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Though excavations have shown that Alsace was inhabited during the Stone Age and Bronze Age by wandering hunters, it was not until 1500 BC that the first settlers - the Celts- began to clear and cultivate the country. In 58 BC the Roman invasion ushered in a long period of prosperity and a burgeoning of culture in many areas.
It is generally agreed that the Romans established viticulture as a serious and organised business. the great Caesar himself referred to his newly conquered land as “optimus totius Galliae”, the best of all Gaul...” and to protect it built a series of fortifications and military camps.
One of the camps, known as Argentoratum, was enventually to develop into Strasbourg.
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Texts adapted from “A taste of Alsace” by Sue Style, published by Hearst Books and “Alsace the complete guide” by Vivienne Menkes-Ivry, published by Simon and Schuster.
We recommend highly the purchase of those books for a complete knowledge of Alsace.
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Romain Empire
With the decline of the Roman Empire came the Alemans (or Alemanni), an agricultural people whose language forms the basis of the dialect of Alsace. In the Fifth century the Franks drove out the Alemans and Alsace became a part of the Eastern Kingdom of Austrasia.
Next came the Merovingian period, an intense period of evangelism. In 750, Pepin the Brief, father of Charlemagne divided the duchy of Alsace into two parts : the Nordgau and the Sundgau. The approximate equivalent of today’s two departements of Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin.
The Empire of Charlemagne
Under Charlemagne (742-814), the church’s power in Alsace increased still further, monasteries and convents flourished and the province prospered. Though the Emperor only visited Alsace twice, his inspectors came regularly.
The impressive list of provisions specified in advance of their visits shows that Alsace in the eight century was rich and prosperous.
After the death of this first Great European Emperor, his sons dismantled his large Empire : first it was Lothaire who inherited the region but Louis the German temporarily snatched Alsace away from his brother. Then in 842, Louis and their half-brother Charles the Bald ganged up on Lothaire, swearing the oath of Strasbourg just outside the city. In signing this document - historically important as the earliest in which both French and German almost modern languages were used - they pledged themselves to an alliance against Lothaire.
A year later the Empire of Charlemagne was formally divided and Alsace would eventually fall again in Louis arms. For the next eight centuries, Alsace’s destiny was intimately linked to the Holy Roman Empire. Louis the Pious is chiefly remembered for his fondness for hunting in the Vosges. He further distinguished himself by allowing all wine to travel duty-free, thus giving an early boost to Alsace wine exports.
The Hohenstaufen Emperors
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the golden age of Alsace under the Hohenstaufen Emperors, one of whom, Frederick the first (Barbarossa), claimed Alsace to be “the dearest of our family possessions”. It was a period of intense urbanization which saw the birth of a powerful merchant class with increasingly sophisticated tastes.
During the second half of this same century Alsace was embellished with many beautiful Romanesque churches. This artistic flowering took place at a time when Alsace could boast of a number of rapidly expanding towns and cities, each with a wealthy merchant class and powerful guilds and trade associations.
In the early years of the thirteen century Strasbourg won the privileged status of “free imperial city”. The city’s magnificent Gothic cathedral was built under the direction not of the bishop, but of a body controlled by the town council.
Other towns that grew in importance during this period were Sélestat and Colmar, Wissembourg, Obernai and Mulhouse. The Hundred Years’s war helped in some ways to increase Alsace’s prosperity, as it became a convenient depot and trading post for goods that could not easily be transported through war-torn France.
Then the picture changed dramatically. A succesion of bad winters followed hard on the heels of poor harvests and then the crowning disaster of bubonic plague. For this the Jews proved a convenient scapegoat, and they were viciously persecuted in the pogroms of 1336 and1349.
The Habsbourgs
By now the Habsbourgs were on the imperial throne. The Renaissance in the Rhine lands brought a welcome return to peace and prosperity. Excess and riotous living became the order of the day, a fact which drew the fire of both religious and secular writers and orators. The region became a major intellectual and artisitc centre.
The brilliant team of architects and stone masons working on strasbourg’s cathedral drew journeymen from far and wide. The Colmar painter and engraver Martin Schongauer influenced artists all over Europe. Strasbourg, the setting of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type thirty years earlier, now had many of the leading printing work-shops in the german-speaking world.
This new vehicle for the rapid dissemination of information helped to spread the ideas and ideals of the Humanists, who were well represented in Alsace : the magnificent library built up by the humanist scholar Beatus Rhenanus, friend and biographer of Erasmus, can still be visited in Sélestat.
The Reformation
In the early sixteenth century the Reformation had considerable impact in Alsace, which still has a fairly large Protestant community to this day. Several of Luther’s tracts were printed in Strasbourg and the great preacher for whom the city was famous included a number of his followers. Calvin, too, spend several years in Strasbourg, meeting Luther there.
The eight formative centuries of Germanic influence in Alsace were drawing to a close as the Holy Roman Empire disintegrated into the tragedy of the Thirty Years war (1618-1648). The Protestant Swedes, provoked by the French to go to the aid of the German Princes, were pitted against the Catholics headed by the house of Habsburg. Alsace was the principal battleground, the country was laid bare, its population decimated, its vineyards reduced to charred stumps, its survivors condemned to a diet of acorns, goatskins, grass and sometimes human flesh.
At the conclusion, under the terms of the peace treaty of Westphalia (1648), the Hapsburgs handed over to France all previously held rights to the province. Seduced by the promise of religious tolerance guaranteed under the Edict of Nantes, Alsace for the first time in its history became French.
Louis XIV
By 1681 Louis XIV was looking over the Vosges and exclaiming over his new territory : “What a beautiful garden...”. Without any pressure from Paris, the province of its own volition became increasingly French in spirit, proud to belong to the country generaly regarded as the most civilized in Europe at the time, yet always retaining its Germanic customs and dialects.
By the beginning of Louis XV’s reign in the mid-eighteen century, most of the ruined towns and villages had been rebuilt. Prosperity had returned, symbolized by the elegant Rohan Palace in Strasbourg and Saverne. This was also the period when powerful family dynasties set up successful industries in Alsace. Mulhouse was starting to become a major industrial city, with particular strength in textiles.
In and around Niederbronn in the north-east, the De Dietrich family created important ironworks. By the time the French Revolution broke out in 1789, the people of Alsace felt thoroughly French, even though they were still culturally close to the German-speaking world.
La Marseillaise
A feather in Alsace’s patriotic cap was the fact that the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, was composed in Strasbourg by Rouget de l’Isle in 1792 and therefore should have been called “la Strasbourgeoise”. The excess of the Revolution shocked the traditionnally tolerant alsaciens, though they embraced some of the new ideas which it brought.
The establishement of the Empire brought with it a veritable Napoleonic cult : possibly the alsaciens were readily able to identify with this outsider from another far-flung French provinces, and to admire his power and ruthlessness.
It was something of a mutual admiration : Napoleon expressed a special affection for his Alsace regiments, attached as ever to their dialect : “Who cares if they don’t speak French ? Their sword do” was the Emperor answer to his officers poking fun at alsatian soldiers.
The Franco-Prussian war of 1870
During the nineteenth century industrialization continued. The Mulhouse’s textile factories became world leaders in chintze and other printed fabrics. Canals and railways were built. The fertile soil of Alsace became a major agricultural producer, with tobacco and hops important.
But only too soon that soil was once again the theater of a disastrous war. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 was largely fought in Alsace and resulted not only in terrible destruction and loss of life, but in the return to the German-speaking world of a people who were by now, patriotically French.
When Bismarck proclaimed Alsace a Reichsland French was banned in school and all newspapers had to be in German. Thousands emigrated, many to America : Bartholdi, in exile in Paris, created his famous Statue of Liberty, saying that it represented for him precisely that freedom which he and his fellow alsaciens were currently denied.
The annexation years signalled disaster for the vineyards, as Alsace wines were ignominiously used as bulk blending material for tart German wines. The German era brought social benefits not available in France as well an architectural legacy in some imposing public buildings in Strasbourg.
Alsace enjoyed considerable industrial development too, and was soon well ahead of France in the provision of mains water and drainage, and of electricity.
The First World War
The occupation fused inexorably with the First World War, the two countries were at war and, once again, Alsace became a battlefield. To add to the tragedy, many of her sons, conscripted into the Kaiser’s army, had to fight their former French compatriots.
The suffering of the region were compounded when the French authorities decided to intern as enemy aliens any Alsatian who happened to be in France or her overseas territories at the outbreak of war. Even the great Albert Schweiter dit not escape this highly insensitive ruling.
The post war period saw local agitation for Alsace to become an autonomous region.
A soviet of soldiers almost ruled Strasbourg in the first days of peace before French troops put a term to this original but doomed situation.
The economic depression of the 1930s inevitably had some effect, and Alsace also suffered from France’s unwillingness to invest in a region on which Hitler was starting to have designs.
This period was also marked by the building of the ill-fated Maginot Line, planned as an impregnable defence for France’s border with Germany.
September 1939
In September 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland, approximately one third of the population of Alsace was summarily evacuated to the other side of France, in Perigord.
in June 1940 the Maginot Line was easily breached and Alsace was once more annexed by the Germans. High German was declared the only permissible language. One hundred and forty thousand men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-eight were drafted into the German army, forced to fight on opposite sides from their own flesh and blood. The majority never returned. they were called the “Malgré-nous” (Against our will).
In 1945, after the Allies victory, the painstaking restoration of towns and villages began, hard work and determination once again led to the rebuilding of industry and agriculture.Shortly after the war, Alsace embarked on its new role as a symbol of European reconciliation and unity.
In 1949 Strasbourg was chosen as the seat of the Council of Europe. Thirty years later the European Parliament held the firts of its regular monthly meetings in the city.
Today, Strasbourg is also the European Court of Human rights.
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