Bitche: The Citadel That Held Out in 1870

Required Activities

• Climb the Schlossberg to the gate and work out what Turenne saw when he came up here in the winter of 1673 and went away determined to persuade Louis XIV to fortify it: a long sandstone ridge watching several valleys at once, carrying the ruins of the castle Eberhard of Deux-Ponts built at the end of the 13th century, wrecked in the Peasants' War and in ruins by 1680

• Find the plaque Louis XV had set at the entrance, which dates the end of the works to 1765, and then pick Cormontaigne's additions off the rock one by one: the barracks, the artillery and powder magazines, the guardhouses, the advanced work built between 1755 and 1760, and the esplanade laid out at the foot of the glacis in 1765

• Find the heaviest of the three bells cast for the citadel in May 2006 — sixty-three kilos, struck with the arms of the town and of Commandant Teyssier — and work out what it commemorates: a garrison that was never taken, bombarded for a month and blockaded for six, which handed the fortress over on 26 March 1871 only on its own government's orders and marched out with the honours of war

• Go down into the underground complex, listed as a monument since 1979 along with the citadel above it, and follow the audiovisual route through the galleries — then find the relief model of Bitche made in 1794 in the museum and use it to see how much of the fortress and the town below has changed in two hundred and thirty years

• From the ramparts, count the valleys the citadel can see down at once — the reason it was built here — then walk down off the rock through the Jardin pour la Paix, laid out between the fortress and the town, and look back up at the wall from the bottom