The history of Sarlat is still standing in its streets

Sarlat begins with neither a square nor a castle, but with a community of Benedictine monks settled at the bottom of a damp hollow, away from the main roads. The site is far from obvious: sunken, crossed by a stream, hard to defend.

The founding is placed in the 9th century, without a firm date: no text attests to the abbey before the 12th. The relics of Saint Sacerdos, a former bishop of Limoges, arrive later and start drawing pilgrims. Houses then gather around the abbey church, then streets, then ramparts.

That original shape never moved again. The plan of Sarlat is still that of an enlarged monastic village, its lanes all converging on the same point. Almost nothing survives of the earliest buildings: a Romanesque bell tower and a few window openings, embedded in a Gothic nave rebuilt a thousand years later.

For nearly five centuries, Sarlat belonged to its abbey. But the merchant families had grown rich on trade, and grew steadily less willing to let the abbot decide everything, from the market to the taxes.

The conflict was settled by a text: the Book of Peace, agreed in 1298 and ratified by the king the following year. The abbot kept spiritual authority; the townspeople obtained four elected consuls, an administration, and the defence of their own town. A small legal revolution, and one you can see in the stonework.

Over the following decades, the patrician families built to show what they had become. Around 1330-1340 the d'Albusson family raised a house on the rue des Consuls that would be enlarged for three centuries: pointed arches at street level, Gothic windows above, the second floor rebuilt in the 15th century, a wing and a wrought-iron balcony in the 17th. The façade reads like a geological section through one family's fortune. In 1473 the notary Guillaume Plamon bought it, and it is his name that stuck.

In 1317 the pope created the diocese of Sarlat. The former Benedictine abbey church became a cathedral, and Raymond de Roquecorn took office the following year. For a town this size it was a change of scale: a bishop, a chapter, an administration, and building work.

The abbot's lodging became the bishop's palace. It was enlarged mainly between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, against the flank of the cathedral, at a time when the bishops of Sarlat were often Italian and often elsewhere. The palace was built, in other words, for occupants who rarely lived in it.

It has served everyone since. The Concordat suppressed the diocese in 1801; the palace became the town hall, then a courthouse, then a theatre, then a covered market, and today the tourist office. Five uses in a century and a half, in a building designed for one.

The war arrived well before the treaty: in 1348 an English company seized the château de Campagnac, the fortified house guarding Sarlat to the north-west. Then, in 1360, the Treaty of Brétigny handed the whole of south-west France to the king of England. The town changed sides without a siege, by a stroke of the pen in an agreement signed four hundred miles away.

It sat badly. When du Guesclin pushed the English back, Sarlat set its terms: it first obtained confirmation of its privileges, and only then, in 1370, agreed to become French again and to send its militia to help reconquer the region. The change of allegiance was not a surge of loyalty, it was a contract.

Sarlat was never taken. When the conflict ended in 1453 the town grew prosperous again quickly, and took the salamander into its coat of arms. It is that recovered prosperity, more than the war itself, that built the town you walk through: most of these honey-coloured façades under their heavy stone roofs date from the second half of the 15th century.

In 1365, in the middle of the war, Sarlat laid the foundations of a new parish church. Work stopped, restarted, stopped again. In 1479 the architect Pierre Esclanche built the first bay, the façade, the great door and the bell tower. The church of Sainte-Marie was not consecrated until 1507, one hundred and forty-two years after the first stone.

That slowness says everything about the century: you do not build in one go when war keeps passing through, but you do not give up either. The same generation that finished Sainte-Marie restarted the Gothic rebuilding of the cathedral, under bishop Armand de Gontaut-Biron, who consecrated the one and demolished the Romanesque nave of the other.

Sainte-Marie would later be everything except a church: deconsecrated in 1794, sold off in parcels, a bakery, a timber store, a post office, a clinic. In 2001 Jean Nouvel closed it with two monumental steel doors and installed the covered market inside. It took an architect to give it a crowd again, for want of a congregation.

Between 1520 and 1525, Antoine de La Boétie, criminal lieutenant of the Sarlat sénéchaussée, built a house facing the cathedral that resembles nothing around it: a sharp gable, mullioned windows, carved medallions, the whole Italian vocabulary that had just reached France.

His son Étienne was born there on 1 November 1530. Somewhere between sixteen and eighteen he wrote the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which asks a question nobody had put quite that way: why do millions of people obey a single man, when all they would have to do is stop?

The text circulated underground for centuries and was picked up by every revolution that followed. Étienne died at thirty-two, in 1563. His friend Michel de Montaigne devoted to him the most famous chapter of the Essays, the one where he writes, for want of anything better: "because it was him, because it was me".

In the 19th century, Sarlat missed everything. The railway came late, industry never came at all, the young left. The one serious wound is the Traverse: a straight street begun in 1837 and completed in 1865, driven through the medieval fabric to let carriages through, cutting the old town lengthways in two. It is there, at number 32, that the town would later install its library, in a house left to it by a local notable.

Elsewhere, nothing was demolished, for lack of money. The 15th-century houses stayed up because nobody could afford to replace them. What looks like an economic failure was quietly producing the largest preserved medieval quarter in France.

In 1962 the Malraux Act created France's protected sectors. Two years later Sarlat was one of the first ten towns chosen, and the restoration law was applied there before anywhere else. The state paid, the scaffolding went up, the 19th-century render came off, the honey-coloured stone reappeared. In about a decade, the poorest town in the Périgord became the best preserved in the country.