Ribeauvillé (Rappoltsweiler in German, Rappschwihr in Alsatian) is a French commune located in the Haut-Rhin department, in the Grand Est region. This town is located in the historical and cultural region of Alsace. Its inhabitants are called the Ribeauvillois and the Ribeauvilloises. It had the status of sub-prefecture until January 1, 2015, when the arrondissement joined that of Colmar to form the arrondissement of Colmar-Ribeauvillé.
In a document dating from 1084, Emperor Henry IV of
Franconia donated land called Rapoldestein to the Bishop of Basel.
In 1178, the bishop restructured his episcopal county with the
agreement of the count of Ferrette. The bishop of Basel receives in
exchange the land of Ribeauvillé or Ribeaupierre, with the related
princely rights and the duties of protection of the Christian
populations. Around 1185, he ceded it to one of his vassals, soldier
and squire, Lord Eguenolf d'Urslingen or Egeloff d'Urselingen, from
a Swabian house formerly established in Wurtemberg.
It would
be wrong to improperly confuse the small town of Ribeauvillé at the
entrance to Strengbach with the seigneurial and count dynasty. It
exists, with its vineyard or artisan, bourgeois, noble or worker
houses, well before the erection of the summit castle which became
the “prince's castle”, before the construction of the parish church
and the cellar of the lords of Ribeaupierre. As the Vosges lands,
sometimes Lorraine, administered by the Ribeaupierre, were
predominantly Roman-speaking, Ribeauvillé, a merchant town, benefits
from a vast mountain hinterland envied by other towns in the
Alsatian piedmont.
Once enlarged, it is a fortified city
marked by its four gates, giving rise to four districts. The
"promenade de Herrengarten" is a stigma of the presence of an
autonomous seigneurial administration, which paradoxically has never
been so strong and arrogant as under the first French presence in
Alsace.
The first masters and lords of Ribeaupierre before
1185 already had important links with the house of Lorraine, heir to
Gérard d'Alsace and the house of Dabo-Egisheim. They exercised
various delegated tasks of surveillance of roads and protection of
stubble and forests, mines and quarries under the ducal authority
and that of the Empire. This is why the second house of Ribeaupierre
appeared as soon as it was installed on the mountain bans, for
example in Orbey and in Hohnack, even across the mountain in the
upper valley of the Meurthe in Plainfaing or Fraize, in Saulcy,
ensuring the continuity of its function. from the first house.
Straddling two spaces, a large number of lords or sons of lords of
Ribeaupierre only reveals themselves as mountain war masters, often
resentful of higher authority and as heavily indebted, even
rebellious as the terrible Anselm or Bruno. Sometimes, to feed their
troops with loyal combatants, these warlords plunder or plunder
their town of Ribeauvillé.
Before modern times, the seigneury
of Hohnack belonging to the former Austria was assimilated to the
bailiwick of Orbey. This seigneury, centered on the castle of
Hohenack then on the town of Orbey, also includes the villages and
hamlets of Lapoutriche, Grand Trait, Fréland, Labaroche, Le
Bonhomme, Les Hautes-Huttes, Les Basses-Huttes, Hachimette, La
Cirouche and Ribeaugoutte. It was granted in 1500 by Emperor
Maximilian of Habsburg to Lords Smasmann and Bruno de Ribeaupierre.
At the same time, the Empire fiefdom of the
Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines valley was conspicuously structured in two
halves of bailiwick, that is to say a bailiwick half to the Duke of
Lorraine left bank and half to the Ribeaupierre and the Habsburg
emperors on the right bank. The counts of Ribeaupierre are reduced
to a statute of great ministerial of the Empire, and, to save their
small territorial principality, these bureaucrats intendants and
captains of war must associate with the Emperor, and restrict
themselves to finding interests only in Alsace. There are also the
lands of Heiteren, Wihr and Guémar, Zellenberg and Bergheim, apart
from Ribeauvillé and Thannenkirch.
The house of the Counts of
Ribeaupierre becomes, not without difficulty, Protestant, first
Lutheran then Calvinist, while keeping functions in the Holy Empire.
After the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the council of
anterior Austria was dismantled, and its Alsatian lordships passed
into fiefdom to the crown of France. Once recognized, the royal
house of France more than ever amicably consolidated the
Ribeaupierre in their principality, both mountainous and extended
from Piedmont to the Alsatian plain. Under the name of County of
Ribeaupierre, it asserted itself until the French Revolution.
Louis XIV, master of Alsace, very respectful of the rights of the
Alsatian or German princes, confers the county on the prince of
Birkenfeld. On the death of the latter prince, the Ducal House of
Deux-Ponts collects the inheritance, which then passes to the
Palatine and Electoral House of Bavaria.
After a cotton
manufacture, an important spinning mill was established in 1860. The
link with mountain communities, the source of its former prosperity,
withered away, in the absence of a technically possible railroad to
the mountains or efficient roads. On the contrary, for two decades
the city has suffered from competition from other Alsatian cities.
A little before 1880, the city which keeps its old cachet has
only 5,784 inhabitants. 1 km down the valley, at the end of a path
lined with poplars, the ruins of Notre-Dame-de-Tusenbach remain, a
former place of pilgrimage.