() is a
French Department , named after the
Vosges Mountain Range .
The Vosges department is one of the original 83 departments of France, created on
March 4 ,
1790 during the
French Revolution . It was made of territories formerly part of the
Province of
Lorraine . In German, it is referred to as Vogesen and in Italian as Vosgi.
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. The Vosges department had now an area of 6,127 km&
2 (2,366 sq. miles) which it kept until 1871.
In 1794 the Vosges was the site of a sizeable 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 km&
2 (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.
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.
The
Roman Fortified Town of
Grand , located 30km from
Toul , has an
Amphitheatre and a temple to the
Cult Of Apollo .
