Lorraine - an area guide

Located in the northeast of France, on the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany, Lorraine is one of the old historic provinces of France and Europe, established in the ninth century as the land of Lothair, grandson of the emperor Charlemagne.

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Regional information

Main tourist attractions

Hotels in Lorraine

    The Lorraine area consists of four departments, Meurthe-et-Moselle (54), Meuse (55), Moselle (57), and Vosges (88). It is the only French region to border on three different foreign countries – Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany: it also borders on three other French regions, Alsace to the east, Champagne-Ardenne to the west, and Franche-Comté to the south.

   Lorraine was not always part of France. When, in the 9th century, Charlemagne divided his empire into three parts, Lorraine, like today's Luxembourg, Holland and Belgium, was part of the middle Empire, between France in the west and Germany in the east. This middle section of the Carolingian empire was bequeathed to Charlemagne's grandson Lothair, and was thus known as Lotharingia, which has given the modern name Lorraine.

    Lorraine has always been on the dividing line between the French speaking lands of the west and the German-speaking lands of the east. In bygone centuries, Germanic tongues were spoken in much of the region, as is witnessed by the many Germanic place names in the region, such as Metz, Forbach, or Freyming-Merlebach. The north of the region borders on the Saar region of Germany, and on Luxembourg. French has nevertheless been the main language for many centuries.
     Joan of Arc, or as the French call her Jeanne d'Arc, is doubtless the most famous child of Lorraine, and her birthplace can be visited in the village of Domrémy-la-Pucelle, in the Vosges department.

    Until the late twentieth century, Lorraine was known as an industrial region, part of a large European industrial heartland stretching over north-east France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the west of Germany. The region was home to a lot of heavy industry, notably coal, iron and steel, concentrated in particular in the departments of Meurthe et Moselle and Moselle. Cities such as Pont-à-Mousson, Thionville or Forbach were major centres in the industrial age. With the decline of rustbelt industries in France, Lorraine went through major economic and social upheavals. While the iron and steel industry remains the regions biggest industrial employer, most  of the old smokestack industries have been modernised or replaced by high-tech plants, such as the Mercedes-owned Smart production line in Hambach, opened in 1997.
     As for the Vosges mountains, they still support a textile industry as well as a sawing and wood-milling industry. While nothing like as active as it was in its heyday, the Vosges textile industry is still active, and Vosges linen is reputed throughout France for its tradition and quality.
      Unlike other French regions, Lorraine, though a historic region, does not have a single natural capital; the region's two major cities, Metz and Nancy, are of similar size (each with an urban area of around 420,000 inhabitants), and have both been regional capital at times in history.
     Today's capital is Metz, préfecture of the Moselle department, and one of the oldest cities in France. It was in Metz that the Carolingian dynasty first came to power, and from the tenth to the seventeenth century, Metz was a city of the (Germanic) Holy Roman Empire, only becoming French on the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
     Nancy, by contrast, is a much more recent city. Developing in the Middle Ages, it blossomed into a major regional city in the eighteenth century, as capital of the new French duchy of Lorraine. It was Stanislas, deposed king of Poland, to whom the duchy was given in 1737, who developed the great neo-classical city with its magnificent central square named in his honour.
      Outside of the industrial areas, and particularly in the west and south of the region, the departments of the Meuse and the Vosges, Lorraine is a rural region, with hills and forests. The department of the Vosges, which includes the western part of the Vosges mountains, is heavily forested; with its neat chalets, its picturesque villages, and its coniferous forests, it is an part of France that in in places very reminiscent of Switzerland (photo top of page), or of Germany's Black Forest, which lies on the other side of the Rhine valley. The most attractive part of the Vosges is the area around Gerardmer, a very popular holiday area with its lakes and forests. Epinal,  capital, of the Vosges, is a small town in the high valley of the Moselle.

Main tourist attractions in Lorraine