STRASBOURG owes both its name
- "the city of the roads"
- and its wealth to its position on
the west bank of the Rhine, long one
of the great natural transport
arteries of Europe. The city's
medieval commercial pre-eminence was
damaged by too close an involvement
in the religious struggles of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
but recovered with the city's
absorption into France in 1681.
Along with the rest of Alsace,
Strasbourg suffered annexation by
Germany from 1871 to the end of
World War I and again from 1940 to
1944.
Today old animosities have been
submerged in the togetherness of the
European Union, of which, as the
seat of the Council of Europe, the
European Court of Human Rights and
the European Parliament, Strasbourg
is one of the capitals. Prosperous,
beautiful and modern, with an
orderliness that is Germanic rather
than Latin, the city is big enough -
with a population of over a quarter
of a million people - to have a
metropolitan air without being
overwhelming. It has one of the
loveliest cathedrals in France and
one of the oldest and most active
universities: this is the one city
in eastern France that is definitely
worth a special detour.
