ROCHEFORT a town of France, the chef-lieu of an arrondissement of the department of Charente Inférieure and of the fourth maritime prefecture, lies on the right bank of the Charente, 9 miles from the Atlantic, and is built partly on the side of a rocky hill and partly on old marshland, which renders the position unhealthy. The town is laid out with great regularity in chess-board fashion. The fortifications are sufficient merely to prevent it being taken by surprise. By rail it is connected with La Rochelle (18 miles north-north-west), Niort, and Saintes. There are both a naval and a commercial harbour. The former has the advantage of deep anchorage well protected by batteries at the mouth of the river, and the roadstead is perfectly safe. The windings of the channel, however, between Rochefort and the sea, and the bar at the entrance render navigation dangerous. This harbour and arsenal, which are separated from the town by a line of fortifications with three gates, contain large covered building yards (where eighteen vessels of the first class may be upon the stocks at once), eleven slips, three repairing docks, and on the right bank of the Charente in the Gardette meadows a large timber basin capable of floating 1,766,000 cubic feet of timber. Besides the various establishments implied in the name, the arsenal is the seat of a ropewalk dating from 1666, a school of navigation and pilotage, a signal-tower 98 feet high (once attached to a church), the offices of the maritime prefecture, the navy commissariat, a park of artillery, and various boards of direction connected with the navy. About 5000 or 6000 men are usually employed in the arsenal. Other Government establishments at Rochefort are barracks for infantry, artillery, and marines, a provision factory, and the ...naval hospital· (800 beds) and school of medicine. In the grounds of this last institution is an artesian well, sunk in 1862-66 to a depth of 2800 feet and yielding water at a temperature of 107° Fahr. The commercial harbour, higher up the river than the naval harbour, has two basins with an aggregate area of 5 acres and 3400 feet of quays, and a third basin is being constructed (1885) 25 acres in extent with 3800 feet of quays, capable of admitting large vessels on every day of the year. The town has good public and botanic gardens, and the Place Colbert contains an allegorical group representing the ocean and the Charente mingling their waters. Besides shipbuilding, which forms the staple industry of Rochefort, sailcloth and furniture are the local manufactures, and hemp for cordage is grown in the vicinity. Along with Tonnay-Charente, 4 miles higher up, Rochefort has a trade in brandies, salt, grain, flour, cattle, horses, fish, colonial wares, timber, and coal. There is regular steamboat communication with the United Kingdom. In 1882 285 vessels (128,570 tons) entered and 270 (123,501) cleared. The population of the town was 26,022 in 1881 (27,854 in the commune).
The lordship of Rochefort, held by powerful nobles as early as the 11th century, was united to the French crown by Philip the Fair in 1303; but it was alternately seized in the course of the Hundred Years’ War by the English and the French, and in the wars of religion by the Catholics and Protestants. Colbert having in 1665 chosen Rochefort as the seat of a repairing port between Brest and the Gironde, the town rapidly increased in importance: by 1674 it had 20,000 inhabitants; and, when the Dutch admiral Tromp appeared at the mouth of the river with seventy-two vessels for the purpose of destroying the new arsenal, he found the approaches so well defended that he gave up his enterprise. It λvas at Rochefort that the naval school now transferred to Brest was originally founded. The town continued to flourish in the later part of the 17th century. In 1690 and in 1703 it escaped from the attempts made by the English to destroy it. Its fleet under the command of La Galissonnière, a native of the place, did distinguished service in the wars of American independence, the republic, and the empire. But the destruction of the French fleet by the English in 1809 in the roadstead of lie d’Aix, the preference accorded to the harbours of Brest and Toulon, and the unhealthiness of its climate have seriously interfered with the prosperity of the place. The convict establishment founded at Rochefort in 1777 was suppressed in 1852.
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