40 Fun Facts About Grenoble

What did Grenoble's townspeople hurl at royal troops from above in 1788, giving the day its name?

Roof tiles rained down on Louis XVI's soldiers on 7 June 1788, the Day of the Tiles. The revolt led to a provincial assembly that many historians count among the first sparks of the French Revolution.

Which famous Tour de France symbol was first worn on a 1919 stage that set off from Grenoble?

The yellow jersey was first pulled on by Eugène Christophe in Grenoble on 19 July 1919, before a 2 am start for Geneva. A plaque unveiled for the centenary in 2019 marks the spot.

Which herbal liqueur made by monks shares its name with the mountain range just north of Grenoble?

Chartreuse has been made by Carthusian monks since 1737, and only a select few of them know the full recipe of 130 plants. Its hue became so familiar that English borrowed the drink's name for the shade in 1884.

Schuss, the unofficial mascot of Grenoble's 1968 Winter Olympics, was a cartoon figure of what?

Schuss was a stylised skier in a blue suit with a large red ball for a head, and is counted as the first Olympic mascot. The first official one, Waldi the dachshund, followed at Munich in 1972.

The royal title Dauphin, taken from the province once ruled from Grenoble, means which animal?

Dolphin is the meaning of Dauphin: the lords of the Dauphiné bore one on their coat of arms. Humbert II sold the province in 1349 on condition that the French heir always carried the title.

What nickname do locals give the spherical cabins of Grenoble's cable car, in service since 1976?

The bubbles, Les Bulles in French, arrived in 1976 and became a symbol of the city. The line itself opened in 1934, making it one of the oldest urban cable cars anywhere.

Built on a river plain ringed by three mountain massifs, Grenoble is often described as one of France's what?

Flattest cities is the surprising label: Grenoble is built on a level river plain about 214 metres up, between three massifs. That makes it unusually easy to get around by bicycle.

Which nut grown around Grenoble won one of France's first origin labels for a fruit, in 1938?

Walnut orchards around Grenoble have carried an appellation d'origine contrôlée since 1938. The Noix de Grenoble area spreads over three departments, mostly along the Isère valley.

Napoleon marched through Grenoble in 1815 on his way to retake power after escaping which island?

Elba had held Napoleon for under ten months when he landed in France and headed north. At Laffrey, just outside Grenoble, he walked up to the royal troops sent to arrest him and they joined his cause.

Which novelist, author of The Red and the Black, was born in Grenoble in 1783 as Marie-Henri Beyle?

Stendhal gave his pen name to Stendhal syndrome, the dizziness he described feeling among the art treasures of Florence in 1817. He spent his childhood in and around Grenoble.

Which fashion accessory, exported as far as Russia and America, made Grenoble rich in the 1800s?

Gloves were Grenoble's signature trade: by 1787 its 64 glovers turned out nearly two million a year. Rival Grasse had faded after Protestant craftsmen left France when the Edict of Nantes was revoked.

Which fortress above Grenoble, reshaped by General Haxo in the 1800s, is reached by cable car?

The Bastille shares its name with the Paris prison but was built to guard France's Alpine frontier. It is the Grenoble area's main tourist site, drawing about 600,000 visitors a year.

Grenoble's 1968 Winter Olympics were the first Olympic Games that TV viewers could watch how?

In colour is how Grenoble 1968 went out, a first for any Olympics. The same Games brought the first Winter Olympic drug tests and saw East and West Germany enter separate teams.

Which French leader came to Grenoble in November 1944 to honour its part in the Resistance?

Charles de Gaulle made Grenoble a Companion of the Liberation, an honour given to only five French communes. Free French broadcasts on the BBC had already dubbed it the capital of the Maquis.

Grenoble is the biggest metropolis in the Alps, ahead of which Austrian host of two Winter Games?

Innsbruck staged the Winter Games in 1964 and 1976, either side of Grenoble's own in 1968. The two Alpine cities have been twinned since 1963.

In 1987 Grenoble became the second French city, after Nantes, to bring back which street transport?

Tramways returned to Grenoble 35 years after the last old line closed in 1952. The new low-floor cars were the first in the world that wheelchair users could board unaided.

Grenoble's ice hockey club is the Brûleurs de Loups, a name meaning the burners of which animals?

Wolves give the Brûleurs de Loups their name, which the club founded in 1963 as Grenoble Hockey Club adopted only in 1992. The team plays in the Ligue Magnus, the top tier of French ice hockey.

At the opening of Grenoble's 1968 Winter Olympics, helicopters dropped 30,000 scented paper what?

Roses are Grenoble's emblem: three red ones on gold fill the city's coat of arms and also featured in the 1968 Games logo. The paper flowers fell alongside 500 small Olympic flags on parachutes.

Grenoble belongs to which French region, formed by a 2016 merger and governed from Lyon?

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes came into being on 1 January 2016, when two older regions were joined, and takes in twelve departments. Grenoble is the prefecture of one of them, Isère.

Which Frenchman swept all three men's alpine gold medals at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble?

Jean-Claude Killy won the downhill, giant slalom and slalom, the last only after rival Karl Schranz was disqualified on appeal. He left the Games as their most successful athlete.

Which Roman emperor gave Grenoble its name when the Gallic town of Cularo was renamed for him?

Gratian visited Cularo and raised it to the rank of a city, which was renamed Gratianopolis in 381. Centuries of sound changes wore that down to Graignovol and finally Grenoble.

Which decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs was schooled in Grenoble and later taught history there?

Jean-François Champollion arrived in Grenoble aged ten to live with his elder brother and became a professor there at just 19. A lycée in the city now carries the Champollion name.

Which Grenoble-born inventor built a mechanical duck that seemed to eat and digest grain?

Jacques de Vaucanson hid ready-made droppings inside the duck, so the digestion was a trick. His lasting work was an automated loom of 1745, whose ideas Jacquard later perfected.

Which mathematician, famous for his series, studied heat while Napoleon's prefect in Grenoble?

Joseph Fourier ran the Isère department from Grenoble for more than a decade, overseeing road building while he worked out how heat spreads. He is also credited with first describing the greenhouse effect.

Near Grenoble, engineer Aristide Bergès popularised the phrase 'white coal' for which energy source?

Hydropower from mountain torrents drove Bergès's paper mills, and he made the phrase famous at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Grenoble celebrated the industry with an international exhibition in 1925.

Grenoble's Perret Tower of 1925 is billed as Europe's first tower built from which material?

Reinforced concrete was still a novelty when architect Auguste Perret used the tower to show what it could do. It is the only structure left from the city's 1925 exhibition.

Which massif southwest of Grenoble became a short-lived 'free republic' of the Resistance in 1944?

Vercors fighters, about 4,000 strong, declared their republic after D-Day, but some 10,000 German troops overran the plateau that July. Its cliffs face Grenoble from the massif's eastern edge.

Which yearly EU title did Grenoble hold in 2022, after Lahti and before Tallinn?

European Green Capital rewards a city's environmental record, and Stockholm was the first winner in 2010. Grenoble had cut the speed limit to 30 km/h on most of its streets in 2016.

The Museum of Grenoble was the first museum in France to open its collections to what?

Modern art entered the museum under Andry-Farcy, its curator from 1919 to 1949, a decade before New York's Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929.

Grenoble's ESRF, a ring-shaped research machine opened in 1994, makes some of the brightest what?

X-rays from the European Synchrotron are 100 billion times brighter than a hospital's, letting scientists study proteins and fossils in fine detail. A neighbouring institute, the ILL, probes matter with neutrons instead.

Which knight 'without fear and beyond reproach' is buried in Grenoble's Saint-André church?

Bayard was moved there in 1822, almost three centuries after he died in battle, and his statue stands on the square outside. Legend has him holding a bridge alone against hundreds of Spanish soldiers.

Which fastener did Grenoble's Albert-Pierre Raymond patent in 1886, a year after a German rival?

Snap button patents went to Heribert Bauer in Germany in 1885 and to Raymond in Grenoble in 1886. Those early versions held shut with a tiny S-shaped spring rather than today's groove.

Troops from which country occupied Grenoble from 1942 until German forces took over in 1943?

Italy ran a comparatively tolerant occupation, so many Jewish families fled to Grenoble from German-held parts of France. That refuge ended when German troops arrived in September 1943.

Which river, rising in the Écrins massif and fed by glacier melt, joins the Isère at Grenoble?

The Drac's name is linked to an Occitan word for a water demon, from the Latin for dragon. Grenoble's long fight to tame its two rivers gave the city the symbol of the serpent and the dragon.

Which American figure skater won her country's only gold medal at Grenoble's 1968 Winter Olympics?

Peggy Fleming, then 19, was placed first by all nine judges. Her win marked America's recovery from the 1961 plane crash that killed its whole figure skating team, including her coach.

Which mountain resort about 30 km from Grenoble staged the alpine races of the 1968 Winter Olympics?

Chamrousse hosted all six alpine events, with the men's downhill finishing at nearby Casserousse. The Games also raised the profile of other resorts near Grenoble, such as Villard-de-Lans.

Which Nobel-winning physicist of magnetism founded Grenoble's nuclear research centre in the 1950s?

Louis Néel made Grenoble a science city by pairing research labs with industry, a formula known as the Grenoble model. He was also the instigator of the city's Polygone Scientifique research district.

Which château near Grenoble, site of a famous 1788 assembly, houses a French Revolution museum?

Vizille hosted the province's three estates on 21 July 1788, weeks after Grenoble's riot against royal troops. Its museum, opened in 1984, is the only one in the world devoted to the Revolution.

Which Gallic tribe held the village of Cularo, the settlement on the Isère that grew into Grenoble?

The Allobroges also held Vienne and Geneva, and Cularo first appears in the record in 43 BC. Rome later administered their old territory from those three towns.

Which author of Les Liaisons dangereuses spent six years as an artillery officer in Grenoble?

Choderlos de Laclos was posted to Grenoble from 1769 to 1775, grew bored with garrison life and turned to writing. His scandalous novel in letters followed in 1782.