- Type
- Fortress
- Built
- 1698 · 17th century
- Coordinates
- 48.0181°, 7.5283°
History
Under the Peace of Ryswick of 1697 France had to give up Breisach on the right bank of the Rhine, which had guarded its Alsatian border. Louis XIV commissioned Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban to design a new fortress on the French side of the river. Work began in 1698, and within a few years a regular octagonal town rose on open fields, ringed by a double circuit of bastions, ravelins and ditches. The fortress embodies Vauban's so-called third system, the most mature stage of his military engineering. In 1870, after a siege and bombardment, it surrendered to the Prussians, and it was damaged in the fighting for Alsace in 1945. In 2008 Neuf-Brisach was inscribed on the UNESCO list as part of the Fortifications of Vauban.
What to see
The town keeps its grid of streets converging on a spacious parade ground with the Church of Saint Louis. A walk around the walls reveals bastions, ravelins and dry moats, and monumental gates such as the Porte de Belfort and the Porte de Colmar lead inside. The Porte de Belfort houses the Vauban Museum, whose scale model shows the whole defensive system from above.
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