Nestled beside the River Allier is the most elegant small town in all of France. Vichy really requires flounces of crinoline, and blokes in boaters and blazers, to set it off properly. In truth, it gets them, during the annual June festival celebrating Napoleon III. At other times, you’ll just have to do your best. Wear tracksuit bottoms or the Everton away strip round here and you’ll look a real goof. These are imperial surroundings.
Or they were once. Vichy, an hour from Clermont-Ferrand in northern Auvergne, is really a small spa town onto which international and imperial commotions were grafted and later detached, leaving a framework of grandeur which today’s 25,000 Vichyssois fill with surprising adequacy.
The most famous spa town in France
As with most spa towns, the Romans were first in. It’s been the most famous such spot in France ever since, the only French spa among 12 added to the World Heritage list in 2021.
Celebrity thus resides firstly on Vichy’s spring water, a sparkling item if ever there was one. Drinking the stuff, bathing in it, being massaged with it or, better still, all three consecutively, relieves a list of ailments which lengthens with every Vichy representative you talk to. Then – second source of celebrity – the beaming asceticism comes with a coating of historical glamour. In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III brought needs, mistresses and raffishness to town.
He caused frothy buildings and chalets to be built, and great parks to be created in what was soon the most famous spa town in Europe. The well-bred showed up to drink, bathe and have their colons irrigated. The town was a special favourite with French colonials. As a local fellow once told me: “Many were terrible drinkers. They came for liver relief.” Given the jaunty possibilities flanking the spa, it’s not certain that the livers gained as much relief as intended.
The provincial town streets now blossomed with great classical hotels and villas over-decorated in the Belle Epoque manner. The town hosted world class shows – opera, classical music but also Buffalo Bill’s touring troupe. Vichy became a summer capital of France and remained so into the 20th century.
Don’t mention the war
Then came the stain. The collaborators moved in. Its international status explained the 1940 choice of the town as HQ for Marshal Pétain’s regime, Vichy’s third claim to fame. The place had more accommodation than anywhere in France, bar Paris and Nice. It could soak up ministers, civil servants and diplomats. It also had the only international telephone exchange in France outside the capital, a nearby airfield and a history of handling the high and mighty. They felt at ease there.
The Second World War record has dogged Vichy since. Locals don’t like to talk about it much. As former mayor Claude Malhuret said: “The people of Vichy never sought the regime.” It wasn’t their fault that the bad guys chose to settle among them.
Thus, they have spent much time banishing the ghosts of unearned notoriety or, at least, having them take their proper, four-year place within a 2,000-year story of thermalism and refinement.
Visitors will ever show up to see where Pétain lived and worked, as they seek the site of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. These days, though, the shadows have receded – still vital and darkly fascinating, but mainly a subplot to Vichy’s sunlit story. It makes a fascinating whole.
A town without blemishes
There are, as someone clever once wrote, no ugly bits to Vichy: “It’s the beneficiary of 500 years of investment by wealthy hypochondriacs.” You must start at the Parc-des-Sources – vast, tree-festooned epicentre of Vichy life, as delightful a central square as provincial France offers.
At one end is a huge glass and metal pavilion, where you may try all five different Vichy waters on free vend. This thrusts you into the company of people for whom the difference is a matter of importance. I doubt you’ll hang around too long. Away at the other end – through the trees, past the bandstand and café terraces – is the fantastic opera house and casino, half classical with caryatids, half Art Deco with cast iron and glass. The initial core was built by a British fellow called Badger. Within, the décor – gold and ivory to the fore – goes extravagantly beyond reason.
This was the noble setting in which French democracy committed suicide. On July 10, 1940, parliamentarians voted full powers to 84-year-old Philippe Pétain. As a plaque in the foyer records, 80 MPs and senators voted against le Maréchal, but 569 voted for. So the marshal had a free hand to reverse the republic, substitute “Work, Family and Fatherland” for “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” – and otherwise complement the Nazis’ task.
Most of his work was done right here, round the fringes of the Parc des Sources. Halfway along was the big, very fancy Hotel-du-Parc. The first floor became the Foreign Ministry, the second the PM’s offices and, on the third floor, Pétain himself had rooms from which he theoretically governed the whole of France (and not just the southern, “free” zone). His former flat has long been owned by an association of nostalgic Pétain fans. You’ll not get in to visit. On the other hand, you may see – directly opposite the entry to the building – a plaque on a stone stele commemorating the August 26 1942 round-up of 6,500 non-French Jews ordered from these premises.
Here, and in adjoining streets, an eclectic mix of monumental buildings – Art Deco, gothic, Italianate, bow-fronted British – was pressed into service as government offices, ministries and embassies. Also, post-1942, the Gestapo HQ. The wandering is good. Shorn of menace, these streets lend Vichy an interest and dignity unusual in a small town.
And then there’s the endless parkland which needs ladies with bonnets and parasols, but gets rather more joggers than necessary. It’s fringed on one side by chalets built by Napoleon III for himself, his mistress and various hangers-on. On the other side, it runs to the River Allier, fraught with the possibilities of water-borne activity, bars, bistros and other elements suggestive of loose-limbed leisure. You could be on holiday. You probably are.
Take the waters
Tradition suggests that, in Vichy, you take the waters. Granted, numbers of “curistes” – or health-seeking spa users – have dropped since the great spa days of the early 20th century, when some 110,000 would arrive each year. Dipping demand has been exacerbated by the French health service’s limiting of funding. If the state wasn’t paying, then the patients weren’t showing. So Vichy treatments, we now learn, are also staggeringly effective in the great 21st-century wellbeing battles – the ones patients pay for themselves – against ageing and obesity. I would tell you more about this but, frankly, the details slid below my boredom threshold.
I am not a natural customer for spa treatments. Worshipping at the temple of one’s own body generally makes me want to march about blowing a trombone and throwing back Scotch. Nor am I much impressed by spa “bars” which sell only herbal tea. But on the occasion I went to the poshest of Vichy’s three spas, I have to say that all the bubbling baths and massages left me feeling significantly sprightlier. This was unexpected.
Farm to fork
Then I went for lunch. This is the Auvergne region, and the Auvergne doesn’t do raw carrots. It eats meat. Salers cattle, sheep and pigs trot out of the farm gate and pretty much directly onto the dining table. My petit salé lunch comprised cuts of pork for a family of 10, embellished with lentils. Half a bottle of St Pourçain red further undid all the good I’d done in the morning. Vichy has a fine closed-circuit system going here: fatten them up and fur their arteries so they need spa treatments so they’ll feel guilt-free in eating and drinking to excess again. Repeat. This has much to recommend it. I suggest you follow suit.
Then you might shop, or amble to the oldest part of Vichy. Here’s the house of Albert Londres, France’s most famous investigative journalist. He exposed the scandal of the penal colony of French Guiana, amongst much else. Not far away, the 17th-century Palais Sévigné was requisitioned as Pétain’s second residence in 1940. Then-palais-owner Elisabeth Risler-François used his presence as the perfect cover for the hiding of a Jewish refugee and the organising of Resistance activity. Neither Pétain nor his people ever noticed. The story of Vichy is more nuanced than anyone told you.
Where to stay
Best in town is the five-star Vichy Célestins Spa Hotel – associated with the Céléstins spa across the way. Excellent bar and restaurant, too (vichy-spa-hotel.fr; room-only doubles from £145). Tighter budgets might try the three-star Hotel Le Midland. It has a settled sense of class (hotel-midland.com; doubles from £61).
Where to eat
At the Maison Decoret, Jacques and Martine Decoret have a Michelin star, elegant 19th-century surroundings and prices to match in what is among the Auvergne’s finest restaurants (maisondecoret.com). Right on the river, La Table de Marlène is also pretty nifty, gastronomy-wise. It’s within Rotonde premises which also boast a less ambitiously-priced bistro overlooking the water (restaurantlarotonde-vichy.com).
How to get there
EasyJet (easyjet.com) and other airlines fly direct to Lyon, from where Vichy is two hours by road, or 90 minutes by train. Meanwhile, the Intercité rail service from Paris Bercy gets to Vichy in just under three hours (sncf-connect.com).
Further information
Have you ever visited Vichy? Share your experiences in the comments section below
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