La Flèche

La Flèche is a town and commune on the Loir River in the Sarthe department of the Pays de la Loire region, in the Loire Valley of western France. It serves as the sub-prefecture of the south of the department, is the chief town of its canton and is the second most populous commune in Sarthe, with 14,947 inhabitants counted for 2023. Its people are called Fléchois. The town lies about halfway between Le Mans and Angers, on the Greenwich Meridian, and the former communes of Sainte-Colombe, Saint-Germain-du-Val and Verron have been absorbed into it. La Flèche grew up on the old border of Maine and Anjou, and Henry IV founded a royal Jesuit college there in 1603, the origin of the Prytanée National Militaire that still stands in the town. Settlers from La Flèche also took part in founding Montreal in the seventeenth century. The origin of its name is uncertain, though it may relate to the Latin Fixa, meaning a fixed boundary stone.