Driving Down the Rhine: The Old Fortress at Neuf Brisach

One day I was playing around on the computer to look for driving directions. I was playing with the maps and stumbled across the village of Neuf Brisach. On the map, Neuf Brisach looks like a perfect circle. From the Satellite view, the village looks like a snowflake. It's obvious that the city planning was not haphazard.

In the late 1600's, Louis the XIV claimed Alsace for France for the first time. He was smart enough to realize that claiming is easy, but keeping can be difficult. Consequently, he commissioned his foremost military engineer, the Marquis de Vauban, to devise fortifications to keep the new territory. Neuf Brisach is the product of Vauban's design.

Now, Vauban was responsble for building some of the most defensible fortresses in Europe. Strasbourg, up until the Franco-Prussian war, was a citadel fortress on the French frontier. Vauban designed the defenses around Strasbourg back in the 1680s, doing the best he could with an existing city. He did the same with Luxembourg. With Neuf Brisach, however, he was not constrained by having an existing city to defend. Rather, he was able to design the perfect fortress in the middle of an open field. The perfect fortress built from scratch to defend the Rhine valley from invasion. Today, the village of Neuf Brisach still sits almost entirely within the old fortifications designed by Vauban. You can still walk around the defensive walls and admire the parapets and cannon emplacements. Sheep graze in the areas designed to be flooded in case of attack.

The fortress has been tested only a few times since it was built. The last time was in WWII, when the Germans hunkered down in the city as a last gasp before retreating back across the Rhine into Germany. The allies bombed and shelled the city mercilessly.

The local museum recounts the story of the allies who finally captured the city. A number of photos, such as the one shown below, recount the tale of Benjamin I. T. Wigg, of Carmel, Indiana. Strange to be reminded of home so far away from home.