The braderie takes over central Lille from Saturday afternoon until Sunday evening without closing overnight: professional antique dealers, households emptying attics, and around a hundred kilometres of stalls along the pavements. The accompanying ritual is moules-frites, eaten at every restaurant in the city, which competes to build the tallest pile of discarded shells on the pavement outside.
Its origins are medieval — a servants' right to sell their masters' cast-offs once a year — and it has run, with interruptions, since the twelfth century.
The attendance figure most often quoted has no year and no stated method attached to it. The city has not published a comparable recent count, so we record none; the honest statement is that the crowd is very large and uncounted.
Lille is an hour from Paris and thirty-five minutes from Brussels by rail, and the trains that weekend are the busiest of the year.
PlanningAnchored to the first weekend of September, running continuously from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening.