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Saarbrucken sits a few kilometers from the French border and has spent most of its history oscillating between the two nations. After World War I, the Saar coal mines were handed to France under the Treaty of Versailles; in 1935, more than 90 percent of the population voted to rejoin Germany. The architect Friedrich Joachim Stengel shaped much of the city's 18th-century appearance in a French classicist style, most legibly in Ludwigsplatz and the Ludwigskirche, which feel more like Lyon than the Rhineland.

The Saarbahn tram physically crosses the international border on its way to Sarreguemines in France, and French residents form one of the city's largest foreign communities.

Fifteen kilometers away, the Volklinger Hutte, an ironworks active from 1873 to 1986, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the only fully preserved ironworks from the industrial age anywhere in the world. The Deutsch-Franzosischer Garten, a large park created for a 1960 binational exhibition, remains a popular meeting point between the two countries: architecturally French, politically German, culturally both.