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Is the city of Rennes really the best place to live in France?

The Breton capital of Rennes has topped yet another table as the best city in France to live in. But does the western city really deserve its numerous accolades...and why?

Published: 26 February 2018 12:50 CET
Is the city of Rennes really the best place to live in France?
Place Saint-Anne in Rennes. Photo: TouN/Wikicommons
Rennes jumped from seventh position to first in the annual list of the best places to live in France (except Paris) by French newspaper L'Express.
 
 
But this is certainly no novelty win for the Breton city. 
 
The Brittany capital has been nominated as the best city for quality of life by numerous polls, including The Local's 2016 quality of life survey when it took first place for the best city in France for foreigners to live in. 
 
And for the L'Express's ranking, the city claimed the topspot after scoring highly in several categories including environment, education, property prices, healthcare and security. 
 
“Rennes has something to offer to everybody: arts, food, sports, culture, parties, urban life, country life,” Philippe Henri Max Laporte, who moved to the city two years ago for a masters degree and decided to stay, told The Local.  
 
“In spite of its small size, Rennes has everything a big city would offer,” he added. 
 
Here's what you need to know about what this much-lauded French city has to offer. 
 
The basics
 
Known for its traditional half-timbered houses (see photo below), Rennes is the capital of France's Brittany region, as well as the Ille-et-Vilaine department in northwest France.
 
Pleasing on the eye, this historic city dates back more than 2,000 years to the days when it was a small Gallic village named Condate.
 
The city was the parliamentary and administrative hub of France from the early sixteenth century until the French Revolution and its importance has been on the rise once again since the 1950s, thanks in part to the city's buzzing industry.  
 
Today it has a population of about 700,000 inhabitants.
 
The half-timbered houses of Rennes. Photo: Sokoljan/Wikicommons
 
Great outdoors
 
Now we know a bit about the city's history, what's everyday life like in Rennes?
 
Well, in terms of environment, it's no wonder Rennes, which is just a one hour's drive away from the stunning French port city of St Malo, as well as many other scenic spots on the northern Brittany coast, pushed ahead of the competition. 
 
And it would be understandable if les Rennais rarely felt the need to get out of the city, with the capital of the Brittany region ranking among France's greenest cities, with a whopping 42 m² of green space per inhabitant, compared to the national average of 31 m². 
 
The stunning Parc du Thabor alone should be enough to win over nature lovers, but if not there are 59 other city parks to explore as well as community gardens for those looking to flex their green fingers. 
 
 
Culture 
 
And the city's cultural offering also seems to be a part of Rennes life which its residents are in no doubt over. 
 
Rennes has everything to offer “from 'classical' culture through the museum of fine arts, presenting high end ancient artworks and exhibitions of great quality, the opera house or the Orchestra of Brittany that both strive to make their concerts available to everyone,” said Laporte.
 
On top of that the city's landmarks are certainly something to be envied, with Rennes boasting architectural gems such as the Saint-Germain church, the Brittany parliament which dates back to the 17th century and was recently restored and there's even a modern highlight in the shape of an apartment building designed by superstar French architect Jean Nouvel.
 
And for any foodies out there, its blossoming gastronomic scene has also been praised, with the Rennes tourist board calling the city France's “new face of gastronomy”. 
 
Opera de Rennes. Photo: Frédéric BISSON/Flickr
 
Student life 
 
Locals aside, the city has also long been a draw for France's student population. 
 
In fact Rennes welcomes a whopping 65,000 students plus from all over France each year — more than a quarter of its population.
 
And naturally this has an effect on the atmosphere of the city. 
 
“Rennes has a strong student population which gives the city such a young and vibrant feel,” Nelia Fahloun who lives in Rennes told The Local. 
 

 
Nightlife 
 
Unsurprisingly the large number of students ensures that Rennes — a small city compared to its competitors — punches above its weight in terms of nightlife. 
 
“The nightlife is also a big aspect of this city,” resident Laporte said. “The most famous street is the Rue Saint Michel nicknamed Rue de la Soif (or 'Street of Thirst') for all its bars settled in old 16th century houses.”
 
Although he added that this can be a downside for people living in popular drinking areas. 
 
Getting around (and out of) the city
 
The compact city center in Rennes is easily walkable, and nightmarish traffic jams like those in Paris and Marseille are nowhere to be found. 
 
Eric Beaty, Economic and Commercial Attaché at the US consulate in Rennes for 16 years has praised the “efficient” and “quite inexpensive” Metro system.
 
“Somebody can live in the city and not need a car,” he told The Local previously. 
 
In The Local's 2016 study, Rennes beat out several major cities, including Paris when it came to the quality of public transport which was based on several factors including bicycle paths and the number of residents served by public transport.
 
And thanks to the new high-speed trains from Paris-Rennes launched in July last year which reduced journey times between the cities from 2h04 to 1h25 a day trip to the capital is easy too. 
 
A high speed train passes near the Rennes-Paris highway in Laval. Photo: AFP
 
Renting

 
The rent culture of the city's ranked by L'Express also played a part in quality of life.
 
And this is yet another great perk to living in Rennes.
 
It can be hard to justify paying €1,000 a month to live in a 6m² studio (also known as a closet) with a shared bathroom in Paris when you can live in relative luxury in Rennes for only €470 (according to recent figures). 
 
Unemployment 
 
As part of the L'Express ranking, Rennes was also ranked France's second best city for work, with only Nantes coming out in front. 
 
At the end of 2017, Rennes had an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent compared to a nationwide unemployment rate of 9 percent.
 
And in 2015, Rennes was ranked as the best mid-sized city in France for starting a business, thanks in large part to the high quality of training the city's universities offer and the “eco-system” for creating a business, which includes the low jobless rate.
 
Photo: kuutamolla.gmail.com/Depositphotos
 
Okay, Rennes sounds great…
 
But is it really the best place to live in France?
 
According to experts (even those living in Rennes) it's important to put the L'Express ranking and others in perspective. 
 
“We must take these rankings for what they are worth,” Patrick le Floch, economist at the University of Rennes told French local newspaper Ouest France.
 
“The more a city has a good image, is dynamic, attractive, the more it attracts investors. Ranking derives from attractiveness and attractiveness arises from ranking.”
 
Still, there's no doubt that Rennes certainly has a lot to offer anyone who's ready to ditch the capital for the charms of a smaller city. 

ART

Brittany’s capital revives forgotten heritage: Italian mosaics

Italian mosaics, once all the rage in France, fell into neglect and ruin by the 1970s, when homeowners began covering them up with parquet floors or even linoleum.

Published: 8 August 2018 07:11 CEST
Brittany's capital revives forgotten heritage: Italian mosaics
Photo: Damien Meyer/AFP

The legacy is one that the Brittany capital Rennes has set out to showcase — and with good reason, because the city boasts dozens of works by key purveyors of the craft — the Odorico brothers from Italy's northeastern
Friuli region.

Their mosaics can be spotted in 122 towns and cities across western France, but they are concentrated in Rennes, where the brothers settled in 1882.

Every summer, the city's tourism office puts on tours devoted to the work of two generations of Odoricos.

The tours, snubbed by the public during the 1990s, are now often sold out as interest in the neoclassical art has burgeoned.

An association of “Friends of Rennes Heritage” has identified at least 47 Odorico works in the city.

Tourist guide Therese Jannes says the brothers Isidore and Vincent Odorico emigrated to France for “economic reasons” before making it big in Rennes at the height of the Art Nouveau movement.

They started off in Paris, where they met their mentor Gian Domenico Facchina, also from Friuli, at work decorating the Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house completed in 1875 that would become an icon of the Second Empire style.

Facchina was the inventor of a revolutionary mosaic technique — the reverse, or indirect, method in which the mosaic is created in reverse on a temporary surface, then transferred to its permanent home.

The technique enabled mosaicists to work faster and more cheaply, making the art more accessible to private clients.

Venetian and Roman styles

The Odoricos left Paris, settling first in the central city of Tours before moving to Rennes.

At the time, the mosaic was enjoying a heydey in France, and the Odoricos positioned themselves as experts in the Venetian and Roman styles.

The two brothers rapidly built up their order book for both public and private projects.

In 1918, six years after Isidore died, his widow and their sons — also named Isidore and Vincent — created the company Odorico Brothers, opening branches in nearby Dinard but also just outside Brittany in Nantes and Angers.

By then, when Art Nouveau was giving way to Art Deco, the rapidly industrialising city of Rennes became one of France's leading producers of mosaics.

At the height of their success, the family employed up to 100 mosaic craftsmen.

Vincent handled the back office, while Isidore, who had studied at Paris's prestigious School of Fine Arts, created original Art Deco works that are “recognisable at a glance”, Jannes says.

A prominent example is the mosaic over the entrance to the city's former central market, now a contemporary art centre, with the name “municipal market” in geometrical blue letters against a green and yellow background featuring subtle gradations.

Another key stop on the tour is the Poirier building, which boasts an example of one of the younger Isidore's favourite techniques — that of contrasting matte and glossy tiles.

Shiny gold and silver tiles are set in circles against a nuanced grey, blue and smoky green background.

Mosaics cover the entire facade of the building — very avant-garde in its time.

Admiring the work, tourist Julie Garfield of California said: “I love the interplay between light and dark.”

'Unmistakable'

Maeva Urvoy, visiting from nearby Saint-Brieuc, remarked on the mosaics' harmony with the architecture, saying they “are perfectly aligned with the building's shapes and spaces.”

The final stop on the tour is the Saint-Georges municipal pool, a converted church where Isidore Odorico left his indelible mark.

Odorico Brothers shut down in 1979, more than three decades after Isidore's death.

Mosaics had long gone out of style, so much so that many works by Italian immigrants had fallen into neglect or were even destroyed.

“One day a lady found a mosaic at her home. An architect told her to remove it because it wasn't worth anything,” Jannes recalls — it turned out to be an Odorico.

But today “awareness of this heritage is really growing,” she says. “People find mosaics under their linoleum or the parquet. The works aren't necessarily signed but some characteristics are unmistakable.” 

By Laure Le Fur