Coordinates: 48°41′06″N 1°21′20″W / 48.685°N 1.3556°W / 48.685; -1.3556

Avranches is a commune in the Manche department in the Basse-Normandie region in north-western France. It is a sub-prefecture of the department. The inhabitants are called Avranchinais.

By the end of the Roman period, the settlement of Ingena, capital of the Abrincatui tribe, had taken the name of the tribe itself. This was the origin of the name Avranches. In 511 the town became the seat of a bishopric (suppressed in 1790).

In 933 Avranches and its territory, the Avranchin, were ceded to the Normans.

In 1172 (September 27–28) a council was held at Avranches apropos of the troubles caused in the English Church by the murder of the Anglo-Norman saint Thomas Becket. Henry II, King of England, after due penance done in Avranches on 21 May 1172, was absolved from the censures incurred by the assassination of the holy prelate, and reached the Compromise of Avranches with the Church, swearing fidelity to Pope Alexander III in the person of the papal legate.

Arielle Dombasle (born April 27, 1958) is a French-American singer, actress, director and model. Her breakthrough roles were in Éric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach (1983) and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Blue Villa (1995). She is best known to American audiences for her appearances on Miami Vice and the 1984 miniseries Lace. She has released eight singles between 1978 and 2011 and seven albums.

She was born Arielle Laure Maxime Sonnery de Fromental in Norwich, Connecticut, the daughter of Jean-Louis Melchior Sonnery de Fromental, a silk manufacturer, and Francion Garreau-Dombasle. She is part of a significant French-American immigrants in Mexico under her grand father diplomatic tenure. Dombasle family's surname was created in 1912, when Dombasle's grandfather René Sonnery (1887–1925), an industrialist from Lyon, married Anne-Marie Berthon du Fromental. In memory of her mother who died at the age of 36, Arielle Sonnery, she took the pseudonym of "Arielle Dombasle".

She and her brother Gilbert were raised in Mexico by their maternal grandparents after their mother's death in 1964. She was also raised at Château de Chaintré, the Sonnery family estate near Saumur, Maine et Loire. Her maternal grandfather, Maurice Garreau-Dombasle, was a close friend of and advisor to Charles de Gaulle and served as the French ambassador to Mexico. Her maternal grandmother was Man'Ha Dombasle (née Germaine Massenet, 1898–1999), a writer and poet who translated Rabindranath Tagore's works into French and was a longtime friend of the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who dedicated his 1972 novel The Halloween Tree to her.