- Briey
French commune
nomcommune=Briey
région=Lorraine
département=Meurthe-et-Moselle
("sous-préfecture ")
arrondissement=Briey
canton=Briey (chief town)
insee=54099
cp=54150
maire=Guy Vattier
mandat=2001 -2008
intercomm=Communauté de communes du Pays de Briey
longitude=5.940277778
latitude=49.249444444
alt moy=240 m
alt mini=200 m
alt maxi=300 m
hectares=2,713
km²=27.13
sans=4,858
date-sans=1999
dens=179.1
date-dens=1999Briey is a commune of the
Meurthe-et-Moselle Departement, inFrance , located above and in a steep section of the valley of the little River Woigot, some thirty kilometers to the west of the autoroute that connectsMetz withLuxembourg . The town itself had a gently declining population through much of the twentieth century, but the level has recently recovered to around 5,000.Geography
Briey forms a part of an extensive grouping of once heavily industrialised towns that also includes
Jœuf andHomécourt , along withHagondange ,Amnéville andRombas in the adjacent department.The town is arranged into four principal quarters, and traversed by the River Woigot (itself a tributary of the Orne). North of the river, Briey-Haut (Upper Briey), the area centred on the former
medieval citadel , stretches out towards the villages of Mance and Moutier, and overhangs Briey-Bas (Lower Briey), which occupies the banks of the Woigot. The steeply angled “grand-rue” (“Main Street ”) connects the two areas of the town, which elsewhere are separated by a cliff-face garden. South of the valley is Briey-les-Hauts, another “high town”, facing the villages of Lantéfontaine and Valleroy. Beyond Briey-Haut, the fourth quarter is Briey-en-Forêt, a 1960s development dominated by Le Corbusier’s “Cité Radieuse”, a substantial apartment block, which displays an architectural assertiveness characteristic of its time: the “Cité Radieuse” has frequently struggled to attract residents, triggering aesthetic and political controversy since first it emerged out of the surroundingwoodland .Economy
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Briey Basin was one of Europe’s leading
steel producing regions: in the 1970s the Hagondange-Briey agglomeration still had a population of above 130,000, although by 1990 this figure had fallen to 112,000.Intensive heavy industrialisation is now a receding memory, and the
service sector has provided the principal sources ofemployment growth in recent years, with increasing numbers of the working-age residentscommuting to nearbyMetz orLuxembourg .History
The origin of the name "Briey" comes from the Celtic word "Briga" which denotes a
fortress . There is a record of the Counts of Bar having held acastle here in 1072. Briey received Town Privileges in 1263. The turbulent years following the traumas of 1348/1349 and resulting sudden shifts in economic power, were marked by an upsurge of violence across the region, and in 1369 Briey was burned out by a force from nearbyMetz .The increasing fragility of the old middle kingdom culminating with its disappearance in 1477 created areas of political uncertainty on both sides of the
Rhine and ushered in several centuries ofwar fare which tended, at least till 1871, to involve on the one sideFrance and on the other side various neighbouring countries whose leaders did not wishFrance to become larger. Briey found itself captured by Charles the Bold in 1475, ravaged byprotestants in 1591, and captured by aSwedish army in 1635. No doubt the relative strength of the natural defensive position of the oldcitadel preserved Briey from yet more frequent devastations, but it was nonetheless reportedly occupied briefly by aRussian army during the final days of theNapoleonic War in 1815.In 1801 Briey became a
sub-prefecture in theMoselle Department. However, after 1871 most of theMoselle Department was subsumed within theGerman Empire under the terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt. The former French department ceased to exist and its residuum, including Briey, was integrated into a new Department ofMeurthe-et-Moselle . When Lorraine was recovered byFrance in 1919 it was decided not to return Briey to its former Department which is why, in terms of departmental boundaries, the town remains administratively separated from the eastern portion of the Briey Basin.References
*"This article is based on the corresponding French Wikipedia article."
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