Strasbourg

• 1. Introduction

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  Strasbourg sits on the eastern edge of France, pressed against the Rhine, and it has spent two thousand years being fought over, traded away, and reclaimed. In 1988, the city celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of its founding as the Roman camp of Argentoratum. That same year, UNESCO declared its historic island centre, the Grande Ile, a World Heritage Site. Few cities of comparable size carry so much European history in so small a space.

  The city today holds about three hundred thousand inhabitants within the commune itself, and its metropolitan area crossed one million people in 2023. It is the official seat of the European Parliament, one of the three de facto capitals of the European Union alongside Brussels and Luxembourg. It hosts the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and more than twenty international institutions in total.

  What made a mid-sized Alsatian city the legislative heart of Europe? How did a settlement that began as a Celtic fortification become a crossroads where French and German civilisation rubbed against each other for centuries? And what trace do those collisions leave on the streets, the buildings, and the people of Strasbourg today? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name Made of Conquest

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  Until the fifth century AD, Strasbourg was called Argentoratum, a Celtic Gaulish name built from two roots. The first, arganto, meant silver or precious metal; the second, rati, meant fortified enclosure. The combination hints at a place where valuable things were protected, possibly a site near river gold mining. Roman writers Latinised the name first as Argentorate, then as Argentoratum in later texts.

  Then came a complete break. After the fifth century the Germanic name Strasbourg took over, and it carries a very different set of meanings. The Stras- element is cousin to the German Strasse and English street, both descending from the Latin strata, meaning paved road. The -bourg ending connects to the German Burg and the English borough, from a Proto-Germanic root meaning hill fort or fortress. Town at the crossing of roads. The name is a map in two syllables.

  Gregory of Tours recorded the transition. In the tenth book of his History of the Franks, written shortly after 590, he described a bishop named Egidius being exiled to a place he called "the city of Argentoratum, which they now call Strateburgus." That sentence is the earliest written evidence of the new name. The city that had identified itself by its metal and its walls was now identified by its roads.

• 3. Between France and Germany

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  In 12 BC, the Roman camp of Argentoratum first appeared in written records. The fertile Upper Rhine Plain between the rivers Ill and Rhine had already been settled since the Middle Paleolithic. From 362 until 1262, bishops governed the city, their authority reinforced in 873 and again in 982.

  The citizens put a violent end to episcopal rule in 1262 at the Battle of Hausbergen, and Strasbourg became a free imperial city. It joined France in 1681 when the armies of Louis XIV conquered Alsace. Then in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, it passed into German hands as part of the Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine, and stayed there until the end of World War I in 1918.

  The cycle accelerated terribly in 1940. German forces captured the city in June during the Battle of France. It was formally annexed into the Gau Baden-Elsass under Nazi Gauleiter Robert Wagner. Liberation came in November 1944, when the 2nd French Armoured Division under General Leclerc retook the city. Among the darkest episodes those years produced was the Jewish skull collection, one of the atrocities the source text names from that occupation.

  The pendulum swings defined Strasbourg's culture. The University of Strasbourg, currently the second-largest in France, drew students across both linguistic worlds for centuries. Goethe studied law there, as did Metternich and Montgelas. The institution has produced nineteen Nobel prizes in total, making it the most eminent French university outside Paris.

• 4. The Reformation's Laboratory

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  John Calvin and Martin Bucer both spent formative years in Strasbourg, along with Wolfgang Capito and Matthew and Katharina Zell. The city was not merely a bystander to the Protestant Reformation; delegates from Strasbourg took part in the Protestation at Speyer, the event from which the word Protestant derives.

  The city's religious history runs even deeper and stranger. Johannes Tauler brought German mysticism through Strasbourg. Philipp Spener shaped Pietism there. Albert Schweitzer developed his philosophy of Reverence for Life in connection with the city. Catholic and Protestant cultures have coexisted in Strasbourg for centuries; the source notes this coexistence as a defining trait of Franco-German identity in the city. Strasbourg also holds the largest Islamic place of worship in France, the Strasbourg Grand Mosque.

  1518 appears among the city's darker dates: the Dancing plague, a historical episode in which people danced uncontrollably in the streets for days or weeks. That same centuries-long list includes the Strasbourg massacre of 1349, the Reign of Terror of 1793, and the Siege of Strasbourg in 1870. Strasbourg absorbed each of those catastrophes and rebuilt around them. The Eglise Saint-Thomas, partly Romanesque and partly Gothic, houses a Silbermann organ on which both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Albert Schweitzer played. It survived the many wars that reduced other structures to rubble.

• 5. Gutenberg and the Printed Word

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  Johannes Gutenberg worked in Strasbourg before his more famous period in Mainz, making the city one of the first centres of European printing. Two other pioneers, Johannes Mentelin and Heinrich Eggestein, also operated there. The consequence was a library that by 1870 held no fewer than 7,000 incunabula, meaning books printed before the year 1500.

  That collection was destroyed completely in the 1870 Siege of Strasbourg. The loss came about because the city's municipal library had been erroneously marked as City Hall on a French commercial map that German artillery captured and used to lay their guns. A librarian from Munich later observed that the destruction was not the fault of the German artillery officer who used the French map, but of what he called the slovenly and inaccurate scholarship of the Frenchman who made it. The observation is cutting, and it captures something of how European conflicts have often destroyed the very civilisation they claimed to defend.

  From scratch, Strasbourg rebuilt its collections. The Bibliotheque nationale et universitaire now holds more than three million titles, making it the second-largest library in France after the Bibliotheque nationale de France. In 1605, Johann Carolus printed what the source describes as the world's first newspaper in Strasbourg. That tradition of making ideas visible on paper has roots stretching back to Gutenberg himself.

• 6. Cathedrals and Courthouses

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  The sandstone Gothic Cathedral of Strasbourg is the city's most recognisable structure, famous for its astronomical clock and its position at the centre of a medieval cityscape of black and white timber-framed buildings. The Maison Kammerzell stands near it as one of the most notable of these structures. The Petite France district, also known as the Gerberviertel or tanners' district, lines the Ill river with buildings of the same character.

  The German period from 1871 to 1918 left behind an entirely different layer of architecture. The Neustadt, the German district added to the city, is now considered among the main surviving examples of Wilhelmian architecture, because most major German cities suffered intensive damage in World War II. Streets and boulevards run up to seven stories high, mixing five centuries of European styles along with Neo-Egyptian, Neo-Greek and Neo-Babylonian influences. The former imperial palace Palais du Rhin anchors this district.

  Contemporary Strasbourg has added its own layer. The European Court of Human Rights building, designed by Richard Rogers, stands in the Quartier Europeen. The tramway station at Hoenheim-Nord was designed by Zaha Hadid. Marc Mimram's Passerelle, a futuristic bridge over the Rhine, opened in 2004. The Place Kleber, the largest square at the city's centre, was named after general Jean-Baptiste Kleber, born in Strasbourg in 1753 and assassinated in Cairo in 1800. A vault beneath his statue there holds his remains.

• 7. The European Capital

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  Strasbourg became the seat of European institutions in 1949, starting with the International Commission on Civil Status and the Council of Europe. The European Parliament followed in 1952. The city now houses Eurocorps, the European Ombudsman, the European Science Foundation, the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, and the International Institute of Human Rights, among more than twenty international bodies.

  The Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau, a formal administrative zone straddling the French-German border, was established in 2005 and fully operational from 2010. It had a population of roughly 1,020,000 in 2023. The city is considered the legislative and democratic capital of the European Union, with Brussels serving executive and administrative functions and Luxembourg the judicial and financial ones.

  That international role shapes daily life in measurable ways. Strasbourg ranks second in France for international congresses and symposia, after Paris only. The European School of Strasbourg gives priority admission to children of staff at European institutions. The Ecole nationale d'administration, which trains the majority of France's senior civil servants, was relocated to Strasbourg specifically to give it a European character as part of a government decentralisation plan. In 2016, Strasbourg was elevated from capital of Alsace to capital of the larger Grand Est region, a recognition that its gravitational pull extends well beyond the Rhine plain.

• 8. Roads, Rivers, and Rails

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  The port of Strasbourg is the second-largest river port in France after Paris and the second-largest on the Rhine after Duisburg in Germany. Strasbourg's position at the crossing of roads was not a medieval metaphor; it describes a geographic reality that has shaped the city for two millennia.

  Modern transport reinforced this pattern. The TGV Est connected Strasbourg to Paris in 2007, and a second phase completed in July 2016 shortened the journey further. The TGV Rhin-Rhone linked the city to Lyon in 2012. The Strasbourg tramway, which reopened in 1994 after decades of absence, now runs six lines covering 55.8 km. An earlier tram system had operated from 1878 to 1960, complemented by trolleybus routes from 1939 to 1962. The city also runs more than 500 km of bicycle paths and a cheap bike-sharing scheme called Velhop.

  The Grand contournement ouest bypass road, planned since 1999 and opposed by environmentalists who established a Zone to Defend around the proposed route, was finally opened on the 11th of December 2021 as the A355 autoroute. The city's historic centre meanwhile operates on a principle the source calls filtered permeability: the street network is adapted to favour walking and cycling by making certain routes discontinuous for cars while keeping them fully connected for pedestrians and cyclists. The Christmas market, the Christkindesmark, has drawn visitors to those pedestrian streets every year since 1570.