Twin towns of Strasbourg

Strasbourg is twinned with:
Boston, United States, since 1960
Leicester, Great Britain, since 1960
Stuttgart, Germany (then West-Germany), since 1962
Dresden, Germany (ex-East-Germany), since 1990
Ramat Gan, Israel, since 1991
Jacmel, Haiti, since 1996 (Cooperation decentralisee)
Novgorod, Russia, since 1997 (Cooperation decentralisee)
Fes, Morocco (Cooperation decentralisee)

Education in Strasbourg

Strasbourg, which was a humanism center, has a long history of higher education excellence, melting French and German intellectual traditions. Although Strasbourg had been annexed by Royal France in 1683 it still remained connected to the German speaking intellectual world throughout the 18th century and the university attracted numerous students from the Holy Roman Empire with Goethe, Metternich and Monteglas, who studied law in Strasbourg, among the most prominent. Nowadays, Strasbourg is known to offer among the best university courses in France after Paris universities.

There are three universities in Strasbourg:

Strasbourg I - Universite Louis Pasteur
Strasbourg II - Universite Marc Bloch
Strasbourg III - Universite Robert Schuman

The campus of the Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA) is located in Strasbourg (the former one being in Paris). The location of the “new” ENA - which trains most of the nation’s high-ranking civil servants - was meant to give a European vocation to the school.

The Ecole superieure des Arts decoratifs (ESAD) is an art school of european reputation.

The permanent campus of the International Space University (ISU) is located in the south of Strasbourg (Illkirch-Graffenstaden).

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.
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Sights in Strasbourg

The city is chiefly known for its sandstone gothic cathedral, and for its medieval cityscape of Rhineland black and white timber-framed buildings, particularly in the Petite-France district alongside the river Ill. Strasbourg’s historic center, the Grande ile (great island), has been classified a World Heritage site by the UNESCO in 1988, for the first time for a whole city center.

Besides the cathedral, Strasbourg houses several other medieval churches that have survived the many wars and destructions that have plagued the city : the part romanesque, part gothic, very large Eglise Saint-Thomas with its Silbermann organ on which W. A. Mozart and Albert Schweitzer played, the gothic Eglise Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune protestant with its crypta dating back to the 5th century, the gothic Eglise Saint-Guillaume with its fine early-Renaissance stained glass… The neo-gothic church Saint-Pierre le Vieux catholique serves as a shrine for several 15th century altars that had been saved from destruction and installed a century ago.

The German Renaissance has bequeathed the city with some fine buildings ( for especially the current Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie), as did the French Baroque and Classicism with several palaces, among which the Palais Rohan (now housing three museums) is the most spectacular. Others are the Hotel du Prefet, the Hotel des Deux-Ponts and the city-hall Hotel de Ville ( hotel particulier meaning palace ). As for French Neo-classicism, it is the opera house on Place Broglie that most prestigiously represents this style.

Strasbourg also offers high-class eclecticist buildings in its very extended German district (Place de la Republique, Place de l’Universite, Place Brant, Place Arnold), being the main memory of Wilhelmian architecture since most of the major cities in Germany proper suffered intensive damages during World War II. Streets, boulevards and avenues like Avenue de la Foret Noire, Avenue des Vosges, Avenue d’Alsace, Avenue de la Marseillaise, Avenue de la Liberte, Boulevard de la Victoire, Rue Sellenick, Rue du General de Castelnau, Rue du Marechal Foch et Rue du Marechal Joffre are homogenous, surprisingly high (up to seven stores) and broad examples of german urban lay-out and of this architectural style that summons and mixes up five centuries of european architecture as well as neo-egyptian, neo-greek and neo-babylonian styles. (more…)

Introducation of Strasbourg

Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region of northeastern France, with approximately 650,000 inhabitants in the metropolitan area in 1999. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the prefecture (capital) of the Bas-Rhin departement.

The city’s Germanic name means “town (at the crossing) of roads”. Stras- is cognate to the English street from the German equivalence of the word, Straße, while -bourg from the German -burg (”fortress, town”) is cognate to the English borough. Strasbourg is an important centre of manufacturing and engineering, as well as of road, rail and river communications.

Strasbourg is the seat of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights and it hosts a seat of the European Parliament, together with Brussels.The name Strasbourg comes from Strateburgum, ‘the city of the roads’, because of its strategic geographical position on the west bank of the Rhine. Today, it could be called ‘the city of the trams’, due to an excellent and recently expanded network.

The city was already a thriving commercial center in the Middle Ages, when building began on the impressive Cathedrale Notre-Dame. Its intellectual and artistic heights were reached during the Renaissance. In 1566, the university was founded and leading figures of the Reformation settled in Strasbourg. Religious strife caused considerable upheaval during the 16th and 17th centuries, although the 1681 annexation of the city by France brought stability and enabled Strasbourg to reassert its economic strength. Its symbolic significance as a major European city was confirmed when it was chosen as the seat of the Council of Europe in 1949, the European Court of Human Rights in 1994 and the European Parliament, the position of which was finally guaranteed in 1992. After Paris, Strasbourg is now France’s most important diplomatic town.
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