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Alsace is marked in red
Flag of Alsace.svg
Blason région fr Alsace.svg

Alsace (Alsatian and German: Elsass, pre-1996 German: Elsaß) was an administrative region of France. It is now part of the administrative region of Grand Est. Alsace was on the eastern border of France. It was on the west bank of the Upper Rhine, next to Germany and Switzerland.

The departments in Alsace were Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin.

Before the region merged with Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine in 2014, data from INSEE stated that about 1.8 million people lived there as of 2013.[1] Its capital was Strasbourg, the largest city. It changed hands between France and Germany many times. The people living there had an attitude and set of social values that was closer to the German ones, than the French. Language, cuisine, music, dress and customs were Germanic, and very close to the Swabian ones across the Rhine.

The overall culture was generally more German than French, being somewhere between German and French. Alsace was part of the Holy Roman Empire and was still inhabited by people speaking a dialect of Upper German. In the 17th century, all of Alsace was annexed (in steps) under King Louis XIV of France. He made it one of the provinces of France. Alsace is frequently mentioned in conjunction with Lorraine, because the possession of these two régions (as Alsace-Lorraine) was often contested in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was after a division among the successors of Charlemagne in the 9th century.

References[change | change source]

  1. "Populations légales 2013 des régions" (in French). INSEE. Retrieved 1 July 2016.

Other websites[change | change source]

Media related to Alsace at Wikimedia Commons