History of Strasbourg

At the site of Strasbourg, the Romans established a military outpost and named it Argentoratum. It belonged to the Germania Superior Roman province. From the 4th century, Strasbourg was the seat of a bishopric.

The Alamanni fought a battle against Rome in Strasbourg in 357. They were defeated by Julian, later Emperor of Rome, and their king Chonodomarius was taken prisoner. On January 2, 366 the Alamanni crossed the frozen Rhine in large numbers, to invade the Roman Empire. Early in the 5th century the Alamanni appear to have crossed the Rhine, conquered and then settled what is today Alsace and a large part of Switzerland.

The town was occupied successively in the 5th century by Alamanni, Huns and Franks, who gave it its present name. In 842, Strasbourg was the site of the Oath of Strasbourg, the text of which is considered to contain the oldest written document in the French language. A major commercial centre, the town came under control of the Holy Roman Empire in 923, through the homage paid by the Duke of Lorraine to German King Henry I. The early history of Strasbourg consists of a long conflict between its bishop and its citizens. The citizens emerged victorious after the Battle of Oberhausbergen in 1262, when King Philip of Swabia granted the city the status of an Imperial Free City.

A revolution in 1332 resulted in a broad-based city government with participation of the guilds, and Strasbourg declared itself a free republic. The minster of Strasbourg was completed in 1439, and became the World’s Tallest Building, surpassing the Great Pyramid of Giza. During the 1520s the city embraced the religious teachings of Martin Luther, whose adherents established a university in the following century. Strasbourg was a centre of humanist scholarship and early bookprinting in the Holy Roman Empire and its intellectual and political influence contributed much to the establishment of Protestantism as an accepted denomation in the southwest of Germany. Together with four other free cities Strasbourg presented the confessio tetrapolitana as her protestant book of faith at the Imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1530, where also the slightly different Augsburg confession was handed over to the emperor.

After the reform of the Imperial constitution in the early 16th century and the establishment of “Imperial Circles” (Reichskreise), Strasbourg was part of the “Upper Rhenish Circle”, a corparation of Imperial estates in the southwest of the empire, mainly responsible for maintiaining troops, supervising coining and securing public security.

During the Thirty Years War, the Free City of Strasbourg remained neutral. However, it was suddenly seized by King Louis XIV of France in September 1681, whose unprovoked annexation was recognized by the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). The official policy of religious intolerance which drove many Protestants from France after the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) was not applied in Strasbourg, as the Edict of Nantes (1598) had still been in effect in France at the time of the city’s annexation. With the growth of industry and commerce, the city’s population tripled in the 19th century to 150,000.

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed “La Marseillaise” on April 25, 1792 in Strasbourg during a dinner organised by Frederic de Dietrich, Strasbourg’s mayor. However, Strasbourg’s status as a free city was revoked by the French Revolution.

Annexed to the newly-established German Empire, as part of the Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen, in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War (Treaty of Frankfurt), the city was restored to France after World War I, in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles without a plebiscite, the outcome of which might not have been too convincing from the French point of view, since Strasbourg was almost exclusively German-speaking. It was again effectively a part of Germany during World War II, from 1940 to 1945.

In 1949, it was chosen to be the site of the Council of Europe, and since 1979, Strasbourg has been a seat of the European Parliament, although only 4 days each months sessions are held in Strasbourg - all other business is conducted in Brussels. Those sessions take place in the Immeuble Louise Weiss (also known as “IPE IV”), built in 1998, which houses the the largest parliamentary assembly room in Europe and of any democratic institution in the world. Before that, the EP sessions had to take place in the main CE building, whose unusual inner architecture had become a familiar sight to european TV audiences. In 1992, Strasbourg became the seat of the franco-german TV channel and movie-production society Arte.