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History

City of Mulhouse history

Mulhouse has an extraordinary past: a small village, first mentioned at the beginning of the 9th century, that allied with Switzerland from the 14th to the 18th century, before being attached to enemy Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. These many influences are reflected in the digitisations carried out by the Mulhouse municipal library, and hence in this colleciton.

Most of the documents in this collection could be considerer 19th-century "Mulhouse essentials": Le Livre d’or de Mulhouse (1883), for example, by Nicolas Ehrsam, Louis Schoenhaupt &Ernest Lehr, is a colourful collection of coats of arms and lineages of the great Mulhouse families. Ernest Meininger (1852-1925) is also the author of many of the books in this corpus: the Histoire de Mulhouse (1923), the Guide de Mulhouse both in French (1919) and German (1893), the Chronique de la famille Engelmann de Mulhouse (1450-1898) (1914), and last but not least L'Hôtel de ville de Mulhouse (1892).

However, some of the documents from this collection are older: manuscripts dated between 1552 and the 18th century, such as Schultheissenbuch der Stadt Müllhausen im oberen Elsass 1552, Tragoedia Mylhuisina, dass ist wahrhafftige beschreibung der Bürgerlichen Empörung und Ubellstand der Statt Mülhausen, auch wie selbige von den evangelischen Orten belägeret und eingenommen worden MDLXXXVI (1586), or Der Stadt Mülhausen Geschichten bisz auf unsere Zeit von dem Originali selbst abgeschrieben anno MDCCII, by Jean Rissler (1760-1829) – see opposite. They provide a vivid record of life in Mulhouse in the pre-industrial era.

Mulhouse was rightly nicknamed the "French Manchester" because of its numerous factories and manufacturing plants, a ubiquitous part of the Mulhouse landscape. It's hardly surprising, then, that the industry features prominently in this selection, from the Histoire documentaire de l'industrie de Mulhouse et de ses environs au XIXe siècle (Enquête centennale), published by the Société industrielle de Mulhouse in 1902 (see opposite), to the engravings depicting factories in the Haut-Rhin department.

The Milhüser Schnitzelbank (see opposite) is a unique manuscript record of an 1820s edition of the Mulhouse carnival, complete with pen-and-ink vignettes... many of which are very lively!
 
Finally, a number of prints give us a glimpse of the Mulhouse of the past... such as the lithographs of J. Pedraglio showing the New Town area (now Square of the République) in colourful compositions. Some of the views are purely architectural projects, showing us an idealised Mulhouse... but one that never materialised.

For more views of Mulhouse, see the "Views of Mulhouse" collection.

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