The history of Luxembourg

Luxembourg is one of the smallest countries in Europe, a landlocked grand duchy of about 2,600 square kilometres between Belgium, France and Germany. It grew from a castle built on a rock above the Alzette river in the tenth century, and its counts became Holy Roman Emperors and kings of Bohemia. For four centuries afterwards it was a province of the Low Countries under Burgundian, Spanish, French and Austrian rule, prized for a fortress so strong it was called the "Gibraltar of the North". The great powers created the modern Grand Duchy in 1815, cut it down to its present size in 1839 and guaranteed its neutrality in 1867. Occupied by Germany in both world wars, Luxembourg emerged as a founding member of NATO and the European communities and one of the richest countries in the world.

Decorated bones found at Oetrange show that people lived in the area more than 35,000 years ago, and the first farming villages, with houses of timber and wattle, appeared in the Neolithic in the fifth millennium BCE. In the Iron Age the land was home to the Treveri, a Gaulish people of the Celts who built fortified settlements known as oppida. The largest, on the Titelberg in the far south-west of the country, covered about 50 hectares and was a centre of crafts and coinage.

Julius Caesar conquered the Treveri during the Gallic Wars, completing the task by 53 BCE. Under the Roman Empire the region belonged to the province of Gallia Belgica, governed from nearby Trier, which became one of the empire's capitals in the fourth century. Roads, villas and small towns such as Dalheim spread Roman culture, and Latin replaced the Celtic language. Germanic Franks settled in the region from the fourth century, and by the late fifth century it was part of the Frankish kingdom. The Northumbrian missionary Willibrord founded the abbey of Echternach in 698, which became a centre of learning and manuscript painting in the Carolingian Empire of Charlemagne. When the empire was divided in 843 the land fell to the middle kingdom, later called Lotharingia, and in the tenth century it became part of the duchy of Lorraine within the Holy Roman Empire.

The history of Luxembourg as a separate territory begins in 963, when Siegfried, a count of the Ardennes, exchanged lands with the abbey of St Maximin in Trier for a small fort called Lucilinburhuc, the "little castle", on the rocky outcrop of the Bock. A town grew up around it. Siegfried's descendants gathered lands through marriage, purchase and war, and Conrad I, who died in 1086, was the first to call himself count of Luxembourg. By the end of the thirteenth century the county stretched from the Meuse to the Moselle and straddled the border between German and French speech, a division that still shapes the country.

In 1308 Count Henry VII was elected King of Germany, and in 1312 he was crowned emperor in Rome, the first of four members of the house of Luxembourg to hold the imperial or royal title. His son John the Blind married the heiress of Bohemia and became its king; he was killed fighting for the King of France at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, early in the Hundred Years' War. John's son, the emperor Charles IV, ruled from Prague and in 1354 raised Luxembourg to a duchy for his half-brother Wenceslaus. The duchy reached its greatest extent with the acquisition of the county of Chiny in 1364. Charles's sons Wenceslaus and Sigismund were also kings and emperors, but they paid little attention to their ancestral land and pledged it to creditors. After Sigismund died in 1437 the dynasty's male line ended, and in 1443 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, captured the city of Luxembourg.

From then on Luxembourg shared the fate of the Low Countries. When the last Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, died in 1477, his lands passed by marriage to the Habsburgs. Under Charles V, who was born in Ghent, and after his abdication in 1555 under Philip II of Spain, the duchy was governed from Brussels as part of the Spanish Netherlands. Unlike the northern provinces, which rebelled against Philip and formed the Dutch Republic, Luxembourg remained Catholic and loyal to Spain.

Its fortress placed it at the centre of the long wars between the Habsburgs and France. By the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 Spain ceded the southern part of the duchy, around Thionville, to France. In 1684 the armies of Louis XIV besieged and captured the city, and his engineer Vauban rebuilt its defences; the duchy was returned to Spain by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. After the War of the Spanish Succession it passed in 1715 to the Austrian Habsburgs. The eighteenth century was a rare period of peace, and the reforms of Charles VI, Maria Theresa and Joseph II, including a new land register and toleration for non-Catholics, modernised the administration. Luxembourg historians once described all these centuries as a time of "foreign domination", but people at the time accepted their Spanish or Austrian rulers as their lawful princes; a national feeling only developed in the nineteenth century.

During the wars of the French Revolution, French troops blockaded the fortress for seven months before it surrendered in 1795, and Luxembourg was annexed to France as the Département des Forêts. Conscription and anti-clerical laws provoked a peasant revolt in 1798, the Klëppelkrich or "cudgel war", which was quickly crushed. Under Napoleon French rule became more accepted, and the Napoleonic legal code remains the basis of Luxembourg law.

After Napoleon's fall the Congress of Vienna in 1815 made Luxembourg a grand duchy and gave it to William I of Orange-Nassau, King of the Netherlands, as compensation for his family's German lands, which went to Prussia. Luxembourg lost its territory east of the Moselle, Sauer and Our rivers to Prussia, joined the German Confederation, and received a Prussian garrison in its fortress. William governed it as if it were a Dutch province, and when Belgium revolted in 1830 most Luxembourgers joined the Belgian side, leaving only the fortress city under Dutch control. The Treaty of London in 1839 divided the country: the larger, French-speaking west became the Belgian province of Luxembourg, and the German-speaking east became the present Grand Duchy, with about 170,000 inhabitants.

The smaller state built its own institutions, receiving a constitution in 1841, and in 1842 it joined the German customs union, the Zollverein. Poverty drove many people to emigrate, and about one in five Luxembourgers left for the United States between 1841 and 1891. In 1867 King William III of the Netherlands offered to sell the Grand Duchy to Napoleon III of France, provoking a crisis with Prussia under Otto von Bismarck that threatened war. A conference in London resolved it in May 1867 by declaring Luxembourg permanently neutral under the guarantee of the great powers. The Prussian garrison left and the fortress walls were pulled down. A new constitution in 1868 remains, much amended, in force today.

The discovery that the region's phosphorous iron ore, the minette, could be used to make steel with the Thomas process transformed the south of the country from the 1870s, and steelworks drew immigrant workers, especially from Italy. When William III died in 1890 leaving only a daughter, the Dutch crown passed to Wilhelmina, but Luxembourg's succession law favoured male heirs, so the grand ducal crown went to Adolphe of Nassau-Weilburg, a German prince who had lost his own duchy to Prussia in 1866. For the first time in centuries Luxembourg had a ruler of its own. The Luxembourgish language, a Moselle Franconian dialect, became a written and literary language, and in 1912 it was made a school subject.

Germany ignored Luxembourg's neutrality and occupied it throughout the First World War, though it left the government in place. Grand Duchess Marie-Adélaïde was accused of sympathy for Germany and abdicated in 1919 in favour of her sister Charlotte. That year a referendum confirmed the monarchy, and the country introduced universal suffrage for men and women. In 1921 it formed an economic union with Belgium, sharing a currency, and in 1937 voters rejected a law to ban the Communist Party.

On 10 May 1940 German forces invaded again during the Second World War. Grand Duchess Charlotte and the government escaped to London and North America, and her broadcasts on the BBC became a symbol of resistance. Nazi Germany treated Luxembourg as German land, banned French, and in 1942 annexed it in practice. In a census of October 1941 an overwhelming majority answered "Luxembourgish" to questions on nationality, language and ethnicity. When conscription into the German army was announced in August 1942, a general strike spread across the country; the occupiers executed 21 strikers and deported hundreds more. About 13,000 young men were called up, and more than 2,800 of them died in German uniform. Of some 3,500 Jews living in the country before the war, between 1,000 and 2,500 were murdered in the Holocaust. American troops liberated the capital on 10 September 1944, but the north was devastated in the Battle of the Bulge that winter, and the last Germans were driven out early in 1945.

The war ended Luxembourg's neutrality. It was a founding member of the United Nations in 1945, of the Benelux customs union with Belgium and the Netherlands, and of NATO in 1949. Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister who proposed European coal and steel integration in 1950, had been born in Luxembourg City, and the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community was based there from 1952. Luxembourg was one of the six founders of the European Economic Community in 1957 and has hosted the European Court of Justice and other EU institutions. Its prime minister Pierre Werner drew up the first plan for European monetary union in 1970, the Schengen Agreement on open borders was signed in 1985 in the Luxembourg village of Schengen, and the country adopted the euro in 1999.

The steel crisis of the 1970s and 1980s was managed through negotiations between government, employers and unions, and banking, investment funds and later media and space industries replaced steel as the basis of the economy, making Luxembourg one of the wealthiest states in the world by output per person. Nearly half its residents are foreign nationals, the largest group being Portuguese, and tens of thousands of workers cross the border daily from France, Belgium and Germany. Luxembourgish was declared the national language in 1984, alongside French and German. Luxembourgers have played large roles in European politics: Jacques Santer and Jean-Claude Juncker, both former prime ministers, became presidents of the European Commission.

Grand Duchess Charlotte reigned until 1964, followed by her son Jean and, from 2000, Henri. Juncker, prime minister from 1995 to 2013, resigned after a scandal over the intelligence service, and the liberal Xavier Bettel led coalition governments until the Christian Social People's Party returned to power after the 2023 election under Luc Frieden. On 3 October 2025 Grand Duke Henri abdicated, and his son became Grand Duke Guillaume V, the head of the world's only remaining sovereign grand duchy.