Rhone
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ron, a river of central Europe. It rises in the famous Rhone glacier in the Swiss canton of Valais. Its general direction is westward into France, where it takes a turn to the southward and falls into the Gulf of Lyons. Where its cold waters issue from the enormous mass of the glacier, it may be crossed easily by stepping stones. The waters of the upper river are roily, but before leaving Switzerland it passes through Lake Geneva. Its silt is deposited in the upper end of that lake, and its blue waters leave the lake at its western extremity with the swiftness of an arrow. A mile or two to the westward of the Geneva, the Rhone receives the Arve, swollen by the waters of the valley of Chamonix and the glaciers of Mt. Blanc. At one place above its junction with the Saone, its principal tributary, the Rhone passes through a chasm so narrow that the overhanging rocks almost touch each other. It is said that at one point one may stand with a foot on either bank "and see between the beautiful river trembling as it were with rage, and hastening to escape from the defile through which it is doomed to pass." The waters have, of course, cut a wide passage underneath. Lyons, the center of the French silk industry, is the largest city on its banks. The lower or navigable portion of the river is connected with the Rhine and the Loire and Paris by a remarkable system of canals. The Rhone and the Rhine were for ages the great highway between southern and northern Europe. Speaking in his lines To the Rhone of its issuance from the glacier and its lordly course through France, Longfellow says: Forth, like a steel-clad horseman from a tower, With clang and clink of harness dost thou go To meet thy vassal torrents, that below Rush to receive thee and obey thy power. And now thou movest in triumphal march, A king among the rivers! On thy way A hundred towns await and welcome thee; Bridges uplift for thee the stately arch, Vineyards encircle thee with garlands gay, And fleets attend thy progress to the sea! --Longfellow.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 note that one could cross the infant Rhône on stepping stones at the glacier's snout no longer holds: the Rhône glacier has retreated well over a kilometre since the 19th century, a proglacial lake has formed at its foot since the mid-2000s, and its remaining ice is now draped in white blankets each summer to slow the melt. The narrow chasm above the Saône junction — the Perte du Rhône near Bellegarde, where the rocks 'almost touch each other' — was drowned in 1948 by the reservoir of the Génissiat dam. The whole French course was afterwards remade by the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône into a staircase of dams, locks and hydroelectric plants, so that barges now run from the Mediterranean to Lyon on a tamed, largely artificial channel, while the canal link to the Rhine that Aiton's called 'remarkable' carries almost no freight. The river's chief modern job would have astonished the writer: its water cools a string of nuclear power stations, including Bugey, Saint-Alban, Cruas and Tricastin.
Written for this edition, 2026.