They specialised in military fiction and ghost stories in a rustic mode, applying to the Vosges mountain range and the Alsace-Lorraine region techniques inspired by story-tellers from the Black Forest.
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Both Erckmann and Chatrian were born in the département of Moselle, in the Lorraine region in the extreme north-east of France.
Wissembourg formed the setting for the Romantic novel L’ami Fritz (1869) co-written by the team of Erckmann and Chatrian, which provided the material for Mascagni's opera L'Amico Fritz.