Devised to celebrate the Vichy dance weekend, Easter 2016
Vichy
Vichy is a spa town with approximately 25,000 inhabitants, situated on the river Allier in the eponymous
departement
– south of Paris and almost in the geographical centre of France.
Vichy is not only known for the curative power of its spa (Vichy is the most important spa in France – even the ancient Romans appreciated the hot springs and called the town they had founded
Aquae Calidae
; during the reign of emperor Diocletian towards the end of the 3rd century CE the area belonged to a certain Vipius and was therefore called “Vipiacus”, which in time became “Vichiacus” and eventually “Vichy”) and the internationally-distributed bottled mineral water, but also for the fact that, from July 1940, the provisional government under
le maréchal Pétain
was housed there – this was a reasonable proposition given that there were more than 300 hotels where officers and civic servants could be housed. Vichy served as an administrative centre for those areas in the south of France that had not been occupied by the Germans.
The “Vichy regime” ended when de Gaulle was inaugurated as president on 25 August 1944. After the war, the spa activities were resumed, and soon after, Vichy was again the “queen of spa towns” (
reine des villes d’eaux
). This declined somewhat in the 1970s, but in 2021, Vichy and ten other spa towns, the
Great Spa Towns of Europe
– including Baden-Baden, Bad Ems and Bad Kissingen in Germany – were incorporated in the UNESCO list of world heritage.
From “Anselm's Notes on Dances”, by Anselm Lingnau
(Used by permission.)