L'Exode

L’Exode

THE EXODUS

Nos patriae fines…

“French subjects, native to the ceded territories, currently domiciled on this territory, who intend to retain French nationality shall enjoy, until October 1, 1872, and by means of a prior declaration made to the competent authority, the right to transfer their domicile to France and to establish themselves there…”: such were, in their essential provisions, the terms of Article 2 of the Treaty of Frankfurt. The Alsatians and Lorrainers could, if they wished, leave, quit their country to return to the fatherland: the treaty left them that option — an elegant euphemism, since this option was, in fact, for all who held to remaining French, an obligation. No one could at once keep his quality of Frenchman and his domicile in Alsace-Lorraine. One had to remain in Alsace-Lorraine and become a “German subject,” or to “opt” in due and proper form for France and depart.

I have said elsewhere [footnote: La Carte au liséré vert.] what reactions the treaty produced upon the various categories of persons, how the anguishing question posed itself for each of them: to leave or to stay? But if concern for the future — for most, to leave was to remake their lives — could provoke different resolutions according to each one’s resources and connections, the sentiment was unanimous. All those whom no imperious necessities held back departed, and even many others who, by remaining, would have had no difficulty justifying themselves: how many circumstances before which the most delicate conscience, the most touchy patriotism would have felt more inclined to pity than to blame! As the term of September 30, 1872 approached, departures grew more rapid, more agitated, more feverish, and, in the last days, by the trains and the roads that led toward the new frontier, there was a formidable rush of brave people, enthusiastic and heartbroken. The old, the young, a single horror trembled in them, determined their actions: to see one’s sons, to see oneself, in the uniform of those by whom one had suffered so much and who, from one day to the next, were imposing it upon the vanquished… [footnote: See Annex I.] Yet the emigration did not stop at the fatal date. Those who remained were German subjects, but they could, if they returned to France, obtain their “reintegration” into the quality of Frenchman. Year after year, other departures followed: people left, “because of the sons,” always, or to rejoin married daughters, or even less close relatives, or, simply, France, the French… The Alsatians and Lorrainers spread out through all of France, bringing to her, with the same faith with which their fathers had enrolled themselves at the altars of the Fatherland, an energetic will to serve her. Names from over there recognized suddenly far from the country, found again, in the north, in the south, in the west, throughout all that remains of the national territory, and which one prolongs instinctively, at once, with the memory of their origin: — Staehling? Flach? Strasbourg; Koechlin? Engel? Mulhouse; Gauckler? Wissembourg; Bloch? Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines… — factory heads addressing their workers in the dialect of Schiltigheim [footnote: Popular name for Schiltigheim, near Strasbourg.] or that of Dornach [footnote: Suburb of Mulhouse.]; foremen’s reports spelled in the Alsatian fashion; the kilbés [footnote: “Village festival,” in the Haut-Rhin.] in the environs of Sidi Bel Abbès where Alsatian legionaries amuse themselves as in their villages; those who return, from Africa or Asia, glorious with a little French glory all the same, but whom a pitiless frontier halts a few quarters of an hour from the house where their “old folks” would like to embrace them once more; and those who do not return…; the home that suddenly springs up because a professor in his chair, a lawyer at the bar, a colonel before the front of his regiment have pronounced the simplest, the most banal words, but stressing the consonants, singing the vowels in a certain way in which one has suddenly felt, with a shiver, the past vibrating; the little merchant across the way, beneath my window, who has “never wanted to go back there, so as not to see the Prussians in his own home,” and that other, a former schoolmaster at Obermodern, “unreplaced” in France, who pushes a little cart of the “four seasons” and who said to me weeping: “Ah! my beautiful country!…” all this is the Exodus…

In Alsace, this question of emigration was often discussed: where lay the duty toward the larger as toward the smaller fatherland, whether one ought to leave or stay — a difficult problem. To leave was to give to misfortune a courageous testimony of fidelity, to put once more in the service of France, despite the loss of Alsace, all that one carried within oneself of Alsatian virtues. To stay was to contribute to maintaining France in Alsace, despite the foreign conquest, to prolong her memory and her spirit in the country that was no longer French. To leave… but to leave, was it not to make a clean sweep before the men from beyond the Rhine? to open Alsace to them like a mill-pond that would fill little by little and that perhaps would later spill over, in a new torrent, upon France? To stay… but, by staying, how long could one keep the tradition intact? Would the sons save it in themselves as easily as the fathers, who had known no other, and would they not become, one day, whether they willed it or not, by the sole fact of having remained there, new forces for Germany? But what matter these largely retrospective considerations? Even those who today most vividly deplore, in Alsace and in Lorraine, that emigration weakened the country’s bone structure, made more difficult its struggle to maintain its personality, even these agree that this gesture had to be made. It was the indispensable complement of the political protest. Without it, the words pronounced by the representatives of Alsace would not have, before history, the same authority. To make declared, at Bordeaux, “null and void a pact that disposes of us without our consent,” at Berlin, “that Germany has exceeded her right as a civilized nation by constraining vanquished France to the sacrifice of a million and a half of her children” — this was a protest all the more courageous and beautiful because one was ready, if haughty Germany pursued her way without listening, to depart amid hazards and perils, far from the bell tower, perhaps to regret it forever without ever seeing it again.

French opinion and German opinion were themselves, too, differently affected according to the hour and the circumstances, by the fact of the Alsatian emigration. In France, as soon as the war was ended, committees were formed to welcome the immigrants from Alsace and Lorraine, but the tenderness that the mother-fatherland showed to those who came toward her did not lack a certain suspicion toward the others; thereafter, an effort was made to be more just, and France knows today all that she owes to Alsatian immigration, but she also understands that, without the Alsatians who remained in Alsace, her very name there would now be no more than a Germanized word. As for the Germans, they did not see without bitterness the lists of optants lengthen in the sub-prefectures and the columns of emigrants on the roads. If the Correspondance provinciale, one of the semi-official organs of the Berlin government, then wrote that Alsace-Lorraine was going to become a German country “in the most perfect sense of the word, as a consequence of the elimination of the inhabitants who declared themselves for France” [footnote: See Annex II.], this was only an argument of consolation that it offered to its readers, with more ingenuity, no doubt, than sincerity. Europe was too moved by the dramatic scenes of the emigration [footnote: See Annex III.] for Germany herself to be indifferent and to feel no shame at seeing the “reconquered brothers” thus flee at her approach. Otherwise, the German administration would not have sought to retain them, exerted its pressure in the countryside to hinder the movement of emigration, offered favorable treatment to functionaries who would remain in its service, tolerated [footnote: If not immediately, then at least some years after the war.] by exceptional measures, that certain captains of industry should remain French citizens while retaining their domicile on the annexed territory. Since then, she seems to have changed her method, at least in certain periods, the latest of which is very close to us. That “German subjects” of such recent and rude acquisition should not have become passionately German, that they should still be only Muss-Deutsch, “Germans by force” — Germany, who knows admirably how to remember when her own history is in question, Germany grows irritated and exasperated at this spectacle, and certain departures that still occur do not surprise the administration of the “Imperial Territory” enough for us not to have some reason to believe that they correspond to its secret desires… Still more than political susceptibility, the human and economic overproduction of Germany has contributed to modifying in the same sense the manners of seeing and acting of the authorities. It was not only from the political point of view that the Treaty of Frankfurt separated Alsace and Lorraine from France: the new frontier was, at the same time, a customs barrier [footnote: See later, pages 30, 91, and Annex IV.]. Alsatians, Lorrainers were leaving, pushed back toward their traditional market, leaving behind them, almost to abandonment, shops, business interests, sometimes even a factory. But there were not, in the Germany of 1871, enough men or available capital for her to find her interest in encouraging this movement. Today, German overproduction, which tends to spread throughout the world, finds within its immediate reach, in the French provinces that Germany has annexed, a first ground of colonization and exploitation. After the small merchants of the beginning, who were content to take the empty places, have come, particularly over the last ten years or so, entrepreneurs of great enterprises, captains of industry emboldened by success. To buy out establishments, to found new houses, depots or branches, the Germans no longer feel the same embarrassment as forty years ago. And here, toward France, are a few more departures, the mass of the exodus swollen by a few more units.

… I have wished to follow upon some of the roads by which they passed the crowd of these emigrants, to gather together what remains of them on the soil they fled, what remains of “home” in their dispersed firesides. Tender devotion to our little fatherland, sensibility ever awake when it is in question and vibrant at the slightest shock, no doubt; but still — may the word not seem pretentious! — the ambition of a historian, the will to grasp and to fix, while there is yet time, some of the aspects of this great popular movement, the consequence of the national disaster. Tomorrow, perhaps, it would be too late. Documents will subsist, in libraries and archives, but living memory will no longer illuminate them. Today there still remain actors of the drama, many men who had lived together in Alsace or Lorraine through their years of apprenticeship and hope; since then, an unforeseen frontier has separated them, but they have carried with them, through life, this image of the same horizons, this same memory of the first impressions, which never fade. They need no effort to imagine Alsace without the Germans: their eyes saw her French. Whether they pursued their careers in Alsace-Lorraine after the annexation or interrupted them there to take them up again in France, both groups remember, with a single memory, Alsatian society before the war, what everywhere were the briskness in labor and the liberalism of minds, the confidence in the future and the sweetness of living; how one talked, at the café of the little town, of the Mexican war, or of the plebiscite plan, or of a certain letter from the “German Patriots” already claiming Alsace; what were the outlets of each industry, with whom Langenhagen of Sarre-Union “worked,” Dollfus-Mieg of Mulhouse, Blin of Bischwiller or Goldenberg of Saverne; then, suddenly, the war, the guards mounted together at the Porte de Pierres, the skirmish at Chalampé or the sorties of Belfort, more emotions experienced in common and relived with a single heart; then, the end, after the brutality of war, the brutality of peace, what were the repercussions of the Treaty of Frankfurt on private existences, what petty vexations followed for this man, because he had said too loudly that the French would return within three years, as everyone believed — a general sentiment which contributed too, to determine in one sense or the other each man’s conduct —; what ruin for that one, lately happy, almost rich after a patient labor, awarded a medal at the Exposition of 1867 — suddenly ruined by the loss of the French clientele; what grief for that other, because his son, a soldier in France and departed without a “certificate of emigration,” could not return to Alsace, second him, succeed him one day… Without this contribution of living memory, one will be able, tomorrow still, to evaluate with precision the economic and social consequences, for France and for Alsace-Lorraine, of this emigration; but one will perhaps no longer grasp all its causes and all its circumstances, one will no longer see as today out of what moral incompatibilities and what material upheavals it was made, of what vexations and what tearings. Tomorrow, this history will be statistics; today, it is still life.

To all those whom I have consulted in the course of this study, those who were of the exodus, those who only followed it with their eyes and thoughts, I owe the same thanks, for the sympathy of their welcome, for the help they offered me, for the encouragements they lavished upon me. They confirmed me in the confidence that my effort was not vain and, more than once, comforted me in the harsh pursuit of my task. But they are too numerous for me to name them all; and, for some, to be cited would not be without inconvenience. I content myself with saying my gratitude here, and what emotion I owe them. Among the consequences of the exodus, this one at least is indisputable: by the bond that subsists between persons, it has prolonged Alsace’s participation in French life and the memory of France in Alsatian consciousness. Often, in my comings and goings on the two slopes of the Vosges, I have been able to give “those who left” news of the little fatherland abandoned, not forgotten, to speak with “those who stayed” of so many people, of so many beloved things they have never seen come back, and it seemed to me that thus I was contributing, for my modest part, to maintain this bond, to make endure, despite the frontier, this fraternity. [footnote: M. Ernest Lavisse, of the Académie française, was kind enough from the beginning to take an interest in this work and to welcome its principal chapters into the Revue de Paris, with a sympathy whose memory is very precious to me. May he find here the respectful homage of my lively and sincere gratitude.]

FROM BISCHWILLER TO ELBEUF

The war was scarcely over when a small town of the Bas-Rhin, in full prosperity, saw nearly half of its population depart, almost an entire industry, which set out as far as Normandy in search of the means of living again while remaining attached to France: Elbeuf was about to grow rich on all that Bischwiller lost.

The industrial activity of Bischwiller had its origin at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A hamlet built around a farm of the bishopric of Strasbourg (Bischoffswiler, Episcopi villa), Bischwiller had long been but an unimportant seigneury, many times sold or pledged to local nobles. The Reformation arose, a general cause whose local repercussions were to determine all the subsequent destinies of Bischwiller. Not far from there, at the outlet of a Vosges pass, but on the western slope, a new town soon rose up, Phalsbourg, the work of the count palatine Jean-Georges de Veldence, a refuge widely open to the persecuted Protestants of France and the Low Countries, hard-working industrialists, active merchants, who came in great number to settle there. Behold, in 1583, Jean-Georges sells his town to Duke Charles of Lorraine, by a “capitulation,” it is true, which guarantees toleration to the inhabitants. Vain precaution: it was quickly perceived that the Lorrainer had not forgotten the League; his son and successor, Henri, walked in his father’s footsteps, and they had to set out again by uncertain roads in search of new homes. It was then (1618, 1621) that many of them reached Bischwiller. The Duke of Deux-Ponts, of whom it was now the property, offered them without stint advantages and guarantees: the same rights as the ancient inhabitants, eligibility for the seat of aldermen, freedom of labor, free concession of communal lands on which to build, exemption for seventeen years from all seigneurial corvée, the concession to the new corporation of drapers of a waterfall for the establishment of a fulling mill… To these workers come thus — by way of Phalsbourg — from Lixheim near Sarrebourg or Courcelles near Metz, from Rocroi, from Commenchon or from Grandrieux, from the Vermandois or from Limburg, belongs the honor of having introduced into Bischwiller that textile industry that was to transform, vivify, render famous the obscure old village of the nobles de Beger and d’Eschenau, its former owners. Doubtless, in the later seventeenth century, then in the eighteenth and the nineteenth, the cultivation of tobacco, of madder, of hops, appeared as other sources of wealth — but accessory: in the drapery industry brought by the first columns of refugees, “there was,” said one day Dr. Luroth, a good administrator of Bischwiller, “there was a leaven that was, sooner or later, to raise the whole loaf.” When, in 1811, the admirable prefect Lezay-Marnésia had a report made on the industrial situation of Bischwiller, the town counted nearly 4,000 inhabitants, the working population was 1,700 persons, of whom 1,100 were employed by the drapery — prosperity which grew considerably, almost without interruption, for sixty years, thanks to mechanical spinning, then to the steam engine, thanks also to the new means of communication (Paris-Strasbourg railway, Strasbourg-Haguenau-Wissembourg railway).

These were then periods of splendor, 1842, 1849-1852, 1862-1869, that are still remembered at Bischwiller; these were all the consequences of industrial prosperity: enlargement of schools and workshops, perfection of looms, construction of a hospital, construction of a secondary “Progymnasium,” organization of mutual aid societies, of maternal charity, of patronage for illiterate children, founding of a popular library, of adult classes: more than 300,000 francs spent from 1850 to 1866, without contribution from the commune or any public treasury, simply through this “enlightened and firm initiative,” through these “sole forces of association founded on the broadest public and religious tolerance,” upon which M. de Quatrefages [footnote: The illustrious scholar, member of the Institute, professor at the Muséum. He had been a student at Strasbourg. — The inauguration ceremony took place on October 10, 1864. For several years past, M. de Quatrefages had spent the vacation period at Bischwiller.] pronounced an enthusiastic eulogy at the inauguration ceremony of the Progymnasium. Workers flowed in, attracted by the bait of large wages easily earned; in 1853, a new quarter was built: three streets prolonging older streets and six new streets, of a uniform width, on a regular alignment plan, lined with small comfortable houses, inexpensive, with a single ground floor, which often had to be built up afterwards.

… All of a sudden, one summer morning, the echo of near cannonades, then, in the afternoon, the gleams of fire from the direction of Froeschwiller, a galloping horse, riderless, returning, panic-stricken, toward its camp of the previous evening, a few wretched fugitives, and, the next morning, a platoon of Badenese dragoons, pistol in hand, through the streets of the little town. It was over with the prosperity of Bischwiller. No more new quarters would be built, there would no longer be need to add stories to the ground floors.

But Bischwiller was, like all Alsace, ardently French. Must it be said also that she put a certain coquetry into keeping a revolutionary air, and that her independent humor must have augured ill for the future? Alsace, the Alsace of the Ten Free Cities, of the Republic of Strasbourg and the Republic of Mulhouse, the Alsace of the Marseillaise, was about to fall beneath a foreign yoke, the harshest there could be. Now, in democratic Alsace, the people of Bischwiller particularly prided themselves on not having, in 1793, hoisted the white flag at the approach of the Austrians, on having given triumphal receptions to Benjamin Constant under the Restoration [footnote: In 1827 and 1829. One still perceives through the chronicle the echo of these popular acclamations: “Bischwiller was proud to be represented in the Chamber of Deputies by one of the most brilliant orators of the Chamber and one of the most valiant defenders of public liberties… The whole population went forth to meet him and saluted him with transports of joy… The old and untiring athlete of the representative regime… harangued the crowd in a voice vibrant with emotion and happiness… His words, heightened by the brilliance of a fine old man’s head, whose long white hair floated in the wind, produced a veritable intoxication of happiness in the population…” When he died, in 1830, “a commemorative service was celebrated in his honor at the Protestant church… Pastor Culmann, in an address interspersed with choruses, celebrated in eloquent terms the civic virtues of the constant defender of right against force, of light against darkness, who died in the service of fatherland and liberty.” (Eug. Bourguignon, op. cit., pages 254ff.) — See, following the Annexes, the Index of works consulted.], on having lately still accumulated noes against the Empire [footnote: At the plebiscite of 1870, 1,455 noes, 322 yeses.] — and their republican city, at the very moment when the fatherland was becoming a Republic, would be outside the fatherland! Did they not confusedly sense how much the Prussian-style regime would here offend the susceptibility of Alsatian democratism?… Perhaps; but, more than a confused sentiment, a clear idea occupied their minds, animated their wills. France remained, and alone justified the desire to remain hers, to go to rejoin her… They would leave…

Fortunate ones! if they wished to leave, the conditions of existence of their industry would be no obstacle to their departure. First, with regard to outlets. They manufactured chiefly fine plain cloth, for an elegant and rich clientele, black cloth for the cassocks of priests, or for the small jackets of Breton peasants; they had no German clientele: fine garments? Germany was still too poor; cassocks? Germany was Protestant. Now, if they stayed, the customs clauses of the peace treaty (exemption from duties until August 31, 1871, postponed to December 31 — quarter-duty from January 1 to June 30, 1872 — half-duty from July 1 to December 31, 1872 — then full duty) [footnote: See pages 25, 91, and Annex IV.] would separate them from their French clientele. Next, with regard to the very development of their industry: it had not yet reached the age when it would have been forced to remain, riveted to the soil by overheavy charges. There were other manufacturing centers in Alsace where the desire was no less general, nor less ardent, to escape the consequences of the treaty: Mulhouse, for example, and yet one would not see the same mass departure there. It was not that Mulhouse already had a German clientele: the German clientele only came to it with time; but the agglomeration there was more important than at Bischwiller, the number of workers to transport much more considerable, the industrial establishments more powerful, more capable of sending across the new frontier branches or sister-factories, all the equipment more perfected, more complicated, less transportable, the Doller, finally, untransportable — the Doller whose waters lend themselves specially to bleaching and to the application of colors. Bischwiller was freer in her person… Reasons and reasonings that sustained the first impulse, but took nothing from its beauty. They wanted, and they could, depart; they decided upon it, without hesitation, not without anguish. Despite all, the future was uncertain. Would it not be more hazardous to leave than to work at making themselves a clientele by staying? The old clientele called them, wished to continue relations; but would it not pass to others, when they no longer had the mark of origin? would it not tire, the first emotion past? The industrial agglomerations that they were about to enter, would they see their arrival with pleasure — as new factors of activity and success, or as competitors?… They left…

In 1869, there were 11,600 inhabitants at Bischwiller; in 1874, there were no more than 7,700. Of the 96 manufacturers from before the war, only 21 remained; of the 5,000 workers, fewer than 2,000; of the 2,000 looms, 650. Shipments of manufactured goods no longer amounted to more than 400,000 kilograms instead of a million, and the total of drapery business to only 5 to 6 million francs instead of 18 to 20. [footnote: Cf. Eug. Bourguignon, op. cit., page 356.]

Where did they go? Some to Sedan, to Vire, to Reims, to Tourcoing. The greater part, the most important, to Elbeuf.

The antiquity of Elbeuf was still more respectable than that of Bischwiller. Mention is made of the Elbeuvian drapers as early as before the year 900. Since then, with the rhythm of political or religious history no less than of economic theories or the fantasies of fashion, they knew fluctuations sometimes tragic. Menaces of ruin: the day, it is said, when Saint Louis resolved to apply to his person the decrees of the councils and to wear no more luxury stuffs; then, all the upheavals of the Norman country, the Hundred Years’ War, the wars of religion; then again, in pacified France, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which drove from Elbeuf its two most powerful industrial families, the Lemonniers and the Lecointes. Renewals of confidence, satisfied self-esteems and balance sheets: a purchase by Richelieu, who clothes the Scottish Company of the king’s bodyguard in Elbeuf cloth; regulations by Colbert, who protects them in the manner of the grand siècle, ordering, inspecting, verifying the origin of the wools and the number of threads, constraining them to do well, thus ensuring their reputation for a long future; letters patent from Louis XVI, which puts at their service a more philosophical authority, relaxing Colbert’s regulations because, he said, “institutions must not extend to the point of circumscribing the imagination of the industrious man”; a visit from the First Consul, who honors them with a device, brief and clear as a command: “Elbeuf is a hive; everyone works there”… In 1698, Elbeuf manufactured 9 to 10,000 pieces, worth more than 2 million livres; in 1785, 18,000 pieces: 9,000,000 livres; in 1823, its production reached 36 million francs; in 1834, 45 million; in 1868, 85 million. Elbeuf did not derogate by welcoming Bischwiller, nor Bischwiller by taking refuge at Elbeuf.

However, between the industry of Bischwiller and that of Elbeuf, there was analogy, not identity. The manufactured products, here and there, were not absolutely the same. It was black cloth that had made the reputation of Bischwiller; Elbeuf, for its part, made chiefly “novelty.” Difference too in raw materials; or, at least, one of them, much used at Bischwiller, was not used at all at Elbeuf: Mousse, that is, the parts of wool too short to contribute to the formation of the combed ribbon and which fall from the machines during the combing — derivatives of the mother-wool which can be used, either alone or mixed, in carding, with mother-wool. Difference, finally, in manufacturing processes. Until 1871, most Elbeuvian industrialists were what are called “chamber manufacturers”: everything was done piecework, from the cleaning of wool to the weaving of cloth — they had at home no equipment, but only a sales warehouse, or, at most, a workshop for design and sampling; furthermore, there were very few mechanical looms, the country weavers to whom the work was entrusted wove by hand, the old men passing the weft, the young men working the loom. The Bischwillerers, on the contrary, were of the Mulhouse school: they brought and put into practice at Elbeuf the modern formula of concentration in great factories.

Doubtless, the action was not unilateral, the influence did not come from the Bischwillerers alone; there was reciprocal penetration. After a while, the Bischwillerers manufactured “novelty,” like the Elbeuvians; the use of Mousse spread; the experience and skill of the Elbeuvian piece-workers in each of the distinct operations in which they had specialized for centuries, ensured the taste of the Bischwillerers, made it harder to satisfy their desire for finish and perfection… But — to insist only on one point — this distant specialization, contrary to the modern spirit of work, was not without danger: it had succeeded brilliantly at Elbeuf, many manufacturers owed it their renown and their fortune; therefore they were hardly anxious to change the system, being rich enough to let themselves live, that is, to die slowly; whereas the Bischwillerers had to put to work all their resources of initiative and energy, if they wanted to take root where they had transplanted themselves; and one may say that the industrial life of Elbeuf, by their arrival, was renewed, as that of Bischwiller, by their departure, had almost been extinguished.

Forty years later… From the blow that the separation from France struck her, Bischwiller has not recovered.

It was first, not misery: that was avoided by fleeing before it — but desolation, in the original sense of the sacred books, emptiness, abandonment — a curse that had passed, destructive perhaps of the future itself. Then, those of the manufacturers who had stayed tried to take heart again, set themselves back to work; and a few have come, more or less, to terms with the difficulties created by the new situation. In the good times, twice a year, in May-June and in November-December, the buyers flocked to Bischwiller; moreover, for settlements, one dealt with a first-rate clientele (Paris and Lyon). Since then, requests for long credit have had to be admitted, and also, instead of waiting at home, a representation has had to be maintained outside. One of them, who could no longer sell his cassock cloth in France, sought to dispose of it in Switzerland, especially in Italy, through intermediaries, and ended by succeeding. Another, who had a specialty of cloth for mourning crepes, hearse-trimmings, mortuary hangings — uses more particularly Catholic and French — had, in time, to detach the “crepe” part beyond the Vosges, but set himself, in compensation, to manufacture “color” for Italy, for the East. If they have not prospered, at least they have continued to live. Even new industries have come from elsewhere (French or Alsatian capital and administrators; for a few, exclusively German), have profited by the departure of the others, bought, often cheaply, vacant buildings, recreated some activity: a jute factory, a cartridge factory, three cigar factories, two shoe factories, a foundry. Workers too, those who stayed, were able to live thanks to the voids left by those who had departed. Before the war, the workers were the masters of work, the patrons, as people said, awaited them at the threshold; after, in the first years that followed, they could no longer work more than two or three days, earning ten to twelve francs a week, but they found lodging, with a family, for a hundred francs a year, and could rent for twelve francs a field that gave them potatoes for the year; since then, wages have risen, and, in the rarefied Bischwiller, there is no more unemployment.

But if the new industries, slowly, painfully, have somewhat revived the town, they have not however brought back to it the life of before 1870, broad, bold, confident. Even more numerous or more important, would they have succeeded? Save one or two, they are too little in the local tradition; drapery, the secular industry of the country, is anemic, if not languishing, cigars and cartridges can do nothing for it, and are not what it was: the soul of the city — the “leaven” that “raises the whole loaf”! As well, this town from which so many emigrated, scarcely attracts compensating immigrations. The Germans who crossed the Rhine after 1871 settled preferentially in the great cities, where they have their own in crowds in administration and in the army; at Bischwiller, in the face of a few Germans, the Alsatians remain among themselves, jealously, harsh, with tenacity, toward the newcomers, toward those too of the “natives,” if there are any, who do not guard themselves enough against “infiltration”; when, by very rare exception, a marriage is made from one camp to the other, the people mock [footnote: Sometimes, working women, or maidservants, marry immigrants, non-commissioned officers or office clerks; but they are no less astonished at people doing as they do when they have the means to do otherwise. One of them, learning of the marriage of a young girl of the native bourgeoisie with a German, said in her dialect: Ich thät mich awer schäme, wenn ich e Mamsell wär, so einer zu hirothe! — “I’d be ashamed, if I were a young lady, to marry such a man!”], people speak of it for years, relations are broken off with the transgressor, and, once more, the “immigrants” do not understand… Then, despite the “New Drapery Manufactory,” the jute, the cigars, the cartridges and the shoes, despite the population of the three hospices or asylums that did not exist before the war, despite the garrison, also new, of three artillery batteries, the population figure of Bischwiller has only just caught up with eight thousand…

The streets stretch out, too quiet… These have left; and those too; and those again. Here is their empty factory, which now contains only an invalid and dirty boiler, scrap iron for sale. Here is a block of enormous buildings that were bought from departing families “for a piece of bread,” and that now shelter the “Asylum for Idiot Children.” Here is, on the street, a house that seems inhabited and cheerful; but it is summer, they come only one month per year, they have kept it only as a country retreat and as a memory; look, behind the house, the grass that has invaded the courtyard, the deserted factory, its walls cracking, its broken windows that are no longer repaired. Here are closed shutters, the whole width, the whole height of the house: eyes closed forever: here they never come back… Aged witnesses of the happy time when one did not foresee that life would have to be remade, memories of the great hopes that the war broke.

Elbeuf. The turnover of the Bischwillerers is today a third of the total turnover of the marketplace. But success has not made them forget the difficulties of the beginning, the sadness of the departure, the past, the little fatherland. Of the heads of houses, more than one is still there, who carried out the transfer, or saw it done. Of the workers, more than one too remembers the adventures of the journey. They came, in groups of six or seven, like a little squad, one of the patrons at the head, “M. Adolphe,” or “M. Maurice,” or “M. Henri.” At Nancy, at Paris, at each stage, the squad dispersed: he gave a hundred sous to each, and they agreed upon a gathering place near the station, to take the train again the next day or the day after. Sometimes, a comical incident: at Paris, “M. Adolphe,” or “M. Henri,” happy to see French uniforms again, whatever they were, joyfully shakes the hands of a few Federates, offers them a drink; but he hardly had the Parisian accent, they begin to look at him askance. He went off without asking for change. At Elbeuf, they lodged as best they could in old warehouses, sleeping on pieces of cloth. Then others came, and others still, hundreds and hundreds: about two thousand in all, no doubt. At the start, things did not always go very well. One day, at the cabaret des Écluses, on the Seine, disputes and blows: the Alsatians on one side, the Normans on the other; knives even came out. But everything calmed with time.

However the Alsatians continue to form an original grouping within the Elbeuvian population. First, many of them are Lutherans in the midst of a Catholic population, which knew, before the war, only a few of the Reformed; their pastor, an Alsatian of good stock, who was at the field hospitals in bombarded Strasbourg, gives them a sermon in German every fortnight, and, the service ended, converses with them in dialect. For the dialect subsists, spoken currently by all the old, faithfully preserved by many of the young: I have heard them, among themselves, or with the patrons; and hearing this language here, in a little Norman town, five hundred kilometers from Alsace, I controlled myself ill, I felt feverish, I believed myself back there, at their home, at my own… They long married among “fellow countrymen” (and this tradition is not lost either): Philippe Oser, of Oberhoffen, with Julie Danner, of Bischwiller; François Ochsenbein, of Lembach, with Sophie Dott, of Bischwiller; Mathias Nonnenmacher, weaver, born at Niederschoeffolsheim, son of Mathias and Catherine Kieffer, with Sophie Kugelmann, mender, born at Bischwiller, daughter of Georges and Sophie Danner. And what witnesses! Constant Jehl, Jacques Becht, Charles Danner, Antoine Zipfel, Jacques Jesel, Guillaume Ostertag — of Bischwiller, of Oberhoffen, of Mothern, of Runtzenheim, of Rohrwiller… What fine weddings these must have been! not without a little melancholy, I imagine, when the old folks were not there, when a proxy represented them, sent by Maître Kleinclauss, notary at Haguenau, or Maître Kléber, notary at Drusenheim. From their names, from the name of their villages, as from their patois, the same emotion rose in me — familial sweetness, and heavy regret… Fine types of folk from over there subsist, recognizable from the most distant aspect: their build, a whole air of laborious vigor mingled with bonhomie, the moustache and the “imperial,” another old memory… Here is one — at random — in the pavilion of the old looms that beat slowly and that are kept only for these old men: he speaks of his draw at the conscription lottery — with a very long o and a slightly hard r that do not deceive about his origin — he speaks of his “seven years,” of Mexico, and above all of his son, sergeant of skirmishers, in Morocco, whom he hopes to see return one of these days, with the military medal. Another, who was of the rough day, January 22, 1871, when the Francs-tireurs de la Délivrance blew up the bridge at Fontenoy. Another, here, at the office, who keeps preciously in his papers an old map of France from the time when he was a schoolboy: one day, the pastor of his village, or of a neighboring village, of Ringendorf or Rothbach, had given it to him, after adding to it, with his own hand, the two newly French departments, Savoie and Haute-Savoie. Since then!… Another, there, a “fuller,” standing by his machine, asks me if I know his cousin from Bischwiller, whom he has not seen for more than thirty-five years, conscript of 1868 like himself, and who has just sent him, as a souvenir of the soil, four hop plants… And then… there is Philomène! Philomène, who came on foot from Bischwiller to Elbeuf, a little girl of twelve or thirteen, with her father, three brothers still younger than herself, and a wheelbarrow: the wheelbarrow, to convey the little ones when they were tired! It was in 1878. The father could no longer find regular work over there, his six brothers had been French soldiers; he no longer wanted to stay. He could well have borrowed some money to travel another way; but for that, he would have had to talk, write, beg pity, wait — perhaps also deprive himself of a very Alsatian pleasure: that of showing his comrades what one is capable of, to come join them… They made the journey in thirty-three days. At the frontier, the French customs officer was from Haguenau; near Châlons, they had dealings with a gendarme who was from Mutzig: happy chances, that restored spirit to the whole troop. On the other hand, it sometimes happened that they went three days without hearing the speech of the country. Then Philomène wept… Yes, I know, this eternal drama is already in Virgil: Nos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva. [We leave the borders of our fatherland and our sweet fields.] But Virgil is very far off; whereas Bischwiller, that is our own history, of our flesh, and of our heart.

PHALSBOURG

At the opening of a Vosges pass, the most frequented of the whole chain by the soldiers and the merchants who go, for centuries, from Alsace to Lorraine and from Lorraine to Alsace, a little town that commands the passage: there is Phalsbourg, the origin of its military greatness, the reason of its national value, almost all its history; almost, the “annexation” having done the rest.

Phalsbourg is not a town born by chance and without ancestors. She exists because two men willed her to be: in 1570, a little prince almost unknown and who would deserve to be famous, Jean-Georges de Veldence, count palatine; a century later, the Great King.

Jean-Georges reigned over the County of La Petite-Pierre, which enveloped within its limits the site where Phalsbourg rises and where there was then but a poor castle with a few houses: Einhartzhausen. Fantastical, litigious and brilliant, he administered his county with a luxury of ideas and ordinances that astonish, springing up at that date: the state finances, the mines, the bakery, the butchery, order in the street, order in the houses of his subjects, so much wine permitted to men, so much to women, the dogs banished from the family table — he regulates everything, concerned with the slightest detail; he fixes justice, has drawn up a complete code of legislation and procedure, where with Roman law are amalgamated the dispositions of the ancient customs; he organizes instruction: the instruction of princes, who shall no longer be abandoned to the caprice of preceptors without bond and without method, but reunited and raised in common (the princes of all the palatine branches), according to determined principles, for a determined end, the practice of their profession of prince — and the instruction of the people, in schools like “fair gardens strewn with fine flowers,” where youth shall be raised “in the love of God and for the happiness of humanity”…

The administration of La Petite-Pierre, of the county, his State, and of the village, his capital, did it not suffice for the organizing activity of Jean-Georges? Did he wish to try his system on new ground, to create from whole cloth an ideal city where there had been nothing till him? Or was he frightened by the recent attempt of one of his neighbors, a d’Haussonville, protégé of the Cardinal of Lorraine, who had just laid hands on the priory of Saint-Quirin? He had not lost the memory of the Voyage d’Austrasie, of the recent passage of Henri II throwing a few men into the castle of Einhartzhausen before pushing on toward Metz, and Jean-Georges saw no doubt in the act of d’Haussonville a new manifestation of French policy ambitious of progress toward the east, since he called the attention of the emperor to the necessity of intercepting the passage by raising there a new town, more important for defense than a lost castle. Or yet, Lutheran who could continue to live in his country, did he think with fraternal compassion of the Reformed of the west and north, less fortunate than himself, and did astonishing visions of the future stir in his pioneer’s imagination: towns, whole regions regenerated by them for having welcomed them wandering and miserable? Doubtless so, since he had spread far and wide, for the use of the persecuted seeking asylum, the copy in multiple exemplars [footnote: In French and in German.] of the act of foundation of the town with the enumeration of the privileges and franchises he would grant the inhabitants. The Reformed will live there as free as the Lutherans, as respected, as sure of the morrow; both will have their ministers; the immigrants will retain the right to emigrate; they may in no case be brought before a foreign jurisdiction; plots to build upon will be granted to them gratis, wood for the construction of houses, pastures for their large and small livestock. Effective “publicity.” They came from everywhere, from Lorraine, from Metz, from the Barrois, from the Ardennes, from the Low Countries. He attended, impassioned, the realization of his town — Pfalzburg, the City of the Palatine — or, when he was away from it, had detailed reports addressed to him, the list of arrivals, “the names of those who are building”: “this day, the 13th of April 1572,” ”… Master Hance, forester, Monsieur de Confian, Anthoine le Picard, George de Doulouard, ropemaker, the little butcher, the fat tanner, Quentin the mason, George the carpenter, Alleman…”; “all are building in stone, save George the carpenter…” [footnote: Lepage, op. cit., volume II, page 274; Dag. Fischer, Comté de la Petite-Pierre, Revue d’Alsace 1860, pages 100-107; Wolfram, op. cit., page 241.] And what destinies Jean-Georges glimpsed for Phalsbourg, what a grandiose, infinite future! Phalsbourg shall be, between central and western Europe, a great city of exchange and production. Jean-Georges has said it. It must be so. And all conduces to success. From here one is in six hours at the Rhine, in a day at the Saar, in three days at the Moselle, in four at the Meuse, the Marne or the Danube; scarcely more for the Seine, the Rhône, the Loire. A few new roads to create, from Phalsbourg to Spire, to Ensisheim, to Blamont, and one will easily join thereby the regular communications with Augsburg and Vienna, Innsbruck and Italy, Nancy, Lyon and Paris. All the raw materials, Phalsbourg has them at hand, or will have them: wool, from the markets of Brumath, Saverne, Haguenau, has long been in the habit of passing through here over the Vosges; iron too, by the same way, but in the opposite direction, toward Strasbourg and Worms; as for copper, from the market of Frankfurt, it would come up the Rhine and the Zorn: nothing easier than to draw what is needed at the passage. Finally — crowning of his work — he resolved to unite, from north to south, the basin of the Saar to that of the Zorn, from west to east, the Meuse to the Moselle, by works of navigability and junction canals: anticipations of nearly three centuries, of which a learned Strasbourg engineer, the illustrious Specklin, said at the time that they were conceived “for the ruin of poor folk and against the order of God”… Jean-Georges had been able, for more than ten years, at his ease, to build, regulate and dream. Alas! this great administrator had administered badly. Ruined, he pledged the town and its dependencies to the Duke of Lorraine, in 1583, for 400,000 florins. He could not free himself. The town remained with the duke. The dream had vanished in bankruptcy. But Phalsbourg was founded.

Louis XIV made her what she has since been: gracious and massive at once, worthy of him and of his great commissioners. To tell the truth, in the interval, the brutality of the times had prepared the ways for the king. The refuge, the market, the entrepôt created by Jean-Georges, became an arena where religions clashed, then armies, sometimes both in a furious mêlée of all passions.

In the name of the Heavenly Master, the Duke of Lorraine, Catholic, wished to catechize Protestant Phalsbourg, called there Father Anselme and Father Oudé to help the curate Didelot; and with what epic apostrophes the little town then resounded! On April 12, 1621, “heresy in Pfalzburg playing the bravo,” Father Oudé “draws up a cartel of defiance” which he sends “by the schoolmaster to the lodging of the minister”: “Will you have the courage to appear in the lists to sustain the honor of your religion that falls to the ground?…” What then are ministers “thus subjects, or rather slaves of a heap of cobblers,” of a “rabble of artisans,” who can, “if it please them, dis-minister you, and break your wages?… O the brave Consistory!…” But, “boxed in” though he be “within an open contradiction” or “hooked by the talon of some pressing enthymeme,” “the monster, stretched half-dead at the feet of truth, by excess of obstinacy will not yield, though he give the pistol and surrender his arms…” [footnote: “The Religion alleged dying at Pfalzburg in the hands of its physician and minister by a pistol shot on the 12th of April 1621, after having been vanquished diverse times by disputes between the R. P. Nicolas Oudé Jesuit, and Sieur Brazi minister, as is here related faithfully by Maître Dominique Didelot Theologian Curate at Pfalzburg” — at Pont-à-Mousson, by Charles Marchant, Printer to His Highness. — Cf. likewise in the Encyclopédie des Sciences religieuses of Lichtenberger (art.: Lorraine), other titles no less expressive: “Balaam and his companion arrested by the sword of the angel of God, or Sieurs Nic. Oudé Jesuit and Dominique Didelot curate at Pfalzburg, struck by the two-edged sword of J.-C. the angel of the great council,” etc., by Jean Brazi, minister of the Word of God in the Reformed Church of said Pfalzburg; “Column of Diamond erected on the cenotaph, or empty tomb built by Maître Est. Bouchard, heretical doctor, of three faculties of medicine, Greek and poetry, enriched with notes and apostils,” by the R. P. Nic. Oudé of the Company of Jesus, Pont-à-Mousson, 1644. In the Religion prétendue mourante, the R. P. Oudé already called Bouchard this “Huguenot physician… more proper to make souls die than to resuscitate bodies…, who slices off philosophy and theology, and reigns among his own like a one-eyed man among the blind.”]; then, the duke employed other means, constrained them to depart if they did not let themselves be brought back to the Catholic faith: of those who departed, most reached Bischwiller [footnote: See above, page 32.], where the Duke of Deux-Ponts gave them the same welcome they had received from Jean-Georges at Phalsbourg, fifty years earlier.

In the name of the princes of the earth, during the Thirty Years’ War, French, Croats, Spaniards, Imperials from every quarter, the Swedes of Bernard of Weimar disputed the town, leaving behind them the ruins and miseries usual; savage struggle, in all this country: the adversary was not always the same, but the inhabitant always suffered, paid enormous tributes as contribution to the enemies, unless it were as subsidy to the allies, paid for the redemption of pillagings that this redemption did not prevent, paid and saw his house burn at the departure of the troops, paid and ate roots, dry leaves, sometimes corpses: along the roads that descended from Phalsbourg into the plain, a certain Captain Rüst, surnamed La Plante, chief of partisans, incorrigibilis adulter, mördrischer concussor, dealt death to passersby of all conditions, sowohl publicis als privatis, ohne distinction, says the prosecutor who crushed him under epithets in three languages, when he was taken, at the end of ten years.

Through all these vicissitudes, the march of France was sketched out, continuous, persevering, sure of itself, ineluctable: the Lorrainers, whether they would or no, the monks, the Swedes, were already a little of her. At last Louis XIV came, and concluded: a conclusion that was not of chance, but conscious and logical, the resultant of a patient diplomatic and military effort for the liberty of passage through Lorraine and the Vosges. Phalsbourg ceded by the Duke of Lorraine to the king (February 28, 1661), in full sovereignty and property, was, for His Majesty, the road that could “serve his Subjects and his Troops whenever She may will, to go from Metz into Alsace upon her own Lands, without touching the Estates of the said Lord Duke…” [footnote: Article XIII of the text of the treaty. Cf., for the continuity of this design of France, Article XIV of the same treaty: “It is moreover agreed, that the road above mentioned shall begin from the last village of the Messin Country between Metz and Vic, as far as Phalsbourg inclusively, and shall belong in full sovereignty to His Majesty without any interruption for its length, and shall have for breadth half a league of Lorraine on all sides…”; previously, Article VII of the Treaty of Vic (1632): ”…The said Lord Duke promises not only to give safe and free passage through his States to the Armies of His Majesty to enter Germany…”; subsequently, Article VI of the Letters Patent of Duke Léopold I following the treaty of January 21, 1718: nomenclature, modified, of the villages to be included in the “half-league of road” to which the king of France has right.] Soon after, the place was fortified: a belt of bastions and demilunes, magnificent geometry — the mark of Vauban; two gates, the “Porte de France” and the “Porte d’Allemagne,” with their shields, their swords, their standards, their crowns, their stone suns — the mark of the king.

Indeed it could not suffice France to have acquired and fortified her. In the bad mountain road that alone had served until then for the passage of the pass, the king’s equipages, returning from Strasbourg in 1681, would have stuck heavily in the mud, without the reinforcement of four hundred horses requisitioned by the intendant of Alsace. Useless Phalsbourg, if it were not made a road-head, by which to link more conveniently to the interior of the kingdom French Alsace! At the beginning of the reign of Louis XV was thrown between Saverne and Phalsbourg, between Alsace and Lorraine, that sumptuous and robust highway, climbing without harshness thanks to its skillful windings, masterpiece of the art of roads, which was much in fashion among contemporaries (they wore chains in spirals on the climb at Saverne) and which still today is the admiration of technicians. Louis XV convalescent, Marie-Antoinette betrothed, and, for more than half a century, all the guests of the Rohans of Saverne — so many pretty cortèges have trodden it that one can still hear there, in the rustling of the leaves, the delicious and melancholy rhythm of the Trois Marches de Marbre rose…

But Phalsbourg paid dearly for so many honors. Because Louis XIV wished her for having the road free and hastening despite the caprices of independent Lorraine the achievement of French unity; because Vauban anchored her on her rock as for eternity; because her road appeared to young Goethe, finishing here his tour of Alsace, as “the worthy entrance of a great kingdom” [footnote: Wahrheit und Dichtung, book 10: “…early the next morning we reached a public work that opens most worthily the entry into a mighty kingdom”]; because Hoche, in a session of the Popular Society of Phalsbourg, defined her role by this fiery watchword: “Your place remains, at this moment, the only key to the Vosges; fight, let us fight against the enemies, we have iron, we have courage, we shall conquer”; because she poured upon the plain countless battalions, the last stage on the soil of the fatherland in the Revolution’s surge toward Europe; for all these great national reasons that had brought her honor — when bad days came, from the first stage of the invasion, she was at the labor. 1814. 1815. Two sieges in less than two years. If Phalsbourg could be turned, it was only at the risk of a thousand difficulties, delays and perils: to pass under her cannon, to leave the place behind, menacing, to toil on improvised roads, like the one still called in the country the Chemin des Cosaques or des Alliés; the great highway, alone practicable for armies and their munitions, crossed the town itself, and Phalsbourg, if she defended herself, would intercept its use to the enemy. So, although she was ill in a state to resist — Imperial France had overflowed France into infinity, and, the frontier places being no more than inland cities, no one thought they would have one day to resume their role — Phalsbourg nonetheless resisted. The first siege lasted more than three months, the second nearly six weeks. In 1815 as in 1814, it was not to the enemy that she surrendered, but to the white flag. And peace made, she remained French.

She therefore resumed her pretty existence, at once brilliant and modest, of a small military town, proud of her recent glories. Phalsbourg, the Nursery of the Brave, the Emperor had said. Phalsbourgeois, François-Joseph Gérard, who entered the hussars in 1787, then, by way of the Revolution and the Empire, by Mainz, Spain and the Berezina, non-commissioned officer, officer, general of division, baron, grand officer of the Legion of Honor; Phalsbourgeois, Rottembourg, soldier of the Royal-Hesse-Darmstadt in 1784, then, by the Revolution and the Empire, by Mainz, the Mincio, Verona, Jena, non-commissioned officer, officer, general of division, baron, grand cross of the Legion of Honor; Phalsbourgeois finally, the most illustrious of all, Georges Mouton, volunteer enlistee in the 9th Meurthe battalion in ‘92, the hero of the bridge of Landshut and of the Île Lobau, today marshal, peer of France, supreme commander of the National Guards of the Seine; ah! that one, the son of the baker of the rue du Rempart, despite the ranks, despite the honors, despite the wife the Emperor had given him “to assure the repose of his shadowy heart,” a high-born aristocrat, descendant of the sovereign princes of Neuchâtel — he had remained “of the people,” and squarely of his country; a solid Vosgien, a little rough, strict on discipline and an honest man, not liking unnecessary discussions in the service: “Enough writing,” he answered an aide-de-camp whose reclamations tired him [footnote: Cf. Journal des Débats, no. of May 23, 1860, concerning the death of the Maréchale Lobau; — Cabanné, op. cit., page 18.]; nor talk of vanity in his salon: when people spoke of genealogy and heraldry, he referred them to the maréchale… Years pass. Regimes too. The tradition subsists. This little town was but a great place of arms. Everyone there was a soldier, or dreamed of being one. Echoes and gestures by which two centuries of great memories were transmitted, the bugle calls, the parades, the music of Thursday and Sunday, the “report,” the instructions to sentries, all the cheerful regularity of military life determined the careers of the children: easy, spontaneous, enthusiastic recruitment of the future by the daily spectacle of the present, when there is such intimacy between civilian and military, of their lives and of their hearts. Phalsbourgeois by birth or by adoption, the retired officer stayed there, finding something to do: municipal affairs, like Rolfo, first deputy; sometimes, timidly, politics, thus Charpentier, “squadron commander retired at 2,000 francs,” Giraud-Tixier, captain, Colonel Metzinger, who are “deputy electors to the Electoral College”; he sits at the assizes or distributes indemnities; Lieutenant Cabanier, Commandant Collignon, Captain Lang, Captain Lebrun, “elected jurors,” General Thierry, Captain Nicolini, of the Jury of Expropriation; one even, Colonel Uhrich, cantonal delegate moreover, discovers himself an archaeologist, sends notices to the Société d’Archéologie Lorraine on two Mercuries and a votive cippus to Jupiter and Apollo that he has come upon in the “mountains that border Phalsbourg” [footnote: Journal de la Société d’Archéologie et du Comité du Musée Lorrain, 5th issue, August 1855.]… If he had sons, he dreamed for them of an advancement he had not had himself — a military form of the eternal dream of fathers — and often that dream was realized. Phalsbourgeois officers, sons of military men or of bourgeois, of retired captains or of porter-orderlies, of locksmiths or of innkeepers, there were everywhere across the territory; from Phalsbourg they were followed, their number known, who they were, where, without need of the Annuaire, by heart: Uhrich, the other, the brother of the retired one? general commanding the 16th division, at Rennes [footnote: The one who would be governor of Strasbourg in 1870.]; Micheler? at Rome, commanding the 2nd brigade of the division of occupation; Charras? in exile, after having been lieutenant-colonel at thirty-eight; Hirsch? captain at Versailles, in the 2nd regiment of grenadiers of the guard; Gangloff? in the 40th of the line; and Logerot [footnote: Future minister of war, in the Tirard cabinet (1888-1889).], the son-in-law of Madame Lecker, and the three sons of the sacristan Strauch… I know a Phalsbourgeois who has roamed the world and who, after fifty years spent abroad, does not hesitate over the number of the regiments: “At the time of the arrival of the 32nd of the line, returning from the Crimea…” Their ramparts, their garrison, they loved them as their reason for being. They loved them, not without pride: there was something of themselves, of them all and of the city in the Conscrit de 1813, in the Blocus, in Waterloo, in the whole work of Erckmann-Chatrian, Phalsbourgeois of Phalsbourg or Lorrainer from next door; it did not displease them that their little town — barely three hundred meters by four hundred, which had already made much noise in the world! — should appear to thousands and thousands of readers in epic visions; and if the voice of the watchmaker Goulden, of little Joseph, his apprentice, of Aunt Grédel and of Catherine, sometimes softened, if there mingled with the courage of the brave folk a regret for the bell tower, for the Maisons-Rouges, the Quatre-Vents, the Baraques-du-Bois-de-Chêne, for all those picturesque little houses one sees from Phalsbourg, from which one sees Phalsbourg, why should they not recognize themselves there all the same? The Old One himself, the valorous Mouton — who was however a lion: Napoleon’s joke [footnote: It is recalled on the pedestal of Lobau’s statue at Phalsbourg: “My Mouton is a lion.”] — had he not dared to say, the eve of Austerlitz, while a hundred thousand soldiers acclaimed the Emperor: ”…Don’t deceive yourselves… France is too beautiful for one to like staying so long parted from her. In this joy of tomorrow’s battle there is the hope of being done with it”? [footnote: De Ségur, op. cit., page 8.]… They loved it so passionately, their military town, that they always attributed to a high and tenacious rancor the measures by which the importance of its garrison was diminished: a regiment replaced by a battalion, by a depot, by four companies that did not form a corps, and everyone went about recalling the ardor of the republicans of ‘48, of M. Germain, who swore only by Charras, of Erckmann [footnote: The novelist’s father.], of Dr. Léman; that on December 10 Phalsbourg had “voted Cavaignac” [footnote: As people still say in the country. Whereas the other cantons of the arrondissement of Sarrebourg gave Louis-Napoleon considerable majorities, in that of Phalsbourg, in effect, the difference was very slight: Bonaparte, 2,427 votes, Cavaignac, 1,733. (Journal de la Meurthe et des Vosges, no. of December 15, 1848.)], and that at the passage of the prince-president, in 1850, they had cried a little too much: “Vive la République!”… They loved her so faithfully that, even when whole quarters of mountain had been blasted, tunnels pierced, rails laid below her, even when one could go from Strasbourg to Nancy and to Metz without passing through her, even then, if the Ville-de-Bâle, on the main square, grew sad at no longer seeing diligences, if Phalsbourg foresaw the “shortfall” that progress would cost her, no one abandoned her… Something else had to come…

In the little Lorrainer town, the movement and the joy of the great military days. Defiles of regiments, standards and flags unfurled, going to concentrate in Alsace, descending toward the Rhine — “and their soul was singing…” A few days of fever, of enthusiasm… Then, all at once, August 6, toward nine in the evening, a soldier from the country, from the Quatre-Vents, comes into town, panicked, with others, whom he has brought back through the Dossenheim valley; after them, in the night, a few cuirassiers, wretched debris of the immortal charges… It is defeat that passes, now. The morning of the 7th, at half past five, the Marshal himself. The man who had remained, impassive, on the mined tower of Malakoff and who had triumphed in the sun of Magenta, here he is — in retreat. On the Place d’Armes, on the glacis, thousands of men follow each other, pile up, set off again… The 10th, at eight in the morning, a Prussian officer before bastion no. 1: parlementary! The battalion chief Taillant, commanding the place, refuses the demanded capitulation. At noon, new démarche; new refusal. Ten batteries open fire on the town… The 14th, new parlementary; new refusal; new bombardment; the church, the post office, a quarter of the houses are on fire. The mayor, Bender, in the name of the population, asks the commander to continue the defense. Already, the one of 1814, Parmentier, whose memory remained living at Phalsbourg, had said: “If the enemy comes upon us, we shall receive him as Phalsbourgeois, I mean as patriots”… The investing troops succeed each other around the town, the parlementaries at the bastions, always in vain. News circulates, true, false, communicated by the parlementaries, brought by mobiles coming to rejoin their post, born no one knows where, everywhere, nowhere, in the air one breathes: King Victor-Emmanuel arrives to the rescue of France; Prince Charles, before Metz, has asked Bazaine for an armistice; Napoleon has surrendered at Sedan with 80,000 men — a phrase with double meaning that heated optimists and pessimists alike; great victory of MacMahon at Chaumont, the crown prince a prisoner; proclamation of the Republic; battle of Mont-Valérien, 160,000 Prussians out of combat. Meanwhile, the cannon still thundered from the direction of Strasbourg: a sortie? a battle, and Strasbourg unblocked? — Nothing is known. A third bombardment, on August 31; a fourth, on September 15; a fifth, on November 25… We know, now; we know that all the good news was false; all the bad, true. Uhrich, governor of Strasbourg, has had to surrender the place; Metz has capitulated; the Germans are victorious, all the way to the Loire… Monday, December 12, at noon, Commandant Taillant writes to Major von Giese: “The too great distance of the French army and the famine that tortures the inhabitants, the wounded, the prisoners of war, but which could not subdue us if we were alone here, do not permit us to continue the struggle…” Phalsbourg had held four months… The German plenipotentiaries and their escort arrive before the Porte de France, the officer, with his sword, strikes the gate, which opens, the German post relieves the French post: it was all over.

… Then, they left… At Phalsbourg as elsewhere, the conquerors had entered a town that did not want them. Phalsbourg was no longer France’s; the Phalsbourgeois were no longer at home in Phalsbourg. Article 2 of the peace treaty was formal: one could not at once remain on the annexed territory and remain French. Doubtless, the taking of possession did not manifest itself here by particular harshnesses. They did not even haggle on indemnities: damages caused in Phalsbourg by the besieger’s bombs, around Phalsbourg by the defense’s fire — the German functionary settled everything, generously enough. To tell the truth, he did not know much, of the town, nor of its inhabitants, he was constrained, to acquit himself of his task, to inquire of one, of another, and the advisers were skilled at making the payer pay: more than one who arrived anxious at the Lutz butcher shop, rue Mercière, where the collection office was installed, returned with his wheelbarrow full of hundred-sou pieces, all brand-new pieces from the French payments, a bit of the five billion, “so much retaken”… Sometimes even, innocently or not, history will never know, the poor man was greatly embarrassed: a few, who still figured on the rolls, had already left the country, a few others had even left this world, and the functionary’s frequent question: “Where is he now, this one?” often received the same response: “At Père-Lachaise.” He ended by asking where this Père-Lachaise was, and why it attracted so many Phalsbourgeois… Meager vengeance, at which they laughed in the evening at the café; but not lacking in symbolic value. These conquerors were strangers. Strangers to the pleasantries of the little town, but also to its language, to its spirit, to its whole life. No grave or noisy incidents; but the opposition of self and not-self, and that suffices; against that, indemnities can do nothing. Yesterday, discussion of the municipality with the treasury: the town paid 630 francs per year to the French State for participation in barracks costs; the Germans, now, demand 4,000 francs. Today, discussion with the sub-prefecture: the new Catholic schoolmaster does not know French, yet more than a third of the pupils do not understand a word of German, the other two thirds know neither how to read nor write this language… At the collège, they were not at first so absolute. Founded in 1806 by the mayor Parmentier, who had obtained for this purpose the buildings of the ancient Capuchin convent, the collège of Phalsbourg had a great reputation, not only in this whole Lorrainer region, but also in neighboring Alsace: as Phalsbourg was of fine and good French language, many Alsatians sent their children there to prevent them from keeping, as they grew, the accent of the first years, and there were always at Phalsbourg sixty or eighty boarders, Alsatians; even a few Germans. Would they come back, if French were proscribed from one day to the next?… Teaching there continued not only French, but still, partially, in French. Yet, the not-self appeared still, irritating, in the general overexcitement of the hour. Almost all the professors had left or were preparing to leave; the replacements came, almost all, from Germany; one of them, who had lived in France, the Latin professor, understood the situation, but the others!… Whacks with the ferule, and Franzosenkopf!… I do not wish to redo familiar caricatures, which are not always caricatures… And then, the mathematics professor pronounced virjule — which was only an accident, a pretext for tumult in class, for family mockery — but the Latin professor pronounced dominouss, and caoussa, and tertsia, by which a Germanic habit infiltrated, indelible and characteristic for life; and when they went out walking, on the road to La Petite-Pierre or on that of Saint-Jean, the children of the newcomers struck up Die Wacht am Rhein; and the past of France was no longer taught, but the history of Germany, the glory of Barbarossa and of many others, and, on March 22, feast of Emperor Wilhelm, one heard piously celebrated his virtues of sovereign, of man and of old man, Herrscher, Mensch und Greis… It was, in the wake of the armies, History approaching, other names, other facts coming to occupy in minds the eminent place, the seizure of souls by foreign, hostile traditions… Yes, truly, everything pushed them out. There was doubtless a philosophy in Article 2 of the treaty; to remain French in German Phalsbourg, a rough undertaking, perhaps… Then, very softly, almost in secret, one went to Mittelbronn, half an hour’s walk away, to the accountant of the quarry, former seminarian, passionate about geometry, who taught the French terminology of mathematics; or, at Phalsbourg itself, to the rabbi, who corrected dominouss to dominus; then, one fine morning, one set off for Nancy, ready to enter the lycée, pure of all Germanism, without taint. And the parents followed, as soon as they could.

… “Everyone has left.” “All society has gone.” “The town is beheaded.” “All that could leave, has left.” Such are the formulas in which the situation of the years following the war is defined and summed up, in the memory of the witnesses and their sons, forty years later; and, of these expressions, the last, grammatically neutral, is not, if you reflect on it, the least precise nor the least forceful. They left, one departure entraining another, the retired, the bourgeois who could “realize” quickly or who had a little money ahead of them, as is said; then peasants too, who could have continued to live there quietly and who — thirty or forty families — sold their lands, to leave for Algeria, where the French government and the “Société d’Haussonville” offered them new ones; scribes and laborers, fifty or sixty introduced “into the railway, at Paris,” by one of their own, who was already in place; and hundreds of others, of whom one finds the trace by chance in private conversations: always the same drama, the same date: “From Phalsbourg to Toul,” 1873, “From the Baraques-de-Chêne to the rue du Temple,” 1875… Today still, when the surrounding quarries no longer feed them, because white stone competes too much with red stone and emery wheels with grindstone wheels, the workers do not go to Vallérysthal or to Niderviller, neighboring glassworks and faienceworks, which solicit them: since they must leave, they go farther, to Lunéville or to Baccarat… About a thousand persons departed, out of the three thousand to three thousand five hundred that Phalsbourg counted with her dependencies. Since then, little by little, the gaps have been filled: people have come from around, from the countryside, falling back upon the town, or from farther, from beyond the Rhine, administration employees, re-enlisted non-commissioned officers; a few shopkeepers too. Image fairly exact of the population thus undone and remade: one no longer finds in the Municipal Council the names that habitually figured there before the war — Bender, Hoffer, Antoni, Aron, Reeb… — it is composed barely for half of Phalsbourgeois of Phalsbourg, the others being from the surroundings, only one from Germany… Honorable elements, but who succeed and do not replace. “Phalsbourg is beheaded.” Listen to all the old Phalsbourgeois, and at once a famous word of Talleyrand comes back to memory, adapting itself to the history of the little town: he who has not lived at Phalsbourg before the war has not known the sweetness of living. And it is not only because their youth has gone. Of their town of yesterday, which had a personality, a tradition, a soul, of that happy, intelligent and fine atmosphere, which enveloped and penetrated even the most modest and raised them to a kind of aristocracy, there remains but regret; of that military pride, joyous, valiant — only the satisfaction, silent and as if veiled, of following over the bad frontier, still without need of the Annuaire, the promotions of those who have left, the Hotzes, the Uhrichs, the Brissés, the Teissiers, the Hollenders, the Michelers…

Yet, the gates of Louis XIV are there, and the barracks of Vauban, and the Place d’Armes, Lobau at the center, in great bronze dress, and, along the streets that cross at right angles, the houses aligned as on parade; here is the collège, the town hall, the market hall where divine service was celebrated during the siege, after the fire of the church, and the pretty house of the “King’s Lieutenant,” with its royal crown, where Commandant Taillant had his office; here still, on the road to the Quatre-Vents, the farm that belonged to Lobau, and even (do the personages of those novels not live as much as the great dead of history?) there, near the Porte de France, across from the old Boeuf-Rouge, the house from which little Joseph Bertha and his master glimpsed, one morning in 1812, Napoleon leaning his head through the door of his carriage, because a horse of the escort had just fallen on the post of the butcher Klein… You see, nothing has changed in the little town. Those who return, recognize themselves there. She sleeps, therefore she lives… No. She seems to sleep, as if she lived, still. They recognize themselves there, but they do not recognize her. The ramparts: stone by stone, almost all has been transported to Strasbourg, to serve for the new fortifications of the city! Involuntary homage to the solidity of Vauban’s materials, prodigal economy, whose instigator, if I am not mistaken, died mad; the rest, fragments of bastions and demilunes, dispersed and fossilized memories, by which the shape of the vanished past is laboriously made out to the imagination. In the disused collège (its “clientele” had departed for France), a normal school has been installed; in the infantry barracks, a penitentiary: more successions that are not replacements, uses of vacant premises for a departmental service — but on the margin of the town. The cavalry barracks has remained a barracks; even there appear still, graven in the stone, corridor numbers that have a grand air of Louis-Quatorze epigraphy; better still, French words, painted rather freshly, those — but in singular order: Offizier-Pavillon… And that says everything: the barracks is still a barracks, Phalsbourg still has a garrison, but one knows which one, and, as the popular tongue says with energetic simplicity, the heart is no longer in it…

… Around 1870 there lived at Phalsbourg (I have often been told this story long ago) a wretched dazed fellow who heard barely, articulated badly, scraps of patois, and had never understood much of anything. But, when he saw soldiers parade, before the war, his face lit up, he saluted, hand to forehead, manifested noisily his joy; on Sundays, a few would always come to the house, where the father, former sergeant-major, liked to tell stories of Algeria; then, a happy innocent, he served them, fêted them, tolerated their shoves, joined in their loud talk… One day, after four months of tumult that had left him quietly identical to himself, he saw arriving, billeting paper in hand,… Brunswick chasseurs. What mysterious gleam suddenly dissipated the fumes of his brain? With those, nothing was allowed. If they stirred in the little room, if they made too much noise playing cards, if they shouted, even if they laughed a little loud, our man placed a finger on his lips and pronounced, correctly: “One must not dare!”… I have never seen Phalsbourg again without thinking of this gesture of a simpleton… The town is silent; and “one does not dare” disturb this silence, when one is French, neither smile at it, nor turn one’s thought from it: in living Phalsbourg, there was too much of France, and her silence is made of too many dead things, which were French…

MULHOUSE-BELFORT

In one and the same French department, two sub-prefectures, one, an industrial city, the other, a military city; the frontier, displaced by the war of 1870-71, separating them suddenly; the repercussion of the brutal fact upon their character or their development; the partial transfusion of the one into the other and the close intimacy between the two, singular consequences of this division: this whole complex drama, economic and sentimental, is the very life of Mulhouse and of Belfort, such as the Treaty of Frankfurt has made it.

Antique urban agglomeration around a fortified castle, Belfort bears a name that depicts its secular aspect and resonates with all its history [footnote: Cf. Schoepflin, Alsatia illustrata, vol. II, page 41: “ab amoenitate situs, vel praestantia munitionis, nomen suum Castrum traxisse videtur”; — and Mémoires de deux voyages, op. cit., page 213: “It is one of the keys of Alsace, and the advantageous situation of its castle has caused it to be named Belfort.”]. To tell the truth, one encounters in the town the vestiges of an old industrial establishment of very high origin: the Mazarin forge, which the cardinal found on his Belfort estate when Louis XIV gave him a few seigneuries of upper Alsace to reward him for the Treaty of the Pyrenees, a forge then ruined by the wars, at once restored by the cardinal’s care, then exploited by his heirs. Today still, if the trans-Vosgian factory that has installed itself, twenty-five years ago, in the debris of Mazarin’s establishment, enjoys a right to draw water of one meter in the pond of Malsaussé, it is by virtue of an authorization granted, on July 2, 1671, by the owners of the pond, to “Monseigneur Armand Charles, Duke of Mazarini, peer of France and count of Belfort”… But the Mazarin forge was never more than a family property. Belfort was a town of war, and remained so. “Alsatiae et Lotharingiae securitas”: with this title it was already honored, shortly after the peace of Westphalia, by a commemorative medal of the French entry. Beneath these walls, in a house of the Valdoie, Turenne slept his last night before his intrepid ride to the other side of the Vosges, of which the Imperials were to learn, too late for them, the astonishing news. A few months later, in 1675, Vauban came for the first time to Belfort, then returned for nearly thirty years, until the end of his career, building forthwith a new Belfort, town and ramparts, but dreaming still more grandiose, since the entrenched camp of 1792 was only the realization of a Vauban project, abandoned by Louvois for lack of money. Without truce, throughout the eighteenth century, in Belfort, a permanent worksite, military constructions press along the enclosure wall, “Quartier du Moulin,” “Quartier de l’Hôpital,” “Quartier à droite de la Porte de France,” “Quartier à gauche de la Porte de France,” pavilion for cavalry officers, pavilion for infantry officers, arsenal, riding-hall for the garrison… An October afternoon of 1790, against the officers of the Royal-Liégeois whose cries consigned “the nation to the devil,” the civic resistance was led by the “inspector of the buildings of the district,” a Strasbourgeois by birth, build and heart of a soldier: Kléber; in 1814, in the town blockaded four months, Commandant Legrand, despite all summons, refuses to surrender; in 1815, General Lecourbe, by “ten combats fought or sustained,” defends the soil foot by foot, “from the gates of Huningue to the walls of Belfort” [footnote: Order of the day of General Lecourbe, July 23, 1815.]; under the Restoration, a colonel and a few lieutenants conspire in the name of the tricolor cockade… Boilings of military brains, fine bearing before the enemy: Belfort has known all the clatter of garrison towns, all the tumults of war places.

In the etymology of Mulhouse, no fortified castle, in its arms no “tower pavilioned in gold, weather-vaned in silver,” but, simply, a mill wheel, rustic, industrious: Mulhouse, Mulnhusen, from its old Germanic name, a mill surrounded by houses. Until 1845, the armed force was represented there only by a sergeant of gendarmes, after 1845 — and until 1864 only! — by two infantry companies, lodged in barracks that were old factories. A free imperial city, then, in the fifteenth century, a Republic, always obliged to defend itself, against the bishop of Strasbourg, against the Great Companies, against Charles the Bold, against the House of Austria; first, member of the Alsatian Decapole, but often abandoned to its own forces because lost at the extremity of the country, then allied to the Swiss cantons, but more than once in conflict with them over questions of religion or jurisdiction — at Mulhouse had developed a properly Mulhousian spirit, counting on itself much more than on others, of an independence rough to handle at times, even when the heart gives itself, and which did not soften at all, on the contrary, in the happy and broad existence she was to owe to her industry.

We know what this magnificent development was. Already, a tourist of the seventeenth century, having seen the Mulhousians, said of them: “They are all men of commerce and trades, such as are in democratic republics” [footnote: Mémoires de deux voyages, op. cit., page 32.], but, until the middle of the eighteenth, it was only small commerce and small trades: common cloth and leathers for the surrounding countrysides, production limited by the prudence of the “Magistrate” [footnote: The Municipality.] and the jealousy of the corporations. One day in 1746, an association was formed, which was going to determine for Mulhouse the whole subsequent course of its history. J.-J. Schmaltzer, a young Mulhousian who had learned, at Bar-le-Duc and at Neuchâtel, the indienne industry, J.-H. Dollfus, painter, and Samuel Koechlin, former merchant, the “capitalist” of the affair, joined together for the manufacture of printed cloth, under the company name Koechlin, Schmaltzer & Co. This was the act of foundation of the Mulhousian industry. Analogous to the small establishment of the rue Fritschmann [footnote: Since: rue de la Loi.], fifteen houses, in twenty years, were created, then, successively, as if it pursued the great design of being sufficient to itself, ambitious and logical, Mulhousian industry was not content to print on cloth, it also wished to produce the cloth on which it printed, the colors that served for printing, the machines to manufacture the cloth: an admirable ensemble of textile, chemical, mechanical industries, which has made the glory of Mulhouse and its region.

Political upheavals themselves came to its service. During the Revolution, from the day when the Republic of Mulhouse, then allied of the Helvetic Confederation, was reunited to France (1798), all impediments fell: no more corporations to limit her production, no more French customs around her to halt her merchandise in passage. Under the Empire, the decrees of 1808, closing the kingdom of Italy to cotton cloths not from the imperial territory, opened to Mulhousian production a considerable new market. Even the sad end of the epic and, since, the agitations in which other regimes foundered, July days or February days; even the riot for the dearness of grain in 1847 or the “cotton famine,” consequence of the American War of Secession — all these causes, political or social, local or general, marked in the development of Mulhouse only very brief stoppages, followed by immediate revivals, and one may say that the development of French Mulhouse was as regular as extraordinarily rapid: 70,000 inhabitants in 1870 (6,000 in 1798, at the reunion with France), 12 million francs in wages, for textiles alone, 10 million francs of business, just for machines, and, directing, animating all this organism, a powerful and rich bourgeoisie. A wealth that was not of unenterprising prebendaries: one of them, Nicolas Koechlin, was the creator of the first Alsatian railways. A wealth that was not of routinier and ignorant men: as they had worked themselves, sometimes with their own hands, they knew the importance of details, of a water without calcium, of an ingeniously modified spring or a new dye: hence the foundation, as early as 1826, of their famous Industrial Society, with its committees of chemistry, of mechanics, then of commerce, of natural history, of history and statistics. A wealth that was not of egoists: they had not been rich for long, they were of the country, knew their workers, were known by them, all Mulhousians: hence the creation of “working-class housing,” of numerous primary and technical schools, of the Cercle Mulhousien, of the Popular Credit… They had made of their Mulhouse a model industrial town, and before them opened the “long hopes.”

The war came. In Mulhouse without ramparts and without troops, the first Germans entered on September 16, 1870; in Belfort, on February 18, 1871, after a hundred and three days of siege, of which seventy-three of bombardment, and the French garrison only left by virtue of an order from the French government, without capitulating. But, open town or fortified town, were they not both about to undergo the same fate? Doubtless, since Belfort and Mulhouse were equally Alsace.

Belfort, however, was saved. Trouée de Belfort: in this popular image — “made with the natural instinct that arises from the sight of things,” he said a few days later at the National Assembly [footnote: Speech of Thiers in the course of the discussion of the treaty (session of May 18, 1871), in Villefort, op. cit., vol. II, page 121.] — Thiers saw again all the past invasions, foresaw all the peril to come; and thus, in the very immensity of the disaster, the importance of Belfort had grown still more: solid rock above the ruins, sentinel indispensable at the gates of diminished France. “When one has not Strasbourg, one must have Belfort” [footnote: Id., ibid., page 127.]… And then, the defense by Denfert-Rochereau having given Belfort an incomparable prestige, would no doubt permit the representative of France to speak with more authority: Thiers liked to recall Napoleon’s word to Talleyrand, who was being congratulated one day before the Emperor for some happy diplomatic act: “Admit, Talleyrand, that I am for something in this treaty!”…

On Friday, February 24, 1871, at Versailles, in the little house of the rue de Provence where Bismarck lodged, during the discussion of the Preliminaries of peace, Thiers had set forth all the French reasons for keeping Metz: vain eloquence. He argues for Mulhouse: the chancellor again finds “it is too much.” They come to Belfort. Then, “ready” though he was, “resigned” to almost “every sacrifice,” convinced as he was that France could no longer fight and that peace was implacably imposed, Thiers, when Belfort was demanded of him, was “seized with a kind of despair,” hesitating “whether it was not better to continue the war rather than yield this gate of the east of France.” [footnote: Id., ibid., page 122.] For Metz, for Mulhouse, he had pleaded, clearly, eloquently, certainly, but perhaps without conviction, in face of a negotiator he knew “very obstinate and unfortunately too authorized by victory.” But Belfort! He would not yield. — “You wish to ruin France in her finances, ruin her in her frontiers! Well, let her be taken, let her be administered, let taxes be levied! We shall withdraw, and you shall have to govern her, in the presence of Europe, if Europe allows it…” [footnote: Thiers, Notes…, op. cit., pages 124-125.] Tenacious struggle, on both sides, impassioned. Bismarck had to be convinced, on the spot, then, without losing breath, Moltke, William. Bismarck finally yielded, but, as is said, give and take. Thiers would keep his Belfort, but Bismarck would gain thereby his troops’ entry into Paris [footnote: Plus the villages of Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes and Vionville, near Metz, which form part of the same “compensation” granted for Belfort (Article 1 of the Preliminaries).], which had always been refused him until then, but to which he clung as to one “of the most precious fruits of our victory”: thus he would no longer fear, “back home, encountering some poor devil walking on a single leg, and who would say: ‘The leg I left beneath the walls of Paris gave me the right to complete my conquest; it is this diplomat, who has all his limbs, who prevented me’” [footnote: Jules Favre, op. cit., vol. II, page 387.]… At this price [footnote: It is known that a first corps of 30,000 Germans occupied, on March 1, a part of Paris (between the Seine and the faubourg Saint-Honoré, as far as the Tuileries); but as the occupation was to last only until the ratification of the Preliminaries and as the latter was voted the same day, this first occupation corps was the only one, and it evacuated the occupied part, not without Bismarck avowing his disappointment, before Emperor William could effect his solemn entry which was to take place on March 3.], Belfort was saved, but only Belfort, “the town and its fortifications, with a radius to be determined later,” said Article 1 of the Preliminaries. By dint of concession upon concession, of discussion upon discussion, which prolonged themselves until the signing of the definitive treaty, and always give and take, the Germans here, the French in Lorraine — this radius became the whole canton of Belfort, that of Delle, that of Giromagny, the road from Giromagny to Remiremont by the Ballon d’Alsace along its whole course, in a word, all that is since called, by a unique term in our administrative nomenclature, and which is by itself a painful memory and a necessary tradition: the Territoire de Belfort.

Then, for years, there was, by the trouée, a continual passage. From the Haut-Rhin, from Mulhouse, from Thann, from Wesserling, all that could leave flowed through there. They came in hundreds, in thousands. They entered the town hall, unknown, without friends; it is always in the presence of the same automatic witnesses that the deed is drawn up, Joseph Piquet, concierge, and Célestin Bourquard, employee, or Eugène Clerc, schoolmaster. They affixed to the foot of the deed a signature sometimes difficult, but never hesitant, then they went off faithful, and disoriented. 1,488 options, in the period from April 1 to September 30, 1872 alone, plus 12,000 “declarations of transfer of domicile” [footnote: The declaration of transfer of domicile was not the option. The option was the act by which, at the very place where he was established, the Alsatian (or Lorrainer) declared that he wished to remain French; the declaration of transfer, the act by which, on arriving in France, he declared that he wished effectively to transfer his domicile there, an effective transfer without which the option was not valid in the eyes of Germany. But, in the disarray of the moment, there were many confusions: many optants living in Alsace contented themselves with opting at their place of domicile, without transferring it afterward to France; others, on the contrary, transferred it there really, but without regularly accomplishing the formalities of the option; others, finally, came to opt in France, when the frontier was nearby, and to transfer themselves there at the same time, then, at the end of a year or two, returned to Alsace, convinced that the few months during which they had really been domiciled in France would safeguard forever in the eyes of the Germans their quality of French — sources of innumerable difficulties, and initial causes of certain extraordinarily complicated situations.]; without counting all those who did not stop, hastening to go on at once farther, to remake their life faster, to leave for Algeria where lands were being offered them, and who believed that their establishment in France sufficed, by virtue of, the president of the Belfort Emigration Commission one day wrote to the Keeper of the Seals [footnote: Léon Stéhelin, January 28, 1873 (Departmental Archives, M 4/2).], this “feeling accredited in Alsace, that her inhabitants have not ceased to be our compatriots, that their nationality revives as soon as they touch French soil.”

In these banal offices, everything speaks of them: here is a request for a “route slip”: the father has just died in Algeria, at the hospital of Sétif, leaving a widow and six children, the eldest alone has remained in the country, in the Bas-Rhin, now he wishes to rejoin the others, has no money for the trip; there, it is the shipping slip of a Stations of the Cross that the Alsatians of Mulhouse offer to their compatriots established at Aïn-Fekan, near Mascara; there, the papers of a worker from Grandvillars, whom the German authority detains at Altkirch as not having satisfied military law, of another, who lives at Rougemont [footnote: Rougemont-le-Château, of which Dr. Courvoisier, of Grandvillars, said, in a manuscript report on the population movement of Belfort and its region from 1801 to 1873 (Departmental Archives, M 13/2): “Its situation at the foot of the Vosges makes it the favorite retreat of Alsatian families who come there to psalmody the Super flumina Babylonis of the deported Hebrews.”], “forcibly incorporated into the German army, although having regularly opted for French nationality.” — Then, the enlistments, 257 for the single period from September 27, 1872 to February 19, 1873, 414 from March 13, 1874 to February 17, 1875: Bader, Koehl, Bogen, Goetschy, Krebs, Higelin, Gross, Ziegler, Wolff, Schwindenhammer — from Bennwihr, from Wintzenheim, from Thann, from Cernay, from Molsheim, from Niedermorschwihr, from Pfastatt, from Soultz, from Bergheim, from Marckolsheim — to the 7th dragoons, to the 4th hussars, to the 18th, to the 3rd, to the 84th, to the 124th, to the 125th of the line, to the 3rd, to the 19th, to the 27th battalion of foot chasseurs, to the 1st, to the 2nd, to the 3rd zouaves, to the 5th, to the 8th mounted chasseurs, to the 2nd chasseurs of Africa, to the 8th cuirassiers: it seems one sees all the regiments of France filing by, and still in their ranks despite the separation, responding “Present!” through the voice of one of their own, all the towns, all the villages of Alsace… — Then, later, the “reintegrations” into the quality of French of all those who had stayed at first on the other side of the Vosges, but who were “coming back” to France, and who, to the question: Motive for default of option, always made the same responses: “too young, and his mother was in indigence,” “was a minor at the time and no one opted for him,” “could not leave his brothers and sisters in their tender age”; — save this one, of a day-laborer from Rixheim, eloquent without knowing it, and who surely did not suspect all that his declaration contained of the history of his country: he had not opted in 1871, because he “hoped that Alsace would soon become French again.”

Heroic and lamentable parade. Through Belfort, fragment of Alsace remaining French, much of the miseries, much of the grandeurs of the exodus have passed. A day came when something of the best of Alsace was fixed there: a part of the industry of Mulhouse, of its activity, of its power, and of its very soul.

The displacement of the frontier had overturned the conditions of existence of Mulhousian industry and commerce: Mulhouse, suddenly separated from France, was henceforth incorporated, not only into the German Empire, but, by the same stroke, into the German Customs Union (Zollverein). Now, Mulhouse being intimately adapted to the French market, what would be its situation in face of the German market?

Of Alsatian and German industry, it was then the first, it is true, which seemed formidable to the second. The meeting of the German “cotton men” held at Stuttgart, on October 3, 1870, the delegation of South German industrialists sent to Versailles in February 1871, had asked the chancellor that the future “strategic frontier” be “without influence on the interests of the former Zollverein”; and, even after the signing of the Preliminaries, a member of the Reichstag, Count von Luxbourg, acrimoniously pointed out to the government that the Alsatian spinning mills alone employed more spindles and looms than all those of the Zollverein combined [footnote: He gave (Reichstag session of April 13, 1871, in L’Industriel alsacien of the 23rd, after the Journal de Genève) the following figures: for Alsace, 2,170,000 spindles, 63,000 looms; for the Zollverein, 1,560,000 spindles, 48,000 looms. The speaker does not seem, for Alsace at least, to have sensibly departed from the truth. The total figures given by Aug. Dollfus (Notes statistiques…), relating to the same period, are 1,834,833 spindles and 53,300 looms (Cf. likewise O. Reber and L. Lantz, op. cit.). An absolutely precise comparison would, moreover, be very difficult to establish, the authors not always indicating whether their calculations apply to cotton alone or to cotton and wool together, to spinning spindles alone or also to twisting spindles. It is generally admitted that the Mulhousian cotton industry then had an importance roughly equal to two thirds of that of the Zollverein.]. To the German fears corresponded the French illusions: several orators who, at the National Assembly, took part in the discussions on the ratification of the treaty, General Chareton, Raoul Duval, Buffet, underlined this situation, sometimes not without emphasis: Germany was already perceiving “cruelly that these two millions of Alsatians produce nearly as much as her forty millions of Germans”…; “ruinous competition”…; “shirt of Nessus attached to the flanks of Germany”… [footnote: Cf. Villefort, op. cit., vol. II, pages 118, 160, 170.]

These illusions were too fine: the Mulhousians did not share them, or did not share them long. Several attentive “cotton men” who did not deceive themselves with words, having gone to Germany to study the new terrain, did not return without apprehension: labor was less costly there, the workers lived on a little cheese and coffee, were paid 1 franc per day (instead of 3 francs or 3 francs 50 at Mulhouse); the patrons, provided they were active and enterprising, even if they had no money, were beginning to find some. As well, spinners and weavers did not represent all of Mulhousian industry; and, for others, the situation was no less grave, or was even more so. Machine builders had perhaps nothing to fear regarding machines for the textile industry, an extremely refined specialty for which all competition came from England, not from Germany; but they had applied themselves to producing other machines than the weaving loom: locomotives, for example, and, for these, henceforth Alsace, having two powerful centers (Graffenstaden, near Strasbourg, and Mulhouse), would be too considerable a producer in relation to the German Empire, which already had Chemnitz, Berlin, Esslingen, Elbing, Cassel. To the “indienne printers,” especially, although from their industry the whole Mulhousian industry was born, illusion was impossible, for a double danger threatened, immediately, their manufacture and their outlets.

Printing was, at Mulhouse, an industry of luxury and taste, to which the French clientele admirably suited; Germany, on the contrary, was too poor then to furnish the cloth printed at Mulhouse with sufficiently numerous buyers; on this account, one could foresee a much lesser consumption, or the necessity of a complete transformation of the products. On the other hand, for all that is printing, dyeing, bleaching, the Vosges would henceforth be an impassable barrier between the weaving centers of their western slope and the great center of dyeing, bleaching, printing on their eastern slope. To take of this complex situation only a general view, one may say that Mulhouse, before the war, spun the cotton, sent it to be woven on the Lorrainer side of the Vosges, received the cloth back, for bleaching, dyeing, and printing — the two slopes of the Vosges thus forming a complete whole, a single and immense workshop; now, the Vosges becoming the frontier [footnote: See Annex IV.], the Lorrainer slope — l’Est nouveau! as the industrial committee sitting at Épinal called it, in its circular to all the cotton men of the East, of May 14, 1871 [footnote: Published in L’Industriel Alsacien of May 20, 1871.] — the New East was deprived of this “complementary branch” of its activity, the “finishing” industries of the Alsatian slope would no longer work for the neighboring French region, would no longer have it work for them. The diplomats could indeed arrange a transitional period [footnote: See above, page 36, and Annex IV.], for the importation of Alsatian products into France, for the temporary admission into Alsace of French products destined to receive there a complement of labor; but, at the end of this delay, the economic separation was no less inescapable, like the other.

Thus, a wholly foreign terrain, where Alsatian production would arrive as surplus, where the place would be “fiercely disputed,” the secretary of the Industrial Society said in his report of 1872; for the mother-industry, printing, no competition, but the immense Vosgian workshop cut in two, and no market: the recent treaty was, one sees, big with perils for the future.

To the disquiet, to the discouragement of Mulhouse, Belfort offered itself as a hope of renewal [footnote: Need we say here that Belfort was not the only refuge of Mulhouse and its region? The changes that occurred at Belfort are particularly typical, but Mulhouse is to be found throughout the industrial development of the western slope of the Vosges since the war (see further on, pages 103 and following).], Belfort, which its past had in no way prepared to receive Mulhousian industry, where the Mulhousians would find no particularly interesting resources, neither labor, nor quality nor quantity of water, nor business center, where, in short, nothing attracted them, except that Belfort was France, fifty kilometers from their homes: another Mulhouse that “annexed” Mulhouse would delegate to represent it in the New East. Two of the greatest Mulhouse establishments, sewing thread and mechanical constructions, were the first to install workshops and offices at Belfort, around 1878, almost simultaneously; and not by chance: many workers of the construction shops who asked nothing better than to leave, hesitated at the last moment, because at Belfort they would earn less if their wives and daughters had no work there; this female work, indispensable complement of their budget, was furnished by the twisting of thread. Then, other houses followed.

Purely economic transfer? Dry and simple calculation, desire to sell on two markets instead of one? Not at all. Liberal Mulhouse, which had rebelled roughly against the Restoration, and, later, said a Colmar man who did not like her, “shared with one other town of France the sad honor of a vote contrary to the plebiscite” [footnote: National Archives, F 2 (1) 5111 (2), Letter to the Minister of the Interior, March 18, 1852.], independent Mulhouse, republican Mulhouse, ungovernable Mulhouse, Mulhouse was deeply, passionately French. The Mulhousians had just justified, once more, the answer Nicolas Koechlin had made in 1814 to Napoleon, when the Emperor had spoken a little brusquely to him of those “smugglers” of Mulhouse, of those “manufacturers who had amassed fortune”: — “Yes, Sire, we have amassed fortune, but we shall know how to show France how to use it.” [footnote: A. Coste, op. cit., page 327.] They had used it well, and those of 1870 knew how to imitate them: 100,000 francs for the army’s clothing, purchase of a battery of artillery, payments of travel expenses, succor in money and food to soldiers, to prisoners of war — even when the German requisitions crushed the town. And they had not given only their money. All the great names of Mulhousian industry, the small ones too, those of the suburbs as those of the Stock Exchange, are to be found on the rolls of the mobile guard, of the franc-tireurs, of the Legion of Alsace and Lorraine formed at Lyon. The 4th battalion of the Haut-Rhin Mobile, specially recruited in the arrondissement of Mulhouse, had had its fine share of peril and honor at Bellegarde, at Beaune-la-Rolande, at Villersexel, at Héricourt. Everyone at Mulhouse remembered the cannons trained on three factories because the population had hooted at some soldiers, the requisition of 50,000 francs in gold, and the gesture of Jean Dollfus, the mayor, throwing his cross of the Crown of Prussia, souvenir of some recent Exposition, at the feet of the enemy general, who wished to exercise against the town unjust reprisals. Everyone remembered the impression produced by the first visit of the German prefect to the Municipal Council, declaring, as early as November 21: “It is in the interest of all Germany not to let go of Alsace, I have no other mission than to administer the Haut-Rhin in the sense of its forthcoming annexation…” Despite everything, they too had, during the discussion of the Preliminaries, sent delegates to Versailles who tried to act, upon M. Thiers, upon M. von Bismarck. Even, for a few days, the rumor ran at Mulhouse that the town would become a neutral city, or that it would re-enter the Helvetic Confederation, in exchange for a few millions that the great Mulhousian industrialists would quickly have subscribed [footnote: Journal de Genève, no. of April 25, 1871 (correspondence from Mulhouse, dated the 20th): “It did not take long for the rumor, more or less founded, of the retrocession of Mulhouse to France, to spread like lightning throughout Alsace, but, today, this hope seems to have vanished. I shall not repeat all the gossip that has circulated on this subject: some still spoke of neutrality, others claimed that Mulhouse, in its quality of free city and ally of Switzerland until 1798, would obtain entry, like Geneva in 1815, into the Confederation, in exchange for a few millions that would quickly be subscribed by our great industrialists, etc. What gave rise to these rumors were, first, the steps of the German manufacturers with Emperor William, then the Alsatian deputation that went to Versailles on different occasions. An English newspaper, the Standard, if I am not mistaken, said, only a few days ago, that M. von Bismarck had assured on diverse occasions that he would leave the Chambers of Commerce of Germany completely free to judge the question whether or not the annexation of Mulhouse and Upper Alsace would do German industry an irreparable wrong, and that he relied entirely on their decision…” The Swiss themselves, it is said, did not gladly welcome the alleged offer made to them: Alsace would not long be German, and, on the day the French returned, would the town of Mulhouse wish to remain incorporated into the Helvetic Confederation?].

Imaginations, false joys. The definitive treaty purely and simply confirmed the Preliminaries… The Mulhousians were “German subjects”; but they founded the League of Alsace, to affirm themselves “French, despite all the protocols that would deny them this title,” and they sent to the Reichstag protesting deputies, Haffely, then Jean Dollfus. They were “German subjects”; but they joined in all the efforts the fatherland made to raise herself, to efface the traces of the disaster. The brave folk crowded the Savings Bank, withdrawing their savings to participate in the liberation of the territory. On the subscription lists for the reconstruction of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, burned by the Commune, Mulhousian signatures were not lacking. Before the war, the young collegians of Mulhouse, those of Belfort too, went to finish their studies at the lycée of Colmar or that of Strasbourg. The teaching there would be German, henceforth! Then, the Belfortains having solicited from the government the creation of a lycée in their town, the Mulhousians, on the initiative of Koechlin-Schwartz, contributed in very great part to the financial success of this project; then, they sent their sons there. Thanks to Mulhouse, thanks to all the former Haut-Rhin, the lycée of Belfort, which had 365 pupils in 1874, had 530, 566, 551, in 1875, 1876, 1877. Ah! what pretty moving memories in the memory of the adolescents of those days! The days after vacation, the train where these little Alsatians piled in, where pupils were picked up all along the line, those who came from Thann or from Cernay, those who got on at Altkirch or Dannemarie, all happy to cross the frontier, all proud of their young patriotism, especially if the gendarme of their place had grumbled at their French lycée uniform. And later, military service, in France. Meanwhile, the father had remained at Mulhouse, “German subject”; or, sometimes, naturalized Swiss; French citizen, with great pain, in very exceptional cases. So, when the sons returned to work with the father, to prepare to “take over from him,” they had to, if they were French citizens, submit to difficult formalities, ask the police for stay authorizations, to be renewed every month, tolerances always revocable; or to live at Basel, come every morning to Mulhouse, leave again in the evening. More than one had promised himself that, on the day his sons were grown, he himself would leave, and they too. More than one had only accepted to keep his factory at Mulhouse insofar as it was possible for him to remain French in annexed Mulhouse. Then, when it came to deciding a total or partial transfer to France, all these memories, all these feelings, all these resentments gave to the deliberation the briskness that makes one act. It was no longer a question of accounting…

Since the Mulhousians, more clear-sighted than Raoul Duval at the National Assembly or Count von Luxbourg at the Reichstag, foresaw the fierceness of German competition, more than forty years have passed; and the facts, over those forty years, have not belied their forecasts.

Doubtless, in certain cases, accessory causes or causes unrelated to the national question, influenced the destiny of Mulhousian industries. So with printing. Fashion does not always call for the same articles, those which made the fortune of Mulhouse have not maintained themselves constantly in favor. Moreover, the Mulhousian industrialists showed themselves too generous educators, their school of chemistry welcomed too many young men foreign to the region, who afterward returned to their countries of origin — it has dangerously exported its science, and what the Italians, the Spaniards, the Russians, the Japanese once sought at Mulhouse, they manufacture today at home. But these causes would not have produced their full effects, without the other, the first and the essential: the frontier transported from the Rhine to the Vosges. A few establishments have been able, without changing their manner, to continue to produce the “expensive” article, that which “supports” customs duties; a few others, after trying themselves out, in the first years after the war, on less luxurious articles to put themselves on the level of the German clientele, have raised little by little their kind of manufacture, as taste and money became less rare in Germany; and the Mulhousian tradition has thus been safeguarded. But, for all average qualities, the printing centers, which were, forty years ago, Elberfeld, Heidenheim in Württemberg, Augsburg, have become much more numerous (one prints everywhere now, in Germany, from Elberfeld to Silesia, save in the region north of Berlin) — more numerous, and otherwise powerful. The number of Mulhousian establishments has diminished by three quarters, and I do not believe the Mulhousians consider those that remain, even if they are individually of an importance unknown in the industry of old, as representing the former power of Mulhousian printing.

Two examples are particularly significant. First, the spinning and weaving of cotton. To the principal German centers of forty years ago (Augsburg, Württemberg, a few establishments of the country of Baden and of Rhenish Prussia) have since been added Saxony and Westphalia; and with what conquering ardor has this whole united Germany pushed her march forward! While the number of Alsatian spindles, which was 1,200,000 in 1893 (600,000 less than in 1870!) only rises, by 1905, to 1,500,000, in 1909, to 1,750,000, during the same period, the German total (Alsace not included) grows from simple to double, from 4,000,000 in 1893 to 8,000,000 in 1909, and Bavaria, Saxony, Rhenish Prussia with Westphalia, which, in 1893, each produced less than Alsace, have since equalled or surpassed her [footnote: W. Rieger, op. cit., editions 1893, 1905, 1909.]. For combed wool, the same proportions, the same disproportion. This industry was much less important than that of cotton, at Mulhouse, in 1870, and it has greatly developed there, at least until these last years. But, in Germany, the development was, proportionally, much more considerable, favored by several new causes: greater diffusion of well-being, increase of population, and also this fact that formerly, even in the wake of the war, in Germany, people rather liked to give value to French merchandise, whereas today… Germany, in 1870, had no more than 250,000 to 300,000 spindles of combed wool; Alsace, at the same time, had about 200,000; today, Alsace has 450,000, but Germany 2,600,000.

Since the war, there are only two Mulhousian industries that have continued to prosper almost normally. First, sewing thread, because this Mulhousian “mark” is of international superiority, having always to struggle only with England, alone. Next, the construction of machines — if not for locomotives (none are made any more, moreover, at Mulhouse itself, since the Graffenstaden Company merged with that of Mulhouse in 1872), if not for steam engines (as its general industrial development and the needs of motive power that were the consequence grew, Germany has manufactured much of these herself), at least for printing machines, machines for the spinning and weaving of cotton, for the spinning of combed wool, for the weaving of carded wool; and even here one may ask, with some reason, I think, what is, in the total turnover figure, the “percentage” of the Belfort establishment.

The development of Mulhouse, then, has not pursued the same rhythm as that of the “German Customs Union”: Mulhouse has progressed modestly, in an ensemble that has progressed formidably. Do not be astonished that Mulhouse, instead of 70,000 inhabitants in 1870, today has 95,000. The Mulhousians will tell you, even those who have nothing to complain of in life, that the German industrial cities, Augsburg, Elberfeld, Crefeld, Chemnitz, Stuttgart, have grown otherwise!… “95,000 inhabitants! but we would have, without the war, 125,000!” Indeed, the Mulhousians of forty years ago, however well-informed they were, had only calculated figures, compared probabilities of production, of consumption, of competition, on the basis of the past; they could not evaluate, even approximately, the future weight of profound causes that escape statistics, while acting upon them.

To Germany’s credit they had omitted to count this ferment of wealth: victory. Froeschwiller, Sedan, Frankfurt: vocables of which one then considered only the historical value, but of which one has since been able to assess the economic reach. With the Gründungsperiode (founding period) of the German Empire opened, almost simultaneously, and not without relation of cause and effect, a Gründungsperiode of German industry and commerce. Proud of their glory, the Germans at once felt more authority, more ambition, more pride too; it seems that, of deliberate purpose, they undertook to triumph on the economic ground, as on the military ground. The banks opened broad credits, not on financial guarantees, securities on deposit, etc., as in France, but on hopes, on confidence; in the individual, on his qualities of work, of method, of initiative — a system sometimes dangerous, but which singularly favors wealth in formation, the pursuit of clientele at home, the use of outlets. Doubtless people sometimes wished to undertake too much at once, to produce too much, to build too much, to build too big, and accidents are not rare; but, whereas in 1875 the first Alsatians who travelled in Germany could only sell on condition of accepting payment at six months, plus the month of purchase, today the German client is often — when he does not wish to “go too fast” — a Kassemann, a man who pays at open cash, “They have gegründet, gegründet, gegründet, with trails of credit…” a Mulhousian was telling me amusingly. Yes, they founded without money, with the risk of not succeeding, and of not paying; but they founded, and to found, they had a faith that Mulhouse, annexed to them against her will, no longer had.

To their town’s debit, the Mulhousians of 1871 had not counted further the economic effects of another “imponderable,” their own imponderable. Men, capital departed — men who would have been necessary to Mulhouse, I do not say to hinder Germanization (we know it has not progressed there, that there are not more than 10,000 Germans at Mulhouse, and that only one of the great Mulhousian establishments is in German hands), but to become in their turn directing intelligences and souls, in industries where the chief only fulfills his office of chief on condition of having been born to it, of having been raised in it; — capital which, remaining at Mulhouse, would have served to organize more broadly representations and travels in Germany, to transform the installation, to renew material, to fight with perhaps more advantages for the conquest of the German market. But, to spend on the spot human activity and financial resources, to enter deliberately, from the morrow of the war, into the new organism, into the administrative and political views of the young Empire, to seek its support in the numerous questions where industry needs the State’s concurrence, all this “means of getting on” was incompatible with the memory of yesterday: how could these Mulhousian industrialists, French by birth, education, language, tradition, spirit, relations, friendships, how could they pursue a better success, if they had to buy it at this price? For an economic readaptation any more than for a moral readaptation, forty years do not suffice, when there are men and they have heart. And today, when a Mulhousian suddenly receives the administrative notice that his sons, French, shall no longer have the authorization to come see him at Mulhouse; when a Mulhousian by birth, regularly French by option, is refused the authorization to live at Mulhouse where the direction of his affairs calls him; when a young Mulhousian, born French at Mulhouse, but obliged to live at Basel because he has been a French soldier, sees himself forbidden at the frontier the daily journey from Basel to Mulhouse; then, if they go off, they too, Mulhouse loses again a little of herself, but Mulhouse understands…

Belfort, which had 6,000 inhabitants in 1870, today counts 34,000. Alsatians for two-thirds, Alsatians themselves born in annexed Alsace, or sons of “annexed” who came to settle at Belfort. Some of the establishments the Mulhousians created there are independent of Mulhouse; but most are “branches,” whose head office has remained at Mulhouse; the same administrators, brothers, cousins, assume in common the general direction. The mother-house does not forget her sons; and I shall be permitted not to insist on this point… In one Belfort factory, out of 700 workers, 350 are Alsatian; in another, 3,000 out of 6,000. The town has spread, very far, beyond its ancient walls. Along these “housing estates” and these workshops, no streets with quaint old names where the mind amuses itself; no, but something else, at which one does not smile: rue de Saverne, rue de Strasbourg, rue de Mulhouse, rue de Thann, avenue d’Alsace, rue du 14 Juillet, rue du Haut-Rhin, rue de Saint-Privat, rue de la Marseillaise, rue Quand-Même. Every day, the Mülhauser Tagblatt arrives in bales. The dialect in the streets, not the dialect from here, already Romance, a little Vosgian, with drawling intonations, but the dialect of the other side, the yô! whose circumflex stretches endlessly, and our Alsatian oaths sonorous as drums, and the familiar appellations between Haut-Rhinois and Bas-Rhinois: Overländer! Unterländer! Do they sometimes go back beyond the Vosges? “I hardly trust it,” says one. “Not so foolish!” says another, then many others. When they left Alsace, they were not always in order with the German military authority, they were soldiers in France — in France often means in Africa, or elsewhere, in the Legion — and one knows some who, on returning, taken with “homesickness,” were arrested before seeing their village again, dispatched for a few months, for a few years, to Prussian barracks. So, “not so foolish!” — “I still have an uncle at Mulhouse.” “My parents are still at Dornach.” “Yes, cousins at Fellering…” “…my sisters, at Habsheim…” — “And… have you never seen them again?… you never see them again? — Ah! yes, I see them, but not over there. They come, they, always, the 14th of July. There you are, on the 14th they were here. Especially as it was a Sunday…” The 14th of July, the Review at Belfort: the great feverish and noisy accolade of those who have “stayed” with those who have “left.”…

One recent day, two great Mulhousian industrialists, of those who have lived all of Mulhouse’s life for fifty years, were recalling together this long drama, the sadnesses and anguishes of the separation, the struggles, the departures, all that followed the great disillusion, and Mulhouse still suffering from the “vast thoughts” then interrupted, not taken up again. These two words concluded their conversation, one of explanation, the other of consolation:

“We have done nothing since the war.

— We have done Belfort.”

METZ

When the French garrison left Metz, on the morning of October 29, 1870, the Messins, however desperate they were, did not yet measure the full extent of their misfortune. With those convoys of already disarmed soldiers whom non-commissioned officers were leading to the outposts to be “delivered” to the enemy, the Messins saw France depart, and that was already too much! But they did not know all that, with Metz, would go off in her wake: traditions, men, and what would be for the town, after the bitterness of war, the bitterness of peace.

Through the centuries had slowly formed the great historical figure of Metz. The missionaries of the Christian faith appearing suddenly at the confines of the Roman world and catechizing the valley of the Moselle; the surge of the communes emancipating themselves from feudalism; French unity attracting to itself shreds “abandoned” of the Holy Empire “in anarchy” [footnote: E. Lavisse, op. cit., page 5.], and, by them, gaining as far as the Rhine: all these revolutions had left behind them, in Metz, institutions that endured, and, in the long chain of Messin generations, more than one memory faithfully transmitted. Metz, little kingdom of a bishop, Metz, republic of “great burghers,” Metz, since the “protection” of the King, parliamentary and military town: the history of Metz was made of these successive deposits, and in its pre-war physiognomy one easily found again something of all these aspects.

The bishops first. I shall not dwell on all the reasons for which the Church of Metz appears “commendable” to the R. P. Meurisse, who wrote in the seventeenth century the history of its bishops [footnote: Op. cit., page 25.]: the “splendor of their blood,” the “constancy of their orthodoxy,” the qualification of saints borne by thirty-one of them, not acquired “by martyrdom, which is a very short road to it,” but “by a stable and continual exercise of the virtues, which is a much longer, more troublesome and more difficult path…” One may say, at least, without entering into the detail of so many “very particular considerations,” carefully numbered by their panegyrist, that, since Saint Clement, the legendary founder, Roman citizen to whom “Saint Peter himself put the staff in hand as God once did to Moses,” more than one among these bishops remained popular in the memory of the Messins. Whether they defended their flock against the Barbarians — such Bishop Wala, who fell, on Maundy Thursday 882, at Remich-on-Moselle, under the blows of the Norman invader — or, later, against the “unhappy gangrene” of Protestant heresy, when “the Church and Religion” were exposed to “all the fury of hell” [footnote: Ibid., page 603.]; cherished by the people of Metz who had elected them and who supported them against some intruder of sudden imperial investiture, or quarreled with their electors and fleeing the town, transferring to Vic the chief seat of their residence; whether they were Guise and Vaudémont, the first couriers of Lorraine, herself the harbinger of France, or, like the illustrious Coislin, beneficent representatives of France now sovereign; temporal masters of the town or gloriously slaves of their pastoral mission, fighting bishops, building bishops, party bishops, court bishops, bishops of State, they have filled Metz with their action, they have powerfully fashioned its history and its souls.

Facing them, very early, another power had risen up. In the crumbling of feudal forces — dukes of the Moselle, counts of Metz, an imperial advocate even — the burghers already represented for the bishop, we have seen, the sole support, or the sole resistance. For nearly five centuries, Metz was an almost independent republic, governed by a syndicate of a few families, the paraiges, aristocratic bourgeoisie or bourgeois aristocracy, distant infiltration of the phratries or genē. The good people of the paraiges! The paraiges of Porte-Muzelle, of Jurue, of Saint-Martin, of Port-Sailly, of Outre-Seille and of the Common! The Chaversons and the Faulquenels, the Burthemins, the Collignons, the Renguillons, and those Baudoche whose gently obstinate descendance Barrès glorified: expressions and names, of quarters or of clans, which one finds constantly, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, in Messin history. Above them, but long in their hands because he sprang from their families and their votes, the master-alderman personified the bourgeoisie of Metz, its power and its pride: at the birth of a child, the mother was wished that her son would one day be “master-alderman of Metz, or at the very least king of France.” It is to this sovereign bourgeoisie that Metz owed in great part the prosperity of its commerce of those days, its happy and broad existence, attested by numerous contemporary sayings, and the useful starts of its bad character: proud and jealous of their rights, these burghers of Metz, scarcely escaped from the episcopal yoke, knew marvellously how to keep more nominal than real their dependence on the Empire, to multiply the chains of distrust and the precautionary posts on the passage of the emperor when he came to visit them, to reserve their attitude vis-à-vis France growing, ambitious, on the other side. Doubtless, the paraiges, growing poorer in money and men, died slowly; doubtless the authority of the master-alderman vanished, then his very title; but, of this civic life of yore, memories remained, ready to wake in times of crisis, like childhood visions in a sudden peril. The old aldermanic title, at a tragic hour, by instinct, the Messin people found again. “Our master-alderman,” one day, was Félix Maréchal, the mayor of 1870… The line of characters had perpetuated itself. Equal love of order and of liberty, passionate devotion to the public thing, all the spirit of the vanished patriciate remained that of the Messin bourgeoisie. Until the end, the men who sat at the Town Hall of Metz were not only the Municipal Council of a town, but something more and better: the chiefs of a city.

Of lesser antiquity, the parliamentary tradition had cast no less deep roots. It had only appeared there in the wake of the king of France. When Henri II entered Metz under cover of his alliance with the Protestant princes of the Empire, he was saluted there by two titles that did not blend: Galliae rex and urbis protector, king of France and protector of the town. If he wished to remain at Metz, especially if he wished to convert this protection into sovereignty, he would have to, like his predecessors, to assure his power, to base the King upon the Law, have the devoted authority of the men of justice. Therefore, as early as 1555, Henri II sent to Metz a “royal president,” president without justices, at first, but soon surrounded by a clerk and bailiffs, then a procurator general, then graduates. At the same time, the prerogatives of the president extended, he engrossed as many cases as possible, taking here from the jurisdiction of the bishops, there from that of the aldermen, elsewhere from other small sovereign justices, survivals of feudal times. Finally, Henri IV was on the point of erecting this small tribunal of missi dominici into a Parliament, and, in 1633, Richelieu realized Henri IV’s project. The Messins did not at first view the young institution with a favorable eye, they espoused the resentments of their traditional judges, seigneurial, episcopal and municipal judges, who lost in importance all that Parliament gained; but, the first movement of ill humor past, they put their trust in the new justice. Without going to the enthusiasm of a certain Gobineau de Mont-Luisant [footnote: La Royale Thémis, qui contient les effects de la justice divine, humaine et morale: l’establissement de la Cour du Parlement à Metz; et les Acrostiches sur les noms de nos seigneurs de ladite Cour, by Esprit Gobineau, sieur de Mont-Luisant, Chartrain (Metz, Claude Félix, 1634, in-4°).] who, from the very first year of the existence of Parliament, celebrated in acrostics the virtues of each of the magistrates and sang on his lyre the “marvellous Effects” of this “Just Senate,”

Oracle Qui par ses purs Décrets va dissipant l’obstacle De la Perversité,

[Oracle / Who by his pure Decrees goes dissipating the obstacle / Of Perversity]

they saw clearly, little by little, that the formulas employed in the edict of creation were not empty of sense, nor the recriminations on the past without reason, nor the engagements for the future without scope: “…usurpations of certain ones… confusion and disorder… Justice and Police far better ordained and more authorized, to prevent our subjects from oppression and violence…” Indeed, nothing was lacking to the glory of Parliament: the brilliant receptions organized for it or by it; the important consultations asked of it on the treaties in preparation or which it gave without being asked; famous causes of every kind, severe or pleasant (the accusation of “ritual murder” that cost the life of Raphaël Lévy, of Boulay, the debates on the title of prince of Metz which Bishop Claude de Saint-Simon arrogated to himself, the violent opposition of M. Le Monnier to the marriage of his daughter with M. de Valdahon, the energetically sustained complaint of Sieur Boulanger, former chief surgeon, against the Baron d’Huart, former captain of infantry, for a stolen canary, a canary that was “dear to him in his mediocrity,” a canary “trained by the taste of Favart” and which sang so well Le coeur de mon Annette…); finally, the violent incidents that brought Parliament, that of Metz, like its peers, into conflict with the royal power in the last years of the ancien régime — all this created movement and sometimes agitation in the town. One thus understands why ties grew increasingly intimate with time between the families of Metz and their “Just Senate,” and why the suppression of the Parliaments left among the Messin bourgeoisie numerous unemployed parliamentarians who asked nothing better than to become so again in the new form, when the Courts of Appeal were instituted. On the eve of 1870, in almost every family, there was a magistrate or a lawyer, an attorney or a clerk, and all of Metz was somewhat of the Court.

All of Metz, still more, was of the army. Periodically, military tumults had made its walls, its crossroads and its men vibrate. Gaulish Metz gave, it is said, five thousand soldiers to Vercingetorix: glorious preamble to the history of its patriotism. The Romans erect it into a fortress against the Germanic invasions, and there is Metz designated for the centuries as a bastion of honor and peril on the “marches” of the Latin world. On many occasions, armed waves come, from east and west, to growl at its feet: Metz undergoes four investments in the tenth century, one in the fourteenth, three in the fifteenth, finally, in 1552, scarcely entered under royal protection, that famous siege which popularized at once, the painting and the image aiding, François, Duke of Guise, Ambroise Paré and Charles V. Through these vicissitudes of a besieged town that had always to be ready for new attacks, the military career of Metz had specialized. With its mouths of small calibre which, as early as 1324, maneuvered in a sortie at the foot of the slope of Saint-Julien, forced the king of Bohemia to “sound the retreat”; with its light “serpentines” accompanying a “ride” of Messins against Lorrainers, in 1442 [footnote: Cf. Larchey, Maîtres bombardiers, pages 12 and 13.]; with its master cannoneers permanently in pay as early as 1348, Metz held it an honor to have known, perhaps before any other town, the valorous din of artillery, and it seems that even then every Messin was born an artilleryman. The length, the “stupefying” breadth of its moats, its menacing towers, “impregnable to the enemy,” “comparable to those of Babylon,” had received, in the sixth [footnote: Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers, III, 13: Urbs munita nimis, quam cingit murus et amnis…], then in the eleventh century [footnote: Sigebert, edit. cit., page 48: Laudo minas muri, quadris exaedificati, / Non facilis solvi, non expugnabilis hosti… / Mensurans latum, stupeas succrescere longum; / Suspiciens turres, Babylonis suspicor arces…], enthusiastic homages in Latin verses; to raise these “towers,” to dig these moats, to study, combine, transform the robust defenses of Metz, how many military engineers exercised themselves since then! and Metz was of all time the blessed town of the “sappers.”

Artillery and engineers therefore established themselves there one day as in their natural and predestined capital: it was in Year XI, when the First Consul, by a decree of 12 Vendémiaire, prescribed the reunion at Metz of two old royal schools till then separate [footnote: The Artillery School of Châlons-sur-Marne and the Engineers’ School of Mézières, the latter already transferred to Metz since 1795.], to “compose a common school for the two arms,” the École d’application of artillery and engineering: a strong creation of Bonaparte, which was to fuse, more than ever, the Messin population with the army, stiffen with military spirit the slightest burgher of Metz. For nearly three quarters of a century, all the promotions of the École polytechnique entered the army by passing through Metz, enlivening the old city with their joy of living, rejuvenating it each year with their hopes. The buildings of the old abbey of Saint-Arnould, where the School was installed, the polygon of Chambière, the “bridge schools” at Saint-Symphorien, the infantry exercises at Ban-Saint-Martin; the eminent masters: Goulier, Poncelet, Morin, Didion; the mess of the rue du Commerce; the Heaume café, with its two entries, one, rue Neuve-rue, by which the sub-lieutenant-pupils arrived from the School, the other, on the Esplanade, where their “venerated elders” presided over the “breaking-in” of the engineer recruits, barracked across the way; the amusement of being called les six-sous by the urchins of the place de Chambre when they descended toward the Theater — because they were subscribed there by office, with a day’s pay retained, that is, all told, thirty centimes per performance… What charming memories, for each promotion, of these two years of apprenticeship! And above all, how familial sweet the Messin atmosphere was to them! Many of these young men were from Metz or its surroundings: of all the French provinces, it is the department of the Moselle that has furnished the most pupils to the École polytechnique. And then, the most indirect recommendation sufficed to make of the sub-lieutenant-pupil the adopted son of a Metz family. Each had “her pupil.” “Bring me your pupil,” they said to one another, drawing out the o a little, leaning a little on the final e, in the Messin manner: pretty usages, pretty formulas — perfect expression of the tutelary tenderness of Metz for her School, for her artillery, for her army.

All this past, however diverse it was, episcopal and municipal, of the robe and the sword, prolonged itself into the present, and the life of Metz in 1870 was determined by its history, in which each Messin relived his race and found himself in the antique common patrimony. The war came, which undid in one day what centuries had made.

What the war was at Metz, I do not pretend to retell after so many others; nor would this be the place. The Army of the Rhine — Borny, Gravelotte, Saint-Privat — Bazaine: one line suffices to resuscitate in all French memories the painful history of lost Metz. But, were one led back to Metz by the wish to relive there the sadnesses of the exodus rather than those of defeat itself, wandering through its old streets and its old papers, one does not escape the specter: it is everywhere.

Here it is, rising from yellowed leaves, in such a file of various documents lost among registers of statistics and accounts. The dreams of the beginning, the war carried into Germany: a letter from the general commanding the great headquarters, July 28, Hôtel de Metz, room 38, requesting for the duration of the campaign “an interpreter knowing the German language well,” a situation which “will not lack comfort, the interpreter habitually accompanying the general.” After the illusion of the Rhine crossed, the joyless struggle on national soil: the autograph text, with erasures and “bon à tirer” for seventy copies, of the proclamation of General Coffinières, supreme commander of the place, the day after Gravelotte: “The battle has been glorious to our arms,” but murderous, “present yourselves at Fort Moselle and take to your homes the wounded heroes of the battle of Gravelotte!”: wounded heroes replacing unfortunate heroes, which the general had first written and which seemed to him no doubt less pitiable than demoralizing. Then, the end, October 26, October 29, letters from the marshal to the municipality: the place must undergo the same fate as the army, thanks to the population for the care given to the sick and the wounded — the last documents no doubt that bear the signature: The Marshal of France commanding-in-chief the army around Metz, Bazaine.

Here they are, all the lugubrious visions, in the slightest conversation with the old Messins or their sons, in their gestures and in their very language, where the familiar presence of the past is divined: “the battle of the 14th,” “the battle of the 16th”: no need of precision of month, nor of place; where one fought on the 14th, the 16th, August 18, no one here is mistaken. Memories press in crowds, between these walls that have seen. The rue Serpenoise, the Emperor’s last entry into Metz, July 28: a parade already sad, a few Cent-Gardes ahead of the carriage, but no soldiers forming the line, no cannon salvos, no peal of the Mutte, and Napoleon III very pale, looking worried… The place of the Prefecture. It is from there that he left, on August 14, for Châlons — for Sedan…; the carriages turned left here, immediately toward Pont-Thiffroy, then they gained the open country, over there, toward those heights, the Étain road… And always returns the name of Bazaine. Something had been suspected for a long time. Nothing was understood of the command’s inertia. People spoke with irritation of calculated terrors that the military authority wished to provoke in town in order to have pretexts for negotiating, of late communications suddenly creating grave situations that could easily have been prevented. Even one day, solemnly, the municipality protested. There, on those steps of the Town Hall, in the evening of October 13, the mayor Félix Maréchal, surrounded by the whole Municipal Council, appears to the crowd, and, in a slow, grave voice, reads a letter from the Council to General Coffinières, disengaging the responsibility of the town, but affirming that it would do all its duty, that it wished to fight to the last extremity. The next day or the day after, L’Indépendant de la Moselle recalled the text of the laws and military regulations that condemn to degradation and to the death penalty the commander of a place of war, when he capitulates without having repulsed at least one assault on the body of the place. Anguish became day by day more precise, each reporting words, strange attitudes of the marshal. To an intendant who announced to him that supplies were not yet on the point of running out, Bazaine had answered: “What does that matter to me? We must finish and go.” He finished it… The Place d’Armes. The statue of Fabert, marshal of France himself too, with its well-known inscription, very well known, but which one cannot prevent oneself from re-reading here, word by word, and which lifts the heart against the other, humiliating contrast that would heat with a popular rage the most snobbish of the boulevardiers: “If, to prevent a place which the king has entrusted to me from falling into the power of the enemy, it were necessary to put at the breach my person, my family and all my goods, I should not hesitate a moment to do so.” This statue, a veil of crepe covered it, on October 29, when the German troops entered the town.

Then the dispersion began.

The garrison left, prisoner of war. It did not return. The École d’application was reconstituted, at Fontainebleau. [footnote: The Central School of Military Pyrotechnics, which also had its seat at Metz before the war, was transferred to Bourges.] Of the old French military tradition, nothing remained, nothing could remain in annexed Metz. Nothing but the memory, and memories: statues, “natal houses,” street names, Fabert, Ney, Lasalle, Richepanse, Paixhans: sad shades that are not life. And that the newcomers had no root in the population, that there were no longer at Metz, instead of families and “their” pupils, anything but an army of conquerors face to face with a people of conquered — this was natural, notorious, and it would be superfluous to insist.

Of parliamentary Metz there remained no more. Nothing replaced there the French Court of Appeal. In the organization of the Imperial Territory, the Germans allowed only a single Court of Appeal to subsist, extending its jurisdiction to all Alsace-Lorraine: that of Colmar. Moreover, rather than put themselves at the service of the new regime, all the magistrates of the annexed country, save very rare exceptions, “returned” to France. Most of the magistrates of the Court of Metz, especially those who were natives of the region, found themselves again at the Court of Nancy, which was augmented by a fourth Chamber [footnote: It had first been decided (March 27, 1871) that the magistrates of the former Court of Metz would be provisionally convoked at Charleville-Mézières to proceed with the dispatch of affairs. The fourth Chamber of Nancy was created only the following year (March 25, 1872), a temporary creation that became definitive in 1875.], composed solely of the ex-Messin magistrates [footnote: Decree of March 30, 1872 appointing, at the Court of Nancy, as President of Chamber: M. Gérard d’Hannoncelles, former counsellor at Metz [born at Verdun, but of Messin family]; as counsellors: MM. des Godins de Souhesmes, Chouet de Bollemont [of Metz]; Henriet, Thilloy [of Sarreguemines], Cotelle, Pidancet [of Metz]; Pécheur [of Metz], former counsellors at Metz; advocate general, M. Poulet, advocate general at Algiers (since April 27, 1871), but, previously, substitute of the procurator general at Metz; M. Godelle, advocate general at Metz, also passed, as procurator general, to Nancy.]. Last shovelful of earth upon the past: even those who had just reached the age limit were named honoraries “to” the Court of Nancy [footnote: Decrees of March 30 and June 21, 1872: MM. Limbourg [of Florange], honorary president; Gougeon, de Turmel [of Metz]; Dufour, de Bengeot [of Bar-le-Duc] and Villard [of Rethel], honorary counsellors. (M. Gougeon already had the honorariate at Metz before the war.) Must be added to this list of Messins “become honoraries” at Nancy: M. Grand, who is not in those decrees (I do not know why, for, retired like M. de Turmel or M. Dufour, on the date of May 8, 1871, he figured like them in the Annuaire among the “honoraries” of Nancy); — M. Huot, who was (like M. Gougeon), honorary counsellor at Metz since 1869; — and Baron de Gérando, procurator general at Metz, named honorary first president at Nancy on October 27, 1873.]; the very name of Metz disappeared from the judicial Annuaires.

Doubtless the bishop remained. And this bishop was great. Napoleon III, who knew him to be royalist and Breton, had said one day of him: “Monsignor Dupont des Loges will not let himself be won over, but he is a bishop!” Such he had been until 1870, such he was to be, with greater reason, in the new situation that enemy occupation created for his diocese. Since the sanctity of his ministry was capable of compelling respect, of stopping the menace of the conquerors, he would not abandon his unhappy flock, he would know how to make again, with his long pale hands, the sacred gestures that have defended, in all times, Christians in peril. “My dear diocesans have no one but me…,” he said. Defensor civitatis! The bishops of troubled times lived again in him. He led sixteen years this rough and noble existence, exact in fulfilling all the duties of his charge without ever giving the German government the occasion to decree concerning him, in the witty word of another annexed priest [footnote: The word is from Canon Dacheux, in his Cathédrale de Strasbourg, page 53.], “a state of siege in ecclesiastical affairs,” but holding it an honor never to hide his sentiments: on September 7, 1871, a few months after the annexation, at the inauguration of the monument raised in the Île Chambière to the French soldiers who died during the siege [footnote: It is even he, it is said, who had inscribed on one of the faces of the monument this text from the Maccabees: “Woe is me! Was I born to see the ruin of my people, the ruin of the city, and to remain in the midst of her, while she is delivered into the hands of the enemy!”], he had recalled, amid the sobs of the crowd, the recommendation of Saint Paul: “that one must not grieve as those who have no hope,” and, almost at the end of his career, when Marshal von Manteuffel, Statthalter of Alsace-Lorraine, offered him on behalf of Emperor William the cross of the Iron Crown, he answered with a very dignified refusal, invoking fidelity to his past and the religion of his memories. “We slept under his shadow,” one of his faithful was to write, “and it seemed that this man could never die…” [footnote: Cf. Abbé F. Klein, op. cit., page 480.] He died; and if his first successor, Monsignor Fleck, an Alsatian, whom he had succeeded in having given to him as coadjutor with future succession, directed the administration of the diocese according to the heart of the great dead prelate, this could only be a sort of interim and through a tolerance from on high which committed not the morrow. It is true that pontifical decrees consecutive to the Treaty of Frankfurt had, since 1874, attached the bishopric of Metz (as well as that of Strasbourg) directly to the Holy See; but this elegant solution of numerous difficulties that had appeared in the wake of annexation, did not at all abrogate the other dispositions of the Concordat in the dioceses separated from France and left whole the influence of the State — that is to say, henceforth, of Berlin — in the nomination of the bishop. Doubtless also, this town covered with churches and convents, so many priests born of the Lorrainer soil, the influence, even posthumous, of so many establishments of religious instruction whose classes the annexation had emptied or whose masters the Kulturkampf had driven out, in a word, all that subsisted of the episcopal tradition around the bishop, whoever he was, would not fail to impose upon the successors of Monsignor Dupont des Loges, even if they came from beyond the Rhine, as a duty of deferential politeness toward the eldest daughter of the Church, and the perfume that rose from her traces could not be indifferent to their Christian heart. But, in reality, all was changed. Monsignor Dupont des Loges had been the protector of his flock; the German bishop, whether he wished it or not, would perform the functions of an imperial commissary, officious servant of a cause that was not that of memory, and the old intimacy of the faithful with their pastor could no longer be the same, for something remained in them that was no longer in him.

In this flight and disarray of everything, what became of the Messin bourgeoisie, those other “defenders of the city,” and what became of the city itself? They acted faithfully. They were, in their turn, examples. On February 11, 1871, before the signing of the Preliminaries of peace, the Municipal Council sent to the Assembly of Bordeaux a Memoir for the City of Metz, which it confirmed and developed, on April 13, by a second memoir addressed to the plenipotentiaries gathered at Brussels to negotiate the definitive treaty: a complete history of Metz; facts, eloquent by their enumeration alone and their precision. “The city of Metz has been of the Empire,” certainly, but, before being of the Holy Empire, it was of the Empire of Charlemagne, of the kingdom of Clovis, of independent Gaul; Metz has been of the Empire, but as have been “other parts of France, like Italy, like Germany,” one of the “independent States” of every size of which the Holy Empire was but the aggregate. The Messins were of the Empire, but there is “many an example of their resistances and even of their formal refusal of the payment of aids and subsidies claimed from them by the Emperor,” and, “as for jurisdiction, they had forbidden any appeal of judgments of their magistrates to the Imperial Chamber.” Even in those distant times, it is toward the fairs of Champagne and the Lendit of Paris that the Messin merchants directed themselves. As early as 1214, one of the oldest legislative titles written in French, with a certain date, is a Messin document, the letter of the common peace of Metz. Thus, “even when Metz, a free city, was, by a fragile bond, attached to the Germanic Empire, its language, its literature, its chronicles, its public or private deeds, the name of its writers and of its inhabitants — all was exclusively French,” and today (census of 1866), out of 47,242 persons, 44,367 are of French language. Whether one considers, then, either the “past that is dead,” or the life of the present, that is, “these great interests that constitute the moral and material life of a people, it is impossible to approve and even to comprehend the violent annexation of a town that language, origins, commerce, intimate sentiments, in a word everything attaches to France as everything invincibly separates from Germany”… Science, logic, dedication useless. The Messins had nothing to understand or to approve. The treaty was signed. The “violent annexation” was accomplished.

The Messins continued not to understand, and to say so. At the first elections of Alsace-Lorraine for the Reichstag, in 1874, Edmond Goudchaux, who was a Jew and a republican, was charged, as is known, in the name of a group of Messins, to offer the candidacy to Monsignor Dupont des Loges, and he had no difficulty rallying all opinions as well as all confessions upon the name of the bishop of Metz. “I shall have my husband vote for our bishop,” cried an old Jewish woman, the eve of the election, in the rue de l’Arsenal, the Jewish quarter of Metz. Monsignor Dupont des Loges was elected, left for Berlin, consulted en route with his Alsatian-Lorrainer colleagues on the line of conduct to take before the Reichstag and signed wholeheartedly the famous “Proposition Teutsch and consorts”: “May it please the Reichstag to decide: that the populations of Alsace-Lorraine, incorporated without their consent into the German Empire by the Treaty of Frankfurt, shall be called to pronounce themselves in a special way on this incorporation.” At the elections of 1877, “their” bishop no longer presenting himself, it was their master-alderman that the Messins sent to the Reichstag, Paul Bezanson, mayor of Metz, who had just been dismissed for having presented himself as a protesting candidate. He too would know, “inspiring himself with the intimate sentiments of his electors,” how to “defend their imprescriptible and sacred rights”; and, in effect, he renewed before the Parliament of Berlin the energetic complaint of 1874: ”…As does the Eastern Question, the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine is a cause of disquiet for spirits, of frightful warlike preparations, of constant increase of the budget of war… Thousands of optants are expelled, which completely overturns the country. In the name of Alsace and Lorraine, in the name of humanity, I beg you, gentlemen, not to pass lightly before such misery. In the presence of these ills, we would indeed have a means of relief to propose to you; but it would be a heroic means: leave Alsace to herself…” Bezanson dead (1882), M. Antoine succeeded him, the ardent Dominique Antoine, who knew all the grandeurs and all the bitternesses of the struggle, the police vexations, prison, the Leipzig Court, exile. Then, after Antoine, others still, who had perhaps to be, more than their predecessors, “politicians,” but remained no less faithful than they to the Messin tradition: Déliés, Haas, Pierson… In all those who had stayed, a faith watched, now active, now overwhelmed and sorrowful, but ever present.

But the number of these diminished year by year. All that, in Metz, was of the military and parliamentary world, had gone off at once, with the army, with the Court, with France. For reasons that were not only economic, the few Metz industrialists (they were rather few, industry hardly seeking fortified enclosures where one is too cramped and the neighborhood of frontiers where one is quickly in danger) transferred all or part of their establishments to the other side of the new frontier: to Frouard, to Pagny-sur-Moselle, to Bar-le-Duc, especially to Nancy; flour mills, shoe factories, printing, knitting works, precision instruments — such are today some of the greatest industrial establishments of Nancy, made by men and capital from Metz. The Academy of Metz, the Society of Archaeology and History of the Moselle, gave, before the war, a fairly exact image of Messin bourgeoisie. Men of very diverse situations met there: lawyers, Dommanget, Maguin, Ch. Abel, Eliézer Lambert; magistrates, President Salmon, de Gérando, the procurator general, Counsellor Thilloy; officers, Commandant Goulier, General Didion, Colonel Virlet; ecclesiastics, Abbé Fleck, Pastor Cuvier; artists, Émile Michel, Hussenot, Ch. Pêtre; physicians, Dr. Haro, Dr. Isnard, Dr. Scoutetten. And many others besides: M. Aug. Prost, the historian of Metz, Dr. Maréchal, the mayor, M. de Chazelles, M. de Tinseau, M. Bouchotte, M. de Bouteiller, the two Simons, the chemist and the banker, M. Mézières, emeritus rector, M. Claude Collignon, M. Alcan, bookseller-publisher, the Vicomte de Pange, the Comte du Coëtlosquet, M. Olry Terquem, former pharmacist, Th. and Ch. de Gargan, the masters of forges, M. Justin Worms, man of letters and banker, M. Vever, jeweler, M. Simon-Favier, nurseryman, M. Ed. Mouzin, the director of the School of Music: but all old Messins, Messins by family and birth, or, a few, of fervent adoption, no less Messin than if they had on coming into the world breathed the air of the place Sainte-Croix or of the Porte Saint-Thiébault… The “annexation” dispersed all this Messin society; through the Annuaires and the reports one can follow its emigration. The Stanislas Academy, of Nancy, opened broadly to the “sister Society,” it received as titulars, as vacancies came, several of the titulars of Metz [footnote: General Didion, Maguin, Émile Michel.], and added to its “national associate-correspondents,” on the date of November 22, 1872, a new section, the “Section of Metz,” including all the members of the Academy of Metz refugee at Nancy. As for the Society of Archaeology and History of the Moselle, it “had ended by having no more bureau,” says its secretary-archivist [footnote: Abbé Ledain, session of March 13, 1885. The former president, M. de Bouteiller, the two vice-presidents, MM. du Coëtlosquet and Dommanget, the secretary, M. Durand de Distroff, had all left for France.]; it published its memoirs only from time to time, in 1880, in 1885, in 1888, and it was virtually dissolved when the president of Lorraine, in 1885, set about reconstituting it, calling in immigrants.

Metz had emptied. Metz had emptied rapidly of its great bourgeoisie, and France was so close! No river, no mountain to separate them from her; a road quite straight, quite even. A few minutes of railway, and the Messins escaped the foreigner, found again France, the French, the French language. In 1869, there were at Metz 48,233 inhabitants; on December 1, 1871, there remained 39,937; on October 1, 1874, 35,696. Large banal in-folios, names of streets, numbers of houses, names of families, given names: it is the “census” of the town in 1869, administrative nomenclature, dry and cold. Yes, but look closely, and you will see, all of a sudden, the exodus unfold, for these sheets, filled in on the eve of the war, were brought up to date in the aftermath of peace, at the end of 1875, and, in the last column, that of Observations, a little word, always the same, simple and heart-rending, repeats itself ad infinitum, sometimes on more than half the lines of a page: “left,” “left for Pont-à-Mousson,” “left for Nancy,” “left for Paris,” “left for France,” “left for France,” “left,” “left,” “left”…

And little by little also the empty places were filling up. I would not wish to insist — for new facts have supervened and illusion would be dangerous to us — on the poverty from which Germany long suffered, on the harsh and difficult existence which their hostile sky and their rebellious furrows imposed upon the Germans, from the most remote times to days very close to us: more than eighteen hundred years ago already, it is because he was tired of his marshy solitudes, says Tacitus [footnote: “Eadem semper causa transcendendi in Gallias, libido atque avaritia, et mutandae sedis amor, ut, relictis paludibus et solitudinibus suis, fecundissimum hoc solum vosque ipsos possiderent.” (Discourse of Cerialis, Tacitus, Histories, IV, 73.) [The same cause has always been theirs for crossing into Gaul: lust and avarice, and love of changing their seat, so that, leaving their marshes and solitudes, they might possess this most fertile soil and you yourselves.]], that the German periodically invaded the Gauls, burning with the desire to possess this fertile soil, to possess those even who inhabited it: fecundissimum hoc solum vosque ipsos possiderent; and, yesterday still, perhaps malicious interpreters but not unfaithful ones of the old Latin text, brilliant Alsatian polemicists were exercising their wit at the expense “of the famished who fell upon Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the disasters of 1870” [footnote: Le Nouvelliste d’Alsace-Lorraine, no. of January 11, 1913.]. But it does indeed seem that this age-old theory has been verified at Metz. The Germany of 1871 needed to spread, to spread in order to enrich itself. Three thousand empty lodgings, the value of property less by half [footnote: Speech of Paul Bezanson at the Reichstag, March 1877.], what attraction! Metz, conquered by arms, appeared at once as a quite habitable colony to many people who had nothing to leave on the other side of the Rhine, save bad notes in a file or bad pending affairs. [footnote: “We know what we are losing,” a high German functionary of Metz said at this time, “and we know still better what we shall have in its place.” (Cited by D’Elster, op. cit., p. 89.)]

Here one sees at a glance one of the economic and social effects of war. When the army retreats, it is not it alone that yields ground: with it retreats all the national life of which it has the guard, all that is no longer at home — it being gone — while foreign appetites approach, under the protection of the victorious flag: a truth as old as the oldest invasions, but which must be recalled from time to time and which Metz illustrates by its painful example.

The Messin population before the war comprised hardly anything but natives of the country. I do not believe there were at Metz then 1 1/2% of inhabitants come from Germany; all the others, save a few exceptions (2 to 3% Frenchmen of the interior, 1 1/2% Luxembourgers, a few Belgians, a few Alsatians), were of Metz itself, or of the Messin country, or Lorrainers of the surroundings. Today, on a small group of 27 inhabitants of a working-class street where the Lorrainer element nonetheless predominates, I find 16 immigrant Germans; on another larger group, 700 inhabitants of a quarter taken at random, I count 216 who are strangers to the country by their birth; elsewhere, on 700 again, 263 strangers; and, of these 216, of these 263, the near totality come from Germany, from all parts of Germany, Palatinate, Rhine Province, Bavaria, Prussia, Württemberg, Baden, Silesia, Westphalia. Yet chance [footnote: Or this fact that, in the three cases I have just cited, I only operated “on births”; now, many are already born at Metz, but whose parents came from elsewhere.] has favored me! for, if the population of Metz has ended by catching up, recently, with its pre-war figure [footnote: The census of 1910 indicates a civilian population of 55,191 inhabitants; but, for the comparison to be just, one must deduct from this figure the population of Devant-les-Ponts and of Plantières-Queuleu which were only attached to Metz in 1908: hence 6,536 less, which gives us 48,655 inhabitants, or approximately the pre-war figure.], of these 48,000, it is reckoned that at least half are imported from Germany. And, of these 25,000 Germans, many, as is said, have made their affairs well. They bought, they built, especially over the last ten years or so. Doubtless, on 100 buildings belonging to immigrants, 80 are burdened with mortgages, while the proportion is the reverse (20 to 25%) for the properties of natives, and one may amuse oneself with the recent memory of a street under construction which the populace called the Street of Mortgages; it is nonetheless true that with the help of their compatriots, of the mortgage Banks of Germany, which have advanced them probably more than thirty million, they today possess half the buildings of Metz, the other half belonging to natives, those who remained in the country or who left for France. It is a book of history too, beneath its banal canvas binding covered with advertisements, this Adressbuch of the town of Metz, which gives, besides the list of all the inhabitants of Metz house by house, the name, for each of them, of its owner, with a little star in the margin if he does not live there in person; a moving book, not only because one sometimes strikes against mentions like these, full of the past, all the more painful for being more bizarre: “Compagnon, Colonel in Poitier,” “De Richard d’Aboncourt, Major a. D., Lille,” “Graf de la Rochethulon, General, Paris,” “Maizières, Erben,” “Michel Émile, Hauptmann, Lorient, Frankr.” [footnote: I have respected the spelling. “Colonel at Poitiers.” “Major in retirement, Lille.” “Count…, general, Paris.” “Maizières heirs.” “Captain, Lorient, France.” The Mézières heirs: this refers here to the family house of M. Alfred Mézières, of the Académie française.]; not only because the little stars are Pont-à-Mousson, Bar-le-Duc, Verdun, Vitry-le-François, Paris, Nancy, and again Nancy, and always Nancy; but simply because these houses were, formerly, the Pierson house, the Humbert house, or Daubrée, or Vautrin, or Tabellion, and the new owners are named Crummenauer and Rheinländer, Schöning and Lauxtermann, Enders and Krause, Thielen and Langhommer…

METZ

The departures continue. Not a week passes without loads of furniture following this road, and the Messins know it well — they take advantage of the empty return trip to have their “errands” sent up from Nancy. “There are more Messins at Nancy than at Metz; you have only to turn around, you will see them everywhere”: a familiar image of this perpetual flux, which another Messin defined more literarily, saying to me with a sad smile: “Metz is no longer in Metz, Metz is wholly at Nancy.” To retire from business, for many Messins, means leaving Metz and going off to Nancy. And from Nancy one does not come back, one does not come to Metz. But from Germany one comes there always. Of those who had rushed to Metz to try their luck at a better existence, if a few have remained, even after making their fortune, many — if not most — return home, and others arrive, who replace them at once.

But invasion is not penetration. A few years after the war, a “president of Lorraine,” M. d’Arnim, said to M. Antoine, with an apparent good humor that did not lack roughness: “It is all very fine to protest. But why? It would be so simple for us to come to an understanding — we who are arriving, you who are leaving!” It does not appear that Metz has obeyed these suggestions. Once, a homogeneous people, of a single heart; today, two populations juxtaposed, not fused, embarrassed and mistrustful, the one because there are too many strangers in its town, the other because the town remains, in spite of everything, foreign to it. There is not a single Messin who cannot, without the slightest hesitation, enumerate his Municipal Council: the mayor, a Lorrainer; fifteen councillors, Lorrainers; three others who are fairly good or very good Lorrainers without being Lorrainers by birth; eighteen councillors who are Germans. Their language and their habits; the setting in which they move and all that remains of France in their old city, the Cathedral and the long narrow streets that press around it, the fine layout of the Place d’Armes, the sumptuous grace of Blondel’s theatre, of the Hôtel de Ville, of the Palais de Justice; their comings and goings across the unhappy frontier, to go and see, over there, their brothers, their kin, their friends — all this makes for the natives an existence alongside that of the immigrants. Doubtless they have known difficult hours, have felt themselves at a loss; too many of their “leaders” are no longer there. No matter. Those who remain, resist, by the mere fact that they remain. Thanks to them, between Nancy, Briey, Pont-à-Mousson, Lunéville, and Metz, a kind of provincial continuity survives the territorial fracture. And thanks to them the push is no stronger than it is; since they are there, they are the rampart, they cushion the invasion… Walking through the streets of Metz, at the thought of all those who have left, at the sight of those who have arrived, one feels passing with a shudder the words of Tacitus: “…always the same reason for invading Gaul…: to possess that fertile soil, to possess those inhabitants…” One would shudder still more if one did not find some comfort in the courage and even in the fraternal sadness of those who have stayed.

ALSATIANS OF ALGERIA

On 4 March 1871, three days after the ratification of the Preliminaries of Peace by the National Assembly, M. de Belcastel, deputy from the Haute-Garonne, laid the following bill before the Chamber:

The National Assembly, attached by indissoluble bonds of the heart to the patriotic populations of Alsace and Lorraine, whose material territory she has ceded with profound sorrow, under the empire of circumstances she did not make, and wishing, so far as it lies in her power, to keep the souls and the arms of races so valiant,

Decrees:

A concession of one hundred thousand hectares of the best lands at the State’s disposal in Algeria is granted to those Alsatians and Lorrainers inhabiting the ceded territories who would wish, while keeping French nationality, to remain upon French soil. [footnote: The bill carried, along with the signature of M. de Belcastel, those of his colleagues Jules Buisson, of the Aude, and Baucarne-Leroux, of the Nord. — We give here only the essential of M. de Belcastel’s text: the preamble of the bill and Article 1.]

Algeria, in 1871, was no unknown land to the Alsatians. Many of them had served among the troops of the conquest, and a few had come back to Africa after their discharge; those who had stayed in Alsace told of their exploits, familiarized their fellow countrymen with the marvels of the country where they had served, and these veterans’ tales, whose memory has been kept alive in many an Alsatian family, had called forth more than one colonial vocation. Yet other influences were also at work, press campaigns and administrative circulars, of a more methodical action, and capable of more general effects. For many years following the conquest, the most varied colonization schemes had stirred men’s minds: colonization by soldiers and veteran ploughmen, colonization by foundlings or abandoned children, colonization by “poor orphans,” colonization by young convicts, colonization by “our mendicant and indigent classes,” colonization by the unemployed of 1848; [footnote: One may consult on this subject, among other books or pamphlets: Bugeaud, De l’établissement de légions de colons militaires dans les possessions françaises du nord de l’Afrique, Paris, Didot, 1838, in-8; — Baillet, Réflexions sur la colonisation de l’Algérie à l’aide des enfants trouvés ou abandonnés…, Rouen, 1850, in-8; — Ed. de Tocqueville, Des enfants trouvés et des orphelins pauvres comme moyen de coloniser l’Algérie, Paris, Amyot, 1850, in-8; — A. Amaury, Projet d’établissement de colonies agricoles à fonder en Algérie, proposé comme un des plus puissants moyens d’extinction de la mendicité et même du paupérisme en France, Paris, Pollet, 1849, in-8; — Louis Reybaud, Rapport présenté au ministre de la Guerre par la Commission d’inspection des colonies agricoles de l’Algérie, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1852, in-4; — A. Dénain, Appel au Roi et aux quatre-vingt-six départements de la France, Paris, Dentu, 1847, in-8; — Baillet, Projet d’un village et d’une grande ferme normande en Algérie, Rouen, 1850, in-8; — Lieutaud, notary at Algiers, Société angevine pour le placement des colons en Algérie, Angers, 1847, in-4; — Aug. Roncière, Colonisation française de l’Algérie, Initiative bretonne, Saint-Brieuc, 1852, in-8.] still other projects, among them this one, which sprang up almost simultaneously at several points of the territory: “to found, in Algeria, a village for each French department,” which a notary of Algiers developed in idyllic terms: “There a new Bordeaux will rise; further on, a rich Marseille; elsewhere, a town of Lille will remind us that another defends our frontiers… Everywhere reminders of home. The Breton will forget his exile by finding himself in a new Brittany. The Burgundian will join the Burgundian to plant the vine…” “A chivalrous enterprise,” added the author. In truth, an unrealizable conception of theoretical colonizers, but one in which sound observations were mingled, from which it was possible to draw a happy advantage. Cheragas was peopled by peasants from the Var; Aïn-Benian by immigrants from the Haute-Saône; the Minister of War wrote to the prefect of the Haut-Rhin that “the families whom similarity of speech and habit naturally draws together must be grouped together,” [footnote: 27 April 1855 (Archives of the Government General). — In fact, this grouping by people from the same department is a method that the Algerian Administration still applies today, when it creates new villages.] and Aïn-Sultane was, in great part, an Alsatian village. For the rest, even when sounding the note of ideology, these scattered and spontaneous voices contributed to stirring opinion, made easier the effort of “publicity” which the government, if powerless to multiply departmental villages at the point of arrival, was at least attempting at the point of departure, in the villages of the mother country. In Alsace above all, where emigration held no terror, and from which many young men, many young households, had not long since departed for America, the administration exerted itself to attract Alsatian seekers of fortune or adventure, to turn them away from the New World toward that still newer African world. The Minister of War causes the Annales de la Colonisation algérienne to be sent to Colmar, commends to the prefect the Almanach algérien for 1853; the General Council of the Haut-Rhin votes 150 francs for the purchase of 530 copies of the Almanach for the French communes of the department; but, since the Annales seem to it too literary, it offers the prefect 1,000 francs to publish extracts in German, in pamphlet form: in this way there spread throughout the Haut-Rhin 5,000 copies of a Short Description of the African Colony (Kurzer und gründlicher Beschrieb über die Kolonie in Afrika), [footnote: Kurzer und gründlicher Beschrieb über die Kolonie in Afrika, zum Gebrauch der Auswanderer und Auswanderungslustigen, Colmar, Decker, 1853, in-8.] in which the comparison between Algeria and America was carried out entirely to Algeria’s advantage; and the minister congratulated the prefect “on the good effects already produced in his department by the publications he has spread there.” All these attempts were certainly not in vain, and contributed to pouring some Alsatian elements into the “peopling” of Algeria. But no one, neither the ingenious notary, nor the prefects of the Haut-Rhin or the Bas-Rhin, nor even the Minister of War, foresaw at that time the catastrophe that was to precipitate this emigration of Alsace toward Algeria — no longer, this time, to live a larger life in a younger France, but to find again there a little of the lost France.

The Belcastel bill was of a specious simplicity and of a generosity that could not fail to move the popular soul, at that hour when, though vanquished, “the French believed in France” [footnote: The phrase is from an English newspaper, the London Globe, cited in La Patrie of 28 June 1871.]. Warm approvals greeted it. The journal La Patrie, which had been the first to put forward the idea of which the Belcastel bill was the translation into legislative style, [footnote: Even before the Belcastel proposal was laid before the Chamber, as early as 23 February, the Société d’Agriculture d’Alger, following the publication of a pamphlet by Dr. Warnier, former prefect of Algiers, on L’Algérie et les Victimes de la guerre, had named a commission “to study, in concert with the author, the means of summoning at once to Algeria the agricultural families, victims of the war.” On 8 March the Extraordinary Commissioner of the Republic in Algeria, Alexis Lambert, gave the commission an official character, and on the 10th, communicating this decision to the three prefects, he wrote: “A great thing remains for us to do after our misfortunes… It is to offer to our fellow citizens of Alsace and Lorraine a hospitality worthy of their industry and their patriotism…”] criticized all that had been imagined before it — “particular offers,” “partial combinations” — without any possibility of “practical and extensive effect,” and added with unbounded confidence: “Most happily, France has better than that to offer to our unhappy compatriots of the provinces that have been torn from us. She can open Algeria to them… Let our colony become the Alsace and the Lorraine!… We shall have reconquered for France a million true Frenchmen, and the Alsatians will have changed soil without changing fatherland.” The Akhbar, journal of Algeria, proclaimed in a still more vibrant voice: ”…This land that awaits you is not the land of exile, it is not among strangers that you are going to transport your families, your industries — they are brothers who open their arms to you… And that gratitude may not be too heavy a burden upon our new fellow citizens, we would add, if our word could reach them: ‘In coming, you are quits, you have paid your debt of gratitude; for your very presence indemnifies us a hundredfold… Alsatian and Lorrainer immigration will bring to the colony the contribution it lacks, of laborious cultivators, of calloused hands accustomed to drawing wealth from the flanks of the earth… You will double our production and our commerce; you will initiate us into your industries… Algerie et Alsace for ever!’” [footnote: See Annex V.] Opinion, however, was not unanimous. M. Raudot, deputy from the Yonne, made himself, before the National Assembly, the spokesman of the prudent and the sceptical. To offer Alsatians and Lorrainers particular facilities in Algeria, he said, is “to incite these so patriotic populations to leave Alsace and Lorraine,” whereas by staying “they would be there an obstacle to the projects of the Germans and, for us, a hope, one day”; it is to abandon the ceded territories definitively, to leave the field free for the victors, “to give M. de Bismarck a fairly lively satisfaction.” And all these sacrifices will not even be useful to France. By distributing land free of charge, we will only produce bad colonization, we shall begin over again the unhappy experience of 1848, many millions will be spent to no purpose. M. de Belcastel, then M. Lucet, deputy from Constantine, rapporteur of the law, had no difficulty in triumphing over the opponent’s arguments. It is not a question of 1848: the emigrants of that day “were, in part, the refuse of the national workshops of Paris,… milliners, florists, tailors…”; today, we shall act with more discernment, “the concession-holding families will be the object of a careful examination.” As for emptying the territory before the enemy, the fears expressed are greatly exaggerated. A few thousand persons, “out of fifteen hundred thousand who remain separated from us” — “this emptiness is not of a nature to depopulate Alsace,” this is not delivering Alsace to M. de Bismarck. Besides, “the current of emigration is already perceptible”; many are going, many will go, even without us, rather than “voluntarily play the role of a waiting-stone”; they will go off, as they once did, toward America, what is needed is to “direct them to our country.” “It seems to me,” concluded M. de Belcastel, “that at a time when it is universally recognized that… dead land is nothing and that men are everything,… at this moment, there is something great and moral in saying to the Alsatians: ‘We have ceded your territory, we could not but do so; but we offer you, in Algeria, half the extent of a department; if you will settle there, it will be a second France, fertilized by your labor, ennobled by your fidelity to the mother-country.’”

The law was voted on 21 June. [footnote: With a slight modification in the text: “A concession of one hundred thousand hectares of the best lands at the disposal of the State in Algeria is granted, free of charge, to the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine who wish to retain French nationality and who will pledge to go to Algeria to develop and work the lands thus conceded.” The first text, the rapporteur justly observed, might give the impression that the free concession of land would be a sort of premium offered to Alsatians and Lorrainers willing to remain French, whereas this concession has, in addition, “for object to procure for Algeria colonists of whom she has so great a need to assure her prosperity.”] A new law, on 15 September, then a decree, on 16 October, defined or modified some of the provisions originally adopted. Commissions were to be constituted, at Belfort and at Nancy, to receive the engagements, to verify the morality and aptitude of the new colonists; on their arrival, they would receive an urban plot, for the dwelling, and a rural plot, for cultivation; the role of the State would be reduced to ensuring transport by sea, to providing the centres with their water supply, with the means of communication necessary to link them to neighboring centres, with a school, a building for worship, and a town hall.

As for the rest — houses to be built, furniture, oxen, seed, working tools, subsistence — the colonists would have to count only on themselves; the State takes its precautions in this respect, since they must show evidence of at least 5,000 francs of capital. A wise restriction, but one that was not maintained. The force of things prevailed. At Nancy, at Belfort, emigrants presented themselves in crowds, Frenchmen who wished to remain Frenchmen, ruined but valiant. To send them home because they had not 5,000 francs, instead of receiving them in our country, now that the two expressions no longer coincided, took on the look of iniquity. The decree of 16 October opened Algeria to them as to the others. [footnote: Title I of the decree simply regulated the conditions under which Alsatians-Lorrainers showing a capital of at least 5,000 francs could obtain concessions with immediate property. But Title II permitted the granting of concessions to all Frenchmen, Alsatians or not, with or without resources, on payment of a rent of 1 franc per year and on condition that full ownership of the lands should belong to the grantees only after an effective residence of nine years and the bringing of their concession into cultivation. — See Annex VI, the text of the law of 15 September and that of the decree of 16 October.] The number of departures would increase considerably, and the burdens of the State with them.

For the lands, there would be no embarrassment. Between the laying of the Belcastel proposal and the vote of the law, a new fact had occurred in Algeria, a painful consequence of the misfortunes of the mother country. Some effervescence had been showing itself in the tribes since January. At last, on 16 March, an Arab chief, El Mokrani, appeared, in revolt, before Bordj-bou-Arreridj. Other rebellions followed. The repression was not slow in coming. Lands were sequestered, in mass; the guilty tribes had to abandon a part of their goods to redeem the rest, and, in addition, to consent to expropriations against indemnity, whenever the sequestration commissions should judge certain exchanges advantageous to colonization. Thus, whether it was a question of the number of hectares one might dispose of for the Alsatians or of the groupings of “parcels” that would facilitate their settlement, the administration would encounter no obstacle. But for money — the money necessary to the colonists for all that the State would not supply them with, for a whole anguishing provisional period that might last a year or two, perhaps more — a credit of 400,000 francs, which had been voted at the same time as the law of 15 September, certainly would not suffice. Here too the unforeseen intervened: a chain of events, some of which are a little forgotten today, although they belong to the general history of the disaster, were, by a detour, to come to the help of the Alsatians of Algeria.

It is known that of the indemnity of five milliards imposed on France by the Treaty of Frankfurt, two milliards were to be paid before 1 May 1872, the other three before 2 March 1874, and that, until complete payment, the German troops would occupy a part of French soil: a heavy additional burden, at once material and moral. M. Thiers, after the success of the loan that had largely assured him the first two milliards, was thus anxious to gain time on the final installment, that of 1874, which alone would completely liberate the territory. This anxiety, indeed, was not peculiar to M. Thiers. The public was uneasy, easily ruffled, ill-bore the daily wretchedness of foreign occupation. An incident broke out which made it still more irritable. Two German military men had been, at a few weeks’ interval (10 August and 5 September 1871), the one, at Chelles, struck by a feeble-minded gardener’s boy, the other, near Montreuil, killed, in the course of a discussion, by a French ex-combatant of the war, who believed himself in a state of legitimate self-defense; [footnote: The Berlin and Tonnelet affairs. Cf., besides G. Hanotaux, op. cit., pp. 352-356, the letter of Me Ch. Lachaud the elder, of 24 December 1871, published in Le Droit (no. of 27 December); the letter of one of the jurors published in the Journal des Débats of 9 December; Le Temps of 25 November, 8 and 10 December, etc.] and the jurors, in spite of very clear summings-up by the public prosecution, had acquitted the accused (14 and 24 November). In vain did M. Thiers, in the message he read to the National Assembly on 7 December, allude to these events, “supplicating” the population to be more patient, justice to be more strict. Useless condescension. Three days later, in a dispatch addressed to M. d’Arnim, Ambassador of Germany at Paris, M. de Bismarck returned to the incident, heaping up threats, brutalities of language: “…reprisals… lex talionis… hostages… state of siege… the sense of right is completely extinct in France… the degree of moral education and the sense of right and honor which are peculiar to the German people… sentence incompatible with the present state of civilization…” [footnote: See Annex VII.] An end had to be put to it, and France had to be once more, as soon as possible, mistress in her own house. Everyone felt this, and, as M. Thiers had not yet said what financial expedient he would adopt for the balance of the debt, everyone dreamed of liberating projects. The most generous, the most seductive, came from Alsace: that of a voluntary subscription to help the government pay the war indemnity — an admirable gesture from those who would not themselves know the joys of deliverance. The first appeal was launched at Strasbourg, on 23 December 1871, by a few ladies of the city. [footnote: Mesdames Mony, 10, rue des Pucelles; Cuzin, 4, place Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune; Mathilde Lichtenberger, 1, rue du Noyer; Mathilde Weiss, 20, rue du Dôme; Alfred Ott, 8, rue de la Nuée-Bleue. — Already, in the course of November, a “banknote of 500 francs” had been sent to the Minister of Finance, “to help in the payment of the war indemnity,” by E. D., captain of artillery at La Rochelle, with a letter that was inserted in the Journal officiel. The ladies of Mulhouse recalled in their letter the example of this officer and that first isolated gift.] A few days later, on the 28th, the women of Mulhouse wrote to the President of the Republic, joining to their letter a cheque for 24,425 francs: “You will accept it as the widow’s mite…” Then came the ladies of Saverne: 1,630 francs; and those of Bischwiller: 3,740 francs; and those of Wissembourg: 4,400 francs; and those of Munster: 6,000 francs; and Schlestadt, and Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, and Haguenau. The enthusiasm gained ground step by step. A committee was formed at Nancy to coordinate the efforts, to generalize the subscription; it found the definitive formula: [footnote: Letter to the newspapers, from M. Jules Gouguenheim, treasurer of the Committee, initiator of this new form of the subscription, “which the deputies of the eastern departments undertook to recommend to all France.” Cf. Leroy, op. cit., pp. 97-100.] the subscription would be conditional and valid only if it reached 500 millions within the year. At Nancy itself, in the first eight days, 765,000 francs were collected. Mulhouse appears again, with an offer of a million, for which three days and fifteen subscribers sufficed. Over the entire extent of the territory, good wills sprang up in the most varied forms: lists published by the newspapers (and how many Alsatian names figure there — Boeckels and Steinheils, Dollfus and Schaller, Reibell and Hartmann!); warm letters from Legouvé, from Ad. Crémieux, from Littré; collection-boxes in the churches, intended for the Denier pour la Patrie; a meeting organized at the Cirque des Champs-Élysées by Ernest Legouvé, Athanase Coquerel, and Eug. Yung; Barrias, Détaille, Worms, Robert-Fleury, and still other artists, pledge to give each “at least one of their works”; the Chamber of avoués of Château-Thierry subscribes 1,250 francs; the “officers of the marine infantry battalion camped at Villeneuve-l’Étang,” 1,600 francs; the employees at the registry of the Council of the Prefecture of Lyon, a day’s salary every fortnight; the masters and pupils of the primary normal school of Tarbes, 63 francs per month; the compositors of the Progrès du Nord, a day’s work per month until the complete liberation of the territory… But the government stopped the subscription. On 28 February 1872, having to pronounce on a proposition by Antonin Lefèvre-Pontalis and Saincenve relative to the formation of a special commission charged with examining all projects relating to the liberation, the Minister of the Interior, Victor Lefranc, in the name of the government, paid homage to the national impulse: “We must praise, we must thank, we must admire the feeling that has called it forth,” but to follow it, to associate ourselves with it, to direct it, “no, gentlemen, never.” Since a voluntary subscription, which may produce millions, is “virtually powerless, in whatever place, in whatever time, under the empire of whatever feeling,” to produce milliards, it would be “an unheard-of rashness” to encourage the present subscription, and thereby perhaps to harm the future loan. Thus, at one stroke, the government pronounced on the substance: of all the modes of liberation that had been suggested to it for some weeks, it was — as for the first two milliards — the loan that it was choosing; but “we cannot conceal from ourselves,” Le Temps wrote with regret, “that the condemnation pronounced by the executive power against the effort of individual initiatives, and ratified by the vote of the Assembly, is a veritable death sentence for the subscription.” [footnote: 29 February 1872, no. of Le Temps of 1 March.] It had already reached more than six millions actually paid in. Now, in the month of July, the loan of three milliards having succeeded, these six millions found themselves available. And, on M. Wolowski’s proposal, [footnote: There remained, after deduction of the sums returned to the subscribers who had asked for their reimbursement, exactly 6,254,373 francs available. The procedure was by transfer, since “the sums paid in cannot be diverted from the precise destination assigned them by the donors,” M. Wolowski said, “but the Treasury has less to pay, a portion of the credits voted [for the payment of the three milliards] becomes free, and may receive another application” — and it was this surplus that was assigned to the Alsatians-Lorrainers. In two times: three millions by the law of 18 December 1872, the rest by the law of 9 January 1874.] by a law of the following 18 December they were assigned to the Alsatians-Lorrainers, one third for the creation of scholarships in establishments of education, orphanages, etc., one third for direct assistance to families, one third, finally, for the assistance of the Alsatian-Lorrainer emigrants to Algeria: the unforeseen outcome of that long movement of anxiety and of the generous impulse that had shaken France — of the common devotion of the ladies of Strasbourg and of Mulhouse, of the normaliens of Tarbes and the typographers of Lille, of Barrias and of Littré…

Other men, outside Parliament, outside the State, were pursuing the same dream as M. de Belcastel: Jean Dollfus and the Comte d’Haussonville. — Jean Dollfus, the great Mulhouse industrialist, had the Tizi-Ouzou region surveyed by a man of experience, Gerst, another Alsatian, former Finance official in Algeria, and resolved to create there, by himself alone, a village. The Comte d’Haussonville, by contrast, was to act only in the name of a group, but of that group he was the soul. A committee of four members had existed for some time, constituted by M. Mannberguer, a Strasbourgeois, banker at Paris, “to come to the aid of the bombarded of Strasbourg” — a committee of friends, a “private” committee, but whose “duties broadened in proportion to the disasters that struck the fatherland inexorably.” [footnote: Speech given by M. Mannberguer at the inauguration of the monument to the Comte d’Haussonville, at the Camp-du-Maréchal (April 1883).] New benefactors, [footnote: Kleitz, Inspector-General of Bridges and Roads; Wurtz, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris; Léon and Gustave de Bussière; Alexandre, president of the Court of Appeal of Paris; Rumpler, Ruch, merchants; Schaeffer, Plaxland, industrialists; Henri Aron, banker; Comte Edmond de Pourtalès; Commandant Hepp; Comte de Franqueville; Lefébure, deputy; Himly, professor at the Sorbonne; Cuvier, sub-governor of the Bank of France, etc.] nearly all Alsatian by their origin or their connections, gathered round the first; it was resolved, on 31 January 1872, to found a Society that would come to the help, no longer only of the Strasbourgeois, but of all the emigrants from Alsace or Lorraine, and to offer the presidency to the Comte d’Haussonville, whose spirit of initiative, robust enthusiasm, and powerful connections were rapidly to multiply the means of action of the rising Society. The Society for the Protection of Alsatians-Lorrainers Remaining French soon devoted a great part of its efforts to those who were leaving for Algeria. One day, in the Hôtel de la Présidence of the National Assembly, [footnote: The present Hôtel of the Presidency of the Chamber. (The Exhibition opened on 23 April 1874.)] at the call of the Comte d’Haussonville, an extraordinary multitude of masterpieces was assembled: this was the celebrated Exhibition of the Alsatians-Lorrainers, of which the brilliant memory remains, in no way effaced by the “sensational” collections that have offered themselves since to the public curiosity; and it was 245,000 francs for the Society’s protégés in Algeria, for the houses M. d’Haussonville wished to have built for them, for the villages he proposed to found. [footnote: It should be indicated here that besides the 400,000 francs mentioned above, other credits were drawn on the budget of Algeria (Cf. Guynemer, op. cit., pp. 17-18) for expenses relative to Alsatian and Lorrainer immigration. Other funds, of private origin, were also added: a part of the proceeds of the Alsatian-Lorrainer subscription (which must not be confused with the previous subscription “for the liberation of the territory”) organized by the press in October 1872; the sums paid in by the Ladies’ Committee of the rue Scribe (Worms Committee), by the Committees of Marseille, of Le Havre, of Nîmes, of Nancy, of Nice, etc. On the occasion and for the benefit of the press subscription, the Société des Gens de Lettres published a volume, L’Offrande, to which contributed G. Sand, V. Hugo, H. Martin, F. Coppée, A. Assolant, A. Houssaye, A. Barbier, Erckmann-Chatrian, H. Malot, Th. Gautier, Lud. Halévy, Th. de Banville, E. Legouvé, E. About, F. Passy, L. Ratisbonne, etc.]

…Meanwhile, in order “to remain French,” hundreds and hundreds of men, of women, of children, were leaving Alsace, then, by Belfort or Nancy, were going off toward Marseille, toward the Mediterranean, toward the unknown.

Mass emigration: a picturesque expression that pleases our imaginations laden with history, but, behind that deceptive screen, what a reality of sorrows and miseries is hidden!

Doubtless, on their arrival they found, in the committees that were then forming, many of their fellow countrymen, Algerians from before the war, whose hands stretched toward them: Dr. Gros and Dr. Bruch, the procurator-general Kuenemann, the president Zeys, Commandant Riff, Commandant Zurlinden, Captain Rouff, Captain Heintz, M. Noetinger, vice-president of the council of the prefecture, M. Bergtold, M. Pfeiffer, surveyors, high officials of the Algerian P.-L.-M. railway, M. Noblemaire and M. Picquart, M. Ruff, the bookseller, M. Kappler, director of telegraphic transmissions. They also found, among these Alsatian friendships ready to succor, direct, and comfort them, more recent Algerians, whom the option had just driven out like themselves and who had preceded them by scarcely a few months: a whole group of magistrates and lawyers, some of those who were to remain on French soil the living memories of the Court of Colmar, the Court of Metz, the Faculty of Strasbourg, struck from our official directories like the dead: Lauth, judge at Mulhouse; Richert, president at Sarreguemines, named councillors at the Court of Algiers; Mallarmé, son of a former bâtonnier of Strasbourg and who had just entered the bar of Algiers; [footnote: The first two deceased as councillors at the Court of Algiers, the third as a lawyer, at Algiers also.] Maillet, ex-lawyer at Mulhouse, justice of the peace at Sidi-bel-Abbès; [footnote: Today, councillor at the Court of Cassation.] Verner, Wurst, young lawyers at Strasbourg, justices of the peace at Relizane and at Batna; [footnote: Today, presidents of Chamber at the Court of Algiers.] Haffner, lawyer at Colmar, defender before the tribunal of Constantine; [footnote: Today, procurator-general before the Court of Appeal of Pau.] Boerner, substitute at Saverne, procurator of the Republic at Philippeville… [footnote: Since, councillor at the Court of Pau. — Others still: Raclé, of Schlestadt, named justice of the peace at Souk-Ahras, since advocate-general at Algiers and first president at Rouen; Wehekind, of Mulhouse, named justice of the peace at Oued-Athménia, since procurator of the Republic at Nancy and councillor at Amiens; Gauvenet, called Dijon, of Strasbourg, named justice of the peace at Ténès, latterly judge at Le Havre — all came directly from Alsace to Algeria the day after the peace. — One of the rare French magistrates who remained in their functions in Alsace following the annexation, exerted himself as best he could to transmit to his colleagues of the magistracy or to young Alsatian lawyers an appeal from procurator-general Kuenemann, urging them to ask for posts in Algeria. — One may also cite two Lorrainers: M. Leclerc, of Metz, lawyer at Metz in 1867, substitute judge at Sarreguemines in 1869, named justice of the peace at L’Alma, in the department of Algiers, in 1871, and who has “since spent the greater part of his career in Algeria and Tunisia; latterly, councillor at the Court of Besançon;” — and M. Cailly, also of Metz (son of M. Ch. Cailly, bâtonnier of the order of lawyers of Metz), come to Algeria a little later, but who has never left the colony: paid substitute at Aumale in 1882, then substitute, justice of the peace, deputy or judge, at Bou-Medfa, at Algiers, at Tizi-Ouzou, at Batna, currently judge at Tizi-Ouzou. (M. Poulet, substitute of the procurator-general at Metz, remained only a few months in Algeria, as advocate-general at Algiers: see page 152, note a.)]

But in the disarray of those tragic days, however great were these good wills, they could not suffice for the whole task. The immigrants arrived, weary, displaced, uncertain of the hour to follow. They were received and lodged as best could be. The Fort des Anglais, at Algiers, saw hundreds of these unfortunates pass through: the government had placed it for them at the disposal of the Alsatian-Lorrainer committee of Algiers, and they remained there a few days, fed by the care of their countrymen. Then, on artillery limbers, they were directed toward their future residences. On arrival, the military authority lent them tents, or installed them in the bad dry-stone hovels of an abandoned Kabyle village; sometimes, by a fortunate chance, as at Bou-Khanefis, a former military penitentiary, no longer used except for Arabs of the region sentenced to light penalties, offered the new arrivals the resource of its largely available buildings; they settled in the premises formerly inhabited by the prisoners, or else, outside the penitentiary itself but close by, in little houses formerly assigned to the guard troop. Elsewhere, the Engineers try in haste to adapt to their use buildings that could not have expected this new clientele: the caravanserai of Aïn-Roua, for example, or, at Aïn-Abessa, the vast stone constructions that had served as the smala of the 3rd regiment of spahis. But these were only provisional shelters; they had to be given better than these makeshift barracks where they were piled up. Then the military authority sends them detachments of sappers, or disciplinary troops, or Arab work-gangs. While waiting until truly habitable houses can be built for them, gourbis are thrown up after a fashion in stone and earth, with roofs of diss, a kind of grass that protects from the heat but lets the rain penetrate if it persists at all. Sometimes there are plank barracks, fairly well made, which the Engineers will then dismantle and reassemble in new villages, as the progress of the definitive constructions allows the first to do without them…

Most lack everything, even those who lacked for nothing back home: to move from Alsace to Algeria is a complicated operation, which they had simplified by selling quickly and badly at the hour of departure. No furniture. The military administration places at their disposal discarded camp bedsteads, with which they make themselves beds, tables, benches. No clothing. It draws on its stores as abundantly as possible: 600 pairs of cloth gaiters, 800 hoods of black cloth, infantry greatcoats, white gaiters, jackets, trousers, blouses, tunics, by the thousand. When the military administration does not supply it itself, it is still the military that transports. From time to time an artillery convoy arrives, bringing a little of all this, and wheelbarrows, shovels, picks, mattresses, and women’s and children’s clothing, shipments from the committees of Paris. And often it is Zurlinden, or Riff, or another of the Alsatian officers, who comes to see them, bringing them something better still: a few good words in the dialect of home… The distributions follow one another, varied, incessant: subsidies, in money or in kind, here 300 francs from the administration, there 250 francs from the Société d’Haussonville, or advances of 100 and 200 francs from the committees, or shares of the 1872 harvest that Arabs hired by the administration had reaped in their stead; provisions too, if I may say so, in money or in kind — fifty centimes per day per person, or, when the inhabitant is lost in a country without resources for the European, rations distributed in military fashion, brought also by the convoy, with mess-tins and canteens; finally, the lands and the seed, the oxen and the ploughs, not without a few disappointments at times: the twenty ploughs of the village of La Réunion, near Bougie, very fine and which must have cost a great deal, are far too heavy for the Algerian oxen; it would take three pairs to drive them, and they have remained on the village square.

But these were only mishaps without gravity, occasions for joking, reasons or pretexts for complaint. Despite a few laughable maladjustments or moments of bewilderment, the future could, if they set to work, compensate for them the sacrifices of the past: concessions of twenty-five to thirty hectares, often more, for these good folk who had had no more than three or four hectares in Alsace — that was an immense hope of resurrection, that was, after so many upheavals and anguishes, the dawn of a new life, which might yet be happy.

From the month of October 1871 to the month of March 1875, 1,020 families of Alsace and Lorraine — more than 5,000 persons — arrived in Algeria.

From the confines of Morocco to those of Tunisia, nearly a hundred villages in which Alsatian-Lorrainer families have been, in the administrative formula, “admitted to peopling”: Aïn-Fekan, Bou-Khanefis, Oued-Fodda, L’Alma, Corso, Ménerville, Zaajra, Souk-el-Haad, and Rebeval, and Mirabeau, and Dra-el-Mizan, and Zemmorah, and all those that have been named in remembrance: Strasbourg, Metz, Colmar, Belfort, Chèvremont, Horbourg, Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, Marsal, Landser, Bitche, Eguisheim, Altkirch, Ribeauvillé, Obernai, Rouffach, La Robertsau; [footnote: Except for the first of these centres (Strasbourg) and the last two (Rouffach and La Robertsau), the native names alone generally remained in use: Akbou (Metz), Oued-Amizour (Colmar), Aïn-Tinn (Belfort), Aïn-Tagrout (Chèvremont), Aïn-Touta (Horbourg), Khenchela (Sainte-Marie), Aïn-Abessa (Marsal), Aïn-Roua (Landser), El-Kseur (Bitche), Bou-Malek (Eguisheim), Sidi-Khalifa (Altkirch), Bled Youssef (Ribeauvillé), Aïn-Melouk (Obernai). All these villages with Alsatian names are in the department of Constantine, and councillor Richert, who was president of the sequestration commission in that department, was not unconnected with the choice of these names. Any functionary of the government general or of the prefecture could have hit upon Strasbourg, Colmar, Metz, and Bitche, but to think of Chèvremont, Horbourg, Rouffach, La Robertsau, it took an Alsatian of Alsace.] I could not think of seeing them all; but, ambitious of gathering, wherever the wind of disaster might have cast them, the wrecks of scattered Alsace — even were I to limit my pilgrimage to three or four of these Alsatian villages of Algeria — they drew me irresistibly; I would not resign myself to knowing of them only lifeless names, bloodless shadows scarcely glimpsed in the quick pages of a report or a dictionary.

Belle-Fontaine first, [footnote: In the department of Algiers, 48 kilometres east of Algiers. Centre of official colonization.] because here settled the first immigrants from Alsace and Lorraine in 1871: Belle-Fontaine was the birthplace of Alsatian-Lorrainer colonization in Algeria. It was no chance that it came into being at the gates of Kabylia. Alsace was bringing to Algeria “a contribution of calloused hands,” and, the insurrection having opened many eyes, these “calloused hands” had to be capable of handling, with the pick, the rifle. The trace of these preoccupations appears in the Report of the Consultative Committee on Colonization relative to the creation of Belle-Fontaine: it is necessary “to guarantee the security of the country by the peopling of French colonists”; it is necessary “to establish between the Mitidja and Dellys a solid barrier of fortified villages — it is by this road alone that the insurrection threatened to invade us”; “fifty hearths providing a hundred rifles seem to us the minimum to adopt for the future villages.” [footnote: 26 October 1871 (Archives of the Government General).] A few days later the Governor General approved the chosen location, “defensible by its own inhabitants, with no other works of defense than two blockhouses to be set up at its extremities,” and he hastened the preparations, for “time presses,” “every mail-boat brings us immigrants”…

I have seen the village allotment record: the name of each inhabitant of the new centre is followed by the mention of his origin, almost always the same: sometimes — but very rarely — “Algerian” or “colonist of the country”; generally, “Alsatian” or “Lorrainer”: Schupp Ignace-Dominique, Klock Alexandre, Lorentz Jacques, Yung Jean, Seltzer Ferdinand, Krempp Charles, Barbé Quirin, Ducros Joseph, Vinum Joseph, Firmery Georges, Victor and André, Roll Sébastien, Tschirland Alexis… And they remember the four days spent at Nancy, then a day at Marseille, and the crossing, the sea-sickness, the Arabs on the docks at arrival, selling oranges in little piles of five, all one could eat after the buffetings of the Mediterranean… They remember the construction of the church, with its battlements and its cistern. The “fifty hearths for a hundred rifles” come back to me, and also that saying of Marshal Bugeaud: “Peaceful cultivators do not expatriate themselves on a soil they can cultivate only with the Arab yatagan hanging over their heads.” These, nevertheless, did expatriate themselves… They remember, one hesitantly, another with precision, a M. Prost, ex-mayor of Molsheim, decorated, whose resignation the Prussians had demanded from the moment of their arrival, and who, being himself an exile, taught the children of Belle-Fontaine to read and write. Today still the population of the village is almost exclusively Alsatian. All those of the beginning, save the Seltzers and the Schlegels, are present, or represented by their sons. They come from Deltwiller, from Kalhouse, from Gros-Réderching… There is even one from my country; and I think indeed that with his great white beard, his heavy-rimmed spectacles, his woodcutter’s build, his stories of the artilleryman of the Austerlitz barracks at Strasbourg, his rough cordiality, his thrust-and-jab manner and his accent, he is the most magnificent Alsatian of Belle-Fontaine. Then the people and the things of “home,” the living and the dead, those whom he calls the sons and who for me are the fathers, Dr. Kummer, Pastor Herrmann, Lams the mayor, who was from Quatre-Vents, the great Gerst, the hotelier of the Lamb, who was from Pfaffenhofen, and Father Trouard’s parrot at the door of the grocery, there in the little street that runs in front of the town hall — “Zwei Su Siropp, Monsieur Trouard, und e Helje desüh!” [footnote: “Two sous of molasses, and a holy-picture with it!” Helje: originally Heiligenbild, image of a saint; whence, in popular speech, any colored image.] — and all the corners and recesses of the village, the Hintergasse, the Entenpfuhl, the Mühlberg, all this leaps and rebounds and clashes in our hurried conversation; and if I now know that on the site of the Haag brewery there once stood a madder factory in the enclosure of the Bothhof, if I no longer wonder where this quiet old courtyard got its rutilant name, it is because I learned it five hundred leagues from the Moder, modest tributary of the Rhine, at the home of a colonist of the Mitidja…

Most of the immigrants of Belle-Fontaine were cultivators by profession. At Bou-Khalfa [footnote: Four kilometres west of Tizi-Ouzou. Centre of private colonization.] — Bou-Khalfa of Alsace, as it was long called in the country — unfortunately the same was not true. The creation of this centre is the work of Jean Dollfus, who installed there eight families, chosen with the greatest wish to do well and to act patriotically, but by a man whose situation enabled him to find places for factory workers rather than farmers. This one had been a laborer at Thierry’s at Mulhouse; that one a carter at Dollfus-Mieg; a third had worked in the mines of Bouxwiller, and so on. “Few real peasants,” wrote Commandant Riff after visiting them. Jean Dollfus had conceived vast projects: there as everywhere, he saw great. He wished to give his colonists a model horticulturist, to found in his village a school of agriculture, a library. Did he fear — he, the man of immediate accomplishments — that the attempt might be too long in producing happy results? Did he understand, after experience, that others would know better than he how to recruit farmers? Or else, that he alone could not long suffice for the necessary expenses, while the Société de Protection would act more effectively, as he himself wrote, with its “considerable resources,” still further increased by the “magnificent Exhibition” that had just drawn attention to it? After a few months he let General Chanzy, Governor General of Algeria, and the Comte d’Haussonville know that he was disposed to leave his work in other hands. The transfer took place without difficulty. Jean Dollfus had obtained his concession in 1872, with the obligation of installing on it immediately thirty families. Before the expiry of the period allowed him for this purpose (1 February 1875), the Société de Protection had taken possession of the Dollfus concession, and it was the Society that installed the supplementary families on it. [footnote: The economy of the work (whether it was a matter of Jean Dollfus or of the Société de Protection) was the following. The State conceded a territory en bloc; the first concessionaire had to retrocede it by lots to Alsatian-Lorrainer families within a determined period. The State undertakes only the works and constructions of collective interest necessary to constitute the village. The first concessionaire, for his part, — and that is the reason for his intervention, — will provide the families with houses, livestock, and farming tools, will assure their subsistence until the first harvest, etc., the whole as advances, the reimbursement of which is to enable him to make other creations of the same kind. (Commandant Riff said, of one of these villages: “Azib-Zamoun must not become a hotel where one does not pay.”) As for the colonist, he pledges to reside on his lands and cultivate them as a good head of family; for the totality of the lands rented to a colonist, the rent is 1 franc per year; after a certain period of residence and the reimbursement of the advances made, he becomes owner of his concession. The Société de Protection, like Jean Dollfus, was led, in most cases (at Bou-Khalfa at least, and at Haussonvillers), to abandon to the colonists the value of their houses. The Society was the more disposed to take up the work of Jean Dollfus at Bou-Khalfa in that it could regard this centre as a compensation for the loss of Aïn-Tinn (department of Constantine), which had been conceded to it in 1872 and which it was giving up at that very moment (difficulties in the transport of materials, the road not being finished between Constantine and Aïn-Tinn, etc.).] Jean Dollfus abandoned to the Society the houses already built — those houses he had provided with a kind of veranda, “in order to protect partially the front wall from the rays of the sun”; but, since, it appears, the service rendered was not in proportion to the expense, the Society was more economical and built without verandas. So, even today, along the single street of Bou-Khalfa, the Dollfus houses and the Haussonville houses betray to the first glance the secret of their origin…

It seems that this centre, with which private Alsatian colonization began, has always suffered from its initial misfortunes: insufficiently agricultural recruitment, almost inevitable hesitations when the direction changes — and also from some clumsiness in the distribution of the lots: too much “knoll,” not enough “plain”; the “plain” a little less hard to work, but too far from the centre; the “knoll” closer, but more rebellious. Through the years, a few have done business, or happy chances have served them; I do not believe the Kieffers have to complain of life, nor old Lemoine, the former quarryman of Hildehouse. But for many, life has been hard, and still is; the whole aspect of the village is harsh, like the soil; want does not appear there, but the necessity of a continual struggle; and whether they are “d’Haussonville” or “Dollfus” houses, the houses of Bou-Khalfa have kept their somewhat sad modesty of the first hour, as if they were still waiting for a better future.

Haussonvillers [footnote: 82 kilometres east of Algiers, at the junction of the roads from Algiers to Dellys and from Algiers to Fort-National by way of Tizi-Ouzou. Centre of private colonization.] already marks a perceptible progress over Bou-Khalfa. The village was first called Azib-Zamoun, a difficult name to which, it is said, the first Alsatian colonists gave singular variants. Happily, some years later, the General Council of Algiers, glorifying the name of the founder, simplified that of the foundation. The “colonization territory of Azib-Zamoun” had been placed at the disposal of the Society from 1 October 1873. At that moment, Haussonvillers is still only, as a witness puts it, [footnote: Eug. Hepp (Archives of the Société de Protection).] a “geographical conception.” But as early as the following December, thirty-three families were installed there — “one hundred thirty-five persons, plus a one hundred thirty-sixth who has just been born”; and the village, just like the one hundred thirty-sixth person, was entering life. A still primitive life, certainly. They were reduced to the strict indispensable, to the standard furniture sent by the Society — camp beds, a linen cupboard, a kitchen table, and more stools than chairs. One family had, it is true, brought with it its personal furniture, almost luxurious, mirrors, a piano! “The young lady of the house, who drives the plough valiantly during the day, makes music in the evening”; but “the whole country, as far as Dellys and Tizi-Ouzou, has been moved and has spoken of this piano, a new thing in these parts.” Three of the houses are allocated to “public services”: one to the Society’s representative, a second to the surveyor charged with delimiting the village territory and the lots, a third for the seed-grain store. Disheartening storms coincide with the installation of the first colonists, frightful mud on the unmetalled roads, mud “to make one weep,” said one new arrival, weeping hot tears, indeed, on the threshold of her door. The animals are penned in the open air, at the centre of the village, but “they are used to it from birth, being all of Kabyle breeding or origin”; less accustomed to their new owners, they have, in the first days, fits of bad temper, “the oxen, like the camels, the mules, and the native dogs, obeying only the burnous” and manifesting readily “against anyone who does not wear one.” The children, about forty of them, “are still without supervision or instruction,” roaming the fields, “pasturing the livestock”; the school is not finished, the archbishop is in no hurry to install the Sisters; he must, suggests Commandant Riff, [footnote: Ibid., 2 January 1874.] be written to that a lay schoolmaster is about to arrive, and the Sisters will come… Christmas Eve, great excitement along the muddy paths and through the unfinished houses of Azib-Zamoun. The children and their parents hasten to the grain store. In the middle of the kitchen, a Christmas tree, an “Aleppo pine” that has come from the Jardin d’Essai at Algiers, and a large crate, covered with a sheet, with toys come from Paris: the feast was “as bright with joy as with lights.” And the next day, Christmas, the parish priest of Bordj-Menaïel came to say Mass in the very room of the réveillon: he was a young Alsatian priest, a native of Pfaffenhofen, former non-commissioned officer, chaplain of the central prison of Ensisheim at the time of the war, who made his rounds on horseback, in soft boots, and carrying with him a “field altar.”

I have made here too the roll-call of the past: Ackermann Joseph was a sergeant of the transport train when he applied for a concession at Azib-Zamoun; Bossert, Hermann, Kleitz, Sand, Stinus, and others, were also finishing their leave when they arrived here, young farmers, who had not all practised work on the land before going off to the regiment, — and newly married, for, since celibacy was somewhat suspect for obtaining a concession, one would go and take a wife from an orphanage at Algiers. [footnote: I do not know whether from that moment there was an organized service for the Protestants; in any case, a few years later, a room rented in the house of the colonist Sand served them as an oratory. In 1884, the pastor of Tizi-Ouzou expressed the wish that the church of Haussonvillers might be put under that regime of the simultaneum which is well known in Alsace (the church serving in turn the two cults).] Dahlem, Friant, Muller, Runtz, and all the Scheids: factory workers who had worked at Bischwiller, at Sarreguemines, at Guebwiller, and at the Zornhof, near Saverne. A few isolated individuals of still more singular origins, a warder of the military penitentiary and a smuggler. But Blatt, but Heitzler, but Godfroy, but Grusenmeyer, and the two Heinrichs, and Lorentz, and Heppert, and Hosli, and Marchal, and Starck, and Zingraff, and Marizloff — all these had long known agriculture, they were already “colonists” at home, as one of my interlocutors put it. A mixture, one sees, of very diverse elements, of “real peasants” and others who are less so or not at all. Happily, all things considered, in spite of the army-transport man, the ironmonger of Zornhof, and the smuggler, the recruitment was better than at Bou-Khalfa: the “colonists” carried it by far. Enough other circumstances arose that could thwart the success of Haussonvillers. The concessions, here, were on average of forty hectares, but too great a distance

(sometimes twelve kilometres) separated the “parcels,” and, moreover, in use, the quality seemed less enviable than the quantity, an unrelenting effort was needed for a parsimonious “yield.” Furthermore, progress itself has not always served the interests of Haussonvillers. In earlier days, Haussonvillers was an important relay on the road from Algiers to Dellys and Fort-National, with a whole cavalry, with movement, traffic, continual passages of troops. Old memories today! For twenty-five years the railway has killed the relay, [footnote: The railway, repairing some of the harm it has done in the region, counts many Alsatians in its service, among them several sons of colonists. One encounters them all along the East-Algerian line. The stationmaster of Souk-el-Haad is from Schlestadt, the one at Khenchela from Beinheim, the one at Félix-Faure from Guebwiller, the one at El-Guerrah from Lièpvre, the one at Mesloug from Bergheim, the one at Batna from Walbourg. I find some sixty others, in every employment, brakeman, fitter, foreman of laying, team-leader, fireman, track-brigadier, train-chief, principal clerk, head of office, etc. The chief engineer of operations is from Strasbourg. One may note also that the section of the line which is in the province of Algiers was built by a Messin, and the other, the section in Constantine, by a man from Wissembourg.] and, moreover, the construction works of the line, offices or worksites — temporary, but largely lucrative — had drawn many colonists away from colonization. Here, a badly recruited population would certainly have shown a lesser resistance; Haussonvillers has held its ground, and the push of the Arabs, who for several years now, buying or renting, have been taking back upon Haussonvillers part of their old lands, would be still stronger and perhaps more disquieting without this stock of solid colonists, come from Ettendorf, from Artolsheim, from Garrebourg, from Domnom, from Eckartswiller, from Schorbach.

Happier than its elders, the latest comer of Alsatian colonization, the Camp-du-Maréchal [footnote: Between Haussonvillers and Bou-Khalfa.] was the spoiled child of the family: the earlier difficulties were spared it, it profited by all the experience acquired. Placed at the disposal of the Société de Protection from 1873 on, it was not until a little later, in 1879, that the Society set about peopling it, after the first progress of Bou-Khalfa and Haussonvillers. There was therefore more time to prepare the future village, to study the plans, to lay out the ground more practically, to build the roads and the houses, to drain above all, to bar by hygienic plantations the passage of the miasmas that rose from the neighboring Sébaou. The recruitment too could be done more at leisure and benefited from being less hurried. Was the commission before which the future colonists of the Société de Protection appeared, at the town hall of Nancy, [footnote: It was composed of the Comte d’Haussonville, M. E. Lederlin, professor at the Faculty of Law of Nancy, and M. Penot, secretary-general of the Society.] particularly strict in its examination? Perhaps, if I am to believe some of those whom it interrogated. It was, in any case, more demanding: now one had to deposit in its hands a sum of four thousand francs, of which only the half would be returned to the colonists (in the form of various supplies after their settling in); the rest, two thousand francs, representing half the price of the house built for them, would remain the property of the Society. But it did not matter. The candidates flocked in, justifying their resources, some of 8,000 or 10,000 francs, some of 15,000, some of 20,000, even more. Like so many others, if they were leaving home, it was not that misery was driving them out…

Today, this village with its picturesque and martial name — memory of a camp set up there by Marshal Randon and perhaps earlier by Bugeaud, one of those Biscuits-villes, as they were then called, that served as victualling centres for the columns — today, the Camp-du-Maréchal is a perfect enclave of Alsace on the soil of Algeria. Here is the Kern Joseph house. Here is old Hildenbrand’s house. Good day, Madame Goetz! Good day, Madame Kast!… Memories of the departure come to the lips, create at once an intimacy, from the embrace at the station, from the handshakes of disembarkation… The father worked as foreman, at Mulhouse, “at André Koechlin’s.” The war comes; the taking-possession by the Germans; a guard-corps at the entrance of the town. They lived at Brunstatt, a suburb; one had to show “one’s pass” every day, going to work, coming back. An insolence of the sentry, the bad mood of another; a blow of the fist; call to the guard; flight along the canal, by swimming. He took refuge at Belfort. A few days later, the mother, at Brunstatt, gave birth to her ninth child, and the newborn was carried to Belfort that he might not be “baptized a Prussian”… And also memories of the German barracks. Yes, German. For this one had left the country, had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, then, at the end of two years, had wanted to see his village, his old folk again. He is recognized, arrested; then the spike-helmet and black bread, in Westphalia. One day, one of his Alsatian comrades, seized by the throat by a non-commissioned officer: “They stole my father’s oxen, and that is how they treat me!…” Then they left for Algeria, all the children, and the old father said to them, at the moment of separation, in spite of his age: “If things go a bit well with you, send me word, I will come. I have had enough.” He came, and it is here that he died, he is buried in the cemetery of the Camp… They speak of Abbé Fund, Abbé Fournaise, Abbé Grusenmeyer, Abbé Florent Marx, the first parish priests of the Camp and of Haussonvillers, all Alsatians, companions and consolers of the exodus. Alsatians also the Sisters of Ribeauvillé, who long held the girls’ school, there, near the church, on the square, in that pretty white house where the Comte d’Haussonville set up his office when he came to the Camp, and which he has since offered to the commune. [footnote: The princes of Orléans, the Chalais-Périgord, the de Broglie, the Greffulhe had, with the Comte d’Haussonville, taken part in the costs of construction and upkeep of this school (F. Mannberguer, op. cit., p. 5).] Alsatian too the first schoolmaster, M. Schoeffler, former pupil of the normal school of Colmar, assistant teacher at Wintzenheim before the war — and who did not teach only the little ones, for, one day, Fleckinger André, who was twenty-five, and Riemer Jérôme, who was thirty-five, and Timmel Charles, who was forty-four, came to his house to beg him “to open an evening school, so that they might there learn the French language.” They speak of cousins remaining in the old country, of exchanges of kind offices with them, of visits paid them. “We send them figs, oranges, mandarins; they send us kirsch and mirabelle plums.” Old Schweitzer has not been there for ten years, and he has a great longing to go back. M. Criqui, the former mayor, had not seen Alsace again for twenty-four years; he has just spent two months there, with one of those of Bou-Khalfa, and, according to custom, he went, throughout the country, “to bring greetings” to the relations of the others… That one, to see his village again is his “dream,” he tells me, with tears in his eyes, and he is impatiently waiting for the moment when he will be able to cross the frontier without fear of the German military authority: as soon as his forty-fifth year is sounded, he will book his passage and leave. “For good? — …Yes,… if things would change!” His brother, a sergeant of artillery, was killed two years ago in the massacre of Fez. They are all from there, and almost all from two same villages, Seltz and Beinheim, in the arrondissement of Wissembourg. All of them are from there, even the Kabyles: I could not see Kroumpire-Hans, [footnote: Nickname in Alsatian patois that one might translate as: Jean of the Potatoes.] the one of them who has best adopted the mother-tongue of the people of the Camp; he was at the plough and all searches were in vain, but one of his emulators was introduced to me, and as I asked him whether he too spoke Elsässer dütsch, this black devil in a burnous answered me with a sonorous and singing Alle weil, [footnote: Popular deformation and contraction of “alle Wegi”: “Certainly, of course!” It is true that one cites one of the Alsatians of these parts who can give all the discourses of the world in German and in Kabyle, but in French, none.] superbly home-grown, that I shall not forget in my life and that, believe me, the rest of the conversation in no way marred.

Aspects and usages of Alsace live again on this distant soil: the impression is strange, of finding them here, on the other side of the Mediterranean, beneath the African sun. On the hill, wheat, lucerne, tobacco trace side by side long regular rectangles: agricultural atavism, “small cultivation” isolated amid the “great cultivations” of Algeria. Another tradition, no longer of the fields but of the town: in their houses, as they awaited them on arrival, one used to communicate with the cellar through a simple trapdoor from an inner room; they have changed all that; now one enters it from outside, by those sloping shed-doors that rest on the ground and open onto the street, as in the houses of home. And then… “a village where there is no religion is nothing,” the Bernard told me; the processions, a spectacle unknown elsewhere in Algeria, are one of the joys of the Camp-du-Maréchal, and even, these last days, at the latest Fête-Dieu, the fanfare of Hussein-Dey came to militarize the procession with its bellicose brass, to the great enthusiasm of the inhabitants of the Camp and of all the Alsatians round about. To receive, from morning, from the “native secretary” of the town hall the friendly tribute of an “Arab coffee,” and, the next minute, to surprise oneself humming with a native of Monswiller our Dans em Schnookeloch of Alsace, like a rallying-air between “countrymen”; to admire on the wall a calligraphed and coloured placard, the list of the members of this authentic Alsatian municipality — Eininger Félix, mayor; Schweitzer Laurent, deputy mayor; Streicher Jean-Baptiste, Kern Joseph, Albrecht Joseph, Albrecht Eugène, Kast Mathieu, Fund Jérôme, Marier Joseph, Goetz Jérôme, municipal councillors — in a frame of arabesques among which one makes out Kabyle figures enjoying couscous en famille; to see surge from the leaves of the civil register, pell-mell, Eugène Oland, son of Georges and of Marie-Eve Keller, Mohammed Chaouch, son of Chaouch Ali Ben Mouloud and of Khetab Fatma bent Smali, Jean-Pierre Kuntz, son of Joseph and of Marie-Berthe Bauer, Fatma Akrour, daughter of Akrour ben Saïd and of Allouat Yamina bent Saïd; to come upon, a few metres from the Sébaou, in the shadow of the eucalyptus, a work of Falguière, the effigy of the Comte d’Haussonville, on a marble pyramid bearing these words: on one side, ALSACE, on the other, LORRAINE; to speak of Wissembourg with M. Eininger, of Saverne with M. Streicher, of Trimbach with Kast Mathieu, of Ettendorf with Muller Xavier, the rural policeman, and, all the while talking, to answer with a military salute the Arabs who pass, legs dangling, on their mules, to follow long with the eye, in the Eastern twilight, the young biblical shepherd who leads his beasts to the trough: contrasts of every moment, too moving for the mind to amuse itself with them… The day is over; long since, the Kabyles have gone back up to their gourbis; in the street, deep obscurity and silence; the evening stroll. A few human forms, that I make out badly, and voices. Voices, with the intonations, the idioms, the whole accent of home. ”…Why, a big girl like you who wants to be naughty? When you are not good, I leave you outside… — If Froeliger’s sister goes to Paris, she must do an errand for me… — I’m sure, it was the year I received my son…” Suddenly I see again other distant evenings, back there, in one of my Alsatian villages; I recognize familiar voices, saying the same words, sung, drawn out, in the same accent. How that air of home would enfold one deliciously!… but for us, in whatever spot of the earth we meet again, with the sweetness of memories a bitterness mingles, and our emotion is not of tenderness alone and of selfish regret. Between yesterday and today, implacable vision, the unhappy frontier passes… It seemed to me that I still heard old Schweitzer, who had said just a moment ago, “over the apéritif,” good-naturedly, simply, as he thinks it: “France must show herself, she must be strong; France was too good; they had too much confidence” — and I assure you that I did not laugh… I thought then —

The success of the Camp-du-Maréchal, — as one has seen by a few examples, — has not crowned everywhere the efforts of Alsatian-Lorrainer colonization in Algeria. The hazardous recruitment of the colonists, the first surprises of the climate and the soil, brought about in some a regrettable laxity. One still perceives, in the chance of conversations, the echo of the sufferings of former times. They arrived hardened by the sun and the rain, but weak and soon without courage before that sun and those rains. Fever was everywhere, came out of everywhere: they did not know what it was, and they died. They arrived from Alsace, used to drinking good wine, or beer: they found in Algeria only the bad wine of those days and absinthe, of which they knew only by sight at home — a privilege, at that time, of a few military cafés. Perhaps the very facilities offered them were the innocent cause of sad effects. Some quietly accustomed themselves to being helped, preferring to earn nothing and do nothing; and it is not without reason, it appears, that there sometimes ran, of a few of them, this nickname: “planters of billiard-cue butts.” Others, rather than sink into this existence, departed again.

But most of them (about 900 families out of 1,100) have remained. Some have continued the struggle with the soil, energetically, victoriously, they themselves or their descendants being still “in possession” of the primitive concession. Others, abandoning agriculture, have made themselves honorable, often brilliant, positions in commerce, in industry, in the administration. The departures, moreover, have been in part compensated by new arrivals. Although the great movement of Alsatian-Lorrainer immigration had slowed from 1875 and stopped about 1881, Alsatians-Lorrainers came, in fairly considerable numbers, even after that date, drawn by parents, friends, people of their village who had succeeded, or to attach themselves to the fortunes of some enterprise of Alsatian foundation, or for other reasons: legionnaires who, their time done, no longer leave their garrison or its environs — alluvions of Alsace left by the Foreign Legion around its two regiments, at Sidi-bel-Abbès and at Saïda… For all those, the initiative of M. de Belcastel has been the happy seed of their future.

Another person, a higher one, has profited by it. “We have to found a French colony, and not a European one,” wrote in 1871, with reference to one of the projected new villages, the rapporteur of the Consultative Committee on Colonization. [footnote: Session of the Committee, 26 October 1871 (Archives of the Government General).] On what disappointing observations is this judicious advice based, and what fears inspire it — this is not the place to inquire. From before 1871, Algeria had attracted many foreign elements; she has continued, for forty years, to seduce, to absorb, to assimilate. To be sure, the moral contributions of the individual to the collectivity, of a small collectivity to a larger one, escape precise evaluation. It is permissible to affirm, however, that in the crucible where from so many diverse elements a sort of Algerian type is being elaborated, Alsace and Lorraine have thrown some precious qualities of method, tenacity, conscientiousness in work, patriotic susceptibility. Alsace and Lorraine lost — it has often been noted in these last years — that was not merely two provinces the less, it was also, at moments, France “unbalanced”: harmonious composite of North and South, of East and West, in which, suddenly, the East was missing. The five thousand Alsatians of Algeria are not useless for maintaining in this second France the French balance.

And then, this mutual impulse that drew together the mother-country and a few thousand of her children the day after a separation that the victors would have wished definitive, this confident embrace upon ruins, did not lack greatness. General de Galliffet, who then commanded the division of Constantine, wrote one day to his commanders of subdivisions and of circles, discouraged no doubt by a few bad colonists: “It is not a matter of illusions, but of conducting ourselves in such a way that no Alsatian-Lorrainer may one day reproach us with not having done everything to pay the debt the army has contracted toward our compatriots driven from their country.” [footnote: 11 December 1872 (Archives of the Government General). — Cf. dispatch of Admiral de Gueydon, governor-general, to the prefect of Constantine (5 June 1871): “By all possible means the Alsatian-Lorrainer immigrants must be put in a position to provide by their work for the needs of their families. That done, alimentary subsidies must be refused to none. One consideration dominates all the others: the Alsatians-Lorrainers cannot, for lack of means of existence on the soil of France, be forced to return to their native country and thus become foreigners. A credit will be opened to you, ask for it.” (L. C. Dominique, op. cit., p. 141); — and letter of Commandant Zurlinden to the Société de Protection, to have a sum of 30,000 francs requested from the Wolowski Commission for the purpose of restoring the equipment of 160 Alsatian-Lorrainer families of the province of Algiers (10 October 1873): “There is, moreover, a national interest in making these Alsatian-Lorrainer villages succeed, which will remain as the proof of France’s attachment for the provinces she has lost.” (Archives of the Société de Protection)] Grave words, deep reason that inspired the de Belcastels, the Dollfus, the d’Haussonvilles, the Wolowskis, and other initiatives, other devotions less notorious. Yes, “everything” had to be done, in the immensity of the disaster, “to pay the debt” of France toward Alsace, to redeem past faults, to save what could still be saved; everything had to be done, and men have done everything to preserve some Frenchmen for France. But others have done still more to preserve France for themselves. “One would have risked more, if it had been necessary,” said to me one of those of Belle-Fontaine, from whom nevertheless the fevers carried away almost all his own, “for it was too hard to remain over there…”

Industries that have transferred themselves onto the territory that has remained French; little towns that have lost, with a part of their population, their character and their soul; great cities already reached or more and more threatened by the administrative, military, commercial invasion from across the Rhine; “native” agglomerations always compact in which the “immigrant” ventures without boldness; anonymous forces that did not wish to be acquired like things, with the soil, by force, and that have dispersed far away: Bischwiller, Phalsbourg, Metz, Mulhouse, Algeria offer of Alsatian and Lorrainer emigration aspects fairly diverse, I hope at least, not to tire the reader, sufficiently representative also that nothing essential should be lacking in the sorrowful history of this exodus. But of so much valour and misery I have found more than one trace still, on the other roads where I have followed it.

I have seen Wissembourg, our old “corner of Wissembourg,” pretty French sub-prefecture, where once smiled the memory of Marie Leczynska sought in marriage by Louis XV, a sprightly and powdered vision which for forty years has been erased by a bloody one: the body of General Douay carried to the Rehm pharmacy… Here too, as at Phalsbourg, “everyone has left,” the town has been “decapitated.” Of the old French bourgeoisie there remain only seven or eight families, and these are dying out: the daughters did not marry, the sons are no longer here. Industrialists, civil servants, officers: all this little Wissembourg world was attached with one heart to the same traditions and the same soil. It was natural that the departure of some should entail that of others. Industries declined or disappeared. For some, it is true, the conditions of operation have changed in forty years, and the few tanneries set up at Wissembourg would perhaps not have lived long even without the treaty of Frankfurt; but for nearly all, it is the change of frontier that alone stopped the development of the enterprise, that provoked the departure of the men: if one had to start life over from scratch, better to try the new fortune on French soil. Wissembourg, chief town of an arrondissement, was the seat of a civil tribunal; a few weeks after the treaty, the German law of 14 June 1871, reshuffling the judicial circumscriptions of Alsace-Lorraine, suppressed the tribunal of Wissembourg: the French judges had gone, no others came, and all that lived around justice disappeared with it. Wissembourg was a frontier town, centre of an important customs service: a whole personnel which fell back at the same time as the frontier, to where the treaty transported it: “The customs has folded back,” one of my interlocutors told me — a concise, vivid, painful expression. “Of Wissembourgeois,” says another, “there are none left except in the cemetery.” There, at least, beside the monument raised “To the French soldiers — our brothers — fallen for the fatherland,” there are still Velings and Hormises, Zoeggers and Gaucklers, Boells and Webers, Apffels, Scherers, Volperts, Ehrweins, — names which one has found again, almost all, since the war, in the Yearbook of the French army.

“Everyone is gone.” Yet Wissembourg still counts five to six thousand inhabitants, as before 1870. But they are no longer the same. To be sure, its situation on the extreme frontier, the frequency of communications with the people of the neighboring Palatinate, had long since facilitated the introduction of some German elements into the population, especially at moments of political crisis: in conversation, more than one name is followed by this qualifier: “Those there were Freischärler” — so were called, at Wissembourg, the refugees of 1848 and their families. But soon “the milieu” “absorbed” them, as the phrase goes — a very rapid absorption, by this solid and solidly French milieu — which dissolved at once after the war. Then there was no longer either resistance or absorption possible. The slow invasion has followed the exodus, and one can observe here, in its simplicity, the process of this phenomenon. The Wissembourgeois, for example, had nearly all a garden outside the town; bourgeois, sometimes small wine-growers, each cultivated his vine himself, employing to help him in the task peasants from the Palatinate. After the war, one

left for Nancy, for Lunéville, for Paris, one sold up — and the working vine-growers of the Palatinate became the owners of the little gardens. Another fact, almost symbolic. One of the Wissembourgeois most attached to the tradition of the French past resolved recently to leave, he too, Wissembourg and Alsace; now, the heir to a great part of his clientele is one of his employees, originating from beyond the old frontier, and at whose office one sees, hung on the wall, with a portrait of Wilhelm II, a “reproduction of the well-known picture: Heldentod der elf Schill’schen Offiziere vor Wesel — 16. September 1809”: I am certain that the house of his predecessor contained other mementoes than that one… Between those who have gone and those who have come, there is equality of number, but no equivalence of quality: this formula recurs in every conversation. The old bourgeoisie has gone, and nothing has taken its place. But who knows what bourgeois these small people of today, come from Germany to Alsace in the wake of the conquerors, may be tomorrow? I hear painful words: “We are vanquished”… “We are wreckage”… Wreckage… Behind these light folds of the terrain, where the saddened gaze of the Frenchman strives still to see the trace of the vanished frontier, behind these clumps of trees, the angle of these two roads, this house at the edge of the path, this poplar on the crest, — the foreign wave was pressing on: since, in the wake of the furious surge of forty years ago, the infiltration continues, the tide swells, mounts, in a slow but continuous rise, around these abandoned wrecks, and perhaps will submerge them tomorrow.

VIC

A hundred kilometres west of Wissembourg, a little town of Lorraine: Vic. Here the wave has not penetrated. One is too far from the old frontier, too close to the new; and besides, a still powerful dike protects, almost without their having to defend themselves, the towns and the countryside of this region: their habits and their language, purely French, repel the German, even the colonizer. It is no longer the Palatinate that pours into Alsace, it is Lorraine that pours into France. It is not invasion, but it is still exodus, the retreat toward France. And it is still the “folding back.”

Until a late hour of the night, questioning, listening to a few old men of the place — those men who know by heart all the genealogies and biographies of their little town — I have seen the days of the option live again and passed in review those who departed. Vic, ancient stronghold-residence of the bishops of Metz, had, since the Revolution and although the town was not chief place of an arrondissement, kept its tribunal, successor of the former episcopal tribunal. As soon as the day after the war, Vic lost its tribunal, like Wissembourg. There survived of all the past only a notary’s practice. Of the fifty clerks occupied at Vic, only two remained: all the others left — one became registrar of the tribunal at Verdun, another bailiff at Saint-Ouen, another secretary to a prefect, another… But I pass on. Avoués, registrars, head clerks and little clerks no longer had any reason to be here: they have gone. Many others too went, who could have remained, if reason to be alone had then directed consciences and acts. Humbert Jean-François, shoemaker, trombone in the municipal band, gone to Nancy; his brother Jean, the rural policeman, has died at Malzéville; Bussenel Benoît, stone-cutter, went as far as Bordeaux; Courteau Laurent, carpenter, did not wish to stay, “on account of his three sons” — you guess why — he has left with them for Nancy; Grosjean Jean-Pierre, vine-grower, gone to Bezange; Parisot Silvain, forest-guard at Champenoux; Rose Masson, sweet-seller at Essey-les-Nancy; Lefèvre Charles, music-master at Paris; Lhote, the carpenter? to Nancy; Michel Dominique? to Saint-Nicolas; Mathis François? to Algiers; Parent Martin, vine-grower — you know him well, the uncle of Adèle Evrard — has gone to Reims. And how many others! René Germain the tailor, Weber Mathias, father of the Weber who has become forest inspector, Clochette the farrier, Doiteau, Doiteau the Nicolas, pork-butcher; Beaudoin Jean-Pierre, baker; Poinsignon Nicolas, rope-maker; and Pâté Charles, of Lindre-Haute; and Jean-Baptiste the grocer, Constant’s brother; and Etienne Alexis, poor devil of a road-mender, gone to Monceí, who came back to die here, and the widow Devanel with her children, who lived in Sophie Muller’s house, and Théodore-Charles, the vine-grower of the Coin des Quatre-Voleurs… They have gone… More than a third of the population… Look — Place du Moulin, where you were passing just now, a house where there were three households, there is now only one; next door, only one household too; opposite, one as well; the corner house, nobody any more; the other, demolished, “made over” for fodder stores or “candle-shops.” Built property has never gone back up to its former prices. A house that was worth fifteen thousand francs before the war sold for three thousand around 1880… They were leaving… Often, so that the German administration might be ignorant longer of the decision taken and might not complicate with its harassments the other embarrassments of the departure, they would go and make their declaration of option “in France,” at Juvrecourt, or at Athienville, or at Moncel, or at Nancy. They were leaving… They rented lodgings, when one could find them, at Arracourt, at Juvrecourt, at Bezange, at Moncel, and from there came back here to till their field; but sometimes the Germans barred the road… Making the “tour of the town,” I see France a few hundred metres off; the plain, before my eyes, continues and ends in France; the horizon close at hand is France. It seemed to me I saw them all depart, disappear along the road, those who could still believe themselves at home in these Moncels and Juvrecourts, — and the others, those who went farther off, much farther, soon invisible from Vic, and for whom fidelity to the fatherland was nevertheless an expatriation.

AT THE FOOT OF THE VOSGES

Elsewhere, at the foot of the Vosges, on this side of the frontier, I have seen the exodus arrive — these Frenchmen twice over Frenchmen [footnote: This qualification became popular the day after the war and has remained. It is no emphatic formula: this whole book demonstrates its precise sense. Frenchmen by birth, the optants became, by that act, a second time French.] struggle with the difficulties of a life to be made over, wandering, anxious, but always straightening themselves in the pride of not having wanted to “remain Prussians.”

At Val-et-Châtillon, on the Vezouze, a commune which had not a thousand inhabitants, more than two hundred arrived. They came over the Donon on foot, by the valley of the Plaine, the col of the Charaille, the valley of the Vezouze. Several had already opted at Raon-sur-Plaine, the first village they encountered descending from the Vosges, but Raon-sur-Plaine, having no industry, did not retain them in passing; they went on as far as Le Val, took employment in the factories — at the mechanical weaving the “spinner-tiers” and the “weavers” of Schirmeck and Rothau, at the sawmill the woodcutters of Abreschwiller; and, in the following days, the “office” organized a service of carts that went to fetch their furniture from the abandoned village… Lower down in the valley, Cirey was part of a vast complex of glassmaking industry which included, on the other side of the frontier, Saint-Quirin. [footnote: More exactly: Lettenbach, near Saint-Quirin. But the name “Glassworks of Saint-Quirin” is in current use.] And Cirey has gathered in Saint-Quirin. Today, among the “polishers” of Cirey, only half — or barely more — are autochthones; the others, who came either at once after the war, or some years later when the Saint-Quirin works was closed, [footnote: In 1888.] are people from Lorquin, Abreschwiller, Lafrimbolle, Nitting, Niederhof, Hermelange, Vasperviller, Walscheid… At Raon-l’Étape, of some five thousand inhabitants, nearly a thousand are of Alsatian origin. In 1872 more than a hundred young men from beyond the Vosges came to draw lots with the conscripts of the canton. I have run through the lists in which, one by one, for himself and his own, each head of an immigrant family “declares to opt for French nationality and to fix his domicile at Raon-l’Étape”: from 15 February 1872 to 9 June, one hundred twenty families are inscribed — some of five, some of seven, some of nine children; from 9 June to 30 September, one hundred four families; here, sixteen families; there, twenty-six; elsewhere, forty… An immigration which continued, even after 1872. A few had stayed behind, busy cutting timber for the Germans, who were hastening to fell, not believing they would long enjoy their property. But, little by little, the laggards rejoined the others. Then, later still, “annexed” industrialists swarmed here, one from Metz, another from Wasselonne. And always, from these banal registers, I feel rising in me the same feverish emotion, in the last days of this inquiry as in the first, at Raon as at Elbeuf or Belfort: the “last domicile,” the “place of birth,” is Dambach, is Obernai, is Altkirch, is Erstein, and Ingwiller, and Haguenau, and Dattenheim, and Dorlisheim, and Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, and Neuf-Brisach, — all these names which are familiar to me, which recall to me, almost all of them, a face, an image, a memory, which I see again in their place on the old map of France as if I had known the France of that map — and which are, now, the foreigner.

ÉPINAL

Épinal. More “options,” “declarations of domicile,” “reintegrations,” and many other documents, the most varied, where appear and live again all the difficulties, the generosities, the sorrows of the exodus: the accounts of the Prefecture with the Compagnie de l’Est, 13 emigrants transported from Neufchâteau to Langres on 20 July 1871, 9 from Neufchâteau to Gray on the 21st, then, on the following days, 33, 24, 36, 25, 28, 6…; — the summary of operations of the Saint-Dié Committee: 1,290 railway and carriage places, 9,245 fr. 75, and 6,331 meals, and 10,900 kg of bread, and 2,875 fr. 25 to be recovered from the French government for the transport of the young Alsatians of the class of 1872; — the bills established every fortnight by the innkeeper Bojoly, of Épinal, for the maintenance of young emigrants pending voluntary engagement in the French army; — appeals for aid: the Ostermann family, whose “furniture and clothing were burned in the bombardment of Strasbourg, where the husband was crippled”; Franck, of Wissembourg, locksmith, who “sold his tools in order to emigrate”; Ch.-Eug. Leypold, a former soldier, having lost his right eye at the battle of Traktir, father of four small children, foreman of weaving, who “left everything to keep the name of Frenchman”; [footnote: And this one, particularly dramatic: that of Xavier Mayerhoffer, foundry worker at Cornimont. Volunteer for the duration of the war in the 1st Zouaves, then transferred to the 1st Algerian Tirailleurs, he is taken prisoner with the Army of the Loire, escapes, returns to his regiment, which is sent back to Africa. He himself, released at the end of the war, leaves the service, opts for France, returns to “his hearth,” in Alsace, but he no longer finds anyone there: his parents have opted too and have already left, for Vierzon, where he joins them. He has no resources, no work. He finds something to do for a month at Auxerre, then goes to look elsewhere, ends at Cornimont. But he has suffered too many privations, he falls ill, asks for aid… He dies, a few days later, at Cornimont, cared for at the house of another Alsatian who would not be repaid for his costs.] — other requests, hierarchically transmitted, by the primary inspector, in favour of M. Lirhantz, ex-assistant teacher at Thann, not re-placed in the Vosges, “for there are too many to re-place”; or of M. Windenberger, whose salary as assistant at Rambervillers is nearly half less than that he drew as full teacher at Ballersdorf (Haut-Rhin); or of M. Eschenbrunner, ex-schoolmaster at Lixheim, named to Saulcy (Vosges), where he has just arrived, after a costly removal, with his wife and eleven children; — or again, recommended to the prefect by the conservator of forests, “forty-five requests for aid presented by forest officers of the Vosges, fallen back from Alsace-Lorraine”… [footnote: ”…Many of the forest guards of the provinces lost by France, in order to remain faithful to their Fatherland, did not hesitate to sacrifice acquired positions, advantageous posts, and rejected seductive offers made to them by the German government. A great number were ill-treated, expelled, and reduced, until it has been possible to re-place them, to wander to various points; all have suffered considerable losses for their modest position…” (5 April 1873, Departmental Archives of the Vosges).]

Some, seeing the crowd of these yesterday’s Frenchmen pass by, thought at once of fixing them there, for the greatest good of the town. Claude (of the Vosges), deputy to the National Assembly, wrote to the prefect to submit to him an idea of M. Gauckler, the chief engineer of bridges and roads: that barracks be built, even houses, for the optants, for, on the other side of the new frontier, “the German government is keenly preoccupied by the Mulhouse crisis, it is learning at its cost that one can do violence to men, to governments, to situations, but one does not do violence to economic laws” — and the situation created at Mulhouse by the treaty of Frankfurt may have a happy repercussion upon the industrial and commercial life of the Vosges. But the minister, consulted by the prefect, raises objections: “it does not appear to him that there are in the Vosges industrial centres of sufficient importance; he estimates, moreover, that the influx of emigrants into this department has but a transitory character and that most of them will leave the country in a more or less near time, as new worksites open in other parts of France…” [footnote: 24 February 1873 (ibid.).] The event gave the right to M. Claude and M. Gauckler against the minister. The influx of emigrants at Épinal did not have a “transitory character.” By the contribution of Alsatian leaders, workers, capital, Épinal has become a great industrial city whose population has nearly tripled since the war, and which has extended each day further, from factory to factory, by the Grands-Sablés and the Champ-du-Pin on one side, by Golbey on the other. Like Belfort, Épinal is a Mulhousian cutting [footnote: One must understand by this Mulhouse and its region, Cernay, Malmerspach, etc.] in the soil that remained French.

THAON

One day even, beside Épinal, by the will of a few Alsatians, a new town was founded. I shall not return, having described it apropos of Mulhouse, to the mechanism of the cotton industry: I recall only here that the frontier of the treaty of Frankfurt no longer permitted French weaving to have recourse, as before, to the “finishing” industries of Alsace. It could no longer come to them. They came to it. A few Haut-Rhin and Vosges industrialists united, resolved on the creation of an establishment of bleaching and dyeing on the French slope of the Vosges. Doubtless, they were industrialists, who were trying, there as elsewhere along the new frontier, to repair the harm done to their interests by the sudden contraction of the market, the total or partial rupture with their former connections; but, in them as in the others, although it could not be reckoned into a project or an estimate, the “imponderable” weighed on all the decisions to be taken, an invisible always present dominated them: to leave Alsace to found an establishment in France was not merely to try to rejoin the clientele, it was also to recover the nationality. Not without sacrifices and risks that were sometimes considerable: Paris, a great client of Alsace for bleaching, had, for example, from the day after the peace, taken the road to similar establishments in Normandy, and was to be, for the new Vosges men, fairly difficult to recapture… Thus was born, in 1872, — let me be allowed this formula, — thus was born Thaon, of Wesserling and of Rothau. Rothau furnished the personnel of the direction, Wesserling the elements of the bleaching, processes of work and workmen; Rothau, those of the dyeing. From the first days, the little agricultural commune sensed that it was going to grow and transform itself. It took its measures to receive worthily the future that offered itself. It asked for “authorization to establish a market once a week, the new inhabitants having neither cultivation nor harvest”; it decided to create streets to “link the workers’ city to the commune of Thaon,” to enlarge the cemetery, to “treble the emoluments of the teaching personnel,” to “pay a communal road-mender”; it had to provide for “new schools of both sexes and the two religions” as well as “lodging for a brigade of gendarmerie”; so much and so well that, in spite of the sale of affouages for the benefit of the municipal till, in spite of the public auction of the location of the festival, “which is going to become important as a result of Alsatian immigration,” the commune of Thaon found itself in debt to the tune of more than 20,000 francs on 1 January 1873.

But it had no reason to regret its sacrifices. Today Thaon-les-Vosges, in full prosperity, counts 7,000 inhabitants, and delivers to commerce 17 million francs’ worth of products a year. [footnote: Cf. L. Lafitte, Rapport… cited, p. 514.] Only a few peasant houses still recall the agricultural village of former times; the town extends far beyond the old Thaon; like those monumental gates which the development of great cities pushes back little by little upon central avenues after they once marked their limits — so, more modestly but no less significantly, the traditional sign, forbidding mendicancy from the entrance of the village, confesses discreetly its degradation upon the wall of the ex-last house, which is no longer the last at all. Thaon-les-Vosges is a curious microcosm where the sagacity of the ethnologist and the sociologist might exercise itself with profit: three populations live there in good harmony, without yet having lost the particular characters they hold from their quite recent origins, a diversity that appears even in their habits of existence and of work, in their way of understanding and of practising economy. The Boulays, Jacobés, Christophes, Thiriets, Hussons, Grandjacquots, Davillers are of the old Vosges stock, but the Welkers, Dreyers, Hallers, Christens, Schwebels come from the valley of Wesserling, from Fellering, Oderen, Husseren, Saint-Amarin, and all those that are [footnote: One was, for two or three of these families exist no longer, at Thaon at least.] Lederlin, Dieterlen, Diehl, Leypold, Banzet, Christmann, Malaisé, Schromm, Claude, Hollweck — all those are from Rothau. The people of Wesserling are Catholics, like the Vosges folk they had come to join; from the arrival of the first immigrants the church was enlarged, but insufficiently: today, six masses must be said, and at each one the church is too small. The people of Rothau, for their part, are Protestants, save for very rare exceptions, and their arrival did not fail to cause some surprise to the autochthones, who could not imagine that a Protestant could be made like a Catholic. They had as yet no temple, and met at the house of one of the masters, in his dining room, or in an outbuilding, the starch store, summarily transformed into an oratory; there a few heads of family, “lay pastors” as one of them was called, [footnote: Christophe Dieterlen.] had each his Sunday of meditation. The memory of Pastor Oberlin, the celebrated educator of the Ban-de-la-Roche, [footnote: Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, born at Strasbourg in 1740, pastor at Waldersbach, near Rothau, for fifty-nine years.] has continued to live among them; even the least educated do not ignore him; one finds in several families the traditional mementoes of “papa Oberlin,” medallions, silhouettes, “good marks,” which they have brought here with their household gods. Moreover, Catholics or Protestants, patoisants in the manner of Wesserling, or quite French in language, of that beautiful pure tongue that was and is still spoken at Rothau, almost all have remained in close relations with their brothers, uncles, cousins “annexed”: when one has two or three days’ leisure, one goes to see them on the other side of the Vosges (especially at Rothau, for communications are easier with Rothau than with Wesserling), or else they are received at Thaon, the honours of Épinal are done them. A few arrivals, from time to time still, seven, eight, ten a year, are added to the old Alsatian contribution, — a distant eddy of the tempest…

A new town born of the exodus: is it not the symbol of resurrection? Towns renewed, vivified, enriched, for having opened themselves liberally to industrious populations fleeing before the constraint imposed upon their conscience: does this spectacle not appear, at first sight, as a singular turn of things, the happy effect of some “revocation of the Edict of Nantes” in reverse? One would like to believe in the complete reality of these comforting images. But I cannot. That the cotton statistics of the Rayon des Fosses indicate four times more spindles and three times more looms today than at the time of the war is only, in spite of everything, the magnificent flowering of a narrowed field. That Sarreguemines should have swarmed as far as Digoin and Rixheim into the Doubs, that one should find Ars-sur-Moselle at Pompey, Forbach at Pont-à-Mousson, Niederbronn at Lunéville, Sarre-Union at Lunéville too and at Nancy, that the present life of Saint-Dié, of Remiremont, of Sedan, should be made, in great part, of Alsatian emigration, that one should encounter tilemakers from Altkirch in Champagne and glassworkers from Lemberg at Saint-Denis, — all this movement, of whatever devotions it testifies, of whatever praises one decorates it, is a backward march that one cannot sound in fanfare, and if Nancy deserves to be called the capital of the East, it is because the East does not go any further. To abandon oneself to the illusion of a France remade, one would have to have not heard that word that was so many times repeated to me along the old or the new frontier: “the customs has folded back,” “the foresters have folded back”… With them, it is France that has folded back, and that word, in spite of forty years gone by, it is not possible for a Frenchman to hear it, to pronounce it, to write it, without a violent start of emotion and

regret. Not to think with a constant thought of the diminution undergone — that would be to acquiesce in it from the heart, to fold back still more. Even the generous impulse of the exodus and all that of Alsace and Lorraine continues to live in French life, even the admirable confidence the Alsatians who remained in Alsace have always shown to France even in her worst agitations, even the obstinate hopes whose touching confidence I have sometimes received, — none of all this could make us forget the folding back; but, if so many fidelities neither efface nor repair, at least they make the memory of this land and these men dearer still, the grief of having lost them more bitter.

ANNEXES

I

The author, very moderate, of the Letters from Alsace [footnote: See above, page 20, and in the Index: Aus dem Elsass.] which appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, recalled in these terms, a short time after the event (1874-75), the impression produced in Alsace by the immediate obligation of military service, and what were the consequences of that measure from the point of view of emigration:

”…When the first news of the government’s plan spread in Alsace, everyone bestirred themselves to obtain some mitigation of the announced measures. A petition was addressed to the Chancellor, signed by women, for which several thousand signatures were collected. A delegation of Strasbourg ladies was to go to Berlin, to ask audience of the Prince von Bismarck, to entreat him not to call at once under the German colours the young men whose elder brothers had served and were still for the most part serving under the French colours, to let some years pass after which the memories of the late war would be less strong… When Prince Bismarck had declared that he could not go back on the measure in question, all Alsace felt itself painfully wounded. Not only the women, but the fathers, and above all the young men of military age, were dismayed in the presence of a law that might cause them to march tomorrow against their own brothers. One must know how close, especially in recent years, were the military ties that bound Alsace to France; there was not a family among us that did not count in the French army at least one of its members. In the heavy cavalry and in the gendarmerie, the Alsatians formed the great majority, so much so that our country was, more than any other province, represented in the French army. The hasty incorporation of our recruits into the German army therefore naturally produced a deep impression, which propagated itself into the smallest villages. When today one still complains, as German newspapers frequently do, of the spirit of many Alsatians and especially of the attitude of Alsatian women, one must go back to the original source of these feelings. If the war had turned out otherwise and France had tried to incorporate at once into her army the young men of the Palatinate, for example, whose brothers had fought against her, I am convinced that this measure would have struck the population of the Palatinate just as painfully and would have provoked the same emotion. It is there, it is in the immediate incorporation of the Alsatian recruits, that one must seek the first and most important cause of the options, first, and then of the emigrations…” [footnote: Pages 62-63.]

We shall cite here, among so many other contemporary documents, two letters particularly suited to throw light on this situation, which appeared, at a few days’ interval, in November-December 1871.

The one, published by l’Industriel Alsacien, [footnote: Reproduced in Le Temps of 24 November 1871.] had as its author Ch. Dollfus. Here are its principal passages:

”…With regard to the Alsatians, the policy of mitigation should, in my opinion, be summed up in two points: 1° Administrative autonomy of Alsace; 2° Optional military service for all those born before the annexation.

“This exemption would amount to replacing in Alsace for about eighteen years [footnote: The period running from the date of the treaty. (Note of the author of the letter.)] obligatory service by optional service. That is, it will be said, asking too much, condemning oneself to obtain nothing… What prejudice, however, would this delay bring to Germany, which would place the present generation under cover and dispense from service those whose conscience could not tolerate it? This prejudice I do not see, while I see clearly that which would result for Alsace, for Germany herself, for France and for all Europe, from the immediate application of military service to the conquered province. But things seen from Strasbourg, Colmar, or Mulhouse, and things seen from Berlin do not have the same aspect. At Berlin, universal military service is an article of faith, and it is also thought there, probably, that it would constitute, against Alsace, a school of Germanization. They might be mistaken at Berlin. The example of the Frankfurters and the Hanoverians that is readily invoked has here no force, for it does not take account of that enormous difference, that the Hanoverians and the Frankfurters were Germans before Sadowa, while the Alsatians, before as after Sedan, were Frenchmen and warm Frenchmen… Let them take care!… this policy would go against its end: it would engage those who inaugurated it in a path of growing severities and would condemn them never again to leave it…

“The Germans formerly engaged a great deal in psychology, Prussia gave birth to Kant: does she still remember it? Yesterday, the German fatherland rendered to Schiller unanimous honors: and Germany would coldly commit, after mature examination, with open eyes, so flagrant a violation of what there is of the most moral, the noblest, the most respectable among the Alsatians? for the Alsatians, if they are worthy of esteem for not wishing to abandon Alsace, would be despicable, in submitting to their fate, in not feeling, on the morrow of defeat, the pain of conquest. The Germans themselves would despise them if they changed fatherland as one changes a coat, and the Germans would do well. They must not want a debased Alsace. Therefore I still hope that the Reichstag, when the moment comes to decide this capital question, will remember not only Kant, the apostle of conscience, Schiller, the poet of liberty, but Goethe, the most human of the Germans, who wrote those immortal verses, imprescriptible in their truth:

… Gefühl ist alles, / Name ist Schall und Hauch, / Umnebelnd Himmelsgluth. [Feeling is all; the name is sound and breath, clouding the heavenly glow.]

“During the war passion dominates souls and as in a torrent of fire and blood carries the best beyond wisdom and equity. But the war has yielded for nearly a year now to politics, passion has given place to deliberation. Unhappily, assemblies, like armies, obey currents often disastrous, and what many would grant individually to justice and reason, one may fear they will refuse it collectively…”

The other letter, signed X…, was published by the Journal de Genève: [footnote: Reproduced in Le Temps of 2 December 1871.]

“The Journal de Genève has kept its readers informed of the agitation that has been provoked in Alsace by the prospect of an early application of military service. Your correspondents have also let you know of the steps taken to obtain from the government on this point the concessions called for by the public conscience, as much as by the requirements of an exceptional situation, of which the Alsatians have to bear the weight without having in any way incurred its responsibility.

“But it would appear that they entrench themselves at Berlin, so as to concede nothing, behind Article 57 of the Constitution, which says that every German owes military service and cannot be replaced in the accomplishment of this duty. Now, it is said, the Alsatians who shall not have, in October, opted for France and transferred their legal domicile out of Alsace, will have become Germans; therefore, without destroying the German Constitution, they cannot be dispensed from service.

“Berlin has found its non possumus. It is recognized that the feelings that rise everywhere in Alsace against the immediate application of the law are most respectable, but one regrets, perhaps deplores, not being able to respect them. The Constitution opposes it: non possumus! The Constitution is not a matter of feeling, and if it lacks heart in this circumstance, the Germans can do nothing about it in truth… I am not aware, however, that one overturns a Constitution because one suspends its effects temporarily, in view of an unforeseen exception. I do not, in fact, find in the Constitution of the empire any article foreseeing the case in which Frenchmen would be converted into Germans against their will… Moreover, the legislator who makes the law is always free to modify it in whole or in part, for a time or for always, within the limits judged necessary by him. The exception confirms the rule, and the exception of fact justifies in equity and in reason the exception of right.

“Who will deny that Alsace has been brusquely thrown into the exceptional? Obligatory primary instruction and obligatory military service are the two granite columns of the German fatherland. But do the Alsatians dream of shaking them? By primary teaching one seizes the generations to come; can one not leave the present generation, so painfully struck, at rest as to military service and not impose upon it, still all bruised, the helmet of its conquerors? It does not ask that for its sake the general principle be abolished, it asks that, the principle maintained, the bringing into force be deferred as regards it, for a period of time sufficient that it may escape that horrible servitude, that contempt of itself that one would inflict upon it…

“If it is thought that, after having put Alsace in the state in which she finds herself, after having brought trouble from top to bottom into consciences, hearts, families, and properties, it suffices to say to the Alsatians: ‘If you cannot bear German military service, go away! we do not hold you back,’ one is mistaken. It is not as simple as that, as is well known… It is impossible that their eyes should not now be opened to the infallible consequences of a fault that would only be the prelude of many others. What will happen when, all hope having vanished, the families find themselves on the eve of the recruitment? Those who can emigrate will leave the native land, and without carrying it on the soles of their shoes, they will carry to the other side of the frontier, into France, the legitimate resentment that such moral violence, such contempt for what they have in themselves of the best and most intimate, will necessarily have engendered… The most moderate will come to it, the most just, and not by their fault; they will leave with hatred in their heart. Their curse will emigrate with them. Does one think that these exiles to whom one will have succeeded in teaching hatred, will carry with them appeasement to France already over-excited?… They will be oil on the fire…

”…At bottom, what claim do the Alsatians put forward? They ask to be militarily neutralized, at least during a delay long enough to keep out of the ranks of the German army, and to guarantee from the horrible risk of serving against former compatriots, those who saw the conquest accomplished before their eyes. The complete neutralization of Alsace, of which last year the Journal de Genève had made itself the organ, would have been the best solution; unhappily it could not prevail in the unleashing of passions: it had against it, last December, that of being too sensible. Well, could it not be partly recovered, and declared that Alsace — if not as to its territory and its political constitution — shall be recognized neutral at least in the person of its inhabitants?… And if this neutrality of the inhabitants could later extend, by a common accord between France and Germany, as far as the Black Forest, forming a zone of peace and reconciliation between the two peoples united and no longer separated by the bordering province! But let us not dream and let us stay in the present.

“If it is true, as is pretended, that optional service admitted transitorily in Alsace, saving the right to ask a general redemption tax of the province, is a constitutional heresy whose idea the dogmatists of the law cannot envisage without horror, let at least a respite [footnote: The delay would be, according to us, insufficient if it were less than twelve years starting from October 1872. (Note of the author of the letter.)] be granted to necessity, which has its laws too, to the conscience of the Alsatians, which has its own. A national evolution is not accomplished like a military evolution at the command of file-left or file-right. Feelings, habits do not pirouette like that on their heels; as for consciences accustomed to such manoeuvres, I judge that not many exist in Alsace. Those of Germany ought to understand that…”

II

”…Whatever may be the results of the option,” says the Provincial Correspondent, [footnote: Cited by the Journal des Débats, no. of 8 October 1872. See above, page 23.] “the designs and the hopes of Germany will reach their goal. If the German nation, as the price of its sacrifices and its battles, has made the retrocession of the countries formerly torn from the Empire an absolute condition of peace, it was not in her thought to increase her power by an extension of her territory and an increase of her population. Her desire was rather to make the culpable French spoliation be expiated by the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine, as well as to repair the fault which she herself had committed in letting these provinces be torn from her; and her demand was dictated above all by the need of acquiring, with the possession of the ancient frontier countries of Germany, a powerful bulwark against the incorrigible warlike passion of the French. ‘A united State and sure frontiers,’ such was the unanimous cry that made itself heard among all classes of the German people when the victorious march of hostilities authorized the hope that Germany would be in a position to dictate the conditions of peace.

“The nation may say to itself with complete satisfaction that the guarantees for an effective defense of the fatherland are acquired and cannot be called into question by the results of the option. Germany is in possession of her ancient frontier countries and of her powerful fortresses; the strength and devotion of the nation, the tried excellence of our military institutions and of our war administration, the wisdom and firmness of the government of the empire surely guarantee us that we should be able to face with advantage any new aggression of the enemy.

“With 1 October, the internal situation of Alsace-Lorraine has ceased to be obscure and troubled; all uncertainty as to the competence of German laws and the extent of their jurisdiction, as well as to the duration and solidity of German sovereignty, must disappear today. The new country of the empire, which in international law the treaty of peace has restored to Germany, becomes henceforth, by the departure of those of the inhabitants who opt for France, a German country in the full meaning of the word. What the frontier-province may lose for the moment in population and in economic resources will be amply compensated for it by its intimate union with Germany. The sympathy of the nation and the solicitude of the authorities will rival in zeal to bring it about that the assimilation of Alsace-Lorraine, morally also, takes effect more and more, and that the population acquires soon with pride and satisfaction the consciousness of having entered into a full community of existence with the German empire.”

III

The treaty of Frankfurt was formal, and one could not contest that the annexing State had the right to require of the optants a real transfer of their domicile to France. But, since the signature of the treaty, Germany had still aggravated its conditions. Thus, she compelled to this change of domicile not only the Alsatians and Lorrainers domiciled in Alsace-Lorraine but also the inhabitants of the country who were not natives of it: a unilateral interpretation, which was never adopted by France, but which, applied by Germany (d’Arnim’s dispatch to Rémusat, 1 September 1872), still further increased the number of those who had to emigrate if they wished to remain French. The same effect of an analogous cause: during the first months that followed the treaty, minors, emancipated or not, were considered, by common accord, as having the faculty of option (with the proviso of the concurrence of their legal representatives for the declaration of option); then, all of a sudden, in March 1872, a German circular decided that non-emancipated minors could neither by themselves nor through the intermediary of their legal representatives opt for French nationality if those representatives did not opt too: whence new hindrances to the option, or new obligations of departure. On the other hand, one has seen above what emotion was stirred up in the country by the prescriptions relating to the immediate incorporation of the Alsatian and Lorrainer recruits. These various circumstances rendered opinion (we shall speak here only of opinion outside France) particularly impressionable to the news of the emigration.

The Tages Presse of Vienna “paints a heart-rending picture of the desolation of the two provinces. The Austrian sheet points out the contradiction that reigns between the mass banishment of a population and the humanitarian principles professed by the German writers on the war and its consequences. ‘The love of Germany for these brothers found again,’ it says, ‘is so close that, by dint of wishing to press them to her heart, she stifles them.’” [footnote: Journal des Débats, no. of 2 October 1872.] — “The Elberfelder Zeitung agrees with the Tages Presse in depicting in the darkest colors the state of the departments torn from France. One thing strikes the Prussian gazette especially. It ‘fears that at the first military levy perhaps not a single conscript will appear, all the young men having disappeared, even those whose option has been irregularly accomplished and who nevertheless prefer an illegal situation to German service.’” — The Times: “Yesterday [30 September 1872] was a day of mourning for Alsace-Lorraine. By virtue of a clause of the treaty of Frankfurt, it was provided that all the inhabitants born in these two provinces who had not transferred yesterday at midnight their domicile to France or elsewhere would be considered and treated as German subjects. The consequence of this stipulation has been an emigration from these unfortunate provinces which equals, in some districts, depopulation. Eyewitnesses tell us of hundreds and thousands of persons, of every rank and every age, who, for several weeks, and particularly on Sundays, have crowded the railway stations from the Rhine and the Saar to the new frontier… We do not know where we could find an example of so widespread a calamity and so powerful an attachment to the fatherland… ‘There are but a small number of our young emigrants in third-class carriages,’ someone writes us, ‘who know the French language perfectly,’ and yet the intensity of their love for France and of their hatred for their new masters, who are of the same blood and speak the same language, seems almost in proportion to their ignorance. But it must not be forgotten that their German masters were their enemies of yesterday, and that their former French masters have been, in their opinion, their benefactors for two centuries.” [footnote: Journal des Débats, no. of 2 October 1872.] — The Morning Post: “Granted even that the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, although absolutely in contradiction with all the pacific assurances of a purely defensive policy with which the apprehensions of Europe were lulled at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, granted that this conquest must be conceded as one of those faits accomplis which the practical genius of our age tends to respect, is it necessary that an indelicate act should be continued by the least delicate means possible? Prussia holds Alsace and Lorraine. The fact, unfortunately, is only too certain. It can be read in the disquiet of Europe. But is it absolutely necessary that Prussia should seek to render her power in the annexed provinces as disagreeable, as intolerable as a foreign domination can be? As we have said, we do not speak today of renouncing Alsace and Lorraine. We only ask what reason in the world, apart from the exercise of force, there can be in the measures one is going to adopt with regard to the Alsatians?… For this unfortunate people there is not the smallest loophole to escape. Even when parents, too poor and too friendless to be able to abandon their hearths, would nevertheless wish to preserve French nationality for their children, the Prussian government rigorously refuses to accept the option of those children, although validated by the authority of their natural guardians, unless the entire family departs into exile.” [footnote: Journal des Débats, no. of 30 September 1872.] — The Freeman, of Dublin: “It is claimed that the French are no colonizers. What is certain is that populations who have lived for long years under French law preserve attachments that no human force can break. With time, will the Germans efface these sympathetic impressions from the heart of the Alsatians and Lorrainers? We shall not take it upon us to answer that question. Lorrainers and Alsatians unite to the firmness of the Germanic character the ardor and sensibility of the Frenchman. Never will they accept voluntarily, it seems to us, the military despotism of the conqueror. Whatever may happen, the spectacle of an almost mass emigration is saddening. Let the friends of Prussia and certain organs of the English press try to cast blame on the fugitives — the unfortunate exiles are the object of the admiration of honest people; they have just given the world an example of fidelity, and a noble lesson to humanity entire.” [footnote: Journal des Débats, no. of 5 October 1872.]

One could prolong the list of these citations and gather here many other testimonies of the general emotion, particularly with regard to “the torture of the conscription,” the phrase is from another English newspaper, the Spectator. “The conscience of Europe seems to wake for a day,” says the editor of the Débats, who reports some of these foreign opinions. [footnote: Article signed Henry Aron, Journal des Débats, ibid.]

IV

The frontier established by the treaty of Frankfurt was an economic frontier at the same time as a political one. Not that it necessarily had to be so. But the war had put an end to the commercial treaty concluded in 1862 between France and Prussia, acting in the name of the German Customs Union (Zollverein), and this treaty was not re-established at the peace. The financial policy of Thiers, who, moreover, had always been protectionist, consisted in “seeking in tariff increases the budgetary resources that France was going to need in order to face her suddenly increased obligations.” [footnote: O. May, op. cit., p. 219.] Moreover, if the political frontier had not been at the same time an economic frontier, that would have been, in the eyes of many French politicians of the moment, to come to the rescue of German industry threatened by Alsatian competition, since by preserving for Alsatian products their outlets, one would have prevented them from seeking new ones on the German side, to the detriment of the German producers. So much so that the prolongation until 31 December 1871 of the complete duty exemption agreed first until 31 August (Arrangement of 9 April 1871 between Pouyer-Quertier, Minister of Finance, and three delegates of Alsatian industry, Aug. Dollfus, Spoerry, Marin, — then Article 9 of the Treaty of Peace) was conceded by M. Thiers only in exchange for advantages to which he rightly attached great importance: anticipated evacuation of six departments (Aisne, Aube, Côte-d’Or, Haute-Saône, Doubs and Jura) of the twelve still occupied, and reduction of the occupation corps to 50,000 men. The protocol of signature of the two additional Conventions signed for this purpose, on 12 October 1871, at Berlin (1° Convention for the evacuation of six departments and the payment to Germany of the fourth half-milliard of the war indemnity; — 2° Customs and Territorial Convention) specified even, in its Article 1, “that the two Conventions form but one single and unique treaty” and that the stipulations of the first “could not be put into execution if, contrary to all expectation, the ratification of the other should fail on the part of France.” [footnote: Villefort, op. cit., vol. I, p. 88.] M. Thiers himself gave an account of these various negotiations and their reciprocal dependence in his message of 7 December 1871 to the National Assembly (which is also mentioned, with regard to facts of another order, on page 148 of the present book).

V

To consecrate in the eyes of all this union of Algeria and Alsace, [footnote: See page 145.] it was thought to offer a seat of deputy of Algiers to one of the Alsatian deputies. It is fitting to recall here the various circumstances that suggested this project and how it nearly came to be realized.

On 1 March 1871, M. Jules Grosjean, deputy of the Haut-Rhin, had read at the tribune of the National Assembly, at Bordeaux, the famous declaration of the representatives of Alsace and Lorraine “affirming in the most formal manner, in the name of these two provinces, their will and their right to remain French.” Now, another sentence of this same declaration, “At the moment of leaving this hall, where our dignity no longer allows us to sit…,” amounted to a collective resignation of the Alsatian and Lorrainer deputies. It is true that following this reading, a member of the Assembly, M. de Tréveneuc, exclaimed: “Why should the representatives of Alsace not remain among us?”; — that Henri Martin, at the sitting of the 3rd, asked the Assembly “to declare that they are still the deputies of all France, since the representatives elected by one or another part of France do not represent merely the group of French citizens who have chosen them, but represent in its totality the French nation”; — that Victor Hugo drew up the draft of a “Declaration” by which his colleagues “would continue the mandate” of the Alsatian and Lorrainer deputies, a continuation which is at once “of right” and of “duty”; [footnote: ”…At this moment, and without the treaty being able to prevent it, Alsace and Lorraine are represented in the National Assembly of France. It depends on the National Assembly to continue this representation. This continuation of the mandate, we must declare it. It is of right. It is of duty… Since Alsace and Lorraine can henceforth name no other representatives, these must be maintained… If we suffer our honorable Alsatian and Lorrainer colleagues to withdraw, we aggravate the treaty… It is important that in the forced execution of the treaty, nothing on our part should resemble a consent. To submit without consenting is the dignity of the vanquished…” (Victor Hugo, Actes et Paroles, vol. III, Depuis l’Exil, pp. 105 et seq.)] — that at the sitting of 11 March, Colonel Denfert-Rochereau, deputy of the Haut-Rhin, and M. George, deputy of the Vosges, having addressed to the Assembly official letters of resignation, President Grévy, taking up Henri Martin’s theory, observed that “the feeling that had determined” these two representatives, “however honorable, ought not to make them lose sight,” either to themselves or to their Alsatian and Lorrainer colleagues, “that in spite of the changes that the populations who elected them may have undergone in their condition, they are and must remain the representatives of the French people,” and he invited them “not to persevere in their retreat and their resignation”; — that M. George, who was present at the session, immediately withdrew his resignation amid the applause of the whole Assembly, and the president solemnly noted this unanimity; — that finally, in the days that followed, several other representatives of Alsace and Lorraine, MM. Varroy and Brice, of the Meurthe; Claude, of the Vosges; Bamberger, André and Deschange, of the Moselle, returned to the Assembly, “to defend there the threatened Republic.” — But despite these manifestations, the deputation was, in reality, dissolved, and, either at once or some days later, [footnote: Cf. Scheurer-Kestner, op. cit., pp. 350-351.] all the representatives of the ceded departments continued to consider themselves as having resigned. [footnote: But with a sort of “consultative voice,” if one judges by the declarations, one collective (of fourteen names), three others, individual, which they sent to the National Assembly in 1873 to protest against the eventuality of a restoration of the monarchy. (Cf. Ed. Teutsch, op. cit., p. 21)]

On the other hand, at that very moment, the two seats of deputies of Algiers were becoming vacant. In fact, Algiers had elected as its representatives to the National Assembly Gambetta and Garibaldi. Now, Gambetta, elected by several departments, had opted for the Bas-Rhin and followed the lot of the resigning Alsatian deputies; as for Garibaldi, he had, as early as 13 February, “given by letter a general resignation of all his mandates of deputy,” and his election at Algiers, [footnote: Report of M. Vente on Garibaldi’s election at Algiers, Journal officiel of 12 March 1871.] “like all the others of General Garibaldi previously examined,” was to be annulled. Algiers was thus one of the many electoral colleges convoked anew for complementary elections (one hundred seventeen seats were vacant, almost all of them following the election of a certain number of deputies in several departments at once). It was then that some Algerois thought of offering one of their two vacant seats to one of the deputies of Alsace: first to M. Jules Grosjean, of the Haut-Rhin, “a rich manufacturer of Alsace,” says the Moniteur de l’Algérie (no. of 11 March 1871), “to whom the affairs of Algeria are not unknown, owing to a stay of some years in our colony,” but it seems that this project was rapidly abandoned; — then to M. Keller, also deputy of the Haut-Rhin, who accepted. “It is a fine spectacle,” wrote the Akhbar, journal of Algeria (no. of 30 June 1871), “that Algeria gives to the world by stretching across the Mediterranean its hand to the great citizen whom the victorious invasion has driven from his seat, to say to him: heart truly remained French, return to the sanctuary, take again the place you occupied so worthily and defend those who have not suffered, at the same time as you claim the rights of your unfortunate compatriots. But what commiseration, in the highest sense, advised, political good sense ordains imperatively in the presence of the double decision taken by a part of the Alsatians and Lorrainers to leave the native soil, preferring exile to the humiliation of living on foreign soil, and by the National Assembly to offer to these emigrants 100,000 hectares in Algeria. The Chamber, in accepting the Belcastel proposal, has fulfilled a duty, it is for us to do ours”; having to elect our representatives, if we take one from among ourselves, let us choose for the other “the most loved, the most esteemed among the Alsatians, the one to whom they would have given their votes, if those votes had been asked of them…” M. Keller made declarations in the same sense: ”…It is on French soil that they [the Alsatians and Lorrainers] must await the hour of justice and reparation. It is to Algeria, which stretches out its arms to them, that they must consecrate their activity and their energy… I am occupied especially with directing toward Algeria the current of immigration that would flow to the United States if nothing were done to draw it toward you… If Algeria chooses my name to give to Alsace a token of attachment and to consolidate our national unity, I shall not believe myself entitled to refuse its votes.” (L’Akhbar, nos. of 2 and 4 July 1871)

But, as a result of the recent territorial modifications, a deputy’s seat had been allotted to the territory of Belfort, which alone remained French of the former department of the Haut-Rhin, [footnote: Decree of 10 June 1871.] and the election of this deputy was fixed [footnote: By a second decree of the same date.] for 2 July, like all the complementary elections to the National Assembly for the seats of the metropolis. M. Keller having been elected at Belfort, gave up his candidacy at Algiers, where the vote was not to take place until the 9th. Nevertheless, our advantages remain, writes the Akhbar of the 7th: “Alsace and Lorraine will have in the Chamber the implacable organ of their claim; Algeria, a convinced defender, as we ourselves are, that our soil must be the asylum of the victims of the war; France, one more notability at the tribune.”

VI

Law of 15 September 1871

Article 1. [footnote: See above, pages 145-146.] — Commissions are instituted at Belfort and at Nancy for the purpose of receiving the requests of the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine who, wishing to preserve French nationality, would, in accordance with Article 1 of the law of 21 June 1871, undertake to go to Algeria in order to cultivate and develop the lands of which the concession should be made to them by the State free of charge. These commissions shall be charged to ascertain the morality of the emigrants and their aptitude to become agricultural colonists; to make sure that each family has pecuniary resources amounting to at least five thousand francs; to direct, finally, toward the ports of embarkation the families uniting these various conditions.

2. — The State shall provide for the transport by sea of the emigrants between the ports of France and those of Algeria nearest the colonies to be established.

3. — In each of the three Algerian departments, commissions shall be instituted by the general councils for the purpose of receiving the colonists on their disembarkation, of directing them to the lots allotted them, and of rendering them all the good offices their situation may call for.

4. — Independently of the individual lots, each colony must comprise a common, of woodland if there be any, and of pasture land, the extent of which shall be proportioned to the figure of the presumed population.

5. — Each head of family shall be put, through the administration’s care, in possession of his urban and rural lot, with title and plan, as soon as he arrives. The choice of lots shall take place in order of arrival; so far as possible, their extent shall be in relation to the number of members of the family and to the importance of the pecuniary resources at its disposal.

6. — Each centre of population shall be provided, at the expense of the State: 1° with potable water (fountain or well, washhouse and trough); 2° with a town hall; 3° with a school; 4° with a building for worship with its obligatory accessories; 5° with the means of communication necessary to link it to the principal artery of the country and to neighboring centres.

7. — The immigrants shall be employed by preference over all other workers in the works of every nature placed at the charge of the State by the preceding article.

8. — Pending the construction of dwelling houses, the State shall provide the colonists with means of encampment, as for troops in campaign.

9. — Each colony shall be constituted into a commune of full exercise as soon as two-thirds of the inhabitants who are to compose it shall have arrived.

10. — The various expenses rendered obligatory by the present law shall be provided for by means of credits opened in the budget of Algeria, chapter Colonization.

Decree of 16 October 1871

TITLE I

Article 1. — The inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine who wish to profit by the benefit of the law of 15 September 1871 shall have to produce, before the emigration commissions instituted by Article 1 of the said law, a formal copy of the declaration they must make before the municipal authority of the place of their domicile, under the terms of Article 2 of the treaty of 10 May 1871, in order to preserve the quality of French citizen. This title shall be deposited, on the arrival of the emigrants in the colony, at the registry of the tribunal of first instance of the situation of the goods of which the concession shall be granted to them.

2. — On their disembarkation in Algeria, the Alsatian and Lorrainer emigrants shall subscribe definitively the engagement taken by them before the abovementioned commissions to cultivate, to develop, and to inhabit the lands of which the concession shall be made to them free of charge by the State, at the same time as they shall justify that they have remained in possession of the pecuniary resources required by Article 1 of the aforesaid law. The title of concession that shall be delivered to them, under the terms of Article 5 of the same law, shall mention this engagement, and forfeiture may be pronounced against those who shall cease to reside on their lands before having brought them into cultivation in a measure sufficient to prove the loyal execution of the obligations subscribed by them.

3. — The release from the resolutory clause implying, for the benefit of the concession-holders, definitive and incommutable property of the immovables of which they shall have been put in possession, shall be pronounced, at the request of the concession-holders or of their assigns, by decree of the prefect of the department, given on the advice of the departmental commission. This decree shall be registered gratis and transcribed without other costs than the registrar’s salary. In case of forfeiture, the procedure shall be in accordance with the rules established in Article 11 of the present decree.

4. — For three years the concession-holder shall be free of all taxes that may be established on immovable property in Algeria.

5. — Each colony shall be constituted into a commune of full exercise as soon as two-thirds of the inhabitants who are to compose it shall have arrived. Consequently, the conditions of peopling shall be regulated for each of them so that this proportion may correspond to the existence of an electoral body of at least one hundred French citizens.

TITLE II

6. — The governor general is authorized to consent, on promise of property under the conditions hereinafter set forth, to leases of domain lands of a duration of nine years in favor of all settlers of European origin other than those designated in Title I.

7. — The lease is granted on condition of residence upon the land rented. The lessee shall pay annually and in advance, into the cashbox of the receiver of domains of the location of the property, the sum of one franc, whatever be the extent of his lot.

8. — The area of each lot is proportioned to the composition of the lessee’s family, at the rate of at most ten hectares and at least three hectares per resident European (men, women, children, or employees). The act of lease shall determine, for each particular case, the number of Europeans to be maintained on the property.

9. — At the expiration of the ninth year of continuous residence under the conditions set forth in the preceding article, the lease is converted into a definitive title of property. This deed of property, established by the service of domains, is registered gratis and transcribed without other costs than the registrar’s salary, the whole at the diligence of the service of domains and at the charge of the holder.

10. — After two years of residence, the lessee has the faculty of ceding his right to the lease and eventually to the subsequent concession of the lands to any other European colonist, on the clauses and conditions agreed between them, subject to the notification in due form of the contract of substitution to the receiver of domains of the location of the property. The definitive title of property is delivered, at the end of the lease, to the last occupying lessee.

11. — The lease is rescinded as of right by the fact of non-execution of the conditions of residence imposed in Article 8. In case of rescission, the State takes back the rented land purely and simply. Nevertheless, if the lessee has made on the property useful and permanent improvements, there shall be proceeded publicly, by administrative way, to the awarding of the right to the lease. This award may be pronounced only in favor of European bidders. The price of the award, after deduction of costs and compensation made for damages if appropriate, shall belong to the displaced lessee or to his assigns. If no bidder presents himself, the property shall return definitively to the State, free and clear of all charges.

12. — For three years, the lessee shall be free of all taxes that may be established on immovable property in Algeria.

13. — The Minister of the Interior and the civil governor general of Algeria are charged, each in what concerns him, with the execution of the present decree.

VII

“Your Excellency [footnote: Dispatch from Bismarck to d’Arnim (see page 149), translation communicated by the Havas Agency (Le Temps of 24 December 1871).] has been informed by the newspapers of the impression that the acquittals pronounced at Melun and at Paris have produced upon public opinion in Germany. Whatever the diversity of the parties that exist among us, in the presence of these facts, all are of the same opinion. We are far from wishing to render the French government responsible for the decisions of the jurors, and we incline to believe that this government is no more in a state to dominate the dispositions of the functionaries who took part in these decisions. On the contrary, the fact that the sense of right is so completely extinguished in France, even in the circles where one preferentially seeks friends of political order and of guaranteed justice, puts Europe in a position to appreciate the difficulties the French government meets in its efforts to free the feeling of order and right from the pressure that the passionate temper of the masses brings to bear upon it.

“If, however, I beg Your Excellency to treat this matter with M. de Rémusat, it is not with the object of bringing to the address of the French government the reproaches of the German press, but to forestall the objection that might be addressed to us of not having manifested in good time our opinion on the consequences that may follow from the renewal of similar incidents.

“If crimes such as premeditated murder remain unpunished, the public conscience finds itself offended and calls for reprisals at a moment when it is not possible to obtain justice. If it were possible for us to place ourselves at the point of view of the justice of Paris and Melun, the law of retaliation would have the consequence that, on our side, the murder of a Frenchman, were he brought before our jurisdiction, would no longer entail a penalty.

“The degree of moral education and the sense of right and honor which are peculiar to the German people exclude such an eventuality. But, after these incidents, it will be difficult, in case new crimes of this nature should come to be committed, to satisfy public opinion in Germany by referring to the intervention of French justice. Consequently, as an immediate defensive measure, our commanders of troops, on the territory of the occupation, have had, by the proclamation of the state of siege, to assure the repression of crimes by military justice. The cases in which the immediate arrest of the guilty can be carried out will therefore no longer give rise to international difficulties. But every demand of extradition we might be obliged to make will overexcite and indispose public opinion in France.

“We have therefore not, after the extradition of Tonnelet and of Berlin claimed by us was refused, persisted in this claim, confident as we were in the justice of France. But, in future, we could not, in the presence of the indignation of the German population, keep the same reserve, and, in the case in which an extradition of this nature should be refused us, we should be constrained to arrest and to lead away French hostages, and even, in cases of extreme necessity, to have recourse to more extensive measures in order to obtain justice for our demand, — an eventuality of which we earnestly wish to be spared.

“Abstraction made of the dangers we should have to fear on this side, from the point of view of our mutual relations, the incidents of Paris and Melun reveal, even in the enlightened and well-off classes of the population, dispositions against Germany that cannot remain without influence on our future attitude, in the interest of our own security. We must say to ourselves that, although last year we were attacked by France without any kind of provocation on our part, the exasperation of seeing that we defended ourselves victoriously has reached, even in the circles from which the jurors, the functionaries of civil justice, the advocates and the judges are recruited, a degree so passionate that in the negotiations that must yet intervene between us and France we have to occupy ourselves with assuring not only the execution of the conditions of peace, but also the defensive force of our position in the departments still occupied by us.

“Your Excellency will recall that the last negotiations entered into with M. Pouyer-Quertier were conducted under the impression of confidence that the cessation of the last remnant of our occupation might, by reciprocal agreement, take place in a shorter time than that foreseen by the treaty of peace. The light cast by the incidents of Melun and Paris on the feelings and intentions of the French, even the best brought up, must dispel that confidence, the more so as the friends of right and order in the French press have not felt themselves strong enough to condemn openly the conduct of the jurors, of the men of law, and of the public who applauded.

“The rare voices that have had the courage to risk a timid reproach explain that reproach only by considerations of practical utility, and especially by this consideration: that the Germans, by their occupation, are still in a position to do harm to France; but none of them adds this declaration: that the sentence given is incompatible with the eternal principles of justice, of political order, and with the present state of civilization. It seems therefore that even these feeble homages rendered to right would fall silent the day our occupation should cease.

“I beg Your Excellency to communicate these considerations to M. de Rémusat, without, I repeat, your language letting any trace of irritation on our part toward the government of the Republic show through. Far from that, Your Excellency will insist preferentially on the regret and disappointment we feel at seeing, immediately after we have given proofs of our conciliatory spirit, facts arise in the presence of which I find myself, unhappily, under the obligation of qualifying as premature our hope of seeing reborn between the two countries mutual confidence.

“BISMARCK.”

This dispatch, sent on 10 December 1871 [footnote: Hanotaux, op. cit., p. 353.] by M. de Bismarck to M. d’Arnim, was made public only on the 22nd. It produced in France and in Europe a considerable impression. Even the newspapers which, like the Daily Telegraph, did not contest that the Chancellor was justified in presenting some observations, found that “such language could be difficultly justified by the present circumstances.” The Times, The Morning Post, The Standard are still more energetic. [footnote: Le Temps, no. of 23 December 1871.] General von Manteuffel, commander-in-chief of the army of occupation, at Nancy, in a conversation with the Comte de Saint-Vallier, extraordinary commissioner of the French government attached to the headquarters, formally expressed his disapproval. “I have just left M. de Manteuffel,” wrote M. de Saint-Vallier on 25 December; [footnote: Cf. Hanotaux, ibid., and Ad. Thiers, Occupation et libération du territoire, 1871-1873 (2 vol. in-8°, Paris, 1900), vol. I, pp. 107-110.] “he has just expressed to me the feelings of grief that the reading of the unqualifiable dispatch addressed, on 10 December, by M. de Bismarck to M. d’Arnim and published the day before yesterday by the Berlin newspapers awakens in him. The general is confounded by the perfidy of this lying and slanderous

document…”

INDEX OF THE PRINCIPAL WORKS, ARTICLES, AND DOCUMENTS CONSULTED

Abel (Ch.). — Une Cause célèbre à Metz (in-8°, Metz, 1854).

About (Edmond). — Alsace (1871-1872) (in-16, Paris, Hachette, 8th edition, 1897).

Acker (Paul). — Une Ville industrielle alsacienne, in: Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 March 1912.

Albert (Henri). — La “nouvelle” Alsace-Lorraine, in: Cahiers Alsaciens, January 1914.

Ardouin-Dumazet. — Voyage en France: 6th series (in-16, Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1896); 48th-49th-50th series (ibid., 1907).

Baquol. — L’Alsace ancienne et moderne, edition entirely recast by P. Ristelhuber (in-8°, Strasbourg, Salomon, 1864).

Barbé (Jean-Julien). — A travers le Vieux-Metz. Les Maisons historiques (in-8°, Metz, Imprimerie Lorraine, 1913).

Bardy (G.) and Dutil. — Historique du Lycée de Belfort (in-8°, Belfort, 1908).

Bardy (H.). — Histoire de la Ville de Belfort (in-8°, Belfort, 1897-1901).

— — Belfort en 1816 (in-8°, Belfort, 1888).

Bégin (E.-A.). — Metz depuis dix-huit siècles (3 vol. in-8°, Paris, Fume, 1843-1845).

Benoit (A.). — Le Blocus de Phalsbourg en 1815 (in-8°, Metz, 1863).

— — Le Siège de Phalsbourg en 1870 (in-8°, Nancy, 1871).

— — Vers les Vosges (in-8°, Strasbourg, 1876).

Bès (Eug.). — L’Industrie de la laine cardée dans la région normande (in-8°, Rouen, Cagniard, 1891).

Bonnet (Victor). — La Libération du territoire selon le mode de l’emprunt des Américains, in: Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 March 1872.

Boucher (Henry). — Industrie et Commerce, in: Léon Louis, Le Département des Vosges, vol. V (in-8°, Épinal, 1889).

Bourelly (Général). — La Rétrocession de Belfort à la France, in: Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 October 1905.

Bourdignon (Eug.). — Bischwiller depuis cent ans (in-8°, Bischwiller, Posth, 1875).

Bouteiller (Ernest de). — Éloge de Metz, par Sigebert de Gembloux (in-16, Paris, 1881).

Castellane (de). — Journal du Maréchal de Castellane (in-8°, Paris, Plon, 1895, vol. I).

Chuquet (Arthur). — L’Alsace en 1814 (in-8°, Paris, Plon, 1900).

Corneille (A.). — La Seine-Inférieure Industrielle et commerciale (in-8°, Rouen, Herpin, 1873).

Culmann (F. W.). — Geschichte von Bischweiler (in-8°, Strasbourg, J.-H. Heitz, 1826).

Démontés (V.). — Le Peuple Algérien (in-8°, Alger, 1906).

Dollfus (Aug.). — Notes statistiques sur les diverses industries du Haut-Rhin, et plus particulièrement sur les industries textiles de ce département, in: Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, year 1872.

Dominique (L. C.). — Un Gouverneur général de l’Algérie: l’Amiral de Gueydon (in-4°, Alger, Jourdan, 1908).

Elstein (G. d’). — L’Alsace-Lorraine sous la domination allemande (in-8°, Paris, Olmer, 1877).

Emmery. — Recueil des Édits… enregistrés au Parlement de Metz (8 vol. in-4°, Metz, 1774-1788).

Engel (Alfred). — Documents officiels concernant le 4e Bataillon de la Mobile du Haut-Rhin (in-8°, Mulhouse, Meininger, 1909).

Favre (J.). — Le Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale (vol. II and III, in-8°, Paris, Plon, 1872, 1875).

Fischer (Dagobert). — Die Stadt Pfalzburg (in-12, Mulhouse, 1865).

— — Le Comté de la Petite-Pierre sous la Domination Palatine, in: Revue d’Alsace (1879-1880).

Fraenkel (Paul). — Rapport fait à la Chambre de Commerce d’Elbeuf, séance du 2 février 1910 (in-8°, Elbeuf, Crepel, 1910).

Gaehlin (Paul). — Éphémérides alsaciennes de l’Année Terrible (in-16, Colmar, J.-B. Jung, 1910).

Glück (Émile). — Le 4e Bataillon de la Mobile du Haut-Rhin (in-8°, Mulhouse, Meininger, 1903).

Grad (Ch.). — Considérations sur les finances et l’administration de l’Alsace-Lorraine sous le régime allemand (in-8°, Strasbourg, Noiriel; Mulhouse, Bader; Paris, Germer-Baillière, 1877).

— — Die Optantenfrage vor dem deutschen Reichstag (in-8°, Berlin, 1878).

Guilmeth (A.). — Histoire de la Ville et des Environs d’Elbeuf (in-8°, Rouen, Berdalle, 1842).

Guynemer. — Rapport présenté le 31 juillet 1875 à la Commission générale des Alsaciens-Lorrains au nom du Comité de colonisation de l’Algérie (in-4°, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1875).

Hallays (André). — A travers l’Alsace (in-16, Paris, Perrin, 1911).

Hannoncelles (Gérard d’). — Metz ancien (2 vol. in-fol., Metz, 1856).

Hanotaux (G.). — Histoire de la France contemporaine, vol. I, Le Gouvernement de M. Thiers (in-8°, Paris, Combet).

Haussonville (Comte d’). — Lettres du Gouverneur général, des 30 et 31 décembre 1876 (inserted in the Journal officiel of 31 March 1877).

— — La Colonisation officielle en Algérie, in: Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 June and 1 July 1883.

Heim (Ed.). — La question des optants en Alsace-Lorraine, in: Revue Alsacienne, December 1880.

Hepp (Eug.). — Du droit d’option des Alsaciens-Lorrains pour la nationalité française (in-12, Paris, Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1872).

Hermine (H. de l’). — Mémoires de deux voyages et séjours en Alsace (1674-1676 et 1681), edited by J. Coudre (gr. in-8°, Mulhouse, 1886).

Hollender (Lieutenant-Colonel A.). — Le Siège de Phalsbourg en 1870 (in-8°, Paris, H.-Ch. Lavauzelle).

Keller. — Altes und neues von Pfalzburg (in-8°, Sarrebourg, 1874).

Keller (O.). — Situation de l’Industrie du Coton et de l’Industrie de la Laine dans le département du Haut-Rhin, in: Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, year 1872.

Kiener (P.). — Die elsässische Bourgeoisie, in: Revue Alsacienne Illustrée, 1909.

Klein (abbé Félix). — Vie de Mgr. Dupont des Loges (in-8°, Paris, Poussielgue, 1899).

Klipffel (H.). — Les Paraiges messins (in-8°, Metz-Paris, 1863).

Koechlin (A.). — L’Industrie cotonnière en Allemagne (in-8°, Paris, Pelletier, 1906).

Laffitte (Louis). — Rapport général sur l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France (in-4°, Paris-Nancy, Berger-Levrault, 1912).

— — La Région lorraine, in: Les divisions régionales de la France (in-8°, Paris, Alcan, 1913).

Lalance (A.). — Mulhouse français (in-8°, Paris, Chaix, 1898).

Lamothe (H. de). — Les Alsaciens-Lorrains en Algérie, in: Revue Alsacienne, October 1878.

Lantz (Lazare). — Notice historique et statistique sur le Syndicat industriel du Haut-Rhin (in-4°, Mulhouse, Bader, 1873).

Larchey (Lorédan). — Les maîtres bombardiers, canonniers et couleuvriniers de la cité de Metz (in-8°, Paris, Domaine, 1861).

— — Le Pays messin, in: La Lorraine Illustrée (in-fol., Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1886).

Lasablière (Ch. de). — Notice historique sur la ville de Mulhouse, in: Revue d’Alsace, 1850-1851.

Lavisse (Ernest). — La Question d’Alsace dans une âme d’Alsacien (in-16, Paris, Colin, 1891).

Lederlin (A.). — Monographie de l’Industrie cotonnière (in-8°, Épinal, 1905).

Lepage (H.). — Les Communes de la Meurthe (2 vol. in-8°, Nancy, Lepage, 1854).

Leroy (O.). — Notre histoire au jour le jour, 1ère partie 1870-1874 (in-4°, Nancy).

Lévy (R.). — Histoire économique de l’Industrie cotonnière en Alsace (in-8°, Paris, Alcan, 1912).

Louis-Lande (L.). — Les Alsaciens-Lorrains en Algérie et la Société de Protection, in: Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 September 1875.

Luroth (Dr). — L’Administration municipale de Bischwiller à partir de l’année 1840 (in-8°, Bischwiller, Posth, 1864).

L. K. — Une ville de garnison sous l’ancien régime (in-8°, Belfort, 1906).

L. M. — Mulhouse, in: Revue de Paris, 15 March 1898.

Mannberguer (F.). — Éloge de feu M. le comte d’Haussonville, de l’Académie française, sénateur, président de la Société de Protection (in-8°, Paris, Chaix, 1884).

May (Gaston). — Le Traité de Francfort (in-8°, Paris-Nancy, Berger-Levrault, 1909).

Meininger (Ernest). — Essai de description, de statistique et d’histoire de Mulhouse (in-4°, Mulhouse, 1885).

— — Le Traité de Réunion de Mulhouse à la France en 1798 (in-fol., Mulhouse, 1910).

Meurisse (R. P.). — Histoire des Évêques de l’Église de Metz (in-fol., Metz, 1634).

Mézières (Alfred). — Récits de l’Invasion, Alsace et Lorraine (3rd edition, in-18, Paris, Perrin, 1884).

Michel (Emm.). — Histoire du Parlement de Metz (in-4°, Paris, Techener, 1845).

Nérée Quépat (René Paquet). — Dictionnaire biographique de l’ancien département de la Moselle (in-4°, Paris-Metz, 1887).

Penot (Dr A.). — La Société Industrielle, in: Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, 1876.

Peyerimhoff (H. de). — Enquête sur les résultats de la Colonisation officielle de 1871 à 1895, Rapport à M. Jonnart, gouverneur général de l’Algérie (2 vol. in-4°, Alger, 1906).

Pinet (G.). — Histoire de l’École Polytechnique (in-4°, Paris, Baudry, 1887).

Prost (Aug.). — Journal du Siège de Metz, manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

— — Le Blocus de Metz, Publication of the Municipal Council of Metz (in-8°, Nogent-le-Rotrou, 1898).

Régamey (J. and P.). — L’Alsace au lendemain de la conquête (1870-1874) (in-16, Paris, Jouve, 1911).

Reinach (Joseph). — Raphaël Lévy (in-16, Paris, Delagrave, 1898).

Reuss (Rod.). — L’Alsace au dix-septième siècle (2 vol. in-8°, Paris, Bouillon, 1897-1898).

Ricoux (Dr René). — La Démographie figurée de l’Algérie (in-8°, Paris, Masson, 1880).

Risler (W.). — Verzeichnis der im Deutschen Reiche auf Baumwolle laufenden Spindeln und Webstühle (in-8°, Stuttgart, editions 1893, 1905, 1909).

Scheurer-Kestner. — Les représentants de l’Alsace et de la Lorraine à l’Assemblée Nationale de Bordeaux, in: Revue Alsacienne, May and June 1887.

Schlumberger (Th.). — Rapport annuel, in: Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, year 1872.

Schmidt (Ch.). — Une conquête douanière (in-8°, Paris-Nancy, Berger-Levrault, 1912).

Ségur (Lieutenant-General Comte Philippe de). — Éloge historique de M. le Maréchal Comte de Lobau, given at the session of the Chamber of Peers of 17 June 1839 (in-8°, Paris, Crapelet).

Teutsch (Édouard). — Notes pour servir à l’histoire de l’annexion de l’Alsace-Lorraine (in-8°, Nancy, Berger-Levrault, 1893).

Thierry-Mieg (Ch.). — Les Alsaciens-Lorrains en Algérie, in: Revue Alsacienne, January 1888.

Thiers (Ad.). — Notes et Souvenirs (in-8°, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1903).

Villefort (A.). — Recueil des traités, conventions, lois, décrets et autres actes relatifs à la paix avec l’Allemagne (5 vol. in-4°, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1873-1879).

Wahl (Maurice). — L’Algérie (in-8°, Paris, Alcan, 2nd edition, 1889).

Weber-Koechlin (Dr Jean). — Les Prussiens à Mulhouse en 1870 (in-8°, Mulhouse, Meininger, 1910).

Wolfram (Dr G.). — Ausgewählte Aktenstücke zur Geschichte der Gründung von Pfalzburg, mit einer Einleitung…, in: Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für lothringische Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 1908 (in-4°, Metz).

Worms (Justin). — Histoire de la Ville de Metz depuis l’établissement de la République jusqu’à la Révolution française (in-8°, Metz-Nancy-Paris, 1849).

Zurlinden (Général). — Mes souvenirs depuis la guerre (in-16, Paris, Perrin, 1913).

Aus dem Elsass, — Zustände, Stimmungen und Erwartungen im Neuen Reichsland (in-16, Leipzig, J.-J. Weber, 1875).

Causes célèbres, vol. CXXXIV (in-12, Paris, 1786).

Histoire documentaire de l’industrie de Mulhouse et de ses environs au dix-neuvième siècle (Publication of the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse) (2 vol. in-fol., Mulhouse, Bader, 1902).

Das Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen (3 vol. in-4°, Strasbourg, J.-H.-Ed. Heitz, 1898-1901).

Statistique de l’Algérie, 1853-1855 et 1855-1856 (in-fol., Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1874 and 1877).

Bulletin de la Société d’Agriculture d’Alger, 1871.

Mémoires de l’Académie de Metz, 1872-1873.

Mémoires de l’Académie Stanislas, 1870, 1872, etc.

L’Austrasie (M. Thiria); Les Cahiers Alsaciens (Dr P. Bucher); Les Marches de l’Est (M. Georges Ducrocq); Le Messager d’Alsace-Lorraine (M. Henri Albert); Le Pays Lorrain et le Pays Messin (M. Ch. Sadoul): passim.

Archives of the Government General of Algeria: various documents.

Departmental Archives, Belfort, M 4/21, M 17/20, M 17/3, R 5/12; Épinal, 15 M 9 (Alsatians-Lorrainers).

Various municipal archives.

TABLE OF THIS CAHIER

By the Same Author … 5

The Exodus … 9

Nos patriae fines … 13

Foreword … 17

From Bischwiller to Elbeuf … 29

Phalsbourg … 49

Mulhouse-Belfort … 75

Metz … 107

Alsatians of Algeria … 137

Industries that have transferred … 183

ANNEXES … 203

I. — The author of the Letters from Alsace … 205

II. — The Provincial Correspondent … 212

III. — The treaty of Frankfurt was formal … 214

IV. — The frontier established by the treaty of Frankfurt … 218

V. — To consecrate in the eyes of all this union of Algeria and Alsace … 220

VI. — Law of 15 September 1871 … 224

Decree of 16 October 1871 … 225

VII. — Bismarck’s dispatch to d’Arnim … 229

Index of the principal works, articles, and documents consulted … 235

Table of this cahier … 247

We have given the bon à tirer after corrections for sixteen hundred copies of this sixth cahier and for twenty copies on Whatman paper, on Tuesday 17 February 1914.

The manager: CHARLES PÉGUY

This cahier was composed and printed by unionized workmen.

Caillaud, Printer, 13 and 15, rue Pierre-Dupont, Suresnes. — 1914.