[4] It is located both above and in a steep section of the valley of the river Woigot, five kilometers to the north of the autoroute that connects Strasbourg with Paris, and 22 km northwest of Metz.

Briey forms a part of an extensive grouping of once heavily industrialized towns that also includes Jœuf and Homécourt, along with Hagondange, Amnéville and Rombas in the adjacent department.

The turbulent years following the Black Death and the resulting sudden shifts in economic power were marked by an upsurge of violence across the region, and in 1369 Briey was burned out by a force from nearby Metz.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Briey Basin was one of Europe’s leading steel producing regions: in the 1970s the Hagondange-Briey agglomeration still had a population of above 130,000, although by 1990 this figure had fallen to 112,000.

Intensive heavy industry is now a receding memory, as the service sector has provided the principal sources of employment growth in recent years, with increasing numbers of the working-age residents commuting to nearby Metz or Luxembourg.