Place Sathonay

This guide to Place Sathonay in Lyon opens with gunfire in an Algerian cotton field on April 11, 1842, when a young Lyon sergeant named Blandan and twenty-one mail-carrying soldiers were surrounded by roughly three hundred horsemen. It follows how the French army turned his last words into a lesson recited by generations of schoolchildren, and how the bronze statue above the square was melted down in one war and recast in another. Look for the boules players and children still gathered on the steps below him.