In the daytime, the French town of Belfort is luminescent. The small squares and narrow streets of the old center glow from the pale pink sandstone mined from the nearby Vosges mountains. The sandstone gives the whole sleepy, provincial town an otherworldly atmosphere. Belfort feels like a place out of time, a sense heightened by the slow speech and lilting accent of its people.

The calmness of current-day Belfort, in the eastern region of Franche- Comté near the Swiss border, belies its martial history, a function of its strategic position between iterations of French, German, and Austrian power. Monuments to heroic deeds in times of war can be found around almost every corner and on every square. Towering over the city, visible from nearly everywhere in the old town, is the citadel of Belfort, made of the same Vosges sandstone found below.

On November 3, 1870, Prussian forces led by General Udo von Treskow surrounded Belfort. His French counterpart, Aristide Denfert-Rochereau, declined an offer to surrender. The siege of Belfort that resulted lasted through a brutal winter, and the city eventually fell to the Prussians, on February 18, 1871. The Belfort garrison had held out for an astonishing 103 days. In 1880, the Alsatian sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, who also made the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, completed his Lion de Belfort in commemoration of the siege. It is built out of the same luminescent sandstone which comprises the fort itself.

Further monuments to Belfortian bravery abound in the city. In 1993, Belfort dedicated a sculpture and the Place Anne Frank to the liberation of the Jewish victims of the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators in World War II. The sculpture shows a man, his head held high, his arms spread, his chains broken. Gérard Grisey's father, whose bravery in the face of mortal danger fits well into the history of this town, played a part in the liberation of France. This, in turn, shaped the composer's earliest artistic and psychological development.

On June 19, 1940, the Nazi tank unit Guderian thundered into Belfort and occupied the city. Throughout World War II, Resistance fighters in the region attempted to sabotage Nazi logistical sites. Frequently they were caught.