LYON

LYON. Founded by the Romans as a provincial capital, Lyon maintained its prominence during the medieval period as the seat of a bishopric and an important law court (the Sénéchaussée). Its location at the confluence of two important rivers (the Rhône and the Saône) made it a commercial center as well, allowing it to act as a transportation and financial hub between the Renaissance Italian cities to the south and the French and Flemish cities to the north. From the sixteenth century, silk and other textile production combined with banking to propel the city's economy, and its four annual trade fairs emerged as among the most important in Europe. Merchant dynasties (both French and Italian) came to dominate the city's governing council, or consulate, and continued to rule the city up to the Revolution.

The Reformation came to Lyon from nearby Geneva in the sixteenth century, and religious conflict temporarily damaged the city's economic dominance. Largely an elite phenomenon, Protestantism faded during the seventeenth century although economic and family contacts with Geneva continued. Prompted in part by Genevan and Italian models, Lyonnais merchants developed several new forms of poor relief during this period, including a publicly owned general hospital that took in foundlings and orphans, training them for work in the textile trades and supplying dowries to young women. The city's governing elite also created public institutions to supply food during grain shortages, including an urban administration to purchase grain at city expense, public ovens to bake bread, and an organized rationing system. Lyon thus served as a model in France for poor relief and administrative innovation in times of famine.

While textile production (especially silks) continued to expand through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the four fairs became principally important as financial markets. Their regularity, and the supervision over them by a powerful judicial court (the Conservation des foires) made them attractive to merchants from Italy, Switzerland, and France who wished to make, pay, and exchange loans while minimizing the dangerous transfer of coin. During the latter years of the reign of Louis XIV, royal bankers such as Samuel Bernard manipulated these markets, burdening them with the royal debt and nearly bankrupting them. Though the fairs contracted and became less internationally important as a result, they survived and continued to function on a smaller scale for the remainder of the eighteenth century. Unlike other cities, Lyon maintained a remarkable degree of independence from other royal exactions because the merchants of Lyon successfully manipulated royal patronage and the system of venal offices to preserve a degree of autonomy. As France's "second" city, Lyon enjoyed a tradition of independence and resistance to central authority that continued through the Revolution and into the modern era.

LYON

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