St Malo, and the corsairs the king found it easier to license

St Malo is a walled town on an island, or near enough. It sits on a rocky spur off the Brittany coast, linked to the mainland by a causeway, surrounded on three sides by a sea that rises and falls with one of the largest tidal ranges in Europe, and enclosed the whole way round by granite ramparts that a visitor can still walk in full, looking down over slate roofs on one side and the open Channel on the other. It is a town that was built, quite deliberately, to be difficult to get at, and for good reason: for a long stretch of its history, St Malo's business model depended on being able to defend what it brought home.

Piracy with a licence from the crown

From the sixteenth century onwards, St Malo became one of France's principal bases for privateering, a form of piracy the crown found administratively convenient: a shipowner obtained a letter of marque authorising attacks on enemy vessels, in practice mostly English and Dutch, and kept a share of whatever was captured while the king took a cut and avoided the expense of a standing navy. The Malouins, as the town's sailors and merchants were known, took to this arrangement with enthusiasm and became very good at it. René Duguay-Trouin, born in St Malo in 1673, captured so many prizes during the wars of Louis XIV's reign that he was eventually ennobled and given command of the royal navy; a later corsair, Robert Surcouf, made a fortune against British shipping in the Indian Ocean at the end of the eighteenth century that let him retire to St Malo as one of its wealthiest citizens. Both have statues in the town today.

The wealth this brought was substantial enough that St Malo's shipowners are said to have lent money to the French crown itself during periods when the royal treasury ran short, a reversal of the usual relationship between a port and its king that the Malouins were, by most accounts, rather proud of.

The town that sent Jacques Cartier to Canada

St Malo's maritime ambitions were not limited to raiding. In 1534, the navigator Jacques Cartier sailed from the port on the first of three voyages that took him up the St Lawrence River and laid the groundwork for French claims to what became Canada; he named the country using a Huron-Iroquoian word, and returned to St Malo to be buried there decades later. Newfoundland cod fishing, conducted by Malouin crews on the Grand Banks for generations, was for a long time as important to the town's economy as anything captured at sea, a less romantic trade that nonetheless kept a great many St Malo families fed.

Rebuilt, stone by stone

The old town's near-perfect medieval appearance is, in an important sense, an illusion. In August 1944, as Allied forces fought to clear the Brittany coast, St Malo was almost entirely destroyed by shelling and fire during a battle for the German-held citadel; roughly four out of every five buildings within the walls were flattened. What stands today was rebuilt after the war using the original street plan and, wherever possible, the original stone, a decision that took until the 1960s to complete and produced a town that looks older than it technically is, granite walls reassembled almost exactly where they had stood for three hundred years.

Calling at St Malo

St Malo appears on a number of round-Britain and Atlantic France itineraries, usually paired with Brittany's other historic ports. Ambassador's Seaside Charms sailing, nine nights from Portsmouth, calls there between Cherbourg and the wine harbour of Bordeaux, taking in Guernsey along the way.

The Atlantic Loop, nine nights round from Belfast, reaches St Malo by way of Liverpool and Cherbourg before continuing to Brest and the Isles of Scilly, while Bordeaux & Beyond, twelve nights from Newcastle, uses the town as a stop on a longer tour of western France's harbours.

A walk around the full circuit of the ramparts takes under an hour and gives the clearest sense of what the walls were built to protect: a harbour, a fortune, and a town that spent two centuries deciding for itself which ships it would leave alone.