Christoph Wilhelm von Koch

Travelling extensively in Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands, he gained access to libraries and archives and made contact with intellectuals and prominent public figures.

In 1780 he published his "Tables généalogiques des maisons souveraines de l'Europe" on the family trees of European monarchs and in 1790 he published the two-volume "Tableau des révolutions de l'Europe dans le moyen âge" on political upheavals in the European middle ages.

As leader of the diplomatic mission to Paris, he successfully argued for the protection of Alsacian protestant property against appropriation by the state, citing the treaties of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

Koch served on the French Napoleonic Tribunat council from 1802 until its dissolution in 1807, applying himself among other things to re-establishing the protestant university in Strasbourg.

In 1809 he became Dean of the St Thomas Seminary in Strasbourg and in 1810 a board member of the Assembly of Augsburg Confession Churches.

The city's archivist and historian, Louis Schneegans (1812–1858), described it: At the base, on a kind of altar, is a bust of the scholarly professor, more than life size.

At the base of the pedestal, on a rock, sits a personification of the city of Strasbourg as a young and vigorous woman, [ancient] Greek in proportion and costume, who is presenting a civic crown of oak leaves to the citizen, the distinguished and honest scholar and the civil servant, whose loss was mourned by all.