An inventory of works within the city walls - Besançon

Vauban and Besançon
Vauban made best possible use of
the natural defences of the Besançon
site, with the citadel, the masterpiece
among all the defence works at the
narrowest and highest point,
the right-bank enclosure with Fort
Griffon, bastions and demi-lunes
(ravelins) and an innovative system
on the left bank, taking into account
the surrounding heights which,
higher than the citadel, offered
strategic positions against any
attacker. Adapting the works on
the town site to marvellous effect,
Vauban made Besançon into
a defensive bastion against the
Germanic lands, a role reinforced
further in the eighteenth century.
Vauban’s works at Besançon were
completed in three stages:
- between 1675 and 1683 the town
was provided with a mighty citadel ;
- between 1675 and 1695, the
fortifications of the loop wall and
the Battant ring of defences
were rebuilt ;
- from 1680 (and into the nineteenth
century), barracks were built on
open spaces to the east of the city:
the Saint-Paul and Saint-Pierre
barracks, to accommodate 1,500
to 2,000 garrisoned soldiers.
After Vauban
In the nineteenth century, constant
progress in artillery technology,
in particular in the use of canons with
rifled barrels and shells, considerably
increased the effectiveness of artillery
and rendered Vauban’s defences
obsolete. A new system of defences
would be required to stand up to
the increasingly powerful artillery.
The ancient concept of siege
warfare in which a town resisted
attack using the protection of its walls,
was succeeded by the idea of the
military camp protected by semi-buried
fortifications built on surrounding
high ground: detached forts.
From 1945, the development of
defence policy and techniques having
robbed the town of its role as
a stronghold on the eastern front,
the military authority abandoned most
of the sites situated in the loop,
as well as most of the works on the ring
of defences and the barracks.
In 1959, the town bought back the
citadel from the army which no
longer had use for it. The military
also transferred to it and to the
Département, the old city forts
which then became administrative
or cultural heritage buildings ; those
belonging to the Besançon's ring
of defences were transferred to the
neighbouring communities from 1962.
The army now only owns two forts,
at Montfaucon and Montboucons.
Modifications to the defence system of
the site in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries have however allowed several
features to survive which bear witness
to the grand scale of the old military
base, due to the works of Vauban.