Bas-Rhin

Bas-Rhin (Alsatian: Unterelsàss) is a department of France. The name means "Lower Rhine". It is the more populous and densely populated of the two departments of the Alsace region, with 1,079,013 inhabitants in 2006.

History
Bas-Rhin is one of the original 83 departments created on 4 March 1790, during the French Revolution.

In the mid-1790s, following the French occupation of the entire left bank of the Rhine, the northern boundary of the department was extended north beyond the Lauter to the Queich river to include the areas of Annweiler am Trifels, Landau in der Pfalz, Bad Bergzabern, and Wörth am Rhein. However, upon Napoleon's second defeat in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reassigned the areas north of the Lauter to Bavaria; and those territories are now presently located in the neighbouring German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The department has twice been incorporated into Germany: from 1871 (after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War) until the end of World War I in 1918, and again briefly during World War II (from 1940 to 1945) during the German occupation of France.

Geography
The Rhine has always been of great historical and economic importance to the area, and it forms the eastern border of Bas-Rhin. The area is also home to some of the foothills of the Vosges.

To the north of Bas-Rhin lies the Palatinate forest (Pfälzerwald) in the German State of Rhineland-Palatinate, and the German State of Baden-Württemberg lies to the east. To the south lies the department of Haut-Rhin, the town of Colmar and southern Alsace, and to the west the department of Moselle in Lorraine. On its south-western corner, Bas-Rhin also joins the department of Vosges.

Law
See also the French wikipedia entry (in French) on local law in Alsace for a summary of the position, or the English wikipedia entry (in English) for a brief summary on the same subject.

Alsace and the adjacent Moselle department apply their own legal code for certain areas of the law. The statutes in question date from the period 1871 - 1919 when the area was part of the German Empire. With the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1919, many in central government assumed that the recovered territories would be subject to French law.

Local resistance to a total acceptance of the French legal code arose in Alsace because in various respects reforms under Bismarck had left Germany with a relatively advanced legal system, especially with regard to civil and social rights. After much discussion and uncertainty, Paris accepted in 1924 that Alsace should retain its German originating laws in respect of certain matters, especially with regard to hunting, economic life, local government relationships, health insurance and social rights. Since many of the relevant texts have never been formally translated, occasions continue to arise where reference has to be made to German-language texts.

Numerous other anomalies arise which challenge the centralising instincts of the state. These include the absence, in Alsace and Moselle, of any formal separation between church and state: several mainstream denominations of the Christian church benefit from state funding, in defiance of principals applied rigorously in the rest of France.

Another manifestation of Alsatian legal differences arises on the railways. Where trains run on double tracks, the rule here is that they should travel on the right-hand track. In the rest of France the trains, unlike the cars, travel on the left.

Miscellaneous
Strasbourg, the chef lieu (principal city) of Bas-Rhin is one of two seats of the European Parliament, the other being Brussels.