Mulhouse gets a bad rap, and I arrived primed to dislike it. After the postcard villages of the wine route — Riquewihr, Eguisheim, all that half-timbered perfection — Mulhouse reads at first as a hard-working industrial town that happens to be in Alsace rather than a piece of Alsace itself. It was a textile powerhouse for two centuries, an independent little city-republic that only joined France in 1798, and it wears its factory history openly. But I have come to believe that the towns that don’t try to charm you are often the ones worth your attention, and Mulhouse, once it stops scowling, is generous.
The Painted Square and the Old Town
The Place de la Réunion is where the city keeps its good looks. At its centre stands the old Hôtel de Ville, a sixteenth-century town hall painted an improbable salmon pink and covered head to foot in trompe-l’oeil frescoes — fake statues, fake niches, allegorical figures peering down at the café tables. Lia spotted the Klapperstein hanging by the door, a grotesque carved stone mask once tied around the necks of slanderers and paraded through the streets. The Alsatians have always had a dark sense of humour about public shame.
The Temple Saint-Étienne anchors the other side of the square, a neo-Gothic Protestant church whose stained glass, salvaged from a medieval predecessor, is genuinely worth the crick in your neck. Around the square the lanes are quieter and rougher than the tourist villages, full of kebab shops and old brasseries and the everyday churn of a real working city. We ate a proper Alsatian lunch — choucroute, a carafe of Riesling — in a place full of locals on their lunch break, nobody paying us the slightest attention, which after the wine route felt like a holiday from being a tourist.
The Cathedral of the Automobile
The reason to make the trip, though, sits in a converted textile mill on the edge of town. The Cité de l’Automobile holds the Schlumpf Collection, the largest car museum in the world, and the story behind it is almost better than the cars. Two textile-baron brothers, Hans and Fritz Schlumpf, secretly poured their workers’ factory profits into amassing hundreds of automobiles — including the greatest hoard of Bugattis ever assembled — then went bankrupt and fled when the workers discovered what their wages had funded. The collection was seized and turned into this museum.
Even if, like me, you cannot tell a carburettor from a coffee pot, the place is overwhelming. Hundreds of gleaming machines stretch away under rows of art-nouveau lampposts copied from a Paris bridge, and at the far end, behind a velvet rope, sit the two Bugatti Royales — among the most valuable cars on the planet. Lia, no petrolhead either, admitted afterward that she had teared up a little, less at the cars than at the sheer mad scale of one family’s obsession. That is Mulhouse all over: not charming, exactly, but unforgettable.
When to go: Year-round, since the great draws are indoors. Late November and December bring a quieter, less touristy Christmas market than the famous Alsatian ones, with the city’s textile heritage on display in painted cloth.