Fouchy (French pronunciation: [fuʃi] ⓘ; German: Grube im Weilertal) is a commune in the Bas-Rhin department in Alsace in north-eastern France.

One route runs to the bottom of the valley, and leads out of the village towards Saint-Dié: scattered farms comprise a few hamlets some of the larger ones being La Combre, Berlicombelle, Noirceux, Rouhu, Schlingoutte, and Schnarupt.

Until the late Medieval period, the valley, part of a route between Alsace and Lorraine, played an intriguing role as an interface between the two very different worlds of the residual Gallo-Roman heritage on the one hand and the Germanic sphere on the other.

For the next two hundred years the wealth of Fouchy lands and the surrounding forests offered tempting prizes to local property holders.

An example is provided by a legal case which the Convent of St Faith found itself in opposition to the Abbey of Honcourt and the Villé priest, Father Huno.

Honcourt Abbey provided religious instruction to populations subject to the Convent of St faith, in return for which they expected payment.

However, in a judgment of 1169/70 the court rejected the claim of Honcourt Abbey and Father Huno on the Fouchy tithe, which thereby remained payable in full to Convent of St Faith.

Suffering of a different sort is recorded around 1313 when the citizens of Fouchy were touched by plague, and between 1348 and 1349 they were attacked by the Black Death which ravaged western Europe at this time.

These were also years during which Fouchy experienced a particularly high and unwelcome level of attention from passing armies and other pillaging hoards, leaving behind them desolation and misery.

That is the context in which, following the population collapse caused by the black death, "Grube et Breytenowe" (Fouchy and Breitenau) were ceded to the lords of Frankenbourg, and came to form a part of Ban County.

However, during the fifteenth century the spiritual influence exercised by the convent diminished, and in 1464 it was the abbot of Honcourt Abbey who appointed the Fouchy rector.

The first night he spent at Villé, which he took over along with the Castle of Ortenburg: the next day he established his headquarters at Châtenois, committing numerous atrocities in the process.

Charles the Bold himself would be killed in battle at Nancy less than three years later, leaving behind him a disputed succession which would sow the seeds for the end of the Burgundian Kingdom.

By 1618 when war broke out, advances in weapons technology and in military organisation had made warfare significantly more lethal, even, than it had been in the Medieval period, not merely for soldiers but also for any civilian populations that found themselves in the wrong place.

The valley was ruined economically: climate deterioration experienced in northern Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century will have done nothing to help the survivors at harvest time.

The Treaty of Westphalia confirmed the conquest of Alsace by France, and in due course the French state addressed the challenge of rebuilding population levels in its new eastern territories.

Today the year 17.. inscribed on several of the older houses in the centre of the village bears silent testimony to a century of peace and reconstruction.