DIEPPE is sometimes called the Viking town. It traces its history as a human settlement and port back to the arrival of the Vikings on this coast at the beginning of the tenth century AD. Of course, there were other people living in these parts before then, and the Romans passed this way before the Vikings. But the Romans did not leave such important traces of their occupation here as they did elsewhere.
The Vikings, from Scandinavia, settled in and around Dieppe because of the hospitable harbour they found for their boats at the river estuary that cuts through a forbidding line of cliffs. The name Dieppe derives from the Viking term “djepp”, meaning “deep”.
Dieppe became an important place on the map in the eleventh century in the period when England and France, or more particularly England and Normandy, became linked in a common history, with contesting rulers claiming ownership of each other’s lands.
In 1066 (the one date in history some of us can recall), William, Duke of Normandy sailed with his army to Sussex where he deposed King Harold of England at the Battle of Hastings. That first invasion was launched from the Bay of the River Somme; the following year (1067), William sent supplies to his occupying army from the growing port of Dieppe.
William the Conqueror (or William the Bastard as French history also records him) brought more than soldiers to England: in the wake of the Norman invasion, came the feudal system of government, the Norman Gothic architecture that still dominates our ecclesiastical landscape, and many French words that enrich for all time what the French describe as “la langue de Shakespeare”.
Dieppe has lived through many hostile visits over the centuries. Attacked by the King of France (a rival then to the Duke of Normandy), Dieppe was razed to the ground in 1195. It was to suffer a similar fate five centuries later when, in 1694, an Anglo-Dutch fleet under the command of Admiral Berkeley bombarded and burned down the town in retaliation for attacks by French privateers against English ships in the Channel.
Dieppe had become a fortified town from the end of the fourteenth century, when construction of the castle began: the castle, and one gate of the fortified wall that was built round the town, still stand.
In the sixteenth century, the town – previously nestled beneath the castle – was extended towards the east, into the area now known as the Bout du Quai, after a displacement of the Arques river estuary enabling a larger port to be developed. Dieppe was to become one of the most important ports of France: its mariners embarked on voyages of discovery that opened up large areas of the African and American continents to European predatory trade and conquest.
The town - or its most fortunate inhabitants - knew prosperity in the seventeenth century, thanks to its thriving commerce, the expanding fishing industry and the local craft of ivory-carving. Local hero Abraham Duquesne, whose monument stands on the Place Nationale, gained fame as the vice-admiral of the fleet of King Louis XIV (the king didn’t give him the honour of Marshal of France, because he insisted on remaining a Protestant). Repression, followed by the expulsion, of tens of thousands of enterprising Protestants (Huguenots) from Normandy after 1685 did no favours to the economy of Dieppe, but benefited the countries such as England where they found refuge.
After that bombardment of Dieppe in 1694, Louis XIV ordered the reconstruction of the previously wooden-built town in flint and sandstone. The present appearance of the town centre, clustered around the port, bears the mark of the king’s architect, Monsieur de Ventabren, over 300 years ago. The arcades of the Quai Duquesne are the consequence of Admiral Berkeley’s unfriendly attentions.
After the fall of the Napoleonic empire in 1815, Dieppe developed into the kind of town we can recognise today. Seaside bathing was introduced here in the 1820s (following its earlier invention in Brighton).
The Duchesse de Berry, Italian-born and married into a French Bourbon family, is credited with having turned Dieppe into a seaside resort for her aristocratic friends. Her later infamy, acquired from supporting a failed coup in 1831 against the newly crowned King Louis Philippe (who came from the rival Orleanist dynasty) gets a mention in the history books. But it is not celebrated in Dieppe where the fiery Italian lady is identified more with the pastries on sale in the shop on the Place du Puits Salé that bears her name.
The railway age that began in the middle of the nineteenth century led to the development of Dieppe as both a place to stay and as a staging post on the shortest route between London and Paris.
Dieppe became a favourite place for artists and writers to pursue their creative activities, and to have fun. Artists including Delacroix, Pissarro, Blanche, Beardsley, Sickert and Braque all stayed and worked here. As did the writers Dumas, Wilde and many minor scribblers. And the composers Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Roussel were lovers of Dieppe and its hinterland, too.
If seaside pleasures were for the well-off in the nineteenth century, they became available to most people in the twentieth, a century that was also bloodied twice by world wars. In 1936, four years before Hitler’s armies swept across Europe, paid holidays were introduced by the Popular Front government in France, and Parisian families arrived in their droves to cool their feet in the frothy Channel waters.
There were no seaside holidays between 1940 and 1944, with the German army in occupation. On 19 August 1942, the ill-organised Dieppe Raid took place, leaving a thousand and more young soldiers dead on the beach.
Since the liberation in 1945, Dieppe has shared the triumphs and vicissitudes of the post-war world. Its industries and port activities have suffered from the economic pressures that have spread prosperity so unevenly across the world. Dieppe is not a rich town, life is not easy for many of its inhabitants, but there is a richness of experience, stemming from a long and often troubled history, to be shared by Dieppe with all those who pass this way.