Strasbourg in Transition

ISBN: 0393003213

Author: Ford, Franklin L.

Condition: New

In 1648, when the treaties of Westphalia were signed, bringing to an end thirty years of fighting in central Europe, Strasbourg was a free city within the Holy Roman Empire--German in speech, Lutheran in faith. Because of its strategic location on the Rhine, it has ever since been intimately linked with French-German border problems. The city was annexed without a fight by Louis XIV in 1681; Prussian guns captured it for Germany in 1870; World War I made it French again, only to fall to Hitler's Germany. Today, however, the seat of the Community of Europe, it is the composite symbol of European civilization, as nationalism gives way to internationalism under military and economic necessity.Professor Ford concentrates on the critical century and a half ushered in by the Peace of Westphalia and brought to a violent close by the French Revolution. This was a period of transition in Strasbourg, as French elements were introduced and combined with German tradition to produce not a national, but a uniquely continental culture. Professor Ford examines in detail the political and economic life of the free Imperial city, the gradual economic and cultural changes under French rule in the early part of the eighteenth century, and the rapid cultural and social alterations during the thirty or forty years before the French Revolution--when Strasbourg became a city more than half catholic, essentially bilingual, and dominated by French rather than by German standards. He has made full use of both French and German sources--published and unpublished--to provide a new interpretation of the life of early modern Europe from the vantage point of a single, strategically located community.