Back in the halcyon days of 2011, my wife and I spent a year living in Montpellier, France, on the Mediterranean coast. We had an apartment in the old medieval city center, surrounded by narrow winding cobblestone streets. Our place was on the fifth floor, reachable only by a worn spiral stone staircase. It was a five-minute walk to the city’s main square, a daily farmer’s market, an 18th-century aqueduct, and the oldest medical school in the world still in operation, established in 1220.
Living in Montpellier meant being immersed daily not just in French culture but also in European history. The University of Montpellier, where my wife taught that year, officially dates from the 13th century, but its roots are in the Gallo-Roman rhetoric schools of the Roman Empire. Its alumni include Auguste Comte, François Rabelais, Petrarch, and Nostradamus. Minutes from our place was the beautiful Promenade du Peyrou, an esplanade laid out in 1689 featuring a large equestrian statue of King Louis XIV. The king’s hand is extended towards the city, holding a scroll of the law — a reference to Montpellier’s Protestant rebellion during the Reformation, which was put down after a siege by Louis XIII in 1622.
