AVENUE FOCH, ONE OF LE HAVRE’S main thoroughfares, is a broad, straight boulevard lined with buildings that seem to stand at attention. Only the two distant towers of the Porte Océane rise above the homogenous façades, forming a gigantic gateway that frames the sea. Beyond, container ships, ferries and cruise ships are silhouetted against the western horizon, gleaming brightly in the setting sun.

    The notion of “west” is key to understanding this city that is quite unlike any other. Today’s Le Havre is gearing up to be the port of Greater Paris—the fulfillment of a dream that goes way back. Guillaume Philippe, the city’s young mayor, talks about world-class cities—New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai—with access to a port, “to facilities for transporting merchandise, to globalization.” And Le Havre, France’s leading container port, proposes to be Paris’s “safe harbor” in this global era. It’s an aspiration that dates back at least 200 years. When First Consul Bonaparte visited the town in 1802, he declared, “Paris-Rouen-Le Havre: a single city with the Seine as its main road.” Forty-five years later, the first train pulled into the station of Le Havre after a six-hour journey from the capital; its wagons were emblazoned with a coat of arms bearing the motto Sic Lutetia Portus—“Thus Paris became a port.”

    But this time, it actually might happen. The “Grand Paris” project—a massive urban renewal plan for the French capital and its suburbs—includes a general overhaul of transportation and infrastructure. With expanded rail service and a TGV line connecting the capital to “its” port in less than an hour, the once utopian idea of a maritime Lutetia even makes sense. After all—and Americans know this better than anyone—“west” isn’t simply a compass point but an idea of the future. And from the beginning, Le Havre was oriented toward the future. When François I established it on marshland in 1517, Franciscopolis, as it was then known, was the first “new city” of France. It has been changing and redefining itself ever since. As playwright Yoland Simon writes in a charming book called Le Roman du Havre, “Ports never look back.”

Le Havre was conceived with the newly discovered Americas in mind, but things got off to a bad start. François I ordered the construction of La Grande Françoise, the largest ship ever built, weighing 2,000 tons and carrying three decks of artillery, a chapel, a forge and a windmill. Unfortunately, it was never launched—it capsized during a storm while still docked at port. Then in 1555, Nicolas de Villegagnon set sail from Le Havre to establish a French foothold in the southern hemisphere, founding a colony on an island in the bay of Rio de Janeiro. A Place des Cannibales, in the city’s historic Saint-François neighborhood, once commemorated that expedition.

    Undeterred, Le Havre continued to look westward, motivated first by exploration and then by commerce (including the slave trade), emigration and adventure. Beaumarchais came to Le Havre to equip a ship to assist the American Revolution in 1776. Lafayette set sail for the United States from Le Havre in 1779. In 1783, the first ship flying the flag of the new American republic sailed into the harbor. And it was here that in 1785, Benjamin Franklin boarded a vessel for his return journey to Philadelphia. This transatlantic love affair experienced its apotheosis in the late 1960s with the chic French ocean liners that carried le tout Paris to New York.

    François Vallejo, a literature professor and well-known novelist (one of his books is called Ouest) is a Havrais who wasn’t born in the city. Yet he says he feels quite comfortable here, and apparently many other transplants feel the same way. According to playwright Simon, “Often the Havrais who came from somewhere else […] doesn’t know exactly who he is. And that’s his identity.” You could say that about Vallejo and about the city itself, which—apart from being a port—surprises people by its lack of definition. Nothing tells us that we’re in Normandy, for example—not even a local cheese, pastry or culinary specialty. The most popular bistro is a brasserie, La Taverne Paillette, which specializes in choucroute and testifies to the city’s large number of Alsatian immigrants. Some families originally came here to escape the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, but others were lured by the spirit of adventure that thrives in port cities.

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