For most of its first millennium, Dunkirk was a chess piece. The Counts of Flanders walled it in around AD 960 against Viking raids; monks from nearby Bergues Abbey drained the surrounding marshes for farmland. Over the centuries the town passed between Flemish counts, Burgundian dukes, Habsburg Spain, the Dutch rebels, the French, the English, and the French again. In 1658 Franco-English forces took the city after the Battle of the Dunes; the English held it for four years until Charles II - short of cash and uninterested in a continental enclave - sold it back to Louis XIV in October 1662 for five million livres. The French king promptly turned the port into a corsair stronghold. Jean Bart, the most famous of Dunkirk's commerce raiders, raided English shipping into legend; a statue of him still stands in the central square.

The town entered the twentieth century with 39,000 people and exited the First World War with fewer than 7,000. German shelling killed nearly 600 inhabitants between 1914 and 1918 and damaged 2,400 buildings. The city was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, the Legion of Honour, and a British Distinguished Service Cross for the gallantry of its residents - awards that still appear on the municipal coat of arms. None of it prepared Dunkirk for what came in 1940, when the British Expeditionary Force and elements of the French Army fell back to the beaches between Gravelines and Nieuwpoort and the Luftwaffe began burning what was left of the port. By the time the last evacuation ship pulled away on 4 June 1940, an estimated 1,000 civilians had been killed and the town's water supply had been knocked out. Allied bombing during the four years of German occupation finished the job. When the German garrison finally surrendered to Brigade General Alois Liška of the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade on 9 May 1945, roughly 90 percent of Dunkirk lay in ruins.

What replaced the old city is unsentimental. The post-war reconstruction kept a few landmarks - the belfry, the church of Saint-Éloi, Jean Bart's statue, the Hôtel de Ville - and laid out the rest in a brisk, modern grid suited to handling cargo. Dunkirk's harbour is now the third-largest in France, moving steel, grain, and containers along quays that stretch west toward Mardyck and Gravelines. Petite-Synthe, Rosendaël, Malo-les-Bains, Saint-Pol-sur-Mer and Fort-Mardyck have been folded into the commune over the decades, bringing the 2019 population to 86,279. In 2018 the city went further than any French peer its size, making all its urban buses free of charge - a policy that became national news when ridership rose by more than half within a year.

Every year, in the weeks before Lent, the rebuilt town misbehaves spectacularly. The Carnival of Dunkirk runs for three days around Mardi Gras and turns the city into a churning sea of costumed *carnavaleux* in oilskins and feathered hats, packed shoulder to shoulder behind a *tambour-major* and his band of fifes. Crowds chant, hurl smoked herring from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, and surge through the streets in a *bande* - a snaking line linked arm in arm that anyone is welcome to join, provided they can keep their footing. The tradition reaches back to the eighteenth century, when fishermen feasted before leaving for the dangerous Iceland cod season; their descendants kept the party going long after the cod fleet went away. For seventy-two hours a year, the church in the dunes is a city out of its mind.

From the air, Dunkirk reads clearly: a long, low coastline of pale sand running east toward Belgium, a working port studded with cranes, the canal to Bergues cutting inland, and behind the dunes the squared-off blocks of post-war housing. The belfry of Saint-Éloi - listed by UNESCO with the other Belfries of Belgium and France - is one of the few vertical landmarks. Just east of the city centre sit the Commonwealth war cemetery and the Dunkirk Memorial, names cut into Portland stone; six kilometres further on, the Fort des Dunes still hunches behind its sand cover at Leffrinckoucke. The town that was sold, burned, bombed, occupied, liberated, and rebuilt has settled, for now, into being a port - one that runs free buses, throws an outsized carnival, and keeps the past at the edges of the map.