Montbéliard and Sochaux: The Lutheran Principality and the Peugeot Adventure

Required Activities

• At the castle, tell the two great round towers apart — the Tour Henriette of 1424 and the Tour Frédéric of 1572 and 1595 — and inside find the Montbéliard-style furniture, pegged together without a single nail, including pieces signed by the local cabinetmaker Couleru

• Inside the temple, find the Latin foundation plaque of 18 October 1607 naming the architect Heinrich Schickhardt, look up at the flat ceiling held by nothing but the roof frame over a span of 16 m, and then outside work out why a Lutheran temple has a bell tower at all: the townspeople added one after 1677 to pass the building off as a church and save it from Louis XIV's demolition order

• At Sochaux, work back through the hall to the earliest cars — the numbered Peugeot Types of the 1890s — then find the other half of the firm among the 3,000 stamped objects: the coffee and pepper mills, the saw blades, the sewing machines and the radio sets

• Eat a saucisse de Montbéliard with lentils or hot cancoillotte and check it against its protected specification: natural casing at least 25 mm across, cumin in the seasoning, ten hours of conifer smoke in a tuyé, and pigs fattened on whey from the cheese dairies

• Find the Pierre à poissons, the medieval stone fish-stall in the old town from which Guillaume Farel is said to have preached the Reformation in 1524, then look out for the red-and-white Montbéliarde cows on the slopes above the town — a breed that was called the Alsacienne until 1870, when the name of a lost province stopped selling and the anabaptist herders renamed it after Montbéliard