Professor Ford concentrates on the critical century and a half ushered in by the Peace of Westphalia and brought to a violent close by the French Revolution. This was a period of transition in Strasbourg, as French elements were introduced and combined with German tradition to produce not a national, but a uniquely continental culture. Professor Ford examines in detail the political and economic life of the free Imperial city, the gradual economic and cultural changes under French rule in the early part of the eighteenth century, and the rapid cultural and social alterations during the thirty or forty years before the French Revolution--when Strasbourg became a city more than half catholic, essentially bilingual, and dominated by French rather than by German standards. He has made full use of both French and German sources--published and unpublished--to provide a new interpretation of the life of early modern Europe from the vantage point of a single, strategically located community.
