentionned by Philippe Auguste. On the coat of arms, the represented vessel is the symbol of the powerful corporate body of the Marchands de l’eau, dating back to the Middle Ages. The city motto, “Fluctuat nec mergitur” (“She is tossed by the waves, but does not sink”) is equally a reference to this boat.
Tapisserie à fond d’ornements sur laquelle sont peintes des armoiries couronnées, et entourées des colliers des ordres, du Maréchal d’Aumont.
The Aumont family take its name from the Duchy of Aumont, a small commune in the department of the Somme. The Duché-Pairie d’Aumont was established in 1665 from the Marquisat of Isles-en-Champagne, the title being granted to Antoine d’Aumont de Rochebaron (1601–1669). For a long time, the ducs d’Aumont had the title of first Gentlemanof the Chamber of the King (gentilhomme de la chambre du Roi).
Blason de la Compagnie française des Indes / © Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Ville de Lorient.
The French East India Company (French: La Compagnie française des Indes orientales or Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales) was a commercial enterprise, founded in 1664 to compete with the British and Dutch East India companies in colonial India.
Planned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, it was chartered by King Louis XIV for the purpose of trading in the Eastern Hemisphere. It resulted from the fusion of three earlier companies, the 1660 Compagnie de Chine, the Compagnie d’Orient and Compagnie de Madagascar. The first Director General for the Company was De Faye, who was adjoined two Directors belonging to the two most successful trading organizations at that time: François Caron, who had spent 30 years working for the Dutch East India Company, including more than 20 years in Japan, and Marcara Avanchintz, a powerful Armenian trader from Ispahan, Persia.
