Sainte-Menehould

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (July 2014) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

View a machine-translated version of the French article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Sainte-Menehould]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Sainte-Menehould}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Commune in Grand Est, France

Coat of arms

Location of Sainte-Menehould

(2020–2026) Bertrand Courot^[1]Area

57.11 km² (22.05 sq mi)Population

(2021)^[2]

4,166 • Density73/km² (190/sq mi)Time zoneUTC+01:00 (CET) • Summer (DST)UTC+02:00 (CEST)INSEE/Postal code

51507 /51800

Elevation132–261 m (433–856 ft)¹ French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries.

Sainte-Menehould (French pronunciation: [sɛ̃t mənu]; German: Sankt Mathilde) is a commune in the Marne department in north-eastern France.^[3] The 18th-century French playwright Charles-Georges Fenouillot de Falbaire de Quingey (1727–1800) died in Sainte-Ménéhould. It was the subprefecture of the arrondissement of Sainte-Menehould until its abolition in April 2017.^[4]

History

Dom Pérignon, the Benedictine monk who made important contributions to the production and quality of Champagne wine, and is often (erroneously) credited with its invention, was born in Sainte-Menehould around 1638.

As part of the county of Clermont-en-Argonne, Sainte-Menehould was in the Duchy of Lorraine until 1641, when the county was ceded to France; in 1648, it was granted as an appanage to Louis, le Grand Condé, effectively making it independent of Crown control.^[5]

Condé established Sainte-Menehould as his capital and fortified it in 1652, when he was leader of the 1650-1653 civil war known as the Fronde des nobles. The military engineer Vauban worked on the fortifications as a member of Condé's regiment; he changed sides when captured by a Royalist patrol in early 1653.^[6] Condé's governor, the Comte de Montal surrendered the town in November 1653, allegedly in return for a payment of 50,000 pistoles.^[7]

After his return to France in 1659, Condé retained Clermont, which remained in his family until the abolition of feudalism in France during the French Revolution in 1790. The next year, Louis XVI passed through the town during the Flight to Varennes, where he was recognized, allegedly on account of the similarity between his face and the image on the coinage. The royal party left the town before the significance of the king's recognition had been acted upon, but they were pursued along the road towards Varennes and arrested by Citizen Drouet the local postmaster.

130 years later Ste-Menehould was important in the Champagne Riots of 1910/1911.

Following the end of World War I, Sainte-Menehould saw the birth of French sociologist Michel Crozier.

Population

Historical population
Year	Pop.	±% p.a.
1968	5,392	—
1975	5,772	+0.98%
1982	5,667	−0.26%
1990	5,177	−1.12%
1999	4,979	−0.43%
2007	4,590	−1.01%
2012	4,321	−1.20%
2017	4,120	−0.95%
Source: INSEE^[8]

Cuisine

The town and its several restaurants pride themselves on serving a local specialty called pied de cochon or pig's trotter à la Sainte-Menehould, which are cooked for hours, to the point of softening the bones and making them edible.

Twinning

Cupar, Fife, Scotland

Cap-Pelé, NB, Canada

References

^ "Répertoire national des élus: les maires" (in French). data.gouv.fr, Plateforme ouverte des données publiques françaises. 13 September 2022.
^ "Populations légales 2021". The National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. 28 December 2023.
^ INSEE commune file
^ Décret n° 2017-453 du 29 mars 2017 portant suppression de l'arrondissement de Sainte-Menehould (département de la Marne) (in French)
^ Monter, William (2007). Calabi, Donatella (ed.). Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (2013 ed.). CUP. p. 118. ISBN 978-1107412798.
^ Duffy, Christopher (1995). Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494-1660. Routledge. p. 136. ISBN 978-0415146494.
^ Birch, Thomas (1742). A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe. Thomas Woodward, Paternoster Row. p. 595. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
^ Population en historique depuis 1968, INSEE