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The Doubs River does something remarkable at Besancon: it bends nearly 360 degrees around a limestone bluff, creating a natural peninsular defense that has been exploited for fortification since the Romans occupied the site as Vesontio in the first century BCE. Julius Caesar described it admiringly in De Bello Gallico. The Vauban citadel, built by Louis XIV's military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban in the 1670s and 1680s, crowns the bluff with a fortress that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and contains three museums within its walls, including a museum of resistance and deportation that is among the most serious war museums in France.

Victor Hugo was born in Besancon on February 26, 1802, in a house on the Rue des Petits-Dames that still stands and carries a commemorative plaque.

His family left when he was an infant and he never returned to claim the city, but Besancon has claimed him back emphatically. The Musee des Beaux-Arts in the city center, one of the oldest public museums in France (opened 1694), holds a collection that includes work by Titian, Bellini, Courbet, and Ingres. Gustave Courbet, the Realist painter, was from Ornans, 25 kilometers south, and the influence of the limestone gorge landscape on his painting is evident when you see the local topography.