Rue des Prés in the old town of Sélestat with the Tour de l’horloge (in English: "clock tower") in the background, Alsace, France
Some background information:
Sélestat (in German: "Schlettstadt") is a commune in the Grand Est region of France. The town lies in the department of Bas-Rhin on the Ill river, 17 kilometres (11 miles) from the Rhine and the German border. Sélestat has about 19,300 residents and is situated 20 km (12.5 miles) to the north of the city of Colmar. It is also located between the largest cities of Alsace, Strasbourg and Mulhouse. Strasbourg lies about 50 km (31 miles) to the north of Sélestat while Mulhouse lies about 60 km (37 miles) to the south.
The present name of the town is just a Frenchification of its original Germanic name. It appeared soon after the French conquest in the 17th century. The town is called "Schlettstàdt" in Alsatian dialect and "Schlettstadt" in German. In terms of architecture the city is one of the richest and most varied among the smaller cities of Alsace. Although it is only the 8th most populous town in the region, it has the third largest cultural heritage after Strasbourg and Colmar.
In 727, Sélestat was first mentioned in a document, but the town probably has an earlier Celtic or Roman origin. At the time of its appearance in written documents, it may have been already a market town or simply just a village populated by farmers. In 775, Charlemagne spent Christmas in Sélestat, which indicates that back then, the town must have had enough appropriate buildings and population to accommodate his court and also his troops.
Around 1080, Sélestat was the property of Hildegard von Eguisheim, mother of Frederick I, Duke of Swabia, the first member of the House of Hohenstaufen. Hildegard transformed the place into a religious centre when she founded St. Faith's Church, which she gave to the Benedictines of Conques Abbey. In 1092, the monks from Conques Abbey opened a priory next to the church. Being under the protection of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, which had come to the imperial throne in 1152, the priory of Sélestat strongly influenced local life.
At the end of the 12th century, the House of Hohenstaufen gradually lost its power and as a result the priory started to decline. The citizens of Sélestat took this opportunity to reduce the prior's dominance. A new church was built that was significantly larger than the old one, which was just an apparent way to signify the end of Benedictine hegemony. In 1217, Sélestat was designated as a Free Imperial City by Frederick II from the House of Hohenstaufen, who was the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. Under this new status Sélestat was able to build city walls and collect taxes on its own.
In the following decades the town prospered and in 1354, it became a member of the Décapole, an alliance of ten free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire in Alsace. After many years of decline. the Benedictine priory was closed in 1424. Nevertheless, Sélestat remained a religious centre. Some orders had convents established in the town and several abbeys were located in the proximity.
At the beginning of the 16th century, Sélestat was a noted centre of Renaissance humanism thanks to its celebrated Latin school. This school helped spread Protestant ideas among the population, although the local authorities remained faithful to Rome. Between 1515 and 1522, Erasmus of Rotterdam visited Sélestat four times. Back then, the local economy reached its zenith. It was centered on shipping and trade (mainly of hay, cereals, wine, fish, glass, iron and salt), whereby most goods were transported on the Ill river.
The town’s decline began when the troubles surrounding the Protestant Reformation brought instability and unrest to the region. In 1534, Sélestat‘s convents were sacked by a mob. During the 17th century, Alsace was one of the main battlefields of the Thirty Years War. Sélestat was seized by the Swedes in 1632 after a month-long siege. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia formalised the annexation of the Décapole by France, although the local population still remained predominantly faithful to the House of Habsburg for quite a long time.
At first, Sélestat became a major strategic stronghold for the French. Located near the Rhine, it controlled the access to the Vosges mountains and the rest of France. Between 1675 and 1691, the town walls were rebuilt by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, the foremost military architect at that time. Although Sélestat lost much of its strategic importance to Strasbourg, it remained a garrison town, and the troops stationed there helped to improve the faltering local economy.
During the French Revolution the population was extremely conservative and opposed to change. The new territorial organisation confirmed the decline of the town, which did not become a prefecture and was not distinguished as a subprefecture until 1806. Sélestat suffered from the Napoleonic wars as it was besieged and bombed by the Bavarians in 1814 and blockaded by a German coalition in 1815.
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Alsace and a part of Lorraine were annexed by the new German Empire. The German authorities demolished Sélestat‘s city walls in 1874 and built new spacious neighbourhoods around the old town, as they did in Strasbourg and Metz. After the first World War, the town became French again, but during the Second World War, it was embed in the Third Reich. Its liberation by the Allies took three months and ended in February 1945.
Today, Sélestat is an important tourist destination in Alsace, thanks to its rich heritage, which includes the renowned Humanist Library and an imposing pair of medieval churches. It also benefits from its location on the Alsace wine road and its proximity to Haut-Kœnigsbourg castle. In the second half of the 20th century, the town eventually experienced a new demographic growth when it also became a small industrial and cultural centre of the Alsace region.