The installation is part of a museum called the Mémorial de
l’Abolition de l’Esclavage (memorial.nantes.fr). In a country
that is often accused of covering up its historical blemishes,
the experience felt refreshingly enlightened.
Near the museum, the four of us jumped aboard
a shuttle boat that took us across the estuary to the
fishing village of Trentemoult. We explored narrow alleys
of brightly coloured houses, with their neat gardens of
tropical flora carried back from distant sea voyages (one
neighbourhood is nicknamed ‘Little California’ for its palm
trees). We lunched on the terrace of a delightful seafood
restaurant called La Civelle (entrées `1,400–`3,150; lacivelle.
com), while all around us crowds of Nantais soaked up the
sun on lounge chairs. It all felt much farther away than the
seven minutes it took to get there.
Down a narrow lane from the restaurant, we happened
upon a derelict factory with an incongruous 25-foot
pendulum swinging from its tower. This is Roman Signer’s
Le Pendule, one of 30 giant art installations strung out along
65 kilometres of the estuary, from Nantes to St Nazaire. The
guiding spirit is playfulness. In Nantes itself, you can see
model Laetitia Casta’s wavy-haired image staring up from
the bottom of a canal, like drowned Ophelia, in a
piece by the artist Ange Leccia called Nymphéa. And out by
St Nazaire, Huang Yong Ping’s Sea Serpent, an aluminum
skeleton of a 427-foot snake, rises from the shallows.
These are the kinds of cultural fireworks on which
Nantes has bet big in the past 10 years. In 2012, the city
created a kind of superagency called Voyage à Nantes to
manage its comeback. It shrewdly chose Jean Blaise,
an outside-the-box artistic director and urban planner,
to run it. “Nantes no longer had an identity, and we had to
be audacious to change its image,” he told me. “I don’t want
to sound immodest, but I have to say, I’m pretty satisfied.”SUNDAY
The Marché de Talensac (marche-
talensac.fr), where Nantes displays its
edible bounty on Sunday mornings,
happened to be a five-minute walk
from our hotel. I’m a devotee of my
Paris marché on the Boulevard Raspail,
but I have never seen shellfish like this:
baskets of sea snails, langoustines,
scallops, and tiny pink shrimp still
wriggling. And oysters—I counted
eight different kinds at one stand.
Before heading home, we crossed
over a branch of the Loire to the Île
de Nantes, the island that once housed
the city’s shipyards. While new oice
cubes and apartment buildings are
clustered around the Palais de Justice,
perhaps the best symbol of the
rebranded city is the current
occupant of the island’s massive
shipbuilding hangars.
As its name implies, the theatre
company Les Machines de l’Île
(lesmachines-nantes.fr) makes
machines—like a 40-foot-high
elephant that can plod along at
around one mile per hour, carrying
50 passengers while blowing majestic
jets of steam. In the workshop, you
can interact with this menagerie, find
out how it was made, and ride on a
three-storey carousel of sea creatures
inspired by Les Machines’ kooky local
avatar, Jules Verne. Think steampunk
meets Leonardo da Vinci. This mix
of technology and fantasy represents
the way Nantes likes to think of itself
now. We found it utterly beguiling.From top:
Trentemoult,
a fishing village
across the river from
Nantes; part of the
mechanical
menagerie at the
workshop of theatre
company Les
Machines de l’Île.
WEEKEND