Road-crossing town that hosts Europe's Parliament
Strasbourg, largest city of France's Grand Est and Bas-Rhin prefecture, houses the European Parliament's official home. City population reached 294,229 in 2023, with roughly 875,000 across the metro—eighth-largest in France and home to fourteen percent of Grand Est residents.
The Romans knew it as Argentoratum, from a Gaulish name combining a word for silver or precious metal with one for a fortified enclosure. The camp is first recorded in 12 BC, which let the city celebrate two thousand years in 1988, though the plain between the Ill and the Rhine had been inhabited since the Middle Palaeolithic. After the fifth century a Germanic name took over, meaning town at the crossing of roads; Gregory of Tours noted the switch around 590, when a disgraced bishop of Reims was exiled to the place now called Strateburgus.
Bishops ruled from 362 until 1262, when citizens beat them at the Battle of Hausbergen and won the status of a free imperial city. Louis XIV's conquest of Alsace made it French in 1681; it became German in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, French again in 1918, and fell to German forces in June 1940. Along the way it was a hotbed of the Reformation, with Calvin, Martin Bucer and Katharina Zell active here, and an early printing centre associated with Gutenberg and Johannes Mentelin; Albert Schweitzer's ethic of reverence for life also has roots here. Darker episodes include the massacre of 1349.
European institutions arrived from 1949, starting with the Council of Europe, and the European Parliament, the Eurocorps and the European Ombudsman followed, making Strasbourg one of the EU's three de facto capitals with Brussels and Luxembourg. Like Geneva and New York, it hosts first-rank international bodies without being a national capital, among them the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, and it ranks second only to Paris in France for international congresses.
The Rhine marks its eastern edge, facing Kehl in Germany, while the historic Grande Île sits in the Ill about 4 kilometres away and was listed by UNESCO in 1988. The port is the Rhine's second largest after Duisburg. Greater Strasbourg holds about 523,000 people, and the cross-border Eurodistrict with Ortenau roughly 1.02 million.
Source: Strasbourg
