TOURS

city, capital of Indre-et-Loire dpartement, Centre region, west central France, on the Loire River. It is the chief tourist centre for the Loire Valley and its historic chteaus. Tours offers sharp contrasts in buildings and architectural styles. Its town hall, finished in 1904, is typical of its time, pompous and slightly overpowering. Away from the central square the cathedral of Saint-Gatien sums up four centuries of French religious architecture: the choir is of the 13th century; the nave marks a transition between Flamboyant Gothic and Renaissance styles; the facade was built from 1426 to 1547. Another contrast is found south of the Loire River and west of the rue Nationale, in the town's old section where cobbled streets and ancient houses are preserved. The Muse des Beaux-Arts in the former 17th18th-century archiepiscopal palace has a rich collection of paintings. A university was established at Tours in 1952 and was linked with the educational divisions of Orlans and Poitiers. To the south of the Cher River, a virtual new town has been constructed to house new residents of the city. Tours entered the 1980s in a strong stage of growth, with the decentralization from the Paris region of machinery assembly, chemical products, and pharmaceutical industries. It is also an important road and railroad junction. Early records show that a Gallic settlement, and the capital of the Turons (a pre-Roman tribal group), was on the right bank of the Loire. The Romans moved it across the river. Originally it was called Caesarodunum but, from the 5th century, Civitas Turonorum. The settlement was evangelized in the mid-3rd century by the early Christian ecclesiastic and missionary Gatien, who founded the bishopric, but the Christian community remained small until the second half of the 4th century, when St. Martin, the great apostle of the Gauls, was persuaded to become their bishop. A magnificent basilica was raised above his tomb in the late 5th century, and for hundreds of years it attracted pilgrims to Tours. When the city became part of the Frankish dominion under Clovis I (reigned 481/482511), he accepted for himself and his successors the title of canon of St. Martin. At the end of the 6th century the bishopric was held by St. Gregory of Tours, author of the Historia Francorum (an important contemporary chronicle), who had an abbey built around St. Martin's basilica. The abbey grew immensely rich. The emperor Charlemagne (reigned 768814) reestablished discipline in the monastery and developed the intellectual life under the English scholar Alcuin. After pillaging incursions by the Normans, a protective wall was built around the St. Martin's district, which 400 years later was united to the borough of Tours when a common wall was built around both Tours and Chteauneuf (originally St. Martin's district and known as Martinopolis). Tours continued to maintain its prosperity in the Middle Ages in spite of involvement in the strife between the French and English kings in the 12th century and later during the Hundred Years' War (13371453). In 1462 Louis XI endowed the town with an elected civic council and established a silk industry that thrived for more than a century. The emigration of Huguenots (a Protestant group) after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) resulted in industrial decline. During the French Revolution of the late 18th century, the town was a base for operations against the royalist Vende rebels. In World War II the French government had its headquarters there from June 13 to 15, 1940, and British statesman Winston Churchill met French premier Paul Reynaud there in a vain attempt to dissuade France from negotiating an armistice with Germany. In the 1944 bombardments that preceded the German retreat and the liberation, one-fourth of the town was destroyed. At a point somewhere between Tours and Poitiers is the site of the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers); there, in 732, Charles Martel, master of the Frankish kingdom, defeated Moorish invaders from Spain in a battle that proved to be the turning point in the advance of Islm into western Europe. The battle is believed by some historians to have been fought at Moussais-la-Bataille, 6 mi (10 km) southwest of Chtellerault. Pop. (1982) 131,265.