Auxerre was one of those stops where the motorhome could be left on one side of the river while almost the whole historic city rose directly opposite. The Yonne runs immediately below the old centre, with church towers, stone buildings and red roofs climbing away from the water, so the river is not simply something that passes through Auxerre: it is one of the reasons the city exists where it does.
We stopped at the large parking area on Rue Étienne Dolet, directly beside the Yonne. It was summer and the place was overcrowded with motorhomes, but despite how busy it looked we still managed to find a space for our relatively small one. The parking area itself was spacious, and its position was particularly useful. Shops and restaurants were nearby, while the historic centre was close enough that there was no reason to move the motorhome again.
During our stop it was very quiet and we felt completely safe. There were no motorhome services, which is the main practical limitation, but we did not need them there and the parking itself was completely free of charge. Considering how close it is to the old centre, that made it one of those municipal parking places that are particularly useful during a journey: nothing elaborate, but enough space to leave the vehicle and explore the city without trying to drive through narrow medieval streets.
The Yonne is the best place to begin understanding Auxerre because the city’s development has always depended on transport.
The Roman settlement developed where a major land route met the river. The road belonged to the network associated with the Via Agrippa, connecting important centres across Roman Gaul, while the Yonne provided a natural route north towards the Seine and Paris.
That position remained important long after the Roman Empire disappeared.
For centuries, huge quantities of material travelled down the river from Burgundy towards Paris. Timber from the Morvan was one of the most important products. Paris required enormous quantities of wood for construction and fuel, but forests close to the capital could not provide everything the growing city needed.
Logs cut in the Morvan were therefore transported towards rivers feeding the Yonne. Large quantities eventually passed through Auxerre before continuing towards the Seine and Paris.
Wine travelled the same way.
The hills around Auxerre have been associated with vines for centuries, and wine from the Auxerrois and nearby villages could be transported much more effectively by river than over medieval roads. The Yonne therefore linked this inland Burgundian city directly with one of Europe’s largest markets.
This old commercial relationship is still visible in the geography of the city. The lower town follows the river while the oldest religious and political buildings occupy higher ground just behind it.
Auxerre became particularly important as an episcopal city.
Christianity was established here very early, and the bishops of Auxerre eventually possessed influence extending far beyond the immediate area. The number of religious institutions became so great that Auxerre was once known as the city of thirty churches.
Two buildings still dominate that history: the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne and the Abbaye Saint-Germain.
The present cathedral is not the first church to occupy its site.
Several earlier cathedrals were destroyed, particularly by fire. A major Romanesque cathedral was built during the first half of the eleventh century, and although most of it disappeared when the Gothic cathedral replaced it, its crypt survived underneath.
Construction of the present Gothic cathedral began in the early thirteenth century, around 1215, under Bishop Guillaume de Seignelay.
It then took almost three centuries to complete.
That extremely long construction period explains why different phases of Gothic architecture can be read across the building. The choir and lower portions of the façade belong largely to the thirteenth century, other sections followed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the façade and north tower were not completed until the sixteenth.
The cathedral was finally consecrated in 1543.
Its asymmetrical western façade is particularly recognisable because only the northern tower was completed. What might look at first like damage or a missing later section is really part of the history of a medieval building whose construction lasted for generations.
Below it lies something even older.
The Romanesque crypt dates mainly from 1023–1030 and survived the destruction of the church above it. One small chapel contains an extraordinary late-eleventh-century wall painting generally described as Christ on horseback.
It is an exceptionally rare image.
Instead of the more familiar seated or standing representations of Christ, the figure appears riding a white horse, associated with the apocalyptic imagery of the Book of Revelation. The painting survives from the Romanesque cathedral that disappeared almost a thousand years ago.
Auxerre’s other great religious complex, Saint-Germain, reaches farther back still.
The abbey developed around the tomb of Saint Germain of Auxerre, one of the city’s most important bishops, who died in the fifth century. What began around his burial place gradually became one of the major monasteries of medieval Burgundy.
The underground crypts preserve some of the oldest surviving architecture of the complex.
Parts date from the ninth century, and inside are Carolingian wall paintings that are among the most important surviving examples of their period in France.
This matters because very little monumental painting from the Carolingian world survives. At Saint-Germain, archaeology allows part of that early-medieval environment to be seen beneath buildings that were repeatedly enlarged and reconstructed over the following thousand years.
The monastery therefore contains several Auxerres at once: the late Roman Christian city, the Carolingian religious centre, the Gothic monastery and the later buildings that continued to occupy the site.
The old centre between these two major monuments developed on a much more human scale.
Narrow streets pass between stone houses and timber-framed buildings, some with upper floors projecting above the street. Auxerre retains enough of this fabric for the medieval street plan to remain easy to recognise even though the city continued developing outside it.
One of the most distinctive landmarks is the Tour de l’Horloge.
Its base is considerably older than the clock itself. The tower was erected over the foundations of a gate belonging to the old Gallo-Roman fortified city.
During the Middle Ages it was used as a prison. Then, in the fifteenth century, the Count of Auxerre granted the town the right to possess a civic clock and belfry.
The clock was installed in 1483.
That was more significant than simply giving inhabitants a convenient way of knowing the time. A municipal belfry and clock represented civic autonomy. Time was no longer announced solely from a religious bell tower or controlled by a feudal lord: the town itself possessed a public mechanism regulating the day.
Auxerre’s clock is also astronomical.
Its two principal hands indicate the movement of the sun and moon, linking ordinary civic time to the older astronomical method of measuring months and celestial cycles.
The tower nearly disappeared after a fire in 1825, when work on the spire caused a blaze and part of the structure collapsed. Demolition was later considered, but instead the monument survived and its upper section was reconstructed at the end of the nineteenth century.
The streets around the clock also connect Auxerre with one of France’s most famous comic songs.
Cadet Roussel was a real Auxerrois.
Guillaume Joseph Roussel came to Auxerre during the eighteenth century and worked first as a servant before becoming a bailiff. During the French Revolution, his slightly eccentric character inspired a local song mocking his habits and possessions.
The refrain spread far beyond Auxerre, eventually becoming one of the best-known traditional children’s songs in France.
Today a marked route through the historic centre uses Cadet Roussel as a way of linking buildings and streets around the old city.
Yet despite all of these monuments, the view that defines Auxerre most clearly is probably from the opposite bank of the Yonne.
From there, the city can be understood almost in section.
The river lies in front. Above it rise the old quays and houses. Behind them stand the cathedral and abbey, showing how the ecclesiastical city dominated the medieval skyline.
That was also the landscape immediately connected with our own stop.
Our parking place was on the river side opposite the historic centre, so we did not have to arrive through a monumental gate or search for a difficult space among narrow streets. We simply found ourselves beside the Yonne, with the old city within easy reach.
The riverbanks today are much calmer than when barges loaded with timber, wine and other goods passed continuously towards Paris. Leisure boats have replaced much of that commercial traffic, while the Canal du Nivernais and Yonne network has become important for recreational navigation.
But the physical connection remains the same.
Auxerre faces the river because the river helped create Auxerre.
The surrounding countryside adds another important part of its identity. This is the northern edge of Burgundy’s great wine country, but the vineyards around Auxerre have their own character.
Nearby appellations include Irancy, known especially for red Pinot Noir, while the celebrated vineyards of Chablis lie only a short distance to the east. Within Auxerre itself survives the Clos de la Chaînette, a historic vineyard closely associated with the city’s former hospital and religious lands.
Wine, therefore, is not a later tourism theme attached to the city. It belonged to the same commercial system as the Yonne: vines on the surrounding slopes, barrels moved into town and river transport carrying them north.
Auxerre also escaped some of the destruction that could easily have erased this older city.
Its religious buildings were damaged and altered during the Wars of Religion and French Revolution, while modernisation removed sections of the medieval fabric, but the fundamental relationship between river, cathedral, abbey and old streets survived.
That makes Auxerre particularly easy to understand without needing a complicated itinerary.
The city can be approached from the river, crossed on foot and then explored through streets where different periods overlap almost continuously: Roman fortification beneath the Clock Tower, medieval timber houses around it, a Romanesque crypt beneath a Gothic cathedral and Carolingian paintings beneath an abbey that continued developing for centuries.
For us, the practical experience was much simpler.
We arrived in summer to a parking area already crowded with motorhomes. We nevertheless found a space, had the Yonne directly beside us and were close to shops, restaurants and the centre. There were no services, but parking cost nothing. Most importantly, despite the number of vehicles around us, it remained very quiet and we felt completely safe.
That combination made Auxerre an easy city to stop in with a motorhome.
But the setting was more interesting than the parking itself. On the opposite side of the river was a city whose position had been determined by the meeting of Roman road and navigable river, whose bishops shaped medieval Burgundy, whose wine and timber travelled towards Paris and whose skyline still preserves nearly two thousand years of development.
Auxerre therefore became more than another stop on the road south through France. The Yonne made it a trading city, the Church made it an episcopal centre, and the survival of both riverfront and historic core still allows those two histories to be seen together.