Lyon

The great fairs were founded by royal grant in 1420, when the dauphin, the future Charles VII, gave the city two free fairs a year. Driven off for a time by the marauding bands called écorcheurs, they returned in 1444 and grew to four, filling sixty days of the year. No coin changed hands while a fair lasted: merchants wrote their bargains in books and settled afterwards by bills of exchange, under the eye of the consul of the Florentine nation. Italian bankers and merchants settled in numbers, and in 1536 Francis I granted a Piedmontese merchant letters patent to weave cloth of gold, silver and silk in the city, meant to break Genoa's hold on the trade.

The Wars of Religion ended this golden age. Protestants briefly seized Lyon, a massacre of its Protestants followed the St Bartholomew's Day killings, and many foreign bankers left for good, leaving silk as the city's chief wealth. Silk also made it a city of revolts. In 1793 Lyon rose against the Convention and was crushed, purged and for a time renamed Commune-Affranchie, and once the Jacquard loom had spread through its workshops, its silk weavers, the canuts, rose in two violent revolts in 1831 and 1834.