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Home > Travel France > France Destinations > Alencon
Alencon
France, officially the French Republic, is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in Western Europe and comprises various overseas islands and territories which are located in other regions. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. At 674,843 square kilometers, France is the world's 40th-largest country after Myanmar. France is a member of The European Union and Paris is the capital of this nation. The sole official language of France is French. Since prehistoric times, France has been a crossroads of trade, migrations, and invasions.
Alencon is a town in Normandy, France, capital of the Orne department. It is situated 105 miles west of Paris, and the town had a population of 30,380 in 1999. Alencon belongs to the Communaute urbaine d'Alencon with 52,000 people.
It was probably during the fourth century, while the area was being christianized, that the city of Alencon was born. The name is first seen in a document dated to the seventh century. During the tenth century, Alencon was a buffer state between Normandy and the Maine regions. Alencon was occupied by the English during the Anglo-Norman wars of 1113 to 1203. The city became the seat of a duke in 1415, belonging to the sons of France until the French Revolution, and some of them played an important role in French history.
The fabric industry, prosperous since 1650, started to decline at that time. The economic development of the nineteenth century and the industrial boom was generated by several factories, and transportation networks developed. Unfortunately, the major railway from Brest and Paris misses Alencon and favors Le Mans, 50 kilometers south. Today, Alencon is home to a prosperous plastics industry, and, since 1993, to a plastics engineering school.
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