Walk into the town center and the eye is pulled upward by the seventy-four-meter clock tower of the Hotel de Ville - an ornate spire visible from out at sea, listed by UNESCO in 2005 as part of the Belfries of Belgium and France. It chimes throughout the day. On its first floor are the staircase, wedding room, VIP lounge, council chamber, and cabinet room, all separately listed historic monuments by a 2003 government decree that names individual rooms as if naming saints. Inside Notre-Dame de Calais, in the church a few blocks away, a young army captain named Charles de Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux on 6 April 1921. The cathedral itself dates partly to 1631-1635, was split in two by a Channel earthquake in 1580, repaired six times, and served as an air raid shelter during the Second World War. It has the kind of layered history that a town does not curate so much as accumulate.

Calais owes a significant part of its modern self to a single textile invention. In 1804 the Lyon weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard perfected a loom that used punched cards to automate the weaving of complex patterns - the direct ancestor of the modern computer's stored program. By the 1820s, English Nottingham lacemakers fleeing political crackdowns smuggled the technology across the Channel and set up in Calais and Saint-Pierre. The town became the world capital of mechanical lace. Buildings the size of factories produced fine tulle, chantilly, and bobbin lace for couturiers in Paris, London, and New York. A statue of Jacquard was erected in 1910 opposite the entrance to the Calais Theatre - a town immortalizing a man who had never lived there, in gratitude for what his machine had made possible. The Cite de la Dentelle et de la Mode, in a converted nineteenth-century factory, still preserves the looms.

Between 2015 and the autumn of 2016, the woods and dunes at the eastern edge of Calais became a place the world's media took to calling the Jungle. Thousands of people - Syrians, Eritreans, Afghans, Sudanese, men, women, and children fleeing wars and persecutions of every imaginable kind - lived in tents and makeshift shelters in the sand, waiting for the chance to climb onto a truck or a train bound for Britain. At its peak the camp held perhaps ten thousand people. Volunteers from across Europe came to run schools, kitchens, libraries, and a small church and mosque. French authorities cleared the camp in October 2016, dispersing its residents across reception centers throughout France. The clearance did not end the migration. People still arrive in Calais hoping to reach the UK; people still drown in the Channel trying to cross it in small boats. The Jungle is gone. The reason people came to build it is not.

More than ten million people pass through Calais every year, most of them never stopping. The Port of Calais, France's fourth-largest and largest by passenger traffic, sends ferries to Dover roughly every thirty minutes. Four miles west of town in Coquelles, the Eurotunnel Calais Terminal loads cars and lorries onto the Le Shuttle trains that dive under the seabed and emerge thirty-five minutes later in Folkestone, Kent. Calais-Frethun station, a few stops down the line, is the Eurostar's last French call before the tunnel; from here Paris is two hours and London is just over one. The town's mayor since 2008 is Natacha Bouchart, who succeeded thirty-seven consecutive years of Communist Party mayors. Calais Racing Union, the football club that famously reached the 2000 Coupe de France final as an amateur side, was liquidated in 2017. The lace factories that survive mostly do so as museums. The town the English once called the brightest jewel in their crown spends most of its days waving travelers through it on the way somewhere else.