Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon

The Fortifications of Vauban is a UNESCO World Heritage Site made up of 12 groups of fortified buildings and sites along the borders of France. They were designed by renowned military architect Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) during the reign of King Louis XIV. These sites include a variety of fortifications, ranging from citadels, to mountain batteries and sea fortifications, to bastion walls and towers. In addition, the site includes cities built from scratch by Vauban and communication towers. These sites were chosen because they exemplify Vauban's work, bearing witness to the influence of his designs on military and civilian engineering on a global scale from the 17th century to the 20th century.The network of major sites of Vauban is an association of cities created on March 30, 2005 at the initiative of the city of Besançon. It includes the twelve sites which best represent the fortification system erected by Vauban. The application file was selected on January 5, 2007 by the Ministry of Culture to represent France. On July 7, 2008, twelve of the network's fourteen sites were added to the list at the UNESCO annual meeting in Quebec City.

Centre-Chapelle des Buis, also known as La Boucle, is the district corresponding to the historic center of the city of Besançon. The name La Boucle comes from the meander of the Doubs in which the city originally developed, and whose very shape is that of a loop (Bucle). Until the second half of the 19th century, this district, along with Battant, was the only part of the city of Besançon, before urban expansion into the surrounding areas. The district had a population of 10,659 habitants in 2018, making it the city's sixth most populous district. The economic heart of the city, La Boucle is home to the vast majority of the city's shops and services, as well as virtually all government offices. Thanks to its flourishing past, the district boasts the city's richest and most complete architectural heritage, with around a hundred remarkable buildings, dozens of statues and several bridges, squares and streets. The district is also one of the city's and region's most popular tourist destinations, thanks in particular to the Citadelle de Besançon, one of the city's most representative monuments, welcoming more than 250,000 visitors every year.

The canton of Besançon-5 is an administrative division of the Doubs department, eastern France. It was created at the French canton reorganisation which came into effect in March 2015. Its seat is in Besançon.It consists of the following communes:

Besançon Cathedral (French: Cathédrale Saint-Jean de Besançon) is a Roman Catholic church dedicated to Saint John located in the city of Besançon, France. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Besançon. The cathedral consists of a large nave between two aisles, and dates from the 11th to the 13th century. It has two facing apses, each with an altar. The lack of a transept and the facing apses parallel the designs of contemporary German cathedrals. The Romanesque arches date from the 13th century. It does not have a main doorway. The choir dates to the 18th century. The cathedral is situated near the base of Mont Saint-Étienne, below the citadel. To the east of the cathedral is the 16th-century Porte Rivotte, with two round towers, and pedestrian walkways dating to the 19th century. To the west is the Porte Noire, a Roman triumphal arch of the 2nd century with extensive sculptural decoration.

The Archdiocese of Besançon (Latin: Archidiœcesis Bisuntina; French: Archidiocèse de Besançon) is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or archdiocese of the Catholic Church in France. It comprises the département of Doubs (except for Montbéliard) and the département of Haute-Saône (except for the canton of Héricourt). The see is currently sede vacante. From 1034 to 1184, the archbishop had civil authority within the Holy Roman Empire as the prince-archbishop of Besançon. He gradually lost his civil power to the town council; the city became the Imperial city of Besançon in 1184. The city was annexed by France in stages, eventually being fully subsumed by France in 1792 during the French Revolution. The Archdiocese of Besançon is a metropolitan see with five suffragan dioceses in its ecclesiastical province: the Dioceses of Belfort-Montbéliard, Nancy, Saint–Claude, Saint-Dié, and Verdun.

A terrorist attack targeted the Besançon courthouse on 9 May 1970. It was perpetrated with a bomb by two men from OAS and UDR movements, in a context of resurgence of far-right violence in France.

The Besançon astronomical clock is housed in Besançon Cathedral. Auguste-Lucien Vérité fr:Auguste-Lucien Vérité of Beauvais designed and built Besançon's present astronomical clock, between 1858 and 1863. It replaced an earlier clock that Bernardin had constructed in the 1850s that proved unsatisfactory. Besançon's clock differs from those in Strasbourg, Lyon, and Beauvais. The clock is meant to express the theological concept that each second of the day the Resurrection of Christ transforms the existence of man and of the world.

The Parliament of Besançon (French: Parlement de Besançon) was one of the parlements of the French Ancien Régime, seated in Besançon, in the province of Franche-Comté. It was created in 1676. The previous parlement for much of the region had been at Dole, and had been created in 1422. In 1674, French troops took the city of Besançon, which the Treaty of Nijmegen (1678) then awarded to France. In 1676 the French authorities wound up the previously democratic form of government of the formerly Free City of Besançon. As part of the deal the city became the administrative centre for Franche-Comté, with the Parliaement of Besançon administering the area, replacing the Parliament of Dole.Franche-Comté was one of the last parts of France to have serfdom. The Parliament of Besançon blocked a decree from Louis XVI banning degrading practices towards serfs from 1779 until 1787.

The Free Imperial City of Besançon was a self-governing free imperial city that was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Its capital was Besançon. From 1184 until 1654 the city of Besançon was a free imperial city (German: Freie Reichsstadt) as shown by the coat of arms until today and called Bisanz. The city was first separated from the governance of the County of Burgundy in 1034 as a prince-bishopric, an ecclesiastical state in the Holy Roman Empire. The city was governed by the Prince-Archbishopric of Besançon, although later most of his power would devolve to a council within the town. The free imperial city enclosed only the city of Besançon in the Franche-Comté so for a large part of the time it was controlled those who controlled access across the surrounding land, first by the dukes of Burgundy, and then by the Habsburgs. Finally, it lost its imperial status but remained a free city.

The musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie (Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology) in the French city of Besançon is the oldest public museum in France. It was set up in 1694, nearly a century before the Louvre became a public museum. Reorganized from 1967 to 1970 by Louis Miquel, a pupil of Le Corbusier, the museum is again the subject of a total renovation and an enlargement from October 2015. Three years later, the completely renovated museum was inaugurated on November 16, 2018 in the presence of the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, the Minister of Culture Franck Riester and the Mayor Jean-Louis Fousseret. Attendance is then on the rise with 105,459 visitors recorded at the end of 2019.

The University of Franche-Comté (UFC) is a pluridisciplinary public French university located in Besançon, Franche-Comté, with decentralized campuses in Belfort, Montbéliard, Vesoul and Lons-le-Saunier. It is a founding member of the community of universities and institutions University of Burgundy - Franche-Comté (COMUE UBFC), headquartered in Besançon and which federates universities and other higher learning institutes in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region. With 28 research labs, 667 PhD students and 788 research professors in 2016–2017, the University of Franche-Comté is well represented in the research community. It collaborates with many organizations (University Hospital of Besançon, CNRS, INSERM, CEA, etc.). It has about 29,000 students, including nearly a third of scholarship students and 12% of foreign students. Its Centre for Applied Linguistics (CLA) is one of the world's leading schools for teaching French as a foreign language and French linguistics.

St. Stephen's Cathedral (French: Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Besançon) was a Roman Catholic church located in Besançon on the site of the current Citadel of Besançon in Franche-Comté, eastern France. The cathedral was thought to be constructed between 326 CE and the fifth century. Between the 12th and 13th centuries there was continuing friction between St. Stephen's Cathedral and St. John's Cathedral (French: Cathédrale Saint-Jean, the present Besançon Cathedral),which was believed to be a more recent foundation. Hugues de Salins, who redesigned St. John's, also led the reconstruction plans for St. Stephen's between 1033 and 1050. The two were intended to coexist, despite St. John's having more power in the elections of archbishops.In 1092 St. Stephen's complained that it had been stripped of its precedence, despite the archdiocese believing that it was the principal one of Besançon. In 1238 it was excommunicated due to its attacks against St. John's. Between 1253 and 1254, Archbishop Guillaume de la Tour unified the two chapters, a decision which was ratified by Pope Innocent IV on 1 August 1254.After the Battle of Besançon in 1575, masses were held at both cathedrals to celebrate the Catholic victory against the Protestants.From 1668 to 1675, St. Stephen's Cathedral was abandoned and it was later decided that it should be destroyed, along with some surrounding houses, to allow for the construction of the Citadel of Besançon, after Franche-Comté was given to Louis XIV of France in the Treaties of Nijmegen. However, it was then decided that the cathedral should remain, but it was stripped of its contents, and then destroyed in any case after an accidental fire, when construction of the citadel began. The present Besançon Cathedral currently contains 8 paintings that were copied from 15th-century frescos in the destroyed cathedral, and an eight-lobed marble altar now known as the Rose of Saint John.