This beautiful little palace was the favorite residence of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, after Louis XVI. came to the throne of France. It is now a museum of the personal relics of this beautiful and ill-fated Queen.
Barbizon (Bar-bee-song´), is close to the Forest of Fontainebleau. It is a great artists’ resort, and was the home and death-place of Millet. Corot, Diaz, Daubigny, and Rousseau were other members of the “Barbizon School” of painters.
Chief Industrial Centers.—Textile manufactures are the most important of the mechanical industries of France.
Lyons, the third city of France, at the junction of the Saône with the Rhone, is the center of the silk-growing region and the metropolis of the silk manufactures, in which the country stands unrivalled. St. Etienne (146,000), southwest of Lyons, comes second to it in this manufacture, after which come Nimes, near the delta of the Rhone, Tours, on the Loire, and Paris. Inland trade and manufactures in the south are most active at ancient Toulouse, on the Garonne, and at Montpellier, near the Rhone delta.
Woolen, linen, and cotton manufactures are almost entirely confined to the northern region. Foremost among these manufacturing towns of the north stands Lille, with its neighbor towns of Roubaix and Tourcoing, still nearer the Belgian manufacturing region; and Cambrai, Douai, Valenciennes, and St. Quentin, southeast of it. Rouen, on the Seine in Normandy, and Amiens, on the Sommer, between Rouen and Lille, Reims, in the Champagne district, Sedan, on the Ardennes and Nancy, in French Lorraine, still farther east, are the other chief manufacturing towns of the northern region.
At Sèvres, southwest of Paris, are the chief porcelain factories, which give the models and take the lead in this industry. Limoges is also a noted center of porcelain manufacture.
Glass is very extensively made in the northern departments. Paris itself excels in every kind of luxurious and fanciful manufacture. Besançon, the largest town near the frontier of Switzerland, is a great depot for the produce of the French half of that country, and manufactures watches largely.
The mining industries of France are comparatively limited. Coal is drawn chiefly from the basin of Valenciennes, which continues the Belgian coalfield on the north, from the basin of the Loire and Rhone, and from that of Creuzot, on the south of the heights of the Côte d’or. Iron occurs in eleven districts and is of excellent quality, but generally lies distant from the fuel necessary to smelt it, so that this metal must also be imported in large quantity. St. Etienne, southwest of Lyons, is the most noted center of the French hardware manufactures, especially of guns and machinery; Le Creuzot, in the midst of its coal basin, has also noted ironworks.
The trade of France is only inferior to that of Britain, Germany, and the United States; the position of the country, with coasts on three of the most frequented seas, is exceedingly favorable to its commerce. The great seats of maritime traffic with all the world are Marseilles, on the Mediterranean coast; Bordeaux and Nantes, with St. Nazaire, on the coast of the Bay of Biscay; Le Havre (at the mouth of the Seine), Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkerque, on the English Channel. All of these may in a sense be called the harbors of the central point of the life of the state, luxurious Paris.
Naval and Military Centers.—The naval arsenals of France, dockyards, and stations of the fleet, are at Cherbourg and Brest, on the northwest coast; L’Orient and Rochefort (south of La Rochelle) on the Bay of Biscay; and Toulon, on the Mediterranean. Nice and Cannes, on the Riviera, are favorite winter resorts.