| Toulouse
Toulouse and its beautiful historic centre, is one of the most active
and metropolitan
cities in the whole of France. This is the
transformation has happened since the war, under the guidance of the French State, that has given a lot of money to
make Toulouse the think-tank of
high-tech industry and kind of the most popular Trans-National Euro
Ville.
Always an Aviation centre- St. Exupéry and Mermoz flew out from here on
their pioneering airmail flights
over Africa and the Atlantic in the 1920's- Toulouse is now the home
to Aérospatiale, the driving force behind Concorde, Ariane (The Space
Rocket) and
Airbus. The national space centre, the
European shuttle programme, the leading aeronautical schools,
the frontier pushing electronics industry... its all going off in
Toulouse, whose 110,000 students make
it the 2nd only to Paris as a University centre. But it's not the burgeoning
suburbs of factories,
labs, shopping and housing complexes that all these people go for their
entertainment, but the old Ville Rose-
pink not only in its brickwork but also in its politics.
This is not the first flush of pre-eminence for Toulouse. From the tenth
to the thirteenth centuries the counts
of Toulouse controlled much of southern France. They maintained the most
resplendent court in the land,
renowned especially for its troubadours, the poets courtly of love, whose
work influenced Petarch, Dante and
Chaucer and this the whole course of European Poetry. Until, that is the
arrival of northern French nobles of Albigensian Crusade, In 1271 Toulouse
became crown property.
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