Bussang Pass

The Col de Bussang (Bussang Pass) is one of the busiest passes in France's Vosges mountains. Located in the Grand Est region of France at an altitude of 727 m, it links Lorraine and Alsace via Route Nationale 66 (also European Route 512). The two communes on the Lorraine side of the pass are Bussang, and the Alsace side is Urbès. The ridge crossing at Bussang is one of the main historical passes that have crossed the Vosges since ancient times, alongside the Col du Bonhomme, the Col du Donon, and the Col de Saverne.

The importance of vehicular traffic over the Bussang pass has grown steadily since the last centuries of the Middle Ages, with the intensification of road and trade links between Flanders and Italy. The passage from the Vosges massif to the south is, therefore, part of a road network based on a so-called Lotharingian Europe, but by no means exclusive to the Flanders-Italy junction. To avoid climbing the passes of the southern Vosges, other trade routes took in the Alsatian plain or the Franche-Comté passes. The flourishing forestry and mining activities of the 15th to 17th centuries in the Upper Moselle Valley at the foot of the Ballon d'Alsace reinforced the local traffic around the Bussang pass, where raw material sites and processing factories were concentrated. The industrial and agropastoral activities of the Upper Moselle also encouraged the immigration of skilled workers from German-speaking countries on the Roman side of the pass, such as miners, marcaires from Switzerland, Alsace, and Germany, and coal miners from Sweden, the Tyrol and the Black Forest in the mountainous area between the Col du Bussang and the Col des Charbonniers.

Defourny's Trésor des Chartes de Lorraine does not speak in terms of cols but rather of “passages” or “pertuis” in the village of Vôge. Situated at the crossroads of the Romanesque cultural sphere on the one hand and the Germanic world on the other, the Col de Bussang remains an ancestral frontier between various entities: sovereign states, temporal abbatial or canonical principalities, archdioceses, or linguistic areas. However, its vocation as a passageway has always outweighed its function as a natural frontier.

The use of the term “Col de Bussang” is relatively recent. On either side of the Franco-German language boundary, we used to say or read:

The toponyms of the settlements below the pass on either side, Bussang or Urbès, appear visibly little or not at all in the first names of the pass. As is the case for other regions of the Vosges massif on the Alsatian side, the German-speaking part insists on the topographical characteristic: the term “Steige” designates a “hill” or “climb”. The same name is used for the Col de Saverne (German: Zaberner Steige), the Col de Steige at Offwiller between Moselle and Bas-Rhin. In fact, for German speakers, the name Steige has little to do with mountainous regions: in south and south-west German, it mainly refers to a steep road. Unlike a pass, it is not necessarily intended as a means of crossing a mountain into the neighboring valley. Steigen, for example, is common in the hilly or steeply sloping regions of south-central Germany, where they are used to cross from the valley floor into the surrounding higher terrain.

The term Sattel (German for saddle), on the other hand, clearly refers to the mountain pass's vocation as a “horse's saddle” structure formed in the mountains by the intersection of a ridge line and two talwegs on either side. The narrow indentation between the Tête des Allemands (1,014 m) and the Tête des Russiers (1,187 m) is visible from Lorraine. German-speaking denominations frequently add zur Linden: “from gold to lime trees”. In regional Lorraine French, passes are commonly referred to as “pertuis”, “plain” or “passage”. We spoke of the pertuis d'Estaye or the Passage de la Taye. In the Vosges patois language of the Saint-Dié and Remiremont areas, the regional terms for “pertuis”, “potieu” or “pètu” were commonly used to designate a hole, a pass or a narrow passage in the mountain. As with “Steige”, the term “côte” (side) is often used in 19th-century writings. The first prefect of the Vosges, Henri-Zacharie Desgouttes, describes the Col de Bussang without mentioning the word “col” once: “The Moselle has its source in the arrondissement of Remiremont, at the foot of the Côte du Taye, whose highest point, where two hills meet, forms the boundary between the Vosges and Haut-Rhin departments. In contrast, the emphasis is on two hills that meet at the pass.

The Bussang Pass is located in the Vosges mountains, on the western side in the commune of Bussang in the Vosges department, and on the eastern side in the commune of Urbès in the Haut-Rhin département, entirely within the Grand Est region. It leads into the upper Thur valley towards Thann.

It is dominated by Grand Drumont (1,200 m) to the north and tête des Neufs-Bois (1,228 m) to the south. It links the Moselle Valley (Trier, Luxembourg, Metz, Épinal) with the Rhine Valley and its main tributary, the Ill (Mulhouse, Basel).