Vosges

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Vosges
Coat of arms of the Vosges department
Location
Administration
Department number:	88
Region:	Lorraine
Prefecture:	Épinal
Subprefectures:	Neufchâteau Saint-Dié-des-Vosges
Arrondissements:	3
Cantons:	31
Communes:	515
President of the General Council:	Christian Poncelet
Statistics
Population	Ranked 60th
-1999	380,952
Population density:	65/km2
Land area¹:	5874 km2
¹ French Land Register data, which exclude estuaries, and lakes, ponds, and glaciers larger than 1 km2.

This article is about the department of France named Vosges. For the mountain range, see Vosges Mountains.

Vosges (French pronunciation: [voːʒ]) is a French department, named after the local mountain range. It contains the hometown of Joan of Arc, Domrémy.

History

The Vosges department is one of the original 83 departments of France, created on February 9, 1790 during the French Revolution.^[1] It was made of territories that had been part of the province of Lorraine. In German it is referred to as Vogesen.

In 1793 the independent principality of Salm (town of Senones and its surroundings), enclosed inside the Vosges department, was annexed to France and incorporated into Vosges. In 1795 the area of Schirmeck was detached from the Bas-Rhin department and incorporated into the Vosges department.^[2] The Vosges department had now an area of 6,127 km² (2,366 sq. miles) which it kept until 1871.

In 1794 the Vosges was the site of a major battle between the forces of Revolutionary France and the Allied Coalition. See Battle of the Vosges.

The Place des Vosges in Paris was so renamed in 1799 when the department became the first to pay the new Revolutionary taxes.

After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, 4% of the Vosges department in the extreme northeast of the department were annexed to the German Empire by the Treaty of Frankfurt on the ground that the people there spoke Germanic dialects. The area annexed on May 18, 1871 corresponded to the canton of Schirmeck and the northern half of the canton of Saales. Schirmeck and Saales had been historically part of Alsace. These territories, along with the rest of Alsace and the annexed territories of Lorraine, became part of the Reichsland of Elsaß-Lothringen. The area of the Vosges department was thus reduced to its current 5,874 km² (2,268 sq. miles).

In 1919, with the French victory in the First World War, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France by Germany at the Treaty of Versailles. However, Schirmeck and Saales were not returned to the Vosges department, but instead were incorporated into the recreated Bas-Rhin department.

Geography

The largest cities are Épinal, Neufchâteau and Saint-Dié-des-Vosges.

While the west part of the Vosges is flat sedimentary land (great for mineral waters), the east is closed by an old granite mountain (top is Grand Ballon, 1424m).

The Saône river rises at Vioménil, in the Vosges.

Culture

The Roman fortified town of Grand, located 30 km from Toul, has an amphitheatre and a temple to the Cult of Apollo.

Miscellaneous topics

See also

• Cantons of the Vosges department
• Communes of the Vosges department
• Arrondissements of the Vosges department

References

External links

• (French) Vosges dot com Economic information about the Vosges
• Climbbybike.com: All information on and profiles of the climbs and cols of the Vosges

• (French) General Council website
• (French) Prefecture website
• (English) Vosges Tourism Guide
• (French) Vosges vacations
• (English) Information - Vosges.us
• Illustrated Article on the Vosges Battlefields in Winter at 'Battlefields Europe'
•  "Vosges (France)". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

Coordinates: 48°10′N 06°25′E / 48.167°N 6.417°E / 48.167; 6.417