Fortifications of Neuf-Brisach
Place forte de Neuf-Brisach
Interesting facts
- Louis XIV chose the octagonal plan from three designs Vauban submitted, and the finished outline forms a sixteen-pointed star.
- Rubble from the demolished fortified town of Saint-Louis de Brisach was shipped by canal and reused to build Neuf-Brisach.
- The Vauban Canal, dug to supply building stone, runs about 24 kilometres from Ensisheim to the town.
- Vauban's plan provided for some 500 houses and about 1,500 inhabitants inside the walls.
- During the Napoleonic wars, Austrian troops blockaded the town for 106 days in 1814 and 1815.
- In 1870 a garrison of about 5,500 men with 108 cannon held out under German siege before capitulating on 10 November.
- After 1871 the Germans reworked the defences as the core of a fortified bridgehead guarding the Rhine crossing.
- The royal church of Saint-Louis took five years to build, from 1731 to 1736, and the town hall followed in 1758.
- A French army engineer regiment was based in the town until 1992, nearly three centuries after the fortress was founded.
Why it is worth it
Seen from the air, Neuf-Brisach is a geometry lesson laid out in the fields of the Alsace plain: a perfect octagon of bastioned walls wrapped in a second, wider star of earthworks and moats, with a grid of straight streets and a great central square inside. It is the last fortified town designed by Vauban, Louis XIV's chief military engineer, and the clearest surviving expression of his ideas about how to defend a frontier.
The town exists because of a loss. Under the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 France had to give up Breisach, its fortress on the far bank of the Rhine, and Louis XIV ordered a new stronghold to fill the gap in the frontier between Strasbourg and Mulhouse. Vauban and Jacques Tarade drew the plans; the first stone was laid on 18 October 1698, and the fortifications were complete by about 1702. A canal was dug to carry the pink Vosges sandstone used in the walls. Vauban died in 1707 and the work was finished by Louis de Cormontaigne. The design is the only full realisation of what Vauban called his "third system": an inner rampart around the town with projecting pentagonal bastion towers at its eight corners, and beyond it an outer combat line of tenailles, counterguards and large ravelins in front of each curtain, all wrapped by a covered way. The outer works cover more ground than the town itself.
Inside, the streets form a regular chequerboard around the Place d'Armes, with the royal church of Saint-Louis, begun in 1731, beside it; long rows of plainer tenement housing built against the curtain walls helped screen the houses from cannon fire. Neuf-Brisach was bombarded and taken by German forces in November 1870 and damaged again in the Second World War, yet its plan and defences survive with remarkable completeness. In 2008 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the Fortifications of Vauban. Across the Rhine, about 3.5 km away, Breisach still stands on its rock.
Getting there
Neuf-Brisach is in the Haut-Rhin department of Alsace, about 15 km east of Colmar and close to the Rhine bridge to Breisach in Germany. EuroAirport Basel–Mulhouse–Freiburg (BSL) is about 46 km away.
Plan your visit
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On these lists
48.01750, 7.52750per Wikidata