Situated at the confluence of two rivers, the Aveyron and the Bonnette, the area was called Condat (confluence) during the Celtic era, then Nobilis Valis (Noble Valley) in the Roman era.
Antonin came to evangelise the Rutheni at the beginning of the Christian era. Martyred at Pamiers, his remains returned to Condat in a boat towed by two eagles. At that spot in the 8th century the Abbey of Saint-Antonin was built. The town developed later around the abbey and took the same name.
8th to 12th centuries The town is under the authority of a Viscount. Arts and crafts and commerce are prosperous (wine, saffron, prunes, butchers, tanneries, weaving woollen fabrics…). A class of bourgeois and traders developed. Witness the grand stone houses with their twin windows and the Maison Romane. This was the residence of the viscount (1125), one of the oldest and most beautiful examples of Romanesque civil architecture in France. The ramparts protected the town. The Viscounts began to loose their power in the 12th century and conceded to the town a charter of freedoms, rights and customs (1140-1144). It was one of the first charters in France accorded by the feudal regime.
13th to 14th centuries. With commercial exchanges came new ideas. The Cathar doctrine came this way from Eastern Europe and rapidly became established in the South-West. Persecuted by the Pope and the King of France – the Albigensian crusade – the crusades carried out by Simon de Montfort, besieged Saint Antonin in 1212. The town and the Abbey were partly destroyed. Simon de Montfort became master of the town but was killed in 1218 in the siege of Toulouse. His son Amaury and his brother Guy de Montfort inherited Saint-Antonin which they later ceded, in 1226, to the King of France Louis VIII. He accepted and, the following year, Louis IX (Saint Louis) confirmed his protection on Saint-Antonin, which became a Royal Town and reached its zenith. Commerce flourished with Germany, Italy, England and Holland… The Viscounts, ruined, abandoned power from the beginning of the 13th century. Consuls elected for a year and chosen among the powerful families replaced the Viscounts. But the 14th century brought the start of theHundred-Year War. On the boundary of the English territory, Saint-Antonin suffered badly. Occupied by the English several times (1344, then 1351) it was retaken by the King of France after a two year siege (1352-1354) then became English again from 1360 (the treaty of Brétigny) to 1369. The war, the ravages of large armies and the plague caused a general misery. Activity didn’t start again until the end of the 14th century.
15th and 16th centuries A new period of prosperity started. Witness the beautiful stone houses with mullion windows in the commercial quarter, but also the more modest buildings of cob and wooden beams in the workers quarters. Inside the ramparts the town comprised 6000 inhabitants. Then came the wars of the religions. Saint-Antonin adopted the reformist religion and in 1562, after a fierce struggle the papists were chased from Saint-Antonin which declared itself a “Protestant Republic”. The battles were tough, the abbey and the churches were destroyed. The town reinforced its ramparts. In 1662 Louis XIII laid siege to Saint-Antonin, surrounded the town and raised the ramparts. The Catholics returned and the two communities lived together reasonably harmoniously until the Dismissal of the Edict of Nantes (1685) when the “dragonnades” and the inquisition obliged the protestants to renounce or flee. The “heroic” period of Saint-Antonin was over. The town was again taken in hand buy the King of France: it was the end of the privileges that had been accorded and strengthened since the 13th century and the progressive decadence of the economic and political life. During the 18th and 19th centuries the beautiful religious (the Génovéfain convent) and civil (bourgeois houses) buildings was not enough to mask the decline of the city.
At the end of the 19th century, the opening of the railway line (1856) and the installation of a thermal spa (1924) made it seem that the activity was restarting. But the flood in 1930 destroyed the installation. The railway was removed in 1956.
Today Saint-Antonin is a holiday “station verte” where it feels good to walk in the narrow streets with evocative names where you discover an example of twelve centuries of history at each step. “But we are in a museum!” Thus exclaimed Violet-le-Ducwhen he discovered the “little town of Saint-Antonin” on day in September 1842.
