Table of Contents
Where Did This Journey Actually Start? An Erasmus Experience in Nancy
In a globalized world it seems easier to move from one place to another for longer or shorter periods of time, whether for work or for studies. Yet, it’s worth remembering that this holds true more for some parts of the world than others. There are still borders in this world that become life projects. But for those who have this freedom of movement, sometimes travelling happens so slowly that you actually settle for a while in a place. And as you try to slowly comprehend and take in all the novelty of your new environment, you discover one powerful form of immersive travel.
I was one of the many Erasmus students at the University of Lorraine, a huge international hub. As with all Erasmus experiences, it happens both in the University, as well as in everything that surrounds it. France has traditionally gathered bright minds from its former colonies. In places like this, everybody arrives with a story, and that was my favourite part of the semester there: the fact that the place itself was open to the world. France is a social hub, a node that ties together all the far-reaching arms of la Francophonie, and nowadays, through programs like Erasmus Mundus, even more than that.
There were all these extraordinarily interesting students, coming from every corner of the world through an Erasmus Mundus Master, all having the opportunity to experience local living in France. Most of them were from French-speaking African countries, but others came from Asia, the United States, and Latin America. Studying abroad in France like this, in a university city with deep historical roots, offered a broad contact with various cultures around the globe.
The French teacher was the main agent of acculturation. His role was far more than simply helping us improve our French. With every lesson he introduced us to French history, traditions, geography, and various representative cultural productions. We were fed French culture by the spoonful, from iconic bande dessinée characters such as Lucky Luke to ongoing political tensions. He gave us rather neutral advice, making us aware that we were about to be put under some forces of tension and to be moulded in yet another shape:
“You all come from different countries all around the world. All of you received a certain education and now you should look around, question your beliefs and decide what to keep, what to let go and what to adopt.”
The university was central to life in Nancy. A good part of the city’s infrastructure and activities revolved around higher education. The city filled with young people when the autumn semester started and emptied again in summer.
Art Nouveau Nancy: Where Stone Grows and Iron Blooms
One student association offered city tours, and during one sunny weekend, I joined. The guide was actually a student of architecture and he could very eloquently speak about the elegant elements of the buildings. Nancy is one of the most rewarding places to visit in France outside of Paris precisely because it offers this kind of layered, walkable local experience, one that belongs entirely to its own history rather than performing itself for visitors.
The building you see here is the Huot Houses, designed between 1902 and 1903 by Émile André (1871–1933), one of the most distinctly regionalist architects of the École de Nancy (the alliance of artists, craftsmen, and industrialists that made this small city, improbably, one of the great capitals of Art Nouveau in Europe). What arrests the eye immediately is the façade’s refusal to behave like stone: it breathes, curves, erupts into organic ornament. The characteristic wheel-shaped window at ground level, its radiating white mullions encased in green ceramic tile, evokes a cross-section of a plant stem or a dragonfly wing caught mid-flight. Above it, carved surrounds frame the windows like frozen tendrils, while the steeply pointed gables and sculpted finials reach upward with an almost Gothic restlessness, softened by the warm golden grès vosgien sandstone that gives Nancy’s Art Nouveau its deeply rooted, earthly character. Shell and fan motifs line the plinth; sinuous ironwork guards the gate. These were not mere decorative choices. André was, according to historian Peter Clericuzio, the most committed regionalist among Nancy’s architects: a designer who studied local flora, Vosges vernacular architecture, and the iconography of Lorraine’s troubled political history to create buildings that were, in the fullest sense, of their place. The École de Nancy believed that ornament should carry meaning: the thistle, emblem of Nancy’s civic motto “Non inultus premor” (Latin for ‘I am not injured unavenged’), the Lorraine cross, the monnaie-du-pape flower all appear across the city’s façades as a semiotic landscape of regional pride and, beneath it, the unhealed wound of the 1871 annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany. Nancy’s Art Nouveau was never merely aesthetic; it was a manifesto in stone, iron, and glass, insisting that a province could challenge a capital, and that beauty could carry the weight of history.
At the beginning of the tour, we followed the Circuit Art Nouveau de Nancy. We passed the Huot Houses and into the Quartier Saurupt, the garden suburb that André himself helped plan and populate with experimental cottages. The trail also takes in the Villa Majorelle, the Brasserie Excelsior, and numerous façades along the rue Félix Faure and avenue Foch, where one can enjoy the full richness of this school: stained glass by Jacques Gruber, ironwork by Louis Majorelle and beautifully carved stone.
One of the Best Local Experience in Nancy: History and Architecture Through an Insider’s Eyes
There were only three of us, so alongside the story of the city, I also got the story of our tour guide. He was Algerian and I knew a little about the long and complicated relationship between Algerians and the French. He was born in Aïn Témouchent, and I do remember this small detail because I too had passed through this absolutely random small provincial city in Algeria for about thirty minutes between two buses. Stumbling on this coincidence made us more inclined to converse through our true selves, the kind of meeting with locals that completes one’s understanding of a place with irreplaceable details.
We stopped first at the Porte de la Craffe, one of the last surviving medieval gates of Nancy, its two round towers rising with the stubborn permanence of things that have outlasted everything around them. Our guide explained that Nancy had been the capital of the independent Duchy of Lorraine since the 11th century, a buffer territory perpetually squeezed between the ambitions of France to the west and the Germanic world to the east.
It was here, he reminded us, that in 1477 Duke René II defeated Charles the Bold of Burgundy in the Battle of Nancy, a victory so decisive that Charles was found dead in a frozen pond outside the city walls. Lorraine had always been a land that others wanted, and testimony to that was the Cross of Lorraine. Our guide explained that the distinctive double-barred cross originated as the heraldic symbol of the medieval Dukes of Lorraine.
After the Franco-Prussian War and the German annexation of 1871, it took on a second, more poignant meaning: the upper bar came to represent the lost city of Metz, the lower bar Nancy, and the cross itself became a quiet, defiant symbol of a divided province that refused to forget it had once been whole, a meaning that resonated so deeply it was later adopted by de Gaulle as the emblem of the Free French Forces in World War II.
We then turned onto the rue de la Craffe, the ancient spine of the old city, the route that once carried pilgrims, merchants, and ducal processions southward through the medieval fabric of Nancy. The street has the particular quality of old urban arteries everywhere: slightly too narrow, slightly too crooked, slightly too layered with centuries to feel entirely of the present. It led us toward the Palais des Ducs de Lorraine, the former seat of the Duchy’s rulers, a handsome Renaissance structure whose courtyard still breathes something of the sixteenth-century confidence of the dukes who commissioned it.
Immediately beside it stands the Chapelle des Cordeliers, the ducal mausoleum where many of those same rulers are buried. The chapel’s interior holds one of the most quietly extraordinary optical events I encountered in Nancy: a stained glass rose window through which, in the afternoon hours, a pattern of coloured rays fans out across the stone floor, deep reds and blues dissolving into amber as the light shifts.
At some point we crossed the rue Poincaré, and so I discovered that he was born in Nancy in 1854. I remembered him from high school with the specific fondness one reserves for intellectual heroes encountered young. He was one of the most extraordinary mathematical minds France ever produced, a man whose work on topology, chaos theory, and the philosophy of science still echoes through contemporary thought.
We took a detour through the Parc de la Pépinière, which was originally laid out in the eighteenth century as a tree nursery. Today it is the living room of Nancy’s student local community. On that particular sunny afternoon, small groups were scattered all over the grass, relaxing, reading, discussing, and engaged in various activities from sports to projects related to the university.
We exited through the Place de la Carrière, a long, elegant esplanade flanked by uniform Baroque façades, and walked under the triumphal arch, directly into the Place Stanislas. We stopped for a while to listen to an impressive One Man Band musician that brought the light, flowing, jazzy atmosphere to our ears, all by himself.
When you arrive in Place Stanislas you know beyond any doubt that you are in France. The grandiose space, the opulent Baroque façades, the opera house, the imposing fountains and the gilded ironwork gates. There is nonetheless an elegance in this opulence. The lamp posts had gentle golden flower-like petals, floating during the night like glimpsed from a wonderland.
We stopped for a while and listened to the story of King Stanislas. By family name Leszczyński, he had been King of Poland twice and lost the throne both times. After his second deposition, his son-in-law, who happened to be Louis XV of France, having married Stanislas’s daughter Marie, arranged a comfortable consolation: the Duchy of Lorraine, which Stanislas would rule for the rest of his life, after which it would pass peacefully to France. It was, in essence, a gilded retirement, and Stanislas, generous, cultivated, and apparently genuinely beloved by his subjects, spent it building. He gave Nancy the square that now bears his name, a fountain of Neptune, a triumphal arch connecting the old and new towns, and a reputation for Rococo civic grandeur that Nancy has never quite relinquished. At the centre of the square stands his statue, gesturing with the benevolent authority.
The photo shows the Hôtel de Ville de Nancy. The building was designed by Emmanuel Héré de Corny in neoclassical style, built in ashlar stone, opening officially in 1755. Three projecting bays break up the long façade, the central one crowned by a pediment bearing the Stanislas coat of arms; flanking the central clock are two allegorical statues representing Justice and Prudence. Inside, though not visible here, the building holds a grand staircase with wrought-iron banisters by Jean Lamour and ceiling murals painted by Jean Girardet.
The bronze statue on the right is Stanislas Leszczyński himself, standing on the pedestal at the centre of the square. The square was originally called Place Royale, built to honour Louis XV and it was actually a statue of Louis XV that originally stood on the pedestal now occupied by the duke. The square’s name changed to Place du Peuple during the Revolution, and only later took the name Place Stanislas in recognition of “the Beneficent” duke — so the statue you’re looking at is a later addition honouring Stanislas, not an original royal monument.
Our guide noted, with a smile, that the city of Metz, Nancy’s great historical rival sitting barely fifty kilometres to the north, had for much of the nineteenth century actually been the larger and more industrially significant of the two. When the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871 and Germany annexed most of Alsace and the northern third of Lorraine, Metz found itself suddenly on the other side of the new border, swallowed into the German Empire. Nancy, meanwhile, absorbed a flood of refugees, industrialists, glassmakers, and artists from the lost territories.
That sudden influx of talent and grief and displaced regional pride became, against all expectation, the seed of the École de Nancy and the extraordinary flowering of Art Nouveau that would make the city internationally famous. The loss of Metz, in other words, made Nancy. History, as it so often does in Lorraine, had turned catastrophe into something unexpectedly luminous.
Meeting the Locals: The Architect Who Wouldn’t Cut Corners
We went to a nearby café. Talking to a tour guide is a handy way to start conversing with locals. One sip after another, I found out his story of becoming.
He didn’t particularly want to become an architect, it was his best friend who did. Yet through an irony of fate, he passed the admission exam and his friend didn’t. He was a good student, eloquent, charming, liked by the best teachers, possessing a promising ambition. Algiers la Blanche is an interesting place to mould a mind that in turn will shape the aspect of physical reality.
I shared with him my fleeting impressions of Algiers, among them the white, impenetrable front de mer, imposing the elegance of French imperialism. We talked and discovered that in this world we live in, the stories are no longer one-sided. Some voices are louder and you may think that is everything that can be heard, but if you listen carefully you will hear the whispered-loud voices of the sirocco from the nearby desert.
It takes a while to discover what you are, who you are, and a longer while to accept what you are.
How does one’s life influence one’s artistic thought? After all, Art Nouveau was a revolt against recycling. Maybe at that time, change was confused with revolt. And they decided to run away from the rigours of classicism and from the opulence of Rococo into gentle emulations of nature.
The buildings framing the statue of Emir Abdelkader are classic Haussmann-style apartment blocks: wrought-iron balconies, symmetrical window bays, mansard-adjacent rooflines, and ground-floor arcades for shopfronts. The same motives that you’d find in Paris or Lyon, transplanted wholesale during the colonial period when French planners rebuilt central Algiers as an extension of the metropole. This is the layer locals call “Algiers the White”: the gleaming, French-built downtown that contrasts sharply with the Ottoman-era Casbah just up the hill. The square’s surrounding buildings, including the nearby Grande Poste, were built in Neo-Moorish style, a 19th-century movement that combined European engineering with traditional Arabic decorative elements such as horseshoe arches, mosaics, and domes.
The bronze equestrian figure depicts Emir Abdelkader (1808–1883), an Algerian religious and military leader who led a struggle against the French colonial invasion in the mid-19th century, an Islamic scholar and Sufi who unexpectedly found himself leading a military campaign, building up a collection of Algerian tribesmen that for years successfully held out against one of the most advanced armies in Europe. He’s remembered too for his conduct toward enemies: his consistent regard for what would now be called human rights, especially toward his Christian opponents, and his crucial intervention to save the Christian community of Damascus from a massacre in 1860, which brought him honours from around the world.
The square’s other layer of history sits at its southern edge: the famous Milk Bar café, which was the site of an FLN attack during the Battle of Algiers on 30 September 1956.
My one-time conversation companion continued to recall his life.
“I was quite vehement against moving to France.”
“I remember from my time there, that for many young people, university was just a way to earn a visa.” I told him.
“It was not my case. I went through all the stages. I tried to change myself, become involved socially, change the others around me, change the system.”
He told the story of how, after university, he was employed by an architecture bureau. He worked for them for a while, but the relationship was tense. Algeria was going through a boom in construction. Tall apartment buildings sprang up one after another in the suburbs of major cities. Yet one thing was written on the structural plans and another turned out to be built in reality.
He did not want to cut corners on construction materials in order to increase his and the company’s earnings. His bosses thought he would eventually give up his youthful stubbornness. But he did not, especially not after what happened with the earthquake at the Turkish-Syrian border, where many buildings did not comply with construction norms. After he obstructed a project once, twice, a third time, he was removed from the bureau. The idea of constructing safer, yet more expensive buildings had not taken hold in that particular Algerian company.
That evening, I was left wondering: how this particular architect of Algerian origins, with such a strong personality, will shape the physical reality. How a mind familiarized with the mellow hills of the Atlas in a country brewing with tumultuous change and controversy will, in turn, shape the art of leaving.
Find your own local experience
If this guided walk through the architectural gems of Nancy sparked something in you, or if you find the concept of local living and discovering a place through immersive travel appealing, let yourself be guided by The Verse Voyager’s personality-based travel planning — it will help you find the right idea for your desired length of stay.
TL;DR:
A six-month Erasmus experience at the University of Lorraine, part of an Erasmus Mundus master’s program, becomes a deep dive into local living in Nancy: an evening with a One Man Band in Place Stanislas, a walking tour through Art Nouveau Nancy with a fellow student, layers of history and architecture from the Porte de la Craffe to the Cross of Lorraine, and a café conversation with locals that opens into the immersive travel local experience travel writing rarely captures. The post closes with a postscript on French architectural influence in Algiers, connecting the local community of Nancy’s Art Nouveau builders to the colonial-era streets of Algiers the White. For anyone looking for places to visit in France outside of Paris, Nancy offers history, beauty, and human connection in equal measure.