Dieppe is a commune in the Seine-Maritime department in the Haute-Normandie region of France. In 1999, the population of the whole Dieppe urban area was 81,419. A port on the English Channel, famous for its scallops, and with a regular ferry service from the Gare Maritime to Newhaven in England, Dieppe also has a popular pebbled beach, a 15th-century castle and the churches of Saint Jacques and Saint Remi. First recorded as a small fishing settlement in 1030, Dieppe was an important prize fought over during the Hundred Years' War. Dieppe housed the most advanced French school of cartography in the 16th century, and was the premier port of the kingdom in the 17th century. On July 23, 1632, 300 colonists heading to New France departed from Dieppe. At the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Dieppe lost 3000 of its Huguenot citizens, who fled abroad. Dieppe was an important target in wartime; the town was largely destroyed by an Anglo-Dutch naval bombardment in 1694. Rebuilt after 1696, it was popularised as a seaside resort following the 1824 visit of the widowed Duchess of Berry, Charles X’s daughter-in-law. She encouraged the building of the recently-renovated municipal theater, the Petit-Theatre (1825), associated particularly with Camille Saint-Sans. During the later nineteenth century, Dieppe became popular with English artists as a beach resort. Prominent literary figures such as Arthur Symons loved to keep up with the latest fads of avant-garde France here, and during the season sometimes stayed for weeks on end. The Dieppe Raid in the Second World War became known as a bloody battle, and a costly one for the Allies. On August 19, 1942 Allied soldiers, mainly drawn from the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, landed at Dieppe in the hope of occupying the town for a short time, gaining intelligence and drawing the Luftwaffe into open battle. The Allies suffered more than 1,400 deaths, 1,946 Canadian soldiers were captured, and no major objectives were achi...