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The Lyonnais may be cheese-eaters but they were by no means all surrender-monkeys. The question of who betrayed the resistance hero Jean Moulin in the city still smoulders half a century on. Moulin, whom De Gaulle had charged with coordinating the resistance throughout southern France, had gathered in Lyon, then a hotbed of the antifascist insurrection, with other senior figures in the movement, in the house of a Dr Dugoujon, on June 21 1943. They were meeting to elect a head of the Armé Secrète - the united military force of the otherwise quarrelsome factions of the underground struggle.

But the Gestapo had somehow been forewarned of the rendezvous, and so valuable did their haul promise to be that Klau Barbie, the chief of the secret police in Lyon, turned up in person to arrest the resistance men. They took Moulin to the Ecole Santé Militaire, and there tortured him at length. However, as Barbie disclosed in his 1987 trial in the city, Moulin gave away not a single secret about the paramilitary front that would now be even more vulnerable without his leadership. As to who betrayed the former civil servant and his comrades in the first place, Barbie would say nothing.

You can review the history of the resistance in Lyon at the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance, in the former military building in Lyon in which Moulin and numerous other resistance figures were brutally interrogated. The permanent display - evocative if occasionally over-slick in its lighting and sound effects - includes originals of the crudely printed publications of the clandestine army, such as the nascent newspaper Libération: still gripping in their irrepressible defiance.

But it was not just its dramatic resistance history, nor the cheese-eating (more on the fabled gastronomy later) that drew me to Lyon - the regional capital of the Rhône-Alpes region, hunkered just above its more famous cousin, Provence - but also a bold attempt being staged there to re-examine the birth, in the city, of cinema. An exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts promised to throw new light on the coming-into-being of the exemplary 20th century art form.

It did so by recasting the role of the Lumière brothers in cinema history. Louis and Auguste Lumière may have shot the first ever film - a mundane but somehow affecting clip of workers leaving the family’s Lyon photographic factory - but critics have long portrayed them as mere technicians rather than auteurs.

But the curators presented compelling evidence - as if in a courtroom of the arts - not only of the shared preoccupations of the Impressionists and the Lumières but also of the direct influence of painters such as Monet, Pissaro, Renoir and Cézanne on Louis and Auguste as they made their groping forays into a form of representation they had themselves invented. The point was made straight away when the visitor, on entering the exhibition, is confronted with a continuous projection of the brothers’ 1896 film of waves battering upon rocks, which has seemingly brought motion to a Monet oil of 10 years earlier, Tempête de Belle Île, hanging next to it.

More film/painting pairings illustrate a common focus on the setting and sets of fledgling modernity - urban life, mechanised transport and industry. Giuseppe de Nittis’s late 19th century study La National Gallery et L’église St Martin’s in the Fields - with strolling, top-hatted gents and sandwich-board men spattered by coaches making the muddy circuit around Trafalgar Square - is matched with footage shot by the Lumière brothers and their cameramen in London, Moscow and Berlin. Celluloid stones tumble in the fleeting Demolition of a Wall, next to men at work on a canal-bank in a Stanislas Lépine painting. A panorama of snow-shrouded Aix-les-Bains shot from a train accompanies Monet’s depiction of a steam-cloaked La Gare Saint-Lazare.

The Impressionists’ influence on the Lumières - far from being incidental or unconscious, as critics have tended to regard it - was, the exhibition argues, obvious and powerful. Indeed, the invention of film seemed to realise the Impressionists’ two overriding obsessions: the representation of movement and of light. Of their father, Antoine Lumière, an amateur painter throughout his life, Jean-Luc Godard said, in 1967, he was “a painter … the last Impressionist painter”.

Light and image artfully combined feel typical of Lyon. The city was one of the first in France to institute a “light plan”: the operatic nocturnal floodlighting of monuments and bridges along the Rhône and the Saône. Each year, around December 8, a Festival of Lights sees the city given over to illumination, from fantastical scenarios projected on to the facades of the main buildings to numerous incandescent installations in the traboules, the narrow, ancient passageways that traverse Vieux Lyon. And the fresco has been reinvented to startling effect in the form of enormous trompes l’oeil on riverbank apartment buildings.

The exhibition, and its mirrored themes throughout the city, repaid my decision to test a theory: that ever-cheaper international travel makes a gallery trip from Britain to the Continent barely more of an exertion than a day out at the National Gallery. A budget flight from the UK will get you to Lyon in just over an hour and for little more than the cost of a black-cab ride through London. Indeed, cross-Manche museum-hopping felt almost too easy: I took the train to Lyon, but, even so, the five-hour journey from Waterloo was so smooth - the change at Lille a mere saunter over the platform - it barely registered that I was in France.

The author Will Self recently lamented the banalisation of air travel: that surely golden-robed creatures with winged-helmets should accompany you on your ascent into the heavens, rather than badly teenagers in grubby uniforms. Something similar might be said of the border-erasing Eurostar: perhaps a burst of the Marseillaise on the intercom when the train passes Calais is called for or a complimentary round of trappist ale at the Belgian border.

Still, I soon knew I was in Lyon, not because of the ambience of slightly dated pop music and the sharp pulchritude increase - common French qualities - but because I could not seem to order a bad meal. Lyon may have conceded the culinary crown of France to Paris but it still offers more than ample pleasures to the palate. The “bouchon” restaurants throughout the city serve up the kind of honest fare that fuelled Lyon’s traditionally militant working class. At the other, fine-dining end of the scale, the native Lyonnais chef Paul Bocuse still presides, from his restaurant L’Auberge du Point de Collonges. A meal there starts at euros100, but you can get a taste of his talents at one of the four brasseries, named after the compass points, he has recently opened in Lyon.

I had lunch at Le Nord, selecting from the all-day, three-dish menu du jour, for euros20. The entree, a “Lyonnais speciality”, minced hot sausage and pistachio embedded, toad-in-the-hole-like, in bread, was more interesting than delicious. But my main, a simple, spit-roasted slice of sirloin, served with gratin dauphinois, was like the platonic ideal of a brasserie dish. Not even the doddery diner at the next table, madly demanding of every waiter, “Am I bothering you?” distracted from my sadness at its passing, forkful by richly flavoursome forkful. As for the cheese-eating, a semi-circle of Saint-Marcellin, poised between solid and liquid, was just enough to finish. A 46cl “pot” of the house Côtes du Rhône (the measure, common in Lyon, is a legacy of Lyonnais silk-workers’ stingy wine ration) married contentedly with all the dishes.

The gustatory preoccupation of the Rhône-Alpes finds abstract expression in the Université; du Vin, about 90 minutes’ south of Lyon, in the restored 12th century château of Suze-la-Rousse. I had imagined this improbable institution as staffed by lumbering, crapulous faculty with a tracery of their studies on their ties, their students doomed Byronic types or proto-Bukowskis, but Jacques Avril, in charge of external relations, wanted to talk about “le marketing”.

“Now so much more of the cost of a bottle is marketing,” he said, indicating a good one-third of one with his hands. The threat came from the new-world wines, but he was philosophical about it. “It’s just a certain stage in the development of capitalism,” he said, with a shrug; French vignerons had to accommodate.

But exposure to vulgar market forces had not stripped him of his sensibility. He poured me a glass of an award-garlanded Crozes Hermitage. “Sniff it,” he said; “don’t swill.” “Now swill, and then sniff … Voila!” He looked up from his glass. “Blackberries and … the sea!”

And he was right: mysteriously emanating from the ruby liquid was an essence of fishing nets, sand and seaweed. I sipped, and I could almost hear the gulls. He was offering me another wine now and I looked around for somewhere to spit out the first, but there was no bucket. Oh, well.

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