War and Canals

France's canals have been both strategic assets and battlegrounds. Napoleon understood their military importance, ordering new canals to move troops and supplies. During the Franco-Prussian War, canals carried provisions to besieged Paris. In World War I, British and American forces relied on canals to supply the Western Front.

World War II brought destruction and heroism to the waterways. Resistance fighters sabotaged locks to impede German movements. Jewish refugees fled on coal barges, hidden beneath cargo. The liberation saw fierce fighting along major canals as Germans tried to hold strategic waterways.

"My grandfather was a passeur—a smuggler of people, not goods," recounts David Meyer, whose family operated barges on the Rhine-Marne canal. "He hid Jewish families, Allied airmen, anyone fleeing the Nazis. The Germans never suspected an old bargeman. After the war, some of the families he saved still visited, bringing their children to meet the man who saved their parents."