Strasburg
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
stras'boorg, Germany, the capital of Alsace-Lorraine. It is situated on a plain at the junction of two small streams, two miles east of the Rhine. It is a railway center and a manufacturing city of about 170,000 inhabitants. The principal manufactured articles are beer, leather, tobacco, dyes, sausages, fat goose-liver pies, sauerkraut, clothing, etc. As early as 1262 Strasburg became a free imperial city. A wholesale massacre of Jews took place in 1349. The city was taken from the Germans by the French in 1681 and held by them until the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The University of Strasburg, founded in the seventeenth century, has an observatory and a library of 600,000 volumes. The city possesses one of the most noted cathedrals in Europe. It was founded in the eleventh century and was three hundred years in building. The earlier parts are Romanesque in style. The newer portions are Gothic. The western facade or front is entered by three magnificent portals adorned with rich sculptures, representing scenes from the history of the creation and redemption. These portals are considered among the finest examples of Gothic doorways in existence. The facade contains also a fine rose window forty-two feet in diameter. The nave or main portion is 363 feet long and 135 feet wide. It is 100 feet in height and is lighted by gorgeous medieval stained glass windows. A spire of delicate open stonework tapers to a height of 468 feet. It is exceeded in height by the steeples of Cologne only. The main roof or platform of the church, at a height of 216 feet, commands a magnificent view of the surrounding country. Strasburg was an active center of the French revolutionary forces in 1793. Several hundred statuettes were ignorantly torn down and destroyed by the French soldiers as emblems of tyranny. The cathedral was also damaged by cannon during the siege of 1870, but all traces of injury have been removed. The cathedral contains one of the most remarkable astronomical clocks in existence. See Clock ; Cathedral ; Architecture ; Marseillaise ; Gutenberg ; Alsace-Lorraine
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910, Strasburg was flatly "Germany, the capital of Alsace-Lorraine"; eight years later the German defeat returned it to France, and it has been the French city of Strasbourg ever since, apart from the Nazi annexation of 1940-44. Since 1949 it has housed the Council of Europe, and it is now the seat of the European Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights, a deliberate choice of the most contested border city on the continent as a symbol of reconciliation. The population is around 290,000, with roughly half a million in the wider urban area. The cathedral Aiton's described at such length still stands much as it did, its single spire the landmark of a historic centre listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988.
Written for this edition, 2026.