La carte au liseré vert

The Map with the Green Border

The Map with the Green Border (Alsace-Lorraine)

Georges Delahache

ALSACE-LORRAINE

THE MAP WITH THE GREEN BORDER

THIRD EDITION

PARIS — LIBRAIRIE HACHETTE ET Cⁱᵉ — 19, BOULEVARD SAINT-GERMAIN, 79 — 1910

Forty years have passed, and this corner of the earth…

— V. H.

Foreword

On August 14, 1870, eight days after the battle of Frœschwiller, a cabinet order from the King of Prussia named Count von Bismarck-Bohlen governor-general of Alsace. On the 21st, by an instruction addressed to the chancellor, the king fixed the limits of this government: “the Haut-Rhin, the Bas-Rhin, and the new department of the Moselle, comprising the arrondissements of Metz, Thionville, Sarreguemines, Château-Salins, and Sarrebourg.” In the month of September — that is, during the bombardment of Strasbourg and more than a month before the capitulation of Metz — a map of this government appeared, which had been prepared in Berlin by the geographical and statistical division of the general staff. And when, on February 26, 1871, the preliminaries of peace were signed at Versailles, it was this map that served as the basis for fixing the new frontier: the tracing imposed by Germany was marked in green on “two identical copies” annexed to the “two engrossments of the present treaty.” (1) The map of the government-general conferred on Count von Bismarck-Bohlen in August 1870, the map with the green border of February 1871 — this was Alsace-Lorraine. The annexation which Germany carried out at the end of the war was exactly the one whose plan she had fixed at the beginning.

[footnote: (1) See in the Annexes the text of the Preliminaries, article 1.]

Since then, nearly forty years will soon have passed. Of the men who acted and lived through that time, many are dead. The young people who kept at the back of their memory the impression of a passage of troops, of the setting up of a field hospital, of a terrifying piece of news received in some corner of the provinces — they too are already growing rarer, or will grow old tomorrow. For ourselves, for all those whose eyes did not see, but who, born on the morrow of the great disillusion, vibrated with the grief of their elders and felt being born, in the account of the disaster, those emotions by which for the first time they came out of their own consciousness and rose to the sense of a national consciousness — for those too the years pass, and sometimes, in certain men, memory pales. What remains, of so many sorrows, for the generation that pushes us on with its shoulder?

Doubtless, in the first peaceful mornings, there rose even from the ruins a kind of smoke of hope; the good wills strained by the struggle did not relax, men made bitter retrospects upon the past, they understood that the defeat had had its moral causes — the ignorance of the shepherds, too often presumptuous, the heedlessness of the flocks, readily ready to accuse others; men promised themselves to transmit the memory faithfully to those who should come, to make of them serious, instructed, energetic men: thus, whatever the horror of the present, one would see arise, as the distant Hector had already wished for his son in the melancholy of approaching death, a generation that would be worth more and perhaps would be happier. But good wills, even enthusiastic and sincere, are not the will — the grave, tenacious, constant will, which never loses sight, amid the multiple incidents of particular existences, of the common goal to be reached. Alas! more union would have been needed for that, more confidence in self, a desire more jealously preoccupied with its object. Union? It has always been wanting in us. As for confidence in self, the war had shaken it, the vanity with which we were reproached had dissipated, repentant and contrite; by dint of wishing to be just to others, we became unjust toward ourselves, and the necessary confidence came back to us only by fits and starts, in the hours of alarm, in 1875, in 1887, in 1905–1908: before and after the crises, it was too often verbal and a matter of attitude, not at all intimate, profound, the kind that watches like conscience, that inspires and directs action — a sonorous reminder of “immanent justice” at the end of a speech at an agricultural fair or a prize-giving, and one thought oneself quits with the past. In short… even this poor eloquence would today stammer: other subjects are more in fashion, and that one easily becomes suspect. We have scattered our generosity too much. There are, if I may say so, ideas that have no luck: they arrive at the wrong moment, soon hampered by others that grow up around them and against them — social welfare, universal peace, doubtless noble theories, but ones which serve to authorize certain proceedings that Frenchmen ought not to engage in, — and so beautiful, so beautiful, that one only regrets that their vogue was born forty or fifty years too late: after the fait accompli, to make its revision more difficult, and not before, to prevent its accomplishment. And that is how the sons of Hector are no happier than their father.

They ought, however, to be better. The Germans, had a like misadventure befallen them, would not fail to recall the past, without weariness, punctually, gravely, to all their generations of schoolboys and students. We and ours have but too much inclination to smiling nonchalances. If they are of an ignorance above the average, the young soldiers who, questioned upon their arrival at the barracks, answer that Bismarck was one of Napoleon’s generals and that Strasbourg is a great port of America, others, who have more flair and know how to avoid too gross blunders, would not be much less embarrassed if the questioning were pushed a little: the primary school did its office well, but they were too young, they learned too quickly, and they have been out of it too long, at once taken up by the daily task, by the tavern, by the bicycle, by the public meeting. As for the more fortunate ones who studied in the collèges and lycées, they found there a powerful tradition: the slow study of distant epochs, then, when July comes, the effervescence of the approaching vacation, the rapid grinding-up in view of some examination, the last pages of a manual feverishly turned, leaving in the eyes scarcely the memory of a few “chapter headings” which will be effaced tomorrow… And the day after tomorrow, as members of the city, they will speak of it lightly, without knowing, and they will scarcely ever think of it.

From these preoccupations was born the idea of this little book. Some of those whom their origin attaches to this land that has been foreign for nearly forty years feel for it a kind of tenderness of exiles; they live in it through their thought, as intimately as they can, take pleasure in studying the times when its destinies were one with those of France, follow, loving and at times anxious, the soul of those who have grown up, in parallel, but on the other side of the Vosges. Will it be forgiven me, being one of these faithful, that I have thought a sort of compendium of the question might not be useless? To recall the history of two French provinces that no sign marked out for separation from France, to show what for a long time the will of Germany had been with regard to them, to tell how the painful operation was carried out, what cases of conscience and of interest arose for the various categories of the sacrificed population, how Germany set about sewing this fragment of France onto her reconstituted Empire, and why the suture is still visible: this is what I have tried to attempt, ambitious to fill with some precision the vague words with which men readily content themselves on the subject of a history that is no longer “current.” If I have not been able to read everything, nor to say everything — it would take ten years and ten volumes — I at least wish that this book be granted some merit of clarity and of sincerity; that something be shared of the emotion I experienced in writing it; and that, in favor of that communion of feeling which inclines to indulgence, the reader will not be surprised if, passionately attached to the little fatherland orphaned of the great, I have insisted on discharging a task which for a long time I have considered, toward the one, as a memory, and toward the other, as a duty.

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A LITTLE HISTORY

I

A LITTLE HISTORY

1. — Before there was Alsace or Lorraine

However uneasy the existence already was of those tribes who lived, before the Christian era, on the soil of the future Alsace and the future Lorraine — unceasingly occupied either in driving back an enemy who had crossed the Rhine or in retreating themselves to this side of the Vosges — one cannot found upon their history the whole history that is to come, and, complacently assimilating some of them to the French, others to the Germans of today, study the situation of Alsace-Lorraine in the too vague light of that too distant past. At that age of civilization, these groups of warlike men, encamped upon ill-defined territories, were naturally, and without any right to draw from this allusions to more modern events, in perpetual combats against those of the east or of the west. One is therefore much tempted to skip to the Flood… But, since in this much-discussed question the discussion has run very high without always taking account of the difference of epochs, it is fitting at least to note that these earliest populations were Celtic, that they received more than once, before Julius Caesar, the shock of invaders from beyond the river, and that one day, to be protected against the German Ariovistus, they called to their aid the strength and the organization of Rome — thus preluding that eternal role of anvil-country between two civilizations, which will form the sad unity of their history. Caesar victorious, the region corresponding to the Haute-Alsace formed part of the Maxima Sequanorum, whose capital was Besançon; the Basse-Alsace, of the Germania Prima, whose capital was Mainz; Lorraine, of the Belgica Prima, whose capital was Trier. Of this dominion of Rome the reminders are not lacking: some of the great roads of today still follow the trace of the Roman roads, and Roman is the birth of several of the towns of the country: Metz, Toul, Verdun, Strasbourg, Saverne. In the third century, Christianity penetrated into the region. Then the Germanic invasions resumed; those of the Alamanni above all, who, halted for a moment by the Emperor Julian in 357, later collided with the Franks, already masters of part of Gaul, and, defeated at Tolbiac in 496 by Clovis, ended by recognizing the supremacy of their adversaries (middle of the sixth century).

At this moment there is sketched, for the first time, a sort of differentiation: the Lorrainian plateau becomes the center of the kingdom of Austrasia, to which the Alsatian plain was indeed attached, but the latter, during about a century (seventh–eighth centuries), lived under the nearly autonomous authority of a sort of dynasty of military chiefs: these were the dukes of Alsace. The name of the physical region (Ellsass, which meant perhaps the country of the Ill (1)) became that of a political region: ducatus Alsatiae; and even after the disappearance of the duchy, the surviving memory of it constituted a sort of nominal bond between the scattered and independent Alsatian domains.

[footnote: (1) Etymology, moreover, much disputed, especially nowadays. For M. Chr. Pfister (Duché mérovingien d’Alsace, p. 8), the name comes from the Alisatzen or Alisazen, “those settled abroad,” which the Alamans of the right bank of the Rhine would have employed with regard to their compatriots of the left bank, during the latter’s domination over Alsace before Tolbiac. — See, following the Annexes, the Index of works consulted.]

Despite this first sketch of distinct individualities, the history of the two countries pursued itself confounded, long still, even in the beginning dislocation of the Empire of Charlemagne. At the first partition, at the death of Louis the Pious, the eldest of his sons, Lothair, had, for his inheritance, besides Italy with Rome and the imperial dignity, a long band of territories which included Provence, Burgundy, the lands between the Meuse and the Rhine as far as the North Sea — that is to say, Alsace as well as Lorraine; and when, at the death of this first Lothair, this long territory, intermediate between France and Germany also in formation, was itself divided (855), the eldest of his sons had Italy, still with the Empire which traditionally went with it; the youngest, Provence and Burgundy; the other, Lothair II, from Burgundy to the sea: this was the “kingdom of Lothair,” Lotharii regnum, whence Loherreigne, and finally, Lorraine; but this Lorraine still included Alsace. (1)

[footnote: (1) Cf. Prost, Lorraine, p. xv. In the new State were confounded countries today very diverse for us: parts of Switzerland — the Valais, Geneva, Bern, Basel; Burgundy, Alsace, the cisrhenan Palatinate, Lorraine, the Barrois, the Trois-Évêchés; parts of Luxembourg, of Limbourg; Cologne, Trier; Hainaut, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland.]

Meanwhile the differences of the future were sketching themselves: as early as 842, Louis the German and Charles the Bald, promising each other mutual aid against their brother Lothair, had employed two languages in exchanging their oaths; each had sworn in the language of the other, Charles the Bald in the Germanic language, Louis the German in romance French (and the text of Louis’s formula, known under the name of the Oath of Strasbourg, is precisely the most ancient document that exists of our French language). But it is only from 869, from the death of Lothair II and the partition of his succession, that the political delimitation grows precise: the Alsatian part falls into the hands of Louis the German, and is thus incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire, while Charles the Bald, who was more particularly the French successor of Charlemagne, has himself crowned king of Lorraine at Metz. Moreover, the rivalries between the two sovereigns rapidly muddied the clarity of this partition; new contests arose, and new rearrangements; in favor of instability and disorder, the local forces grow; Duke Gislebert becomes the true master of the country of Lorraine, but can only remain effectively so if help comes to him from outside: he leans upon the west — France — against the east — Germania, — and Germania avenges herself by subjecting duke and duchy to her authority: Lorraine, in turn, henceforth formed part of the Holy Empire. And yet — despite appearances, since at only fifty-five years’ distance the ducatus Alsaciae and the Lotharii regnum both entered into the Holy Roman Germanic Empire — the differentiation was going to continue, their destinies were going to pursue themselves distinct.

2. — From the Holy Empire to the Revolution

This common entry into the Holy Empire had not, in fact, the meaning one might suppose, and which some have wished to give it. The name of the Holy Roman Germanic Empire cannot authorize too ingenious comparisons: the Holy Empire was not the Germany of today. It had for origin and foundation, not a territory, not a nation, but a title that the transfer to Constantinople of the seat of the ancient Empire in the fourth century had, in reality, left vacant for Western Europe. Born of the thought of Charlemagne, who on Christmas Day of the year 800, by letting himself be acclaimed by the people of Rome and crowned by the pope, had reconstituted to his own profit the dignity of Augustus and his successors, the Holy Empire was Roman both by the remembrance of the imperial tradition and by the respect of the Christian tradition. It had become, in addition, Germanic only by being transmitted, in fact, and although always elective in principle, to German princes — representatives of the race of the Carolingians, which was dying out, but to whom the Empire of the founder had not passed intact. For Charlemagne’s succession had dissolved itself into parcels without harmony and without bond; and the Holy Roman Germanic Empire, without material or moral unity, was only a federation into which entered, for the whole or for part of their particular domains, vassals of very diverse ranks and orders: kings and counts, bishops and abbots, towns. And that being so to speak colleagues in the Empire did not mean that one was to develop according to the same law and live a common history — the example of Alsace and Lorraine would suffice to prove.

a) — ALSACE

If one wishes to guide oneself with some clarity in the bushy and turbulent history of this country, it is fitting not to lose sight of two important points: — first, that the unity of Alsace is very recent, and that for a long time it scarcely existed except nominally, by the memory of the ephemeral duchy of the seventh century: in that extreme feudal fragmentation that was the Empire, Alsace, more than any other region perhaps, was a complex whole of very diverse elements, painfully entangled one within another, depending on different and often hostile masters, without any one of them being able to speak more loudly than the others or in the name of all; — next, that, for a long time too, influence, disputed within her by her more powerful neighbors, belonged now to the one, now to the other, according as their state of organization was more or less advanced, more or less suited to assure her of security: considerations as a whole that are rather, no doubt, a consequence of the study of this history, but which it is better to have present in mind from the outset, in order to avoid getting lost in the detail.

In the first times of her union with the Holy Roman Germanic Empire, she was not neglected by the emperors when, for family reasons antedating their elevation to the Empire, they were more directly touched by the affairs of Alsace: thus Frederick Barbarossa, a Hohenstaufen, whose house, before being imperial, governed the duchy of Swabia, to which Alsace was then attached; thus Rudolf of Hapsburg, whose patrimonial possessions extended partly in Switzerland, partly in the Haute-Alsace.

But, from the day when the emperors had no personal reason to interest themselves in her, when their attention, on the contrary, had to turn rather toward the eastern provinces of the Empire menaced by the Slavs and the Hungarians, thereafter, without protection against the others or against herself, Alsace divided herself more and more (1): there were endless wars and pillagings. The bishop of Strasbourg, the city of Strasbourg, the Count Palatine, the Count of Württemberg, the city of Wissembourg, the Swiss, the Count of Lichtenberg, the Lord of Fénétrange, the Duke of Lorraine constantly battle one another at the expense of her tranquility. Add to this the expeditions of all those who enter Alsace and against whom the emperor does not come to protect this too distant country: the adventurers of Enguerrand de Coucy whom the Austrian fiefs of Alsace tempted, the bands of Armagnacs driven from France by Charles VII, then other Armagnacs, under the leadership of the future Louis XI, then dauphin of France, called by the emperor himself to rid him of the Swiss, then the Burgundians of Charles the Bold, called for the same reasons, and against whom the towns united with the Swiss and the duke of Lorraine — until the defeat under the walls of Nancy. Add finally, to crown the difficulties amid which the country was struggling, the religious quarrels recently born between Catholicism and the Reformation — which are going, as we shall see, to determine all the rest of the destinies of Alsace.

[footnote: (1) Cf. J. Heimweh, Question d’Alsace, p. 55 sqq.]

The Reformation had spread easily in several parts of Alsace, the region of Mulhouse, that of Munster, the city of Strasbourg above all, which, as soon as it was won over to Protestantism, became the refuge of many Protestants persecuted in France. The religious question and the political question were intimately mingled. The German Protestants supported the French Huguenots. There was a common enemy, from the political and from the religious point of view: the House of Austria, whose German branch and Spanish branch pursued together the realization of a double design: the omnipotence of Austria and the triumph of Catholicism. The Protestants had, by the Edict of Nantes, acquired in France the liberty of their worship; the Protestants of Germany sought the support of France, and so there was formed, around France, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, for both political and religious interests, a coalition comprising the small Protestant states of Germany, Holland, Sweden, the Swiss. Alsace found herself right in the middle of the mêlée. Richelieu did not lose sight of her, even if he had no fixed design with regard to her, and although the pretty legend is no doubt only a legend: the cardinal hurrying to the death-bed of Father Joseph, his éminence grise, to announce to him triumphantly: “Brisach is ours!” On various occasions, small principalities (the county of Hanau-Lichtenberg), towns (Saverne, Haguenau, Schlestadt, Colmar), weary of being constantly disputed by force of arms, place themselves under the protection of French troops, or of Swedish troops in the king’s pay. And in 1648, at the signing of the treaties of Westphalia, as a consequence and in reward of the protection accorded by the king to the Protestant princes of Germany, the Empire ceded Alsace to France.

But, as is known, Alsace was not at that epoch a compact whole. The Emperor was not the absolute proprietor of a province forming a delimited territorial unity: he possessed there: 1° some hereditary lands (especially in the Haute-Alsace, like the county of Ferrette); 2° a kind of high administration, exercised by his “Prefecture” of Haguenau over the “Ten Free Imperial Cities” (Haguenau, Colmar, Schlestadt, Wissembourg, Landau, Obernai, Rosheim, Munster, Kaysersberg, Turckheim), which had bought from him the right to depend only on him — that is to say, above all, on themselves — without having to fear any suzerainty closer and more inconvenient than his; 3° a simple feudal suzerainty over the rest: seigneurial or ecclesiastical principalities — the lordship of Ribeaupierre, the barony of Fleckenstein, the bishopric of Strasbourg, the republics of Strasbourg and of Mulhouse, lands depending on the bishopric of Speyer, on the county of Württemberg-Montbéliard, on the Palatine house, on the Margrave of Baden, on the Duke of Lorraine.

Hence the discussions in view of peace had been long, subtle, and tangled, moreover without clear conclusion on these points: what exactly did the emperor cede? were they rights of suzerainty? or territories? what did he cede as head of the House of Austria? and what did he cede as representative of the Empire? The confusion subsists in the text of the treaties, where sometimes the emperor retains what the Austrian cedes, and vice versa. The simplest solution would have consisted in making the King of France enter the Holy Empire as vassal of the emperor for Alsace; but the emperor feared the encroaching power of the king, and he preferred to cut his ties with Alsace, while not cutting them altogether. A certain article 87: Teneatur tamen Rex Christianissimus… was later to cause floods of discussion to flow. (1) The preceding articles (73, 74, 76) had enumerated the possessions ceded to the king: Brisach, the landgraviate of Haute-Alsace, the landgraviate of Basse-Alsace, the Sundgau, the Prefecture of the Ten Free Cities; declared that this cession was made to France without any reserve, complete and perpetual; that the emperor renounced, as far as this cession was concerned, the general prohibition against alienating the goods and rights of the Empire. Article 87 supervenes all of a sudden, maintaining for the bishops of Strasbourg and of Basel, the city of Strasbourg, the Ten Free Cities, etc., their “freedom and immediacy with respect to the Holy Roman Empire.” With this closing clause, which puts things back in their former state: Ita tamen ut… “In such a way, however, that nothing be regarded as changed by the present declaration with respect to all the right of supreme sovereignty conceded above.”

[footnote: (1) Cf. Rod. Reuss, Alsace au XVIIᵉ siècle, p. 162 sqq.]

Although there was, beyond any doubt, cession, the entanglement of these clauses sometimes rendered them contradictory. If it were a question of a Homeric chant, one would be tempted to look for the interpolations, the passages fallen out, displaced, badly replaced… Was it weariness from too long negotiations? an imperial stratagem to give and to hold back at once? finesses of diplomats, who wished to forestall the agitation of the independent spirits of Alsace, always quick to disquiet? Perhaps there was also, in that time when battles and treaties were the great raison d’être of princes, a reciprocal but unavowed intention, running implicit between the paragraphs, of leaving the door open to claims, of not definitively limiting either France for Germany or Germany for France. And one would there grasp, still better, as a symbol of that difference of the times — which German theorists take pleasure in not seeing — that today still, there may be in a treaty dangerous interstices, capable of tempting later the litigants of diplomacy and the aggressors of armies, but one would no doubt not find there such an example of confusion in the immediate objects of the transaction: modern states, more jealous of their individuality, do not legally encroach upon one another. The fact remains that if the treaties of Westphalia, with their tamen and their ita, did not clearly determine the definitive situation of Alsace, they at least marked there a decisive forward step: France, which from that epoch lived under a single authority, was more disengaged than the Germany of that time from the subtleties of the feudal régime, and fatally (even apart from the cessions arising from the personal and family goods of the emperor), since she had sovereignty over the rest, she would soon possess the rest of the territory.

Moreover, the uncertainty in which the letter of the treaties of Westphalia sometimes wavered, in those famous articles, had happy effects on French policy. — First, Louis XIV took from it a reason to show himself at once more tenacious in the pursuit of his work and more prudent in the choice of means. Thus he knew the Alsatians were attached to their usages, and that one ought to innovate as little as possible among them; on the other hand, he knew how to establish there a court of justice, as in any newly-united province: which was at once the juridical mark of taking possession by the king, and a means of extending over the new subjects his royal jurisdiction, a little of the spirit of France and the benefit of French unity. He therefore made use of an old Austrian institution, the “Regency,” established at Ensisheim, to which he substituted a “Higher Council,” which he then transferred to Brisach, and which he made an instrument of unification. — Next, one may say that the “Chambers of Reunion” of 1677–1680 were a consequence of the diplomatic obscurities of 1648: this name of Chambers of Reunion designated, as is known, in the Parlements of some frontier cities (Besançon, Metz), certain of their chambers, existing or newly created, whose function was to make precise the articles left obscure in the latest treaties and to make them produce their full effect, to seek out methodically and to “reunite” to the kingdom all that was attached, by virtue of ancient feudal titles or of more recent treaties, to the territories of their resort. (1) It is thus that, besides its normal function of court of last appeal for Alsace, the Higher Council of Brisach also had, from 1680, its “chamber of reunion.”

[footnote: (1) Cf. E. Glasson, Rôle politique du Conseil Souverain d’Alsace, p. 49.]

Here too, one must refer to the time: there was no parity of political civilization between France and Germany, and it was impossible that a country, passing from the German Kleinstaaterei, from Germany infinitely complicated, to France one, should not soon take part, in its personal constitution, if I may say so, of that general unity. Now the treaty of Nijmegen (1679) had just confirmed those of Westphalia in what concerned Alsace: not that it contained an explicit provision on this point, but by the formal exclusion of the clause which the emperor wished to have inserted therein to recall his rights. (2) The decree of the Council of Brisach of March 22, 1680, was therefore only a kind of commentary, with a view to unity, on the treaty of Nijmegen; it proclaimed the principle of the absolute sovereignty of the king in the Basse-Alsace as well as in the Haute, and, in consequence, it “reunited” the last enclave, Strasbourg, capital of the country, which the Imperial troops had evacuated since the peace.

[footnote: (2) Cf. L. Lefébure, Drame de l’âme alsacienne, Correspondant, II, 1908.]

Strasbourg, the independent Strasbourg, had already had, at the time of the Westphalian discussions, the awkwardness of having herself named in article 87, thus binding herself to the other states of Alsace; since then her unhappy adroitness had not corrected itself: liking to tack about, in the flood and ebb of armies, from the one whom she most feared to the one she feared least, she had appeared to fix her conduct in favor of the Imperialists (during the war “of Holland”) at the very moment when Louis XIV held most, if not to her support, at least to her neutrality, and often she had refused the passage of her Rhine bridge to the king’s troops while she granted it to those of the emperor. Thus, when, on September 30, 1681, Strasbourg, enveloped by Louvois’s troops, signed her capitulation — which moreover preserved for her her constitution and her religious liberty; when, in 1697, article 16 of the treaty of Ryswick consecrated the full and entire cession to France of the city of Strasbourg with all her dependencies situated on the left bank of the Rhine, “and for this effect it has been found good to strike the city of Strasbourg from the matricula of the Empire” (1) — it was, no doubt, because the irritating waverings of the “Magistrate” (2) of Strasbourg had had to be put to an end; it was, still more, because, the juridical premises and historical circumstances being given, a conclusion imposed itself: that Strasbourg, one day or another, would finish by detaching herself from that “vast Empire without homogeneity” (3) from which the Rhine separated her, to fall into French unity.

[footnote: (1) Cited by Glasson, Rôle politique, p. 50.] [footnote: (2) The Municipality.] [footnote: (3) Legrelle, Louis XIV et Strasbourg, p. 87: “…a small State, placed, no doubt, on the very vague confines of the Germanic Empire, but accepting communal life with it only at its convenience and at its own hours…; its pretension as well as its tradition was, in sum, to depend only on its own magistrates and to lean only in case of absolute urgency on that vast Empire without limits and without homogeneity, which, in this part especially, had been crumbling for several centuries already into municipalities or into seigneuries.”]

Alsace henceforth formed part of the kingdom of France. Here as elsewhere, the king governed by his Intendants; if the work to be accomplished was delicate, the choice of persons was happy; the king’s agents knew how to reorganize the country, to centralize authority there, to assimilate Alsace little by little to France, without imposing on her a vexatious uniformity and while respecting her traditions. (1) It was, in effect, the cleverness of the new régime to satisfy the unconscious aspirations of Alsace and not to demand from her in exchange the sacrifice of her personality. Because of the regard which the situation itself commanded the king of France to have for them, the spirit of independence of the Alsatians had lost nothing by the change which had been wrought in their destinies. And they only recognized all the better the benefit of French administration, of the ever-present protection of a power one and strong which procured for Alsace a security long unknown, revived agriculture, favored the creation of soon powerful industries, allowed, in short, the country to pursue at its ease a development to which the Kleinstaaterei would no doubt not have offered, for a long time, such favorable conditions.

[footnote: (1) Cf. L. Lefébure, Drame de l’âme alsacienne.]

Thus the union tended to become with the years closer and more intimate. In the middle of the eighteenth century, during the War of the Austrian Succession, when Louis XV arrived to take the direction of military operations and deliver the country from the terror of the Pandurs, Alsace gave him a triumphal reception. In 1781, Strasbourg celebrated by great fêtes the centenary of her union with France, and the “Magistrate” then expressed himself in these terms:

All the orders and citizens of the city of Strasbourg, having for a hundred years enjoyed under the dominion of France a tranquility and a happiness unknown to their ancestors, have shown the unanimous desire publicly to testify to their gratitude and their attachment. (1)

[footnote: (1) J. Heimweh, Question d’Alsace, p. 23.]

At the beginning of the Revolution (July 7, 1789), the citizens of Strasbourg had this address presented to “Our lords the Estates-General of France”:

The citizens of Strasbourg share at the extremity of the country the general gladness at the reunion of the representatives of the French nation of all classes, ranks, and dignities, in a single fasces which combines force and light. We and our descendants, my lords, will rest tranquilly in the shade of that majestic tree which is going to take on a new life by the combined efforts of the good father and of the virtuous sons of the fatherland. (2)

[footnote: (2) Rod. Reuss, Alsace pendant la Révolution, t. I.]

Speeches that were not of mere form. There already entered into them something of the sincere sympathies that the French régime had little by little brought to birth; and more than one realized, like that burgher of Strasbourg who was going to write the history of his city, the reasons why union with France was the happiness of Alsace. (3)

[footnote: (3) “Diese Übergabe an Frankreich war Strassburgs Glücke” — “This surrender to France was the happiness of Strasbourg” — in vol. III of the History of Strasbourg, Neue vaterländische Geschichte der Stadt Strassburg (5 vols., 1791–1801) by Jean Frieße, Strasbourg, 1792 (cited in Messager d’Alsace-Lorraine, 28 September 1907).]

Alsace was ready for the great national fusion that was the Revolution.

b) — LORRAINE

I shall pause less long over the history of Lorraine. First, because only one part of Lorraine will be included in the green border of Alsace-Lorraine; next, because Germany has never claimed it except as a postscript to her claim of Alsace, sensing that the appearances of reasons by which she pretended to justify the latter would evaporate still more quickly when the discussion bore them upon the former: had it ever only been a question of Metz, (1) of Château-Salins, of Sarrebourg, would the theorists have spoken with the same assurance of common language, common manners, and common race? Finally, a reason drawn from her history itself: Lorraine developed along a simpler course, a little less encumbered than Alsace with territorial and feudal complications.

[footnote: (1) Which, moreover — it must not be forgotten — is not properly Lorraine, but the Trois-Évêchés; enclaved in Lorraine, common speech has wrongly taken the habit of incorporating it therein.]

In fact, after the death of Charlemagne, the dissolution of the Lorrainian part had not continued indefinitely. The great officers, depositaries of authority, had, as we have seen, taken advantage of the troubles that accompanied the parceling-out of the imperial succession and the formation of the Germanic federation, to make themselves independent and, relatively, to make some unity. Disorder, here, instead of continuing into a dust of sovereignties, coagulated: instead of multiple seigneuries, scattered, domains of petty princes, fragments of successions attached to some powerful fief of Germany or of France, the country was not long in dividing itself into a few new organisms, thanks to those local chiefs who knew how to constitute them around themselves: particularly the duke Rainier and his son Gislebert (first half of the tenth century), who tacked unceasingly between east and west according to their own best interests.

The entry of the Lorrainian region into the Empire did not change the meaning, and, if I may say so, the form, of its history. The tenth century was not yet finished when a Lorraine was forming, already recognizable to our eyes: the ancient Carolingian kingdom of Lorraine having in effect separated into two pieces, which were never to rejoin themselves, one of them formed the duchy of Haute-Lorraine, or Mosellane, which comprised essentially the region of the upper Moselle, Nancy, Toul, Verdun, Metz. (1) Then (tenth–twelfth centuries), on the one hand, territorial dissolution continuing, on the other hand, the ancient “offices” transforming themselves into hereditary powers and properties, from the Mosellane were born the five elements, soon reduced to three and even to two, which one finds throughout the history of this region until their successive absorption by France: 1° and 2°: the duchy of Lorraine and the county of Bar; 3°, 4°, and 5°: the counties of Metz, of Toul, and of Verdun: all particular States under the tutelage of the Holy Empire, but which, French by language and custom, insensibly loosened the bonds that attached them to it.

[footnote: (1) The other, Basse-Lorraine or Lothier, extended between the Rhine below the Moselle, and the sea.]

The duchy of Lorraine, after having passed into divers hands, came to rest in those of Gérard of Alsace, whose lineage was to form the modern ducal family of Lorraine. From Philip the Fair on, although they were still under the tutelage of the Holy Empire, a new relation linked, on the other side, the successors of Gérard to France: the king of France, by his marriage, was count of Champagne, and the duke of Lorraine becomes his vassal for the fief of Neufchâteau. Hence one sees Lorrainers fighting beside the Frenchmen of the king, on the days of Courtrai, of Mons-en-Pévèle, of Crécy. Hence one sees the dukes mixing themselves up in the quarrels of Orléans and of Burgundy. And, when, from dangerous alliances to haughty intrusions, this struggle of parties took on the character of a national war against the foreigner, it happened that René of Anjou, son-in-law of Duke Charles II of Lorraine, campaigned against the English with Joan of Arc.

This René of Anjou was heir of the county of Bar. Married to the daughter of Charles II, who had no son, he administered the duchy in the name of his wife after the death of his father-in-law (1431). Lorraine and Bar were therefore reunited in his hands, and, save for short periods, did not again disjoin themselves. The Angevin dynasty came near, moreover, to being dangerous for the country: adventurous knights, these princes took pleasure only in attempts at distant conquests. Fortunately, their absences left authority to more level-headed regents, bishops or lords of the country, under whom, peaceably, it developed. Lastly, their successors, a cadet branch of the house of Lorraine, made a great step forward, both in the unity of the Lorrainian lands and in their independence with a French tendency: René II, who had energetically affirmed the personality of Lorraine by breaking the fortune of Charles the Bold under the walls of Nancy (1477), knew how to reunite under his power or that of his own, not only the county of Bar, but also the bishoprics of Metz, of Toul, of Verdun, the county of Blâmont, Épinal, Sarrebourg, and to consecrate the union of the Barrois with Lorraine, ordering that for the future the Barrois should always pass to the heir of Lorraine, without ever being detached from it to the profit of the cadets of the ducal family. And Antoine, successor of René, obtained from the Diet of Nuremberg, in 1542, a declaration ratified by Charles V the following year, by virtue of which the duchy of Lorraine, in return for a financial contribution, was henceforth freed from all jurisdiction on the part of the Holy Empire: it is henceforth an independent duchy, liber et non incorporabilis.

In the same period, Metz (with Toul and Verdun, the Trois-Évêchés) was also freeing itself from the Empire. Just as the dukes of Lorraine, the bishops of these three bishoprics had tended toward independence, obtaining privileges over the counts, becoming in their place the masters of the cities. At Metz, however, more than at Toul and at Verdun, their power was held in check by an ambitious and strong bourgeoisie. Between these two powers, a third, that of the emperor, appeared sometimes, rarely. The emperor possesses indeed, at Metz, at the end of the twelfth century, command and jurisdiction: ban and justice; but he delegates them to the bishop, and only resumes them in cases where he is personally present at Metz. (1) And men did not care for his presence. As distrust toward him increased, the leaning toward France grew stronger. Above all, neutrality would have been desired. There came a moment when it was no longer possible. In the great struggle of the sixteenth century between the houses of France and of Austria, the armies of the two adversaries traversed and disputed the country unceasingly. The king of France had as allies the princes of the Empire, adversaries of the emperor, who, to thank Henry II for the protection accorded to the Protestants of the north against Charles V, thought it good (treaty of 1551) “that king Henry II should make himself patron in the cities that are not of Germanic language” [Metz, Toul, Verdun]: “seeing,” they said, “that the very Christian king bears himself toward us Germans in this affair, with succor and aid, not only as a friend, but as a charitable father, we will have our whole lives long an eternal gratitude for it.” (2) The king’s troops occupied Metz in 1552, and Charles V tried in vain to retake it. Departure from the Empire and union with France were consecrated in 1648 by the treaties of Westphalia.

[footnote: (1) Cf. Prost, Lorraine, p. 95–97.] [footnote: (2) Cited by A. Sorel, Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande, t. I, p. 209–210.]

The duchy of Lorraine, declared non incorporabilis, had not for all that, like Metz, changed incorporation: it remained liber. But it found itself, every day more, mixed up in French policy — always, being of an independent humor, with alternatives of confidence and of disquiet: the hand stretched out, for alliance, or for a good prize, then withholding itself and withdrawing suddenly, for fear of being seized up to the wrist and too tightly grasped. Thus duke Charles III, son-in-law of Henry II, had let the king of France seize the Trois-Évêchés, then patronized the League, until the Guises had disabused him of his hope of winning the throne of France for his son. Thus Charles IV, who spent his time fighting alongside the enemies of France, making by treaties concessions to the king, and quitting his duchy, after each treaty, in order not to have to execute it: but Louis XIV profited from it, needing security on the side of Lorraine, to occupy strongholds there, put garrisons there, have justice rendered there in his name, install his authority or his influence there. So that in 1697, when the treaty of Ryswick had pronounced the restitution of Lorraine and Bar to Leopold, son of Charles, it was by leaning on French prestige that the new duke tried to reconstitute his Lorrainian State: ordinances of justice copied on those of Louis XIV, — taxes of the French system, with French abuses, — expenses for fêtes and buildings, as at Versailles, mad often, as at Versailles. As for the rest, he showed himself docile with regard to France: toward Louis XIV, whom he let put a garrison at Nancy in 1702, — and, later, toward Louis XV, who had declared Lorraine neutral, but toward whom Leopold engaged himself to let this neutrality be violated if occasions of war should require it. From century to century, as the bonds that linked her to the Germanic aggregate loosened or broke, Lorraine, which had absorbed Bar and realized unity for herself, tended in her turn to let herself be absorbed by the unitary monarchy of the kings of France: like a river, swollen itself by its tributary streams, which goes to merge, by a fatal slope, into the unity of the great river.

When, at the death of Leopold in 1729, the duchess took the government, in the absence of their son, Francis III, who was being brought up by his grandfather the emperor Charles VI at the court of Vienna to become the husband of Maria Theresa, this foreign and distant circumstance precipitated by a final push the destiny of Lorraine toward France. The emperor had in fact just engaged himself in the War of the Polish Succession; now, his candidate, Augustus of Saxony, became king of Poland only on the reservation of an indemnification for the dethroned king, Stanislas Leczinski, to whom were given the states of Francis III (who would receive as compensation the duchy of Tuscany). It is thus that Stanislas Leczinski became duke of Lorraine and of Bar (1736), for his lifetime, on condition of leaving, after him, the duchies to the crown of France. That is to say that, by anticipation, the administration became French from the reign of Stanislas; somewhat rough at times, in its desire to efface the memories of the past, it nevertheless provoked only passing discontents, quickly forgotten: beneficent, good-natured, magnificent, Stanislas knew how to make the new régime loved. The capital of this interim sovereign, royal manager on behalf of his son-in-law Louis XV, Nancy, became a spacious and luxurious city, of a very French taste, — just at the same time when at Metz the lieutenant-governor, de Belle-Isle, then bishop Coislin, were also raising admirable monuments: the two neighboring sister cities were receiving simultaneously, although under different administrations, the ineffaceable imprint of national art.

At the death of Stanislas (1766), the duchy reverted to France, and the intendants had no difficulty in pursuing the work of assimilation: for a long time, assimilation was made in spirits, — and the Revolution was approaching, which was going to render it definitive, visible to all eyes, and conscious of itself.

3. — Since the Revolution

One may say that from this moment on the history of the French provinces loses a little of its individuality every day. However, at the opening of the revolutionary period, the traces still appear of their particular pasts. — Thus, on the occasion of the convocation of the Estates-General, one finds again the memories of ancient Alsace, respected by France: first in form, Alsace not having “bailiffs and seneschals of the sword,” the functions attached to their charges “at the various holdings of assemblies of Estates-General” in France were entrusted to three “gentlemen” specially designated by the king; then, in substance, what we should call the electoral constituencies were partly a consequence of the ancient régime: the city of Strasbourg and the “Ten Imperial Cities” had their places set apart in the decree relative to the election. The province of Alsace had been, some years earlier, in view of the institution of the Provincial Assembly, divided into six districts, and these six districts, joined two by two (Haguenau and Wissembourg, Colmar and Schlestadt, Belfort and Huningue) served as the basis for the elections of 1789. The clergy and the nobility of Strasbourg were convoked in the districts of Haguenau and Wissembourg, the clergy and the nobility of the “Ten Cities” “in the districts in which each of the said ten cities is situated”; as for the Third Estate, besides two deputies elected by the Third Estate of Haguenau and Wissembourg, three elected by the Third Estate of Colmar and Schlestadt, three elected by the Third Estate of Belfort and Huningue, there were, for Strasbourg, two deputies, and, for the Ten Cities, two deputies also, “deputies of the Third Estate of the Ten Imperial Cities of Alsace.” (1)

— Thus also the situation of the “possessioned princes”: a certain number of princes of the empire (duke of Deux-Ponts, duke of Württemberg, landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, margrave of Brandenburg, prince-bishop of Strasbourg, bishops of Speyer, Cologne, Trier, Basel) possessed vast domains in Alsace, where they still exercised some of their ancient feudal rights; (2) and when the French Revolution abolished, on August 4, the feudal régime in the whole kingdom, the possessioned princes protested, appealed to the emperor: it was even the origin of the conflict with Austria, and of the great counter-revolutionary war.

[footnote: (1) Regulation of February 7, 1789, “made by the king for the execution of his letters of convocation to the next Estates-General in his province of Alsace,” published by Rod. Reuss, Alsace pendant la Révolution, t. I, p. 3.] [footnote: (2) Cf. P. Muret, Affaire des princes possessionnés, p. 1.]

But, “bailiffs and seneschals of the sword,” or “gentlemen” designated by the king to replace them, “possessioned princes” and what subsisted in Alsace of their feudal rights, the Revolution swept all away. If these princes did not send deputies to the Constituent Assembly, the inhabitants of the territories possessed by them in Alsace had their representatives there, and Merlin de Douai was able to say, at the National Assembly, on October 28, 1790, that the time was no more, though still close, “when kings, skilled in taking advantage of the title of pastors of peoples that the sacred books give them in another sense, disposed as true proprietors of what they called their flocks”; that “the Alsatian people clearly manifested, last year, the wish to be united to France”; that “its will alone consummated or legitimized the union”; and that it has become French “because it really willed it.” (1)

[footnote: (1) Archives parlementaires, t. XX, p. 75 sqq.: Report of Merlin de Douai on the affair of the possessioned princes.]

It was then that, on the occasion of the great fête of the national guards of Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche-Comté gathered at Strasbourg, Frédéric de Dietrich, mayor of the city, received on the platform of the cathedral and had raised the first tricolor flags unfurled at Strasbourg, and that “this spectacle, seen from the opposite banks of the Rhine,” says the official minutes, “taught Germany that the empire of liberty was founded in France.” (2) At the same time, the national guards of Metz — of Metz where soon “patriotism” would be “a passion” (3) — sent to the National Assembly an address by which they declared that “their zeal for the defense of the Constitution” would not be confined “to the enclosure of their city”; that they did “homage to the Assembly of a memory dear to all the hearts of Metz, that of the ancient constitution which their city enjoyed, a free, republican constitution, during which the people of Metz contracted alliances with great peoples and had sovereigns in their pay”; “that the new constitution leaves them nothing to regret in the ancient existence of the Republic, and that on the contrary their fathers would no doubt be jealous of their happiness, were it possible for them to contemplate it.” (1)

[footnote: (2) June 11, 1790: Reuss, Cathédrale de Strasbourg, p. 81.] [footnote: (3) Letter of the commissioners sent by the National Assembly into the departments of the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Ardennes (1 July 1792), cited by Larchey, Pays messin, in Lorraine, p. 85.] [footnote: (1) Minutes of the National Assembly, of February 6, 1790 (Id., ibid., p. 195).]

The new “existence” would be, finally, the suppression of all that still remained of the personal inequalities and the territorial complexities of former times: no more Alsace, no more Lorraine, no more “Ten Imperial Cities,” no more county of Hanau-Lichtenberg, no more lordship of Ferrette or elsewhere, no more prince-bishop, no more little intermediate sovereigns — ruinous, half-foreign — who at times prevented one from seeing France: but an identical organization for the whole country, “departments” replacing and unifying the past: Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin, Meurthe, Moselle, Meuse, Vosges; all Frenchmen citizens, no longer subjects; all equal, all French, from whatever province they came, at whatever hour their province had become French; all united, without distinction of origin, against whoever should menace the common fatherland. So, when the threat rumbled, from all those villages of Lorraine where the curates in the pulpit translated the Gospel into revolutionary language, (2) from all those villages of Alsace where there resounded with a formidable accent of the soil the patriotic professions of faith, men set out, who were the soldiers of the Revolution, and her generals. It is known how these Alsatians and Lorrainers willed, by their energy and their blood, to demonstrate their quality of Frenchmen: Kléber, Kellermann, of Strasbourg, Rapp, of Colmar, Lefebvre, of Rouffach, Ney, of Sarrelouis, Custine, Lasalle, Richepanse, of Metz, Molitor, of Hayange, Mouton, of Phalsbourg, Éblé, of Saint-Jean-de-Rohrbach; — and that at Strasbourg, in the home of the mayor Dietrich, La Marseillaise was sung for the first time.

[footnote: (2) “In a parish of the neighborhood [of Longuyon] a service was held that God might thwart the projects of those who wish to undermine the Constitution. The curate intoned the good psalm. At each verse, the girls and the women added this response: Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles. The men on the right side cried out at once: Fecit potentiam in brachio suo, dispersit superbos mente cordis sui… The good pastor had taken care to explain to his flock that the first phrase meant: He has humbled the aristocrats and has raised up the good citizens. The second: He has shown the strength of his arm and made the projects against the heavens to miscarry…” (“Réponse…, by A. Courtois, citizen of Longuyon,” cited by L. Larchey, Pays messin, in Lorraine.)]

Since then there were in the state of the ancient Alsace and the ancient Lorraine only a few territorial modifications, consequences of the Revolution itself (Mulhouse, a small Swiss republic enclaved in French territory, hampered in its development by a very severe customs barrier, asked in 1798 for its incorporation into France) or of the wars and treaties of the revolutionary and imperial era (1814: loss of the arrondissement of Delémont and of part of that of Porrentruy in the Haut-Rhin, of the canton of Dahn and of part of that of Landau in the Bas-Rhin; 1815: loss of Landau, Sarrelouis, Philippeville, Marienbourg). Prejudicial removals of territory, no doubt; but of any diminution in the moral inheritance of the revolutionary generation, none: Alsace and Lorraine were French, and remained so, simply, each day more so, living the national life, taking part in the government of the country (Humann, General Schneider, ministers of Louis-Philippe), more closely linked to the center by new communications (canal from the Rhône to the Rhine, canal from the Marne to the Rhine, railway from Paris to Strasbourg). In 1848, Alsace celebrated by enthusiastic fêtes the second centenary of her union with France: a remembrance given to the past in order to congratulate oneself that it was the past. In a word, Alsace and Lorraine no longer had a history: that in 1836 Prince Louis Bonaparte had tried to raise a regiment at Strasbourg, this was no more Alsatian history than the attempt of 1840 was the history of Boulogne. Their history was no longer provincial history: it was that of France.

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II

THE WILL OF GERMANY

In 1870, then, the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin, the Meurthe, the Moselle, the Vosges were indeed French, by the same title and by the same heart as all the departments of France. Alsace, Lorraine, the Trois-Évêchés, replaced for eighty years by new administrative divisions, which were at once effect and cause of a new moral state, form an integral part and, it seems, an inseparable part of the national bloc. This is precisely the hour when in Europe there seems to triumph — consequence of the three French Revolutions — the right of peoples to dispose of themselves above the personal conveniences of princes, to suppress out-of-date interior barriers in order to amalgamate and define themselves according to their own will alone, in a word, to give themselves each a political personality conformed to the exigencies of their national consciousness. Italy has just shaken off the yoke of the foreigner; Piedmont, Lombardy, Parma, Modena, Tuscany, the Two Sicilies have just melted into an Italian nation. France has powerfully contributed to this work; and it is only “by the free consent of the legitimate sovereign, sustained by popular adhesion,” (1) “without any constraint of the will of the populations” (2) that she has gained, as recompense for her services, Savoy and the County of Nice: on April 22, 1860, these populations approved the cession, by 130,533 votes out of 130,839 suffrages expressed (135,449 electors registered). In Germany itself, in rough Germany still feudal — if, of the hundreds of German states which existed before 1789, the Germanic Confederation of 1815 had numbered no more than thirty-nine; if the Zollverein drew together twenty-five million Germans under the direction of Prussia; if at the Parliament of Frankfurt the president had spoken of a Constitution to be made “for Germany, for the entire Empire”; if the National Union since 1859, the Reform Union since 1862 have extended their action every day — it is because our revolutionary sense of nationalities had crossed the Rhine as well as the Alps, animating with the same breath the sons of the Prussian junkers and the grandsons of the plebeians of Rome. And France, who, for her part, had for centuries been independent and unified, did not suspect that at that very hour she was about to suffer the cruelest blow to her national right, that one of her members was about to be broken off in pre-revolutionary fashion, by proceeding by takings of territory, without occupying oneself with souls.

[footnote: (1) Address of Napoleon III to the forty Savoyard notables who brought him the wishes of the country, March 21, 1860, in: Saint-Genis, Histoire de Savoie, III, p. 359.] [footnote: (2) Article 1 of the treaty of Turin (24 March 1860); id., ibid., p. 360.]

Why should she have suspected it? There could be, to tear from her Alsace and Lorraine, only those reasons to which the great ancestor Frederick II alluded when he said, à propos of Silesia, that one must first annex and one would always afterwards find theorists to justify the annexation already accomplished.

History? We have just seen what the Holy Roman Germanic Empire was, very different from the new Germany in formation; by what circumstances, normal in the political combinations of those times, Alsace and Lorraine had been detached from it; how they had attached themselves to France. — Ethnography? It would be indeed one of those post-conquest justifications, to claim to validate a political demand in the nineteenth century by Merovingian ethnographic signatures. Besides, the measurement of skulls is often in our favor, not only in Lorraine but even in Alsace; and even “the Alemannic elements” of Alsace are “strongly mingled with Celto-Roman blood.” (1) Finally, if the preoccupation with grouping by races were sovereignly to direct, beyond the consent of those concerned, contemporary politics, why should not Germany take back from Russia the province of Livonia and the city of Riga? why should not Holland belong to Prussia, Belgium to France, Portugal to Spain? why should not Scotland detach itself from England? why should there not be two or three Switzerlands, three or four Russias, and three or four Austrias? (2) Besides, the example of the Poles, annexed in the manner of Frederick II, proves that Germany could only lean upon the theory of races with an egoistic discretion: good for her, the theory would be worth nothing against her. — Language? But more than one language is spoken in France; in Switzerland, three are spoken, and Switzerland is one, of a fiercely safeguarded unity; the United States of America speak English, and they have detached themselves from England. (1) And then, for the argument to have any value, one would have to avoid ruining it oneself by extending one’s claims to excess: Belfort, a part of Alsace, the greater part of Lorraine, Metz, are of French language. — The natural frontier? A more novel argument: the Vosges, being mountain, are truly a frontier, while the Rhine, river, is not. One must not however forget that the Rhine is wide, violent, that without the bridges it is a difficult obstacle, that the wild torrent it was during centuries has only been embanked, regularized, civilized under the Second Empire, — and that, on the other hand, the Vosges are not the Alps. Besides, here too, behind the theory, the real thought appears: it was not to recognize the Vosges as frontier, to wish to go beyond them, as far as beyond Château-Salins, Metz, Thionville… Would the Germans defend the same principle if their neighbors had amused themselves by transporting it symmetrically, from the west to the east of the river, and by claiming for France as far as the crest of the Black Forest?…

[footnote: (1) Cf. W. Wittich, Génie national…, p. 8.] [footnote: (2) Cf. Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alsace est-elle allemande…?, p. 9.] [footnote: (1) Id., ibid., p. 10.]

France, theoretically, rationally, might therefore be tranquil. But, in fact, she ought not to have been so, because she ought to have known: all these arguments, for many years, had been circulating in Germany, spreading by book, by journal, by speech, into all minds. That France had to fear for a piece of herself — there was no reason for it, neither of history, nor of race, nor of language, nor of natural frontier. But there was another, and of that, France should have suspected: it was the will of Germany. Prussia, Germany have had Alsace and Lorraine because they willed them. And that will would not let itself be intimidated by another will, even if it came from Alsace or from Lorraine. The spirit of the junkers was on watch. For it, history, the world had not changed; conquest in the sixteenth or in the seventeenth century, conquest in the nineteenth, there was no difference; (1) and if anything of the ideas of the Revolution had entered into it, it was on condition of serving it without hampering it when it should wish to make use of them against others; thus the principle of nationalities, the inspirer of conscious and free national formations, was to degenerate into Faustrecht, (2) to deform itself, in German hands, into a principle of oppression and of dissolution against the old French nationality. (3)

[footnote: (1) Cf. Albert Sorel, Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande, t. I, p. 209–210. See in the Annexes.] [footnote: (2) “Right of the fist.”] [footnote: (3) In the admirable little brochure cited above, that Fustel de Coulanges, “former professor at Strasbourg,” as he styles himself on the cover, wrote as a “Reply to M. Mommsen, professor at Berlin,” at the beginning of the Franco-German war, this deformation of the principle of nationalities is exposed with a perfect clarity. Cf. also E. Lavisse, Vue générale…, p. 213. See in the Annexes.]

For a long time Germany had known what wound she wished to inflict; for a long time she had been aiming, without hiding it.

Already, in the time when territorial exchanges were more lightly combined, German regret had at times manifested itself. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the same princes who had so willingly abandoned the Trois-Évêchés and Alsace to France to obtain her protection against the House of Austria would have profited no less willingly from the misfortunes of the declining Great King to take back what they had given: in 1709, the Diet demanded Lorraine, Alsace, the Trois-Évêchés, and the Franche-Comté. Analogous attempts later, disguised or avowed, divined, denied, in the course of those diplomatic games which the governments of Joseph II, Frederick II, and Louis XV took pleasure in: Frederick II speaks of them, — and disapproves of them, — because at that moment the ambition of Austria could give umbrage to the king of Prussia: ”…All those acquisitions would have formed as it were a gallery which, from Vienna, by fitting themselves one to another, would have led her to the banks of the Rhine, where Alsace… could be repeated, which finally led to that Lorraine, which had once been the domain of Joseph’s ancestors.” (1) On the other hand, at the beginning of the French Revolution, it is the agents of Prussia who urge the possessioned princes to demand the reunion of Alsace to the Empire. Then, on several occasions, in the upheaval of the revolutionary wars, the emperor began to hope again: in entering upon the territory of France, the allies of 1792 fully counted, if they did not succeed in saving the king, on carrying off something of the kingdom; and, in 1794, if Alsace and Lorraine were preserved, this was already only because of Poland, and because the preoccupation with the east came in time to divert the imperial attention from the west: to assure himself a compensation in proportion to the parts taken by Prussia and Russia in Poland, the emperor would have wished the western German frontier to be carried as far as the Somme and the Meuse. Thus, Protestant princes or Catholic emperor, Prussia or Austria, by turns, strove to come back upon the past. But these were hardly, up to here, more than games of princes.

[footnote: (1) Frederick II, Œuvres Historiques, edit. Preuss, vol. VI, p. 30 and 192, cited by L. Ehrard, Question d’Alsace-Lorraine et Frédéric-le-Grand, p. 5.]

When, Napoleon defeated and France invaded, negotiations opened, Alsace was very threatened, Alsace first and above all, but Lorraine also with Alsace. The ardent poet Arndt had, in 1813, given the signal; in his brochure: Der Rhein, Deutschlands Strom, nicht Deutschlands Grenze, (1) he claimed for Germany, not only what the French had occupied of the banks of the Rhine, right and left, since the Revolution, but also what had belonged to them before 1789: Alsace; and not only of the banks of the Rhine, but also those of the Moselle, the Meuse, the Saar. The formulas of Arndt had a tremendous echo throughout the country: 1813 is the year of Leipzig; every German trembled to the depth of his soul with the common effort toward independence, and felt that the struggle would not be in vain. Brochures (Is the Rhine the natural and sure frontier of Germany?), poems (The Frontier, by Friedrich Stolberg), newspaper articles (Deutsche Blätter, Rheinischer Merkur) multiplied themselves, giving the same watchword, raising the same cry, taking up these ideas, amplifying them with eloquence, claiming Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg, and the Low Countries, and the Franche-Comté, the whole “inheritance of Hapsburg and of Burgundy,” as Arndt said; Alsace and Lorraine “torn from the Empire, avulsa imperio,” said Gagern; “the old German frontier and its fortresses of Alsace and Lorraine,” one read in the Rheinischer Merkur; the entire left bank of the Rhine, to be reunited in a kingdom of Burgundy, in the Deutsche Blätter. Naturally, the ideas of these writers are found again among the princes and army chiefs: the son of the Grand-Duke of Baden refuses to go to Strasbourg “as a traveler”; it is “at the head of his troops” that he ought to enter it; the king of Württemberg wants Alsace for himself, or, failing Alsace, Montbéliard; the Prussian generals demand, for their part, one Alsace and Lorraine as ramparts to Germany, another at least Strasbourg and Landau as guarantees; and Blücher, receiving the municipal council of Nancy, kindly wishes to bring back to the Lorrainers the happy time “which their ancestors enjoyed under the paternal government of the old dukes.” (1)

[footnote: (1) “The Rhine, river of Germany, not frontier of Germany.”] [footnote: (1) Cf. A. Chuquet, Alsace en 1814, p. 137 sqq.]

Happily, the allies feared rendering the task too difficult to the Bourbons if, bringing them back in their baggage-wagons, they should have themselves, as the price of this unpopular journey, two or three French provinces ceded to them. Besides, “the allies” was often but a diplomatic expression: they were discussing among themselves, watching one another; now, the Tsar Alexander wished, from his duchy of Warsaw (formed by Napoleon from the “Prussian” and “Austrian” Polands), to make an independent kingdom, of which however he himself would be king; to compensate her for her lost Poland, he would give Austria Alsace; but for Austria, Alsace was very far off, and would constitute, by its position between France and Germany, a permanent occasion of conflict dangerous for everyone; besides, Metternich would on no account leave to Russia the parts of “Austrian” Poland which it had been necessary to deliver to Napoleon; Austria and Prussia therefore engaged themselves, to hamper Russian ambition, not to permit any of the powers to enlarge themselves at the expense of France such as she was on January 1, 1792. And this is how the losses of France on her eastern frontier were limited as we have seen above, (1) — and how German hopes were deferred.

[footnote: (1) P. 41.]

Deferred only. When in 1840 the ambitious agitation of the Pasha of Egypt Mehemet Ali nearly provoked a European conflagration, beneath the disquiet aroused in Germany by the combative pride of Thiers, Armand Carrel, Edgar Quinet, the Temps, the National, the Débats, there always appeared the same regret and the same desire. Resentment was felt against the princes and diplomats of 1815 for having let the prey escape. After the great success of Becker’s “Deutscher Rhein,” old Arndt sang in his turn: “Come, my dear Germany, united and bold! — … We shall entertain you — With what flattery and ruse have acquired for you, — Strasbourg and Metz and Lorraine: — You shall pay, you shall restore!…” In a poem in manuscript found on the table of the Prince of Prussia, the future emperor William I, there were these verses: “The Rhine must become again — Throughout all its course — The good of German lands! — Unfurl your banner! — And thou, people of the Vosges — And of the forest of the Ardennes, — We will deliver thee — From the yoke of the foreign impostor — … — So that one day thy children — May be Germans — And celebrate the vanquishers — Of their fathers!” (1) And, in 1841, although the fears born of the incident of 1840 were appeased, the future Marshal von Moltke made in a German review the theory of the rights of Germany over Alsace and Lorraine, threatening France with the just anger of Germany, which would draw her sword from the scabbard if ever France should tear up the treaties of 1814–1815, — and which would not put it back, this time, before having exercised all her right and exacted complete payment of the French debt. (2)

[footnote: (1) G. Raphaël, Rhin allemand, p. 64–65.] [footnote: (2) J. Heimweh, Triple-Alliance et Alsace-Lorraine, p. ix.]

Finally, in measure as Germany felt her confidence in herself grow, the times appeared closer, the distant expectation more sure of realizing its object; and there was no longer always need of notorious incidents in international relations to provoke the manifestation of the Germanic sentiment. Polemics of journalists, political views of sovereigns, conversations of professors, cartels of students: more than one word was then pronounced which ought to have echoed as a more efficacious warning. — At the end of 1846, a German publicist, Ch. Biedermann, had dared to be astonished that one spoke so much, among Germans, “of the lively inclination that draws the Alsatian toward Germany; of his regrets, of the uneasiness he experiences at being no longer with us…” Does anyone believe, he added, that Alsace would “voluntarily renounce France, which already assures her of all that the movement of minds still wishes to conquer elsewhere?…” Immediately, the semi-official German newspapers protested, and one of them, killing as is said two birds with one stone, did not fear to compare Alsace and Lorraine to Poland, to claim that they were not more legitimately acquired by France, than the city of Cracow by Austria. (1) In 1856, the king of Württemberg said to M. von Bismarck:

[footnote: (1) Ch. Staehling, Strasbourg et l’Alsace, t. I, p. 21.]

We must have Strasbourg. So long as Strasbourg shall be an exit door for a powerfully armed nation, I shall fear that my country be invaded by the foreigner before the Confederation can come to my aid. The knot is at Strasbourg. So long as that place shall not be German, it will prevent southern Germany from devoting itself to the German national political life. (2)

[footnote: (2) A. de Rippoltskirch, Alsace-Lorraine, p. 9.]

In 1861, Kirschleger, the celebrated botanist, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Strasbourg, attending a congress of naturalists at Speyer, was spoken to by his German fellow-diners of the return of Alsace to the Confederation; and he had, to cut short their insistence, to reply in the energetic style: “You ought at least to ask us if we have any wish to return to you… We wish to remain French.” (1) A little later, when the Luxembourg affair heated minds on both sides of the frontier, the students of Strasbourg sent an address to the German students:

[footnote: (1) Ch. Staehling, Strasbourg et l’Alsace, t. II, p. 113.]

Of war, we will none; of national hatred, we know none. Doubtless, if war were inevitable, we should not haggle over our sacrifices to France; but today, while there is yet time, we come to hold out our hand to you and to ask of you your concurrence, to defend in our two countries the cause of peace and of liberty… Unite Germany, but by liberty and for progress; it is in the same spirit that we too will accomplish our task… (2)

[footnote: (2) L’Industriel Alsacien (Mulhouse), 3 May 1867.]

To this appeal, of a very elevated sentiment and a very dignified tone, the members of the Burschenschaft of Berlin — “that is to say, of the democratic party of the youth of the German universities” (3) — answered with this haughty affirmation of the necessity of return to Germany:

[footnote: (3) A. Schneegans, in Courrier du Bas-Rhin (Strasbourg), 19 May 1867: “The history of the Burschenschaft is the core of the history of the national and liberal movement in Germany.”]

Renegades and turncoats are detested by everyone, and you cannot make an exception… At a time when the little nations, the Greeks, the Romanians, the Serbs, the Slavs are awaking from their torpor and remembering their nationality, you, Alsatians and Lorrainers, cannot persist in your apathy… What! you would renounce your nationality!… march against Germany, our and your mother! What! you would pierce the breast of your alma mater?… Quit your state of bastards, students of Alsace and of Lorraine, become again first in your hearts the true children of the German fatherland… Then, we too, when we shall be victorious in the next war, which is beyond doubt, we shall press you fraternally against our strong breast. But before that, never! Dixi mus et salvavimus animam. (1)

[footnote: (1) Impartial du Rhin (Strasbourg), 19 May 1867.]

— In parallel, the little books resumed their office. In 1860, a compact and grave brochure, edited at Berlin, without author’s name, under this title simple to the point of brutality: “Elsass und Lothringen deutsch,” (2) with an epigraph borrowed from Arndt:

So weit die deutsche Zunge klingt… (3)

and this majestic dedication:

Dem deutschen Volke gewidmet, (4)

showed Germans their duty. We hesitated to desire, to hope — yes, we hesitated to will. Let us hesitate no more. Our belief in a better destiny does not rest upon our imagination: it has for its foundation our will. (5) Very ancient bonds attach Alsace and Lorraine to us. We came near to reconquering them in 1815 — and the brochure contains four chapters (more than half the work) upon these treaties of Paris, so disappointing. It depends upon us that they at last become German again on the political map of Europe. It is the duty of the press, of the school above all, to aid us — of the school, where the foundation of the work to come must be laid, where the shame of outrages suffered must be awakened, where all wishes and all hopes must be turned toward a better future, which will be, at the same stroke, the unification of Germany and the reconquest of the two provinces. (1) And the book ends with this stirring conclusion: as the banner that the general throws into the ranks of the enemy, such must the cathedral of Strasbourg be for us — a pledge that calls us to it, and assures us that we shall one day take back that German land. “Das walte Gott!” “God will it!” (2) Ten years later, when the war broke out, it was hailed throughout the territory by the applause of the professors. First, their master to all, Theodor Mommsen, the great historian, who launched, as early as the morrow of the first victories, his resounding letters “To the Italians,” (3) in which he proclaimed the German will as regarded Alsace and Lorraine. And numerous echoes repeated his word, throughout all Germany: “Alsace — a German province,” by Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, professor of history at the University of Königsberg; “Alsace and Lorraine,” lecture given at Paderborn, by Dr. Bernhard Werneke, professor at the Gymnasium; “The Taking-Back of Alsace and Lorraine,” published at Hanover, by Dr. Georg Hoyns; “Alsace and Lorraine and their Return to Germany,” published at Leipzig, by Professor Dr. Adolph Wagner. (1)

[footnote: (2) Alsace and Lorraine — German. An octavo volume of 105 pages, Julius Springer, publisher, Berlin, 1860.] [footnote: (3) “So far as the German tongue resounds…”] [footnote: (4) “Dedicated to the German people.”] [footnote: (5) ”…Man wagte zu wünschen, zu hoffen, ja — zu wollen… Der Glaube an eine bessere Zukunft… welcher nicht in der Einbildungskraft, sondern in dem Willen gründet…” (Foreword).] [footnote: (1) “In den Schulen ist dafür der Grund zu legen, ist die Scham über die erlittene Schmach zu wecken, sind die Wünsche und Hoffnungen einer besseren Zukunft zuzukehren… Alles, was uns der Einheit näher bringt, bringt uns auch der Hoffnung auf Wiedererlangung von Elsass und Lothringen näher…” (P. 102, 103). This last phrase is underlined in the text.] [footnote: (2) “Als ein Denkmal deutschen Geistes — ward jüngst gesagt — steht das Strassburger Münster da und blickt hinab auf die widerrechtlich uns entrissene Stadt… Wie der Feldherr die Fahne in die Reihen der Feinde wirft, um mit ihr den Sieg zu gewinnen, so sei für uns das Strassburger Münster ein Unterpfand, dass wir einst dieses deutsche Land wieder erringen. Das walte Gott!”] [footnote: (3) Agli Italiani, by “Teodoro Mommsen,” an octavo brochure, “Berlino, 30 Agosto 1870.” The letters composing this collection had first been inserted in two Milan newspapers, La Perseveranza, of August 10, and Il Secolo, of August 20, 1870. The first of these letters bears the date of July 23.] [footnote: (1) “Elsass eine deutsche Provinz,” by Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, full professor of history at the University of Königsberg, — dated Königsberg, 25 August 1870 (Leipzig, W. Weber, 1870); “Elsass und Lothringen,” a lecture given at the “Wissenschaftlicher Verein” of Paderborn on November 30, 1870, by Dr. Bernhard Werneke, senior teacher at the Gymnasium of Paderborn (Münster, Ad. Russell, 1871); “Die Zurücknahme von Elsass und Lothringen,” a word on the character of the French and its development, addressed to the adversaries of that taking-back, by Dr. Georg Hoyns (Hanover, Schmorl and von Seefeld, 1870); “Elsass und Lothringen und ihre Wiedergewinnung für Deutschland,” by Prof. Dr. Adolph Wagner (Leipzig, Duncker and Humblot, 1870). On the cover of this last brochure are announced, among other publications: History of the Prussian State under the Hohenzollerns, The War of Independence (1813–1814), Theory of the Great War, a “special map of Alsace and Lorraine according to their new delimitation since the German occupation,” and a “historical map of Alsace and Lorraine for the study of the territorial modifications in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”]

From all these brochures the same ardor burst forth, from all spoke the same gesture: Alsace and Lorraine must be ours. The war of 1866 has put Prussia at the head of Germany; that of 1870 is going to put Germany at the head of Europe. The star of Germany rises on the horizon, the emperor Barbarossa is awakened, and the ravens no longer fly around his mountain. (1) Our joy is great; our victory shall be complete. What must be its price? This time, we shall have the good fortune to enter Paris alone, without allies, and we shall pay ourselves. (2) What we need is, if not the Franche-Comté and Montbéliard, (3) in any case Alsace and “German Lorraine,” with Metz, although Metz is “two miles from the linguistic frontier.” (4) Europe, moreover, will not protest. It will be for us, after the triumph, to cover ourselves with a solid military organization. And let us not accept that Alsace and Lorraine be neutralized! We have already permitted but too many neutralizations, to our detriment. Alsace and Lorraine must be incorporated into a healthy and vigorous State, into Germany, into Prussia marching at the head of imperial Germany. (5) “Das walte Gott!” “God will it!” (1) — Scarcely, from time to time, a timid objection, commercial and self-interested: a merchant of Bielefeld, member of the Chamber of Commerce, (2) remarks that the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine will have for consequence the encumbering of the German market, that Rouen, Lille, Roubaix will draw to themselves Alsatian manufacture, that one can watch over one’s economic interests without lack of patriotism (“Ask the patriotic province of East Prussia whether she prefers the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to a greater commercial liberty with Russia which would be obtained by the loosening of customs? The reply is not doubtful, and yet no one doubts the patriotism of East Prussia”), (3) and he amuses himself by recalling a jest about the German professor who, with the pieces of his old dressing-gowns, patches the holes of the edifice of the world. (4)

[footnote: (1) “Wie das Jahr 1866 die deutschen Verhältnisse umgestaltete und Preussen an die Spitze Deutschlands stellte, so wird das Jahr 1870 die europäischen Verhältnisse umgestalten und Deutschland an die Spitze Europa’s stellen. Frankreichs Stern sinkt, seine prépondérance ist vernichtet; Deutschlands Stern steigt, Kaiser Barbarossa ist erwacht, und nicht mehr fliegen die Raben um den Berg,…” (Werneke)] [footnote: (2) “Wir haben das Glück gehabt, von keinem Allierten auf dem Siegesmarsche nach Paris begleitet zu sein.” (Maurenbrecher)] [footnote: (3) Franz von Löher (Abrechnung mit Frankreich), cited by Gustav Meyer — see below — asks for Artois, Dunkirk and Lille with Flanders, French Luxembourg (?), the county of Montbéliard, and a few overseas colonies: “Artois, Dünkirchen mit dem vlämischen, Lille mit dem wallonischen Flandern, das französische Luxemburg und die burgundische Freigrafschaft Mömpelgard … und einige kleine überseeische Kolonialländer.”] [footnote: (4) “Metz liegt noch heute nur zwei Meilen von der Sprachgrenze entfernt, was die Germanisierung erleichtern würde.” (Wagner)] [footnote: (5) ”…Es ist wahrlich genug an der Schwächung, welche wir durch die Abreissung jener drei anderen Staaten bereits erlitten haben… Elsass und Lothringen sollen Theile eines modernen gesunden und kräftigen Staats werden…” (Wagner)] [footnote: (1) On these words ends the brochure of Doctor Wagner, like — see above — the “Elsass und Lothringen deutsch” of 1860.] [footnote: (2) “Elsass und Lothringen,” a political-economic study, by Gustav Meyer, member of the Bielefeld Chamber of Commerce (Bielefeld, Thiele und Co., 1870).] [footnote: (3) “Man frage die patriotische Provinz Ostpreussen, ob sie die Annexion von Elsass und Lothringen einem durch Beseitigung von Zoll und Grenzsperre bewirkten freien Handelsverkehre mit Russland vorziehe? Die Antwort darauf kann nicht zweifelhaft sein, und doch wird Niemand an dem Patriotismus der Ostpreussen zweifeln.”] [footnote: (4) “Mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen / Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbau’s,”]

And this long territorial regret animated itself with a hatred tenacious, ardent, holy. One of the levers which had acted most powerfully upon the German soul in the struggle against Napoleon I had been, under the inspiration of the poets, the historians, the philosophers, the remembrance of that ancient Germany which the French Revolution had come to overthrow. Now, even if the principles of 1789 had not been foreign to the national emotion of the Germany of 1813, it was nevertheless against that Revolution that she rose up, not only to reconquer her independence, and, if it were possible, the fiefs of ancient Germany, but also to subdue the revolutionary nation; and thus her will across the century was not only one of independence and unification, but also of revenge, of chastisement, and of counter-revolution. — Whether the French should have at their head a Robespierre or a Napoleon, a Rochefort or a Jules Favre, a Thiers or a Guizot, a consul or an emperor, a hereditary king or a sovereign elected by the people, there is hardly any difference: turbulent, revolutionary they are always, and incapable of respecting the liberty of others. (1) It is not Napoleon who is our enemy, it is France, the French people: hereditary enemy, “Erbfeind,” an expression “unknown to all other languages,” says Lichtenberger, (2) and which “Germany may claim the sad honor of having forged” with us as the target. The poet Stolberg, at the hour of Leipzig, was already vilifying “the frivolous neighbor”; (1) and General Scharnhorst, in 1840, declared that “France represents the principle of immorality”; if she is not annihilated, it is because “there would be no longer a God in heaven.” (2) “Nation of children,” now says the Gazette Nationale, who “loves war like a hunt,” and who is “so frivolous, so frivolous, that she cannot have a single serious idea” (so frivol, so frivol, dass es keinen ernsten Gedanken mehr ausdenken kann); (3) “people gravely sick with the leprosy of sin,” says pastor Schroeder, “and who has lost the consciousness of her better self through the spirit of impiety, of indiscipline, and of impudence”; (4) “the inanity and the rottenness of that hideously degenerated nation,” soldiers will be told to encourage them; (5) “the revolutionary spirit, a miasma that infects all France and which has its seat at Paris,” whereas happily “the monarchical sense of the peoples of Germanic race preserves them from the epileptic convulsions in which the Latin races struggle”; (6) “France knows no greater memories than those of the French Revolution, that catastrophe full of blood and shame”; (7) God is going to inflict on her the ordeal of fire and sword; (1) “this war is a judgment of God.” (2)… On July 19, 1870, before the gathering at which the Reichstag heard the king solemnly appeal to all Germany, and the chancellor read the declaration of war that the French chargé d’affaires had just handed him, the preacher Hoffmann, developing before William and the deputies the verse of the psalmist: “With God we will accomplish exploits,” cried out that Prussia was going to fight “for the morality of the world.” (3)

[footnote: (1) “Rerum novarum semper studiosi, so waren sie seit zwei Jahrtausenden. Ein Robespierre oder Napoléon, ein Rochefort oder Jules Favre, ein Thiers oder Guizot, ein Consul oder Kaiser, ein legitimer Erbkönig oder ein volkssouveräner Wahlkönig an ihrer Spitze, — das macht nach der bisherigen Erfahrung verzweifelt wenig Unterschied. Der Freiheit, weil der politischen Selbstbeherrschung und des Rechtsgefühls gegen andre wird dieses Volk vermutlich immer unfähig bleiben… Unser Feind ist Frankreich, ist das französische Volk, nicht Napoléon…” (Elsass und Lothringen, by Prof. Dr. Ad. Wagner)] [footnote: (2) F. Lichtenberger, Protestantisme et guerre de 1870.] [footnote: (1) Cited by A. Chuquet, Alsace en 1814, p. 351.] [footnote: (2) Cited by Denis, Allemagne 1810–1852, p. 92.] [footnote: (3) Nationalzeitung, 1871: cited by F. Lichtenberger, ibid.] [footnote: (4) Schicksale der Protestanten in Frankreich und drohende Gefahren, by Schroeder, doctor of theology and philosophy, court preacher, 1871 (Id., ibid.)] [footnote: (5) Weihnachtsgruss an die Württembergischen Krieger in Frankreich, 1870. “Christmas greeting to the Württemberg warriors in France” (Id., ibid.)] [footnote: (6) Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 1870, 1871; cited by F. Lichtenberger, ibid.] [footnote: (7) Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (Id., ibid.)] [footnote: (1) Id., ibid.] [footnote: (2) Dr. Fabri, Briefen aus Frankreich (Id., ibid.)] [footnote: (3) Cited by Albert Sorel, Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande, t. I, p. 303.]

Germany had sufficiently strained her will; the hour was come to pass to the act; she acted implacably.

---

III

THE FACT OF 1871

Prussia, at the head of the Northern Confederation, needing a war to draw in the southern States and to realize German unity against someone; (1) Napoleon III weakened, uneasy, his entourage perhaps desirous of a diversion from the difficulties of internal policy; the vacancy of the throne of Spain; the candidature of a Hohenzollern prince, a relative of the king of Prussia; the emotion felt in France, for fear of being one day taken between the two cousin branches; the incident almost settled; then the ambassador of France, Benedetti, going to see King William at the waters of Ems to ask of him an approval of this withdrawal, no longer only for the present, but for the future too; the reply of the king: that his approval has been given fully and without reserve, and that there is no occasion to enter into new negotiations on this subject; Bismarck seizing the affair masterfully to telegraph the account of it to the representatives of the Confederation and to the press, in a condensed and brutal style which turned a diplomatic embarrassment into a national outrage; the responsibility for the war thus skillfully transferred to France, “with the help of God and the telegraph”; (1) Alsace, Lorraine, France invaded: Alsatian villages — Woerth, Frœschwiller, Reichshoffen, Morsbronn — unknown on August 5, 1870, sadly immortal since the 6th; the army of Mac-Mahon hastening its retreat as far as Châlons; Napoleon III a prisoner at Sedan on September 1, and the Republic proclaimed at Paris on the 4th; Strasbourg invested for seven weeks, bombarded with 193,000 projectiles — nearly 300 per hour — obliged to capitulate on September 27, despite the courage of its garrison, too weak, of the inhabitants, of General Uhrich, governor, of Doctor Kuss, mayor, of the generous Edmond Valentin who, named prefect of the Bas-Rhin by the government of the Fourth of September, had just rejoined his post across the enemy lines, the canal, the ramparts under fire, in heroic adventures where he was sustained by his ardent confidence in the Republic — the liberator of 1792! — Metz delivered up; Belfort resisting for one hundred and three days, and Bitche eight months; Paris besieged, the government of National Defense detaching a Delegation to Tours, then to Bordeaux; the king of Prussia hailed emperor of Germany at Versailles, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Louis XIV; the armistice at last, the elections, the National Assembly gathered at Bordeaux, and the preliminary treaty signed on February 26, (1) at Versailles: this is not the place to recount in detail the sorrowful history, and I shall content myself with having recalled it thus — rapid summary of the facts which, from the ardent German claim, generatrix of the war, brings us to the disastrous denouement that the peace was for us.

[footnote: (1) Moltke said in the Reichstag, on April 14, 1874, that if Germany had made her unity peacefully and earlier, the war with France would no doubt not have broken out. (Cf. J. Heimweh, Triple Alliance et Alsace-Lorraine, p. 51.)] [footnote: (1) J. Heimweh, Triple Alliance et Alsace-Lorraine, p. 13.] [footnote: (1) See in the Annexes.]

Germany’s aim had been too precise for an indemnity to satisfy the pride of her triumph, however enormous, however unbelievable it had to be. It is said that under the Restoration, at the time of the discussion on the “milliard of the émigrés” — a single milliard — General Foy cried out that this figure surpassed imagination, that not a milliard of minutes had passed since the birth of Christ… Five milliards! The first time, in their parleys, that the chancellor had named his figure to Thiers: “It is the military who have suggested it to you, it is not the financiers,” Thiers replied, stupefied at this lightness in the colossal. And yet this capital of five milliards, (2) frightful — payable by installments, no doubt, — was further increased — for that very reason — by an interest of 5 percent to be paid on the last three milliards, from March 2, 1871, to the dates on which their payment was staggered: that is, 315,259,073 francs of interest; and this total of 5,315,259,073 francs, net for Germany, became weightier for France by interminable supplements: those 5,315,259,073 francs were, in addition, the costs of the loans destined to make their payment possible — more than 600 millions; — and ten millions further because, the payment having to be made according to strictly defined modes, (1) the costs of the purchase of securities on the European market and of their conversion into securities presentable to Germany were borne by France; — and 320 millions further for the costs of maintenance of the German troops occupying the territory until the final pecuniary liberation, the departures being staggered according to the maturities, and rigorously, with mistrust, men against specie; (2) — and also 856 millions of indemnities to the departments, to the communes, and to private individuals; and 7 millions of indemnities to the railway companies (other than that of the Est); and 2 milliards for the reconstitution of military and naval matériel; and the public works which would impose themselves as a consequence of the treaty: for example, the great navigable artery formed by the canals from the Marne to the Rhine and from the Rhône to the Rhine, being cut by the new frontier, the two French sections remaining would have to be reconnected: hence 65 millions for the canalization of the Meuse and its junction with the canal from the Marne to the Rhine, 2 millions for the canalization of the Moselle, 22 millions for the junction of the canal from the Rhône to the Rhine with the canal of the Est; — and yet other millions, and other tens of millions, until at the final reckoning the figure of five milliards was estimated at the triple. (1) But, whether it were five to Germany’s credit or fifteen to France’s debit, it was only money: money would pay Germany, even at a profit, what the war had cost her; but it was not for this that she had made the war.

[footnote: (2) Two “compensations” reduced to 4,671,901,600 francs not the figure of the war indemnity, but the sum actually to be paid. On one hand, in fact (article 6 of the Additional Articles), the German government bought back for 325,000,000 francs the part of the concession of the Eastern railways which was found in the ceded territory, and these 325,000,000 were deducted from the five milliards — it being incumbent on the French government, which could not cede what did not belong to it, to settle subsequently with the Eastern Company: which it did by paying back to the Company these 325,000,000 francs in the form of an annuity of 20,500,000 francs (to run until 1954, the final date of the concession). On the other hand, the armistice convention had stipulated the payment by the City of Paris, within fifteen days, of a war contribution of 200,000,000 francs, payable in specie, banknotes of the Bank of France, bills of exchange on London and Berlin, an account to be drawn up later with deduction of interests, with paper on Berlin and on London, foreign stamp costs, etc.: whence a credit balance, in favor of Paris, of 26,400 francs, which Germany did not pay to the city, but which she also deducted from the five milliards, the French state becoming debtor to the City in the place of Germany. See A. Villefort, Recueil des traités.] [footnote: (1) In gold or silver, banknotes of the Bank of England, of the Bank of Prussia, of the Royal Bank of the Netherlands, of the National Bank of Belgium, promissory notes, or bills of exchange negotiable, of first order, value in cash on these same countries; bills of exchange domiciled elsewhere than in Germany counting only for the net proceeds of their realization. Only 125 millions in Bank of France notes were accepted, by a special convention.] [footnote: (2) O. May, Occupation du territoire, p. 12–13: ”…The first payment on the indemnity was a half-milliard… For this time, we had been allowed to discharge ourselves in Bank of France notes, up to 105 millions. The surplus, 395 millions, was to be paid in liberatory values, which were, in fact, handed over in drafts on German or English banks. This payment, effected at the beginning of July, was to procure for us the evacuation of the Eure, of the Seine-Inférieure, and of the Somme. The agents of the German Treasury had the mission of receiving at Strasbourg the specie resulting from the encashment of these drafts. Now they maintained that the counting of cash alone had the liberatory virtue. So integral payment was not to date until the day when, as they said, ‘the payment had been acknowledged.’ Now this counting and this verification took time… Germany had no interest in hurrying her movements and repatriating her troops. It was the French Treasury that paid the costs of maintenance of the occupying army. Each day of delay was a net benefit for the German Treasury… On this point, as on so many others, we had to submit to the harassing exactions of an intransigent and pernickety bureaucracy.”] [footnote: (1) All these figures are taken from documents published by Villefort, Recueil des traités.]

She needed a new frontier on the side of France: the green border traced upon “the two identical copies of the map of the territory forming the government-general of Alsace, published in Berlin in September 1870.” The department of the Bas-Rhin, that of the Haut-Rhin, the greater part of the Moselle, a third of the Meurthe, and two cantons of the Vosges would henceforth be German, whatever the will of the Alsatians and the Lorrainers.

In vain did this will manifest itself, energetically, against a violation of right that one would not have believed possible at the end of the nineteenth century. It was no longer, as two hundred years earlier, an Alsace “in abandonment” that had been finished detaching from a Germany “in anarchy,” (1) with the concurrence of a part of that very Germany, without Europe perceiving it and without anyone weeping over it. Now there were fatherlands, and “souls of peoples”… (2)

[footnote: (1) E. Lavisse, Question d’Alsace, p. 5.] [footnote: (2) Id., Vue générale…, p. 213. See in the Annexes.]

As early as February 17, 1871, before the official opening of the negotiations, Keller, deputy of the Haut-Rhin, brought to the National Assembly, in the name of his colleagues from the menaced departments, the protestation of Alsace and of Lorraine, (3) an eloquent and clear declaration which had been drafted by Gambetta, triple solemn affirmation: that “Alsace and Lorraine do not wish to be alienated,” that “France can neither consent to nor sign the cession of Lorraine and of Alsace,” that “Europe can neither permit nor ratify the abandonment of Alsace and Lorraine.” A proposal followed, in parliamentary form:

[footnote: (3) See in the Annexes.]

The undersigned, representatives at the National Assembly, deposit on the bureau of the Chamber the following proposal: The National Assembly takes into consideration the unanimous declaration of the deputies of the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin, the Moselle, the Meurthe, and the Vosges.

A proposal which Keller sustained, briefly but with firmness: “It is a question of our honor, it is a question of our national unity…”; this declaration must be a “serious element” of the negotiations, “since it is the expression of the will of the populations, and since in the times in which we are, in full civilization, it cannot be a question of disposing of peoples without their assent.” Unhappily, France was too vanquished: if Gambetta, who represented war to the bitter end, was the elect of nine departments (among which — significant fact — the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin, the Meurthe and the Moselle), it was twenty-nine departments that had given their votes to Thiers, the representative of peace. So, the deputy of the Haut-Rhin having come down from the tribune, and Thiers having asked the Assembly to act logically with itself, not to vote, if it was preparing to subscribe to a peace treaty, a motion that implied the continuation of the war, the commission charged with examining the proposal replaced Keller’s text with this one — laudatory but evasive, betraying it by translating it:

The National Assembly, welcoming with the liveliest sympathy the declaration of M. Keller and his colleagues, refers itself to the wisdom and patriotism of the negotiators.

Furnished with this “blank check” (the word is Rochefort’s, who greeted by this interpellation the reading of the new motion), Thiers left Bordeaux for the definitive negotiation of the preliminaries of peace at Versailles. Bismarck could show himself uncompromising: the vote on the Keller proposal had completely revealed to him the peaceful dispositions of the Assembly of Bordeaux. On February 26, signatures: Thiers and Jules Favre, for France; Bismarck, for Germany. Atrocious hours. Climbing back into his carriage, Thiers, “motionless and as if thunderstruck,” “was succumbing to his emotion”; “from Versailles to Paris, his eyes did not cease wetting themselves with tears, which he wiped away without saying a word.” (1) On the 28th, he was back in Bordeaux, immediately read the draft of the law destined to ratify his signature. And on March 1, at half past noon, the sad sitting of ratification opened.

[footnote: (1) J. Favre, Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, vol. III, p. 118, cited by Hanotaux, Histoire contemporaine, t. I, p. 128.]

First, Scheurer-Kestner, Floquet, Tirard, Keller, Claude (de la Meurthe), deposited numerous petitions from Alsatians and Lorrainers protesting in advance against a separation. Then Edgar Quinet, gravely, said the profound reasons for which the Assembly ought not to give, by its vote, an appearance of right to the triumph of force:

Hitherto conquerors contented themselves with laying hand on a territory, with seizing it by force. They kept it if they could. Such was the right of war. Today, the pretensions of Prussia are quite new. After seizing Alsace and Lorraine, she claims to have this taking of possession voted, consecrated, by universal suffrage… Here shows itself the intimate thought of the new powers; they know that all which is not founded on the new principles inaugurated by France is null. To make a National Assembly serve to dismember the nation: that is the design of the enemy. Thus the feudal spirit would avenge itself on our free democratic institutions by making them the instrument of our ruin. There is the thought of Prussia: to oblige France to mutilate herself; to make of France a people tributary to five milliards, in the manner of the enslaved peoples of antiquity: that is the new German right, in which feudal hatred mingles with race hatred.

Bamberger, “deputy of the Moselle and a Strasbourger by birth,” speaks of the devotion of Alsace, of its future if France abandons her, and of the future of France herself:

Strasbourg has not failed in her duty, she let herself be crushed. Strasbourg devoted herself for France, and France says to her today: I am vanquished, I am weary. You are unhappy, but I am suffering too, I can do nothing for you, I leave you to Prussia. Your children will become Prussian soldiers who will fight against my own children… Between a future full of sufferings and a debasing rest… [a nation] prepares itself for sorrow. So shall you act if you would not at one stroke compromise the imprescriptible rights of morality and justice, as also your most vulgar interests; if you would not, above all, brave the past of France, which engages you, and the judgment of posterity, which awaits you.

Victor Hugo, grandiloquent, gives laurels to “fighting Paris,” which “is the astonishment of the world,” and red-hot iron to Germany, which, herself, “the victorious nation,” “will have her watchword as a state-dogma, the saber made scepter, speech muzzled, thought garrotted, conscience on its knees; no tribune! no press! the darkness!” while “the other, the vanquished, will have the light…” Germany will also have two provinces more? No.

Possession supposes consent. Did Turkey possess Athens? Did Austria possess Venice? Does Russia possess Warsaw?…

He even already sees France rearing up one day, “formidable,”

with one bound, to seize Lorraine here, to seize back Alsace! Is that all? No! No! to seize, — hear me, — to seize Trier, Mainz, Cologne, Coblenz, the whole left bank of the Rhine… And France will be heard crying: It is my turn! Germany, here I am! Am I thy enemy? No! I am thy sister. I have taken all back from thee, and I give thee all back, on one condition: that we shall be but one people, but one family, but one republic. I shall demolish my fortresses, thou shalt demolish thine. My vengeance is fraternity!…

This intervention of a poet — singer of epics that were, dreamer of idylls that shall not be — moved the Alsatians; they interrupted at the names of Mainz and of Coblenz, and one of them, Tachard, deputy of the Haut-Rhin, protested with dignity that those names had only too much been pronounced of late, that

these two names have lost us, it is for them that we are undergoing the sad fate that awaits us. Well, we no longer wish to suffer for that word and for that idea. We are French, gentlemen, and for us there is but one fatherland, France, without which we cannot live. But we are just because we are French, and we do not wish that there be done to others what we should not wish to be done to us.

Louis Blanc, with a clarity and an energy which made his confidence still more impressive, recalled the great revolutionary struggle. The Republic must deliver the Fatherland. The Republicans had not wanted the war, a political war, a war declared by Napoleon III. But they have the duty to continue it, since Prussia has made of it a war against the nation. The nation! we have no right to mutilate her. Let Europe know that we cannot do a thing which exceeds our right, “tear the quality of Frenchmen from Frenchmen,” — let us have faith, “that faith in the fatherland which saved, in the time of Joan of Arc, old monarchical France, and which later, under the Convention, saved republican France.”

Finally Keller went back up to the tribune: between February 17 and March 1, reality had risen up, and there no doubt was nothing left for him but to bury his hopes, the hopes of Alsace and of Lorraine:

At the solemn hour where we are, you do not expect a speech from me; I should not be capable of making it. He who ought to speak in my place — for you have not yet heard a single deputy of Alsace — the mayor of Strasbourg, the dean of our delegation, at the hour when I speak to you, is dying of grief and sorrow; his agony is the most eloquent of speeches… It is not only as an Alsatian, it is as a Frenchman that I suffer;… I come to claim my share of the French honor… I have insisted, before quitting this enclosure, on protesting as an Alsatian and as a Frenchman against a treaty which, in my eyes, is an injustice, a lie, and a dishonor; and if the Assembly is to ratify it, in advance I appeal to God, the avenger of just causes, I appeal to posterity which will judge both us and others, I appeal to all peoples who cannot indefinitely let themselves be sold like vile cattle, I appeal finally even to the sword of all men of heart, who, as soon as possible, will tear up this detestable treaty.

When all had spoken — these, and others still: Brunet, Georges, Emmanuel Arago, against him, Vacherot, Changarnier, Buffet, in the sense of his opinion — Thiers showed the disorganization of France, the practical futility of a longer resistance; and when the hour of the vote came, the Assembly, judging apparently with Vacherot — who approved the principles in the name of which one ought to continue the war but declared that salvation lay only in peace — the Assembly voted the ratification of the preliminaries, by 546 voices against 107.

As soon as the result was known, Grosjean, deputy of the Haut-Rhin, who had been one of Denfert-Rochereau’s collaborators in the defense of Belfort, read, in the name of his Alsatian and Lorrainer colleagues, this noble, simple, and sorrowful protestation against violated right:

The representatives of Alsace and of Lorraine deposited, before all negotiation of peace, on the bureau of the National Assembly, a declaration affirming in the most formal manner, in the name of these two provinces, their will and their right to remain French.

Delivered up, in contempt of all justice and by an odious abuse of force, to the dominion of the foreigner, we have one last duty to fulfill.

We declare once more null and void a pact which disposes of us without our consent.

The vindication of our rights remains forever open to all and to each, in the form and in the measure that our conscience shall dictate to us.

At the moment of quitting this enclosure where our dignity no longer permits us to sit, and despite the bitterness of our sorrow, the supreme thought which we find at the depth of our hearts is a thought of gratitude for those who, for six months, have not ceased to defend us, and of unalterable attachment to the fatherland from which we are violently torn.

We shall follow you with our wishes, and we shall await, with an entire confidence in the future, that France, regenerated, may resume the course of her great destiny.

Your brothers of Alsace and of Lorraine, separated at this moment from the common family, will preserve for France, absent from their hearths, a filial affection, until the day when she will come to take her place again.

The sacrifice was consummated.

The formalities followed a normal course: discussions, at Brussels, to fix the terms of the definitive treaty; signature of the treaty, at Frankfurt, on May 10; ratification by the National Assembly, at Versailles, on the 18th.

During this time, a moving operation was being prepared: the realization of the green border. As soon as the mutilation was decided, men had busied themselves with the measures to be taken to carry it out. While the French and German plenipotentiaries were examining, at Brussels, then at Frankfurt, all the other questions, a special delimitation commission was named to fix the new frontier. (1) The commission began its work at Brussels, continued it at Frankfurt, and completed it, markers in hand, by mountains and by plains. One must follow for a moment these men, their discussions, their itinerary, to know how the territory of Alsace-Lorraine was made, to sense in advance what realities, long-sorrowful, of sentiment and of interest, those words were going to express: dismemberment of territory, broken bonds with the fatherland.

[footnote: (1) The commission was composed, on the French side, of General Doutrelaine and lieutenant-colonel of engineers Laussedat, with an engineer of bridges and roads, Gustave Renaud, as adjunct; on the German side, of General von Strantz, of the mining engineer Hauchecorne, and of an assessor of regency, Herzog. Subsequently, the following also took part in the work of the commission: Captain Bouvier, aide-de-camp of General Doutrelaine; Krafft, engineer of bridges and roads; the guard of engineers Laloy (French); — staff captain Rhein, the surveyor Hufnagel (Germans). It was lieutenant-colonel Laussedat (later member of the Institut and director of the Conservatoire des Arts-et-Métiers) who in fact, General Doutrelaine being ill and often absent, bore principally, on the French side, the weight of the discussion and directed to the end the work of the French commissioners. He recounted the vicissitudes of his mission in his work entitled La Délimitation de la frontière franco-allemande, to which we have often had recourse in the course of this chapter.]

M. von Bismarck had once said of glory that it is not a value quoted on the Prussian exchange. (2) Plenipotentiaries and commissioners could quickly perceive it. And if it is true that the negotiations relative to the capitulation of Paris had shown “the diplomatic haggling” of the victor, this word of Albert Sorel (3) verified itself again with regard to what concerned, all along the projected frontier, the delimitations of terrain — immediate takings of possession and discountings of interests to come.

[footnote: (2) Cited by A. Sorel, Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande, t. II, p. 187.] [footnote: (3) Id., t. II, p. 1.]

M. Thiers had indeed obtained, as a modification of the primitive and general tracing, the preservation of Belfort, “the town and the fortifications of Belfort,” says article 1 of the preliminaries of February 26, “with a radius which shall be determined subsequently.” But the Germans did not let go of Belfort without demanding a small compensation on the other side. — First, of Belfort, they let go as little as possible: on “this radius which shall be determined subsequently,” the discussion was long and lively. Laussedat and the French maintained that with too short a radius, the retrocession of Belfort became a delusion; Belfort enclaved within a henceforth foreign territory would no longer be of any guarantee for France; this radius had to be understood as the military radius of a fortress, equivalent to the range of artillery: at least 10 kilometers. The Germans, for their part, resisted, going even one day so far as to lean maliciously on our law of military servitudes, which would have limited the radius to 250 meters from the foot of the glacis. The two were far apart! They ended by agreeing, at Frankfurt, on 7 to 8 kilometers. — Then, to compensate for the retrocession of Belfort, they asked for several villages of the Moselle: Redange, Villerupt, Aumetz, Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes, Vionville: to pay for the right of “carrying back our frontier to the line of the Vosges, — says Vicomte de Meaux in his report to the National Assembly for the ratification of the treaty (May 18, 1871), (1) — thus rejoining to the north the ballon of Alsace, and keeping on this point, with 6,000 hectares, 37,000 Frenchmen more,” we should abandon on our frontier with Luxembourg “a length of 8 to 10 kilometers, a superficies of 10,000 hectares, and a population of 7,000 Frenchmen.” It was a little more than appeared: “the loss of mining lands of incontestable richness and of a special quality, the loss above all of a few thousand Frenchmen, who must have believed their fate fixed, and that loss consented to as the result of a voluntary transaction with the victor…” The jovial humor of one of the French negotiators, Pouyer-Quertier, who pleased Bismarck, saved at least Villerupt: ”…I should not have compelled you to become French,” he said to the chancellor, “and you make me a German! — How so?… Who is talking of taking your Normandy?… — The thing is yet quite simple: I am one of the principal shareholders of the Villerupt forges, and you see well that, on this side, you are making me a German.” And Villerupt remained French. (1)

[footnote: (1) Cf. Villefort, Recueil des traités, t. II, p. 93 sqq.] [footnote: (1) Laussedat, Délimitation de la frontière, p. 65.]

On May 18, the Assembly adopted the conclusions of the reporter, and the exchange was definitively recorded in the treaty. (2) No doubt Belfort and its radius, because of the importance of the city, of its situation, of its courageous defense, of the diplomatic victory won by Thiers, constituted an interesting advantage for us. But the compensation was no small thing, and the Germans were not ignorant of the industrial value of the region they were taking in exchange: the principal German on the delimitation commission was a mining engineer; and it was not only for villages and inhabitants that they were disputing, but for a rich subsoil, full of cashable future: in fact, the exploitation of iron ore in this region of Aumetz and of Hayange has considerably increased since the war, with all the consequences of prosperous exploitation: increase of the figure of the population, increase in the price of land. (1)

[footnote: (2) See in the Annexes: first paragraph of article 1 of the definitive treaty.] [footnote: (1) Cf. Laussedat, Délimitation de la frontière, p. 205 sqq.]

Other questions still remained to be settled, reserved by common accord for the tracing on the ground, which began in the first days of July.

What this journey was, one easily divines: Lieutenant-Colonel Laussedat, French commissioner, and Hauchecorne, the mining engineer, German commissioner, going each on his own side, speaking to each other only on duty, although the German, victor and content, had been amiable and proposed that they travel in company. Recognition of boundary markers already existing (the new frontier often coincided with the old limits of departments), examination of cadastral maps, staking of summits, planting of markers — material operations to which the “sapper” Laussedat had long been accustomed, but under which, this time, he felt souls palpitate and powerful interests struggle: it was no longer topography, it was humanity. What one usually calls the impressions of travel further sharpened the Frenchman’s sensibility. When the commissioners arrived at Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes, one of the villages ceded as compensation for Belfort, there was no longer a single house standing, not a room where one could find shelter: occupied by the troops during the day of Saint-Privat, Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes was still a heap of rubble; “rare inhabitants,” recounts Colonel Laussedat, “were searching in the ruins for the debris of their furniture. On a doorstep, a brave woman asks me whether it was true that Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes was going to become Prussian. I was indeed obliged to answer yes: ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I have three children, three sons; they will serve France all the same, and, if it must be, will let themselves be killed for her.’” Farther on, on the limits of the communes of Beuvillers and Boulange, everyone is at the meeting place, except the mayor of Boulange, a miller, a sturdy fellow, who finally appears in the distance, swaying from side to side, addressed by the German commissioner, who urges him on. The mayor slows down still more. The German raises his voice. “Ah well!” says the miller on arriving, “do you think I am in such a hurry to become Prussian?… Excuse me, colonel, for having made you wait, but I am quite sure you are not angry with me, you.” (1)

[footnote: (1) Id., ibid., p. 100 and 102.]

On the ground, then, the discussions of the manner of Brussels and Frankfurt began again, the policy of small compensations pursued itself, sometimes sharper and more painful, precisely because one was on the very ground, man to man, face to face.

The bois d’Avril, for example, was very tempting: valued as forest at nearly a million francs, and containing over the whole extent of its 350 hectares iron ore. Now, the small commune of Crusnes, neighbor to this wood, and on which ore also depended, had been forgotten on the base-map; but, indubitably, by its situation, it ought to remain in French territory… Nevertheless, asserted the German commissioner, as a hamlet of Aumetz it must follow the fate of Aumetz. Inexact assertion, replies the French commissioner: Crusnes has been an independent commune for fifty years. Energetic opposition of the Frenchman, who ends by gaining his point. Which did not prevent the German from demanding a compensation: the bois d’Avril. Then the relations grew tense, the French commissioner threatened to break off, obstinately holding that there should be no question of compensation for a cession to which the German manifestly had no right; he carried it again: a battle won, which preserved to France a commune of 600 to 700 hectares and of 372 inhabitants; as M. de Meaux said in his report, “when it is a question of French soil, when it is above all a question of French families, there is not a cottage that is not for us inestimable, there is not an effort that, in our disaster, we can think superfluous.”

But the bois d’Avril remained desirable, and, missed à propos of Crusnes, it returned to discussion à propos of Moyeuvre. The case of Moyeuvre offers us a first example of the economic upheavals which the treaty contained in germ. Moyeuvre was the center of a powerful metallurgical industry: the forges of Moyeuvre, Hayange, Stiring-Wendel, belonging to the Wendel family; and their representative had vainly insisted, in the parleys and negotiations, at Versailles, at Berlin, at Brussels, at Frankfurt, that Moyeuvre should remain in France: besides the sentiments of the populations, the Wendels insisted on the peril which, for so slight a distance from the new frontier, would menace this industry — a rich region yesterday, perhaps ruined tomorrow, if the separation should close to it its former outlets and throw its products on the German market already overfull. But the treaty had been signed without account being taken of this claim; and, after examination of the places, the bois d’Avril remained French, Moyeuvre stayed acquired to the victors, and the bois de Neufchef likewise — which the Germans had already taken in view of the exchange, in case the retrocession of Moyeuvre was decided, and which they did not give back, all while keeping Moyeuvre.

Two of these last-minute rectifications were the object of particularly interesting parleys: one, at Igney-Avricourt, where the Paris–Strasbourg railway crosses the new frontier; the other, in the Vosges chain, below the Donon, by which the Germans would be, more or less according to the solution adopted, the masters of the roads toward France. (1)

[footnote: (1) Cf. Laussedat, ibid., p. 109 sqq.]

The local-interest railway from Avricourt to Blâmont and to Cirey served to bring as far as the great Paris–Strasbourg line (by Avricourt, point of junction of the two lines) the shipments of the Cirey glass manufactory, as well as various agricultural, industrial, forestry products of the region; the traffic could even, not only branch onto Paris–Strasbourg, but continue straight on, beyond Avricourt, over the great line, as far as the Marne–Rhine canal, which another little line, that from Avricourt to Dieuze, met near Moussey. Inverse traffic, also: of foodstuffs, and above all of raw materials for industry, which, except for coal, came from France. Now, the tracing of the new frontier made German a whole section of the Avricourt–Cirey railway, and, over the eighteen kilometers separating those localities, would have constrained travelers and merchandise to two passages of customs: loss of time, costly formalities, probable ruin of the railway, real danger for the whole region. The French commissioners ended by carrying the point: they obtained the retrocession of a parcel of the territory of Avricourt comprising the station and the territory of the small commune of Igney, the whole comprised between the two ways Paris–Strasbourg and Avricourt–Cirey; in this way, this last line remained entirely on French territory. But more was not granted them: neither the Avricourt–Moussey line, nor a neutralization of Moussey — nothing that should facilitate the connection with the Marne–Rhine canal. And a compensation always had to be given: the construction of a station, at France’s expense, between the two branching points of the two little lines (Avricourt–Cirey–Blâmont and Avricourt–Moussey–Dieuze) on the great one (Paris–Strasbourg).

At the Donon, the situation could be, strategically, more disquieting than at Igney, and the solution was less satisfactory for us. The frontier, rising from the plain, was henceforth to follow the crest line of the Vosges. Now, the canton of Schirmeck, the greater part of whose territory was on the eastern slope of the chain, was, on account of this principle of the crest line, considered as Alsatian and annexed with the Bas-Rhin, although it formed administratively part of the department of the Vosges. Therefore, for that same reason, the canton ought to have been divided, and to France should have been left what came to it geographically on the western slope of the mountain. Such was the situation of the two villages of Raon-sur-Plaine and of Raon-lès-Leau; this last even seemed, according to the text of the preliminaries, to have to remain to France and to have been indicated as German only by an error of the green tracing. But the Germans had all the more interest in keeping these two villages, as they delivered to them the key of the important road which, by the valleys of the Plaine and of the Meurthe, leads to Lunéville. An illogical exception to the principle of the crest line — and unjust too, since it uncovered our territory. The French commissioners obtained, finally, the retrocession, but strictly limited, of the two villages. The neighboring state forests, where, by a usage consecrated in these forested countries, the inhabitants of Raon-lès-Leau had the right to take their fuel — those forests remained to the Germans, and the people of the village were deprived of part of their means of existence. Moreover, although the two villages became French again, the frontier, instead of remaining on the crest line, continued to descend on the western slope and to uncover the French territory. — It was only by the additional convention of October 12, 1871, that the fate of Igney, of Raon-lès-Leau, of Raon-sur-Plaine, the last uncertain localities, was definitively settled.

… The great Goethe had said, in the fields of Valmy, that on that day, in that place, a new era began for the history of the world. Vain word. Eighty years later, the old era was not closed. The Germanic monarchies had never pardoned France for the Revolution. Victorious over the one by war, they took their revenge again on the other by a peace which annexed soil while constraining souls: with the help of force, a debatable historical right prevailed over a certain national right. Alsace-Lorraine was henceforth, in the eyes of the chancelleries, German; and the green border was going to become, on the maps of the schools of France, a black border.

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IV

THE ALSATIANS-LORRAINERS, “RANSOM” OF FRANCE

It will perhaps be remembered: Louis Blanc and several of the orators who had protested at Bordeaux against the cessation of the war (1) had leaned on this principle, among others, that France had no right to sacrifice a fragment of herself in order to safeguard the rest, to purchase her repose and her recovery at the price of a partial cession of her territory — still less at the price of an abandonment of her citizens. This is nevertheless what happened in the end, — and this is what explains the formula often used: Alsace and Lorraine were the ransom of France. To be the ransom is to pay with one’s own existence or happiness the existence and happiness of others. So, once peace was made, however frightful the disasters that France had undergone, material and moral, collective and individual, she resumed little by little her normal life, she persevered in her pre-war being. The French remained French.

[footnote: (1) See preceding chapter, p. 79.]

No doubt, the enemy soldiers still occupied the territory. But temporarily, until the milliards should be paid, and not as an army installed as definitive mistress. The political régime had changed name; but one remained always among one’s own, the substance of institutions and habits did not vary. The station-master was the same as two years earlier, one went to the postmaster as before the war, one had dealings with the same notary, in the same language and the same formulas; it was the same history of France that children learned at school, one sold to the same customers, and on market days it was the same constable who resumed his patrol, grumbler and good fellow. The plant had only to regain its strength in the sun: in order to continue to live, it had neither to uproot itself nor to acclimatize itself to a foreign atmosphere.

For Alsace-Lorraine, things were not the same. What is the repercussion on the inhabitants of a territory of a transfer of territorial sovereignty, what turmoil overthrows existences and souls because guards of engineers have displaced boundary stones and posts — we easily forget, in the monotonous course of our peaceful existences. Far from the events, far from the portion of the country that suffered the most from them, we hardly imagine the anguish in which thousands of men lived, for months, whose hearts did not wish to change, — and whose life would have to be remade.

In fact, before the inhabitants of the territory annexed to Germany a grave question posed itself, to be resolved immediately: to become Germans or remain French, and, at the same stroke, to remain in the country or to leave it: for between nationality and domicile there was, by the terms of the treaty, an absolute bond. Article 2 of the definitive treaty said that “French subjects originating from the ceded territories, currently domiciled on that territory, who shall mean to preserve French nationality” would enjoy, until October 1, 1872, “and by means of a prior declaration made to the competent authority, the faculty of transporting their domicile to France and of fixing themselves there… in which case the quality of French citizens will be maintained for them.” A faculty which was in reality an obligation, if one wanted to remain French; and an obligation of fact, not of form: the option for France, or, quite simply, the option — that is what they called the prior declaration prescribed by article 2 — would not be valid unless it were followed, before October 1, 1872, by a real emigration, transfer of person, domicile, principal establishment. And one had to expect that this article of the treaty, like the others, would be applied strictly. Discussions of the plenipotentiaries, exchanges of notes — nothing that could make one believe in the laxity of the victor. There was hardly one point on which the Germans condescended to stretch the letter of the treaty: “the faculty of transporting their domicile to France” appeared really too restrictive, and it was conceded that the option of the emigrants ought to be valid provided they emigrated in fact, out of Alsace-Lorraine, but in whatever direction. On all the rest, rigorously, the Germans went to the limit of the right the treaty granted them. Not only those originating, those originating and domiciled, as already said in article 2, would be bound by the obligation of opting and departing, if they wished to remain French, but also non-originaries — that is to say, Frenchmen native of other departments and domiciled in those of Alsace and Lorraine. Not only adults, but minors also, and immediately, despite the efforts of the French plenipotentiaries who had insistently demanded that the deadline for option be deferred for minors until the time of their majority; even the German government did not admit that the option of minors could validly be made in any sense other than that of their legal representatives. Add to this that, instead of leaving to the tribunals the task of settling doubtful questions of nationality, the German administration took upon itself to settle them by its own authority. (1) — In a word, Germany would watch rigorously: one was not to count on indulgences, delays, and detours. One had to decide, immediately; a grave decision, whether to depart or to stay.

[footnote: (1) Whence certain unilateral interpretations of the treaty, which sometimes had singular consequences: individuals with two nationalities, or without any. Moreover, and without entering into questions of cases, it may be noted here that non-originary domiciliaries, of whom we spoke just now, remained French by right from the French point of view, while in the eyes of the German administration they had to emigrate so as not to become Germans.]

To depart? Alas! it was no longer a question of going away far from one’s country, at the age of long hopes and through the spirit of adventure, to make one’s fortune elsewhere and come back when one wished, — but, for most, of abandoning, mature men or old men, won-out situations, dear habits, the firm hope of a tranquil end of career, and also the quasi-certainty of “touching” the indemnities compensating for the damages cost by the war, while, if one departed… And then, where was duty, duty toward France? Would one leave the place empty, for the greatest convenience of the wave of replacements that Germania would send?… But, to remain… One must place oneself, to grasp well the tragic of this situation, at the hour when all the remembrance still filled all souls: of the village frightened and bruised for having found itself one day caught in the chance of strategic combinations; of the chief of a Prussian or Bavarian detachment calling the mayor and assistants to the feet of his horse to impose on the commune a war contribution; of the wounded panting on stretchers and of women frantic in cellars; where all that could have been said about the fraternity of peoples, in which the illusion of some had excelled three or four years earlier, did not prevent that men had seen, seen with their own eyes, General Werder — nicknamed Mörder, “the Murderer” — enter into Strasbourg which he had bombarded for thirty-one days, — and on the walls of villages, the rude threat of the invaders displayed in barbarous French. (1) Men were no longer sophisticating. The foreigner was there, victor and enemy. The son, if one remained, would have, perhaps soon, to don that uniform… So there was not a human being, between the frontier of yesterday and that of today, in whose mind and heart there did not stir at once a question of conscience and a question of personal future: for all, delicate to resolve, fertile in discussions with oneself, and full of dangerous unforeseens.

[footnote: (1) Need one recall here the most barbarous of them — barbarity of substance and of form? “Notice. — The most rigorous surveillance for the security of the railway and of the post-roads. — The railway bridge, very near Fontenoy, in the environs of Toul, was today, in the night, made to jump. — As punishment, the village of Fontenoy was burned from top to bottom. — The same fate shall fall upon places in which something similar arrives. — Toul, January 29, 1871. — The commandant of post-roads: von Schmadel.” (Messager d’Alsace-Lorraine, p. 255)]

To functionaries themselves, whose life seems guaranteed against bad fortune by the providence of the State they have always served, the future no longer appeared tranquil and simple, like a perfectly straight road on which one had only to travel without care until retirement, in that country where it was good to live, and which, for many of them, was their country. (1) On one hand, the new administration foreshadowed increases in pay, promotions in grade; but, it was the German administration. On the other hand, whatever the good intentions of the mother-country, she could not make re-enter into her ranks, from one day to the next, — perhaps even ever, — all that the separated departments would discharge as available. When there was made to the Assembly the proposal that “the functionaries who have refused their services to Prussia shall continue to receive from France all or part of the emoluments attached to the functions they fulfilled in the conquered provinces, until the day when they should refuse an equivalent post in the administration to which they belonged,”

[footnote: (1) A. Dumont, Administration et Propagande, p. 41: “France, which had never sought to make the Alsatian idiom disappear before French, named by preference in Alsace men of native origin. This was a liberal conduct, the interests of the State have never had to suffer from it, and the province, administered in great part by its fellow citizens, thus preserved a kind of autonomy.”]

the commission of parliamentary initiative agreed that this proposal “first of all aroused sympathy,” but asked that it not be taken into consideration: adopted, it would draw the Assembly onto a dangerous path:

Particular misfortunes, fruits of devotion to duty and to fatherland, have been so numerous in this cruel year, they are met with in such diverse situations over a great part of our territory, that one cannot hope to repair them by direct allocations. The resources of the State, whatever the fecundity they may yet have, cannot be diverted from their aim of deliverance and general reorganization… The exception solicited here in favor of certain functionaries seemed, on the other hand, to several members of the commission, to be the less to be welcomed in that, in their eyes, it would seem to consecrate that error that functions are a kind of property.

However, the commission judged it “fitting to testify to the interest which the noted functionaries appeared to deserve, and those whose position is analogous”; that “the executive power, on which they depend, can appreciate what was their attitude before the enemy, in any invaded territory,” and grant them by preference “either new posts, or reparative advancements.” (1) — The functionaries could therefore hope, if they reentered France, for benevolent supports; but the competition would be strong, and certainty escaped them.

[footnote: (1) Lucien Brun proposal, etc.; conclusions of the commission, adopted by the National Assembly on March 21, 1872. (Villefort, Recueil des traités, t. II, p. 323.)]

The most important among them, (1) the magistrates, could be particularly interesting for the victor: because of the meaning that would have been given to their conversion, of the éclat of their dignity, of their brilliant situation in the world. On the contrary, would they not be obliged to struggle, in France, to find again the equivalent of what they were losing? A new chamber was indeed created at the Court of Appeal of Nancy (law of March 25, 1872), but it was only temporary at the moment of its creation (it became definitive only from 1875 on); moreover, this chamber was destined above all for the former magistrates of the Court of Appeal of Metz, whose jurisdiction had not entirely disappeared like that of Colmar and, subsisting partially, needed a jurisdiction pro parte: it could therefore not suffice to take in, along with those of Metz, all the others — great magistrates of Colmar, lesser judges from everywhere else; finally, the style of certain articles of the law was not very encouraging. (2) But, on the other hand, the German régime was prefacing itself in a manner that had wherewith to frighten consciences: one could not hope for some period of slow reorganization and of transition favorable to habituation, when one knew that it had claimed to have justice rendered “in the name of the High German Powers” from the very occupation; nor doubt of its contempt for the past, when one had heard the procurator Popp, inaugurating the tribunal of Strasbourg, pompously celebrate the defeat of the “nation greedy for glory and booty,” the “deliverance” of the two provinces “which are our blood and our flesh,” and remind the judges that they had at their disposal, to continue the work begun, “all the severities of the law,” that “clemency would be a fault, moderation a danger”… (1) They would be obliged, these French magistrates of yesterday, to make the surviving French laws serve the consolidation of the new régime, to watch over the execution of all the police measures it might please the German administration to enact, to bend the pride of their French tradition to the use of the language of the victor. All, save six, departed.

[footnote: (1) I do not speak of the prefects and sub-prefects, direct representatives of French authority, who disappeared with it.] [footnote: (2) “Article 3. — The magistrates of the courts and tribunals and the justices of the peace who shall have lost their seat following the abandonments of territory consigned in the peace treaty, and who are not yet replaced, may, if they count at least ten years of paid service, be admitted to make valid their rights to a proportional retirement. This putting into retirement may be applied ex officio to the members of the parquets and to justices of the peace. The pension shall be of one-sixth of the salary for ten years of service… The salary according to which it shall be calculated shall be the average salary of the last six years… — Article 8. — The salary of the magistrates of the jurisdictions of Metz and of Colmar not replaced and not admitted to retirement shall continue to be paid to them during the year 1872.” (Villefort, Recueil des traités, t. I, p. 337.)] [footnote: (1) A. de Rappolstein, Alsace-Lorraine, p. 15.]

But the functionaries of justice were only a staff without troops. Others — those of public instruction, for example, or of the posts — constituted a true army. Everywhere, the heads of service departed, with the hope of an easier “mutation,” often having, more than their subordinates, the means of awaiting it, more conscious also of their exemplary responsibility. The Faculties of Strasbourg dispersed, some seeking a rallying point on the other side of the frontier: it is thus that the Faculty of Medicine, though composed in great part of natives, migrates toward the “Preparatory School” of Nancy, which, thanks to this Alsatian contribution (Stoltz, dean, — Morel, Coze, Fée, Hirtz, Rigaud, Hameaux, Tourdes, Bach, professors, — Hergott, Sarazin, Beaunis, Aronssohn, Ritter, Felz, Bouchard, Bernheim, agrégés), was at once promoted to a Faculty; while several of the former professors and agrégés who did not leave Strasbourg formed there, under the direction of one of them, Ch. Schützenberger, an “autonomous School of Medicine,” which knew how to prove that the country “possessed in itself enough scientific elements to ensure, in the present and perhaps in the future, higher instruction to its children” (1) — but which lasted only a year, the government having “judged this existence incompatible with that of the University of the German State.” (2) Three or four of the former professors of the French Faculty accepted the proposals of the German University; others, of those who had likewise remained at Strasbourg, preferred to renounce official teaching: the illustrious Koeberlé broke off his magisterial career; Eugène Boeckel contented himself with having as disciples the interns whom his position as chief surgeon of the civil hospital gathered around him. (3) One of these Strasbourg Faculties was more particular to the country itself, and perhaps, on leaving Alsace, its members would be even more bereft than others: the professors of the Faculty of Protestant theology, all Lutherans save one, could hardly think of replacing themselves in France, where there was only one sister, or half-sister, Faculty — the Reformed Faculty of Montauban; and it was only in 1877 that the Faculty of Protestant theology of Paris was to be created — memory and debris of that of Strasbourg. Yet the “theologians” followed the common fate; Sabatier, Lichtenberger, Colani went away, their dream vanished: a long sequence of common memories (a kind of Protestantism of the Rhine valley), an intellectual culture in which they had taken pleasure in giving wide place to the Germanic element, had long made them believe that Alsace was and would always be a hyphen between France and Germany… In secondary education, the lycées emptied themselves of their French personnel: not only professors come from interior France, but even natives, and although the new administration immediately made them seductive offers; from the Protestant gymnasium too, (1) when it was known that the German programme would have to be adopted and that teaching would have to be in German, it was an exodus: Léser, Buisson, Boucher, Collier…

[footnote: (1) Schützenberger, Rapport sur les travaux, p. 5.] [footnote: (2) Id., ibid., p. 7.] [footnote: (3) Cf. Dr. Dollinger, Revue Alsacienne Illustrée, 1900, Chronique, p. 8.] [footnote: (1) The Protestant gymnasium of Strasbourg, an institution more than three centuries old; it was a free establishment, and if I speak here of its professors, although they were not properly State functionaries, it is not only because confirmation by the State conferred on them a sort of assimilation with their colleagues of the lycée, but also because of the considerable role it played, alongside the lycée, in the education of the young Strasbourg bourgeoisie.]

But there was also the multitude, the multitude of school-teachers, the multitude of all the subaltern functionaries — clerks, post-office employees, postmen, town constables — the multitude of all those who are more bound to the soil, who live more — an often indispensable supplement to their salary — in the paternal house and from the paternal earth. Do you divine the state of soul of that school-teacher from the environs of Phalsbourg, attached to his canton by a thousand bonds of affection and of interests, who, without budging, was going to receive from the Germans an increase of salary, and to whom the French administration offered, as the only available equivalent, a post at the Bouthits, commune of Lèves, arrondissement of Libourne? And then, always, where was duty? One day, the rector of the Academy of Nancy came to take a walk in a small town of recently annexed Lorraine, had one of the school-teachers discreetly called, whom he had long known and esteemed, and transmitted to him, in conversation, the formal opinion of M. Thiers: that one must stay, hope… Despite all that held them back, many departed, or, staying, took the chances of another career. To some, the German administration was frightening, for themselves: it readily affects a military bearing, plays gravely upon costume and grade; and spending one’s days in uniform behind a postal counter — that would be still wearing their uniform, timidly entering their haughty hierarchy. For others, the school-teachers, who do not “serve” only of their person — an intimate and limited constraint — but who, beyond it, engage the future, they would have to teach German history, and in the German fashion: a patriotic method, ardent, almost exclusive, which scarcely concerns itself with making, for the use of primary schools, impartial and serene science: Germany, “beneficent to all, fearsome to no one”; Charlemagne, German emperor, only German; (1) Alsace insidiously taken by Louis XIII and Louis XIV, but Frederick II proclaimed a great king for having seized Silesia; (2) Germany touching, on the north, the Baltic and the North Sea as far as Calais; on the west, the hills going from Cape Gris-Nez to the Argonne inclusively, the Faucilles, the heights between Rhine and Rhône, the Jura as far as Lake Geneva, — thus enveloping without hesitation Denmark, a bit of Belgium, a bit of Holland, a bit of Switzerland, a good deal of France (3): harmonious unity, as one sees; while, of the 36,000,000 inhabitants of France, one must deduct Bohemians and Cagots, Basques and Italians, Walloons and Bretons, by hundreds of thousands: there are hardly any true Frenchmen, Normal-Franzosen, except in the Île-de-France. (4) One would have to — fatal consequence of this Germanocentric method — set oneself to teaching that the recent annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was not, for the Germans, a conquest (Eroberung), but a taking-back (Zurückeroberung)… In this foreign atmosphere, could French functionaries live? At the very attempt, many felt in advance something like shame. Of all these modest men, to whom the future, if they spoke, would be more difficult than to the great, and whose fidelity would be less glorious, many went away, giving by their departure the heroic proof, and one then generally regarded as the most significant, of their attachment to the vanquished: at the end of 1872, only 26% of the functionaries of Alsace-Lorraine were Alsatians-Lorrainers by origin. (1) As for those who remained, it was rarely by some suppleness of bad ambition, but by material impossibility, constrained, and in a state of mind that had nothing of the renegade:

[footnote: (1) Deutschland nach seinen physischen und politischen Verhältnissen geschildert, by Prof. Dr. Daniel, two volumes, Leipzig, 1860: cited by E. Lavisse, Un livre français et un livre allemand sur l’Allemagne (Revue des Deux-Mondes, June 15, 1873).] [footnote: (2) Histoire d’Allemagne, by Kohlrausch, “former professor, general inspector of all the higher schools of the kingdom of Hanover; work appeared a little before 1840 and which, printed in a great number of editions, spread widely in Germany; the aversion and the bias against France manifest themselves crudely there.” (J. Heimweh, Triple Alliance et Alsace-Lorraine, p. 21.)] [footnote: (3) Deutschland nach seinen…: see above.] [footnote: (4) Handbuch der Erdkunde, by A. Hummel, 1876: cited by Brunetière (Un manuel allemand de géographie, in Revue des Deux-Mondes, June 1, 1876), who remarks that the author is professor in a seminary, that it is a question of a serious work and a teaching one. This last book is, it is true, by its date of publication, four or five years later than the period in which we place ourselves in this chapter; it is not however an anachronism to cite it here: this tendentious history and geography were not of one moment, nor of one single book. One hesitates to cite more: “The inhabitants of Champagne are very closely related to the eastern Lorrainers; their imposing stature, their blond hair, their blue eyes — everything recalls that Germany is not far off.” “In the veins of the Norman still beats, unmistakably, a Germanic blood… Hence his aptitude for affairs, his skill, his eye… It is an after-memory of the time of the ancient sea-kings.” “Burgundy is, of all France, the province that most resembles Germany… Even in the great industrial city of Lyon, one scarcely meets, as in the end in all the neighboring regions, any traces of French inconsistency and frivolity.” “In Languedoc, the race is strong, serious: …it is because, in these regions, the Visigoth conquerors destroyed the Gaulish element, or at least mingled with it a strong proportion of Germanic blood…” Etc.] [footnote: (1) General table of all senior, subaltern functionaries, and employees of the administration, including those of direct contributions and of justice, according to their former nationality, published by the Courrier du Bas-Rhin (January 1873): Prussians: 46%; Alsatians-Lorrainers: 26%; Bavarians: 9%; the rest: Germans from other States, Luxembourgers, Swiss.]

It is certain, says the Augsburg Gazette, (2) that the feeling of the false and untenable position in which they [the Alsatians-Lorrainers who would have accepted public functions] would find themselves prevented a great number of Alsatians and Lorrainers, former French functionaries, from taking service in the German administration. Such a conduct was only possible for those animated by indifferent political opinions and for the small number who applauded the separation from France… At Berlin, they seem to have been of a different opinion; otherwise they would not have made various attempts to have Alsatians and Lorrainers as functionaries. But it is fortunate that those concerned correctly appreciated the position in which they would have placed themselves. In a short time, most of them would have lost all consideration with their compatriots, or else would have been pushed into a most awkward opposition against the government…

[footnote: (2) Cited in the Journal d’Alsace, 12 December 1873.]

Ecclesiastics had, more than any others, before deciding themselves in the agonizing question, the right and the duty to cast their gaze around them, their function being all of moral influence and direction: if, in these countries, it was not a question of blind obedience to the clergies — the willingly jovial finesse of the populations would have opposed itself to that, — at least they were surrounded, in general, with cordial deference and affection. Most of the ecclesiastics remained. They would, once gone, have met many personal difficulties? No doubt; for, of whichever of the three confessions they might be ministers, they would not find again, from one day to the next, the means of pursuing their ministry elsewhere: the curates, because of their absolute number; the pastors and the rabbis, still less, because of their relative number: outside Alsace there were only three or four other large Protestant regions in France; outside Alsace and Lorraine, there were almost no Jewish communities (those of the Midi were of a different rite). But other, higher reasons held them back as well, and they would find themselves at times, in remaining, in situations so painful that emigration would not have been more so: their sentiments were not in doubt, and it did not suit them to hide them.

For Catholic priests, the consequences of the treaty were the more to be feared, in that it placed them in the dependency of a Protestant State. A grave incident, which occurred between the signing of the treaty and the fatal date of the option, could make them understand that the new authority would mean to be respected. Article 6 of the Treaty of Frankfurt had stipulated that “the high contracting parties, being of opinion that the diocesan circumscriptions of the territories ceded to the German Empire ought to coincide with the new frontier…, shall concert together, after the ratification of the present treaty, without delay, on the measures to be taken in common to that effect.” What exactly would be this transfer of obedience? The two bishoprics of Alsace-Lorraine, henceforth withdrawn from the metropolitan jurisdiction of the archbishop of Besançon, would they be, as of old, suffragans of German archbishoprics — Metz, of Trier, and Strasbourg, of Mainz? In fact, the struggle of the chancellor and the pope was to make the “without delay” of article 6 drag a little. A pastoral letter from the bishop of Nancy provoked, without intention, but not without tumult, the regulation of the question. By this letter, of July 26, 1872, read from the pulpit in all the parishes of his diocese, including the annexed ones, (1) Mgr. Foulon announced for September 10 the feast of the coronation of Notre-Dame-de-Sion, inviting the faithful to come and pray that the fatherland “deserve to see soon arise upon her better days,” recalling the “formidable war which desolated our dear Lorraine, and the disastrous peace which has mutilated her…” Three passages of the letter having been declared seditious by the German government, thirty priests were chosen at random from among the two hundred who had been guilty of the public reading, and brought before the tribunal of Metz, which condemned them to eight and fifteen days of fortress. The bishop of Nancy was condemned to two months of the same penalty, in contumaciam; he could no longer reappear in his diocese, and its administration would henceforth be impossible to him. (1) It was then that the Holy See concerned itself, at the proposal of the French government, with regularizing the situation: the pope decreed the new limits of the circumscriptions, the attachment to the bishoprics of Strasbourg and of Metz of all that was on Alsatian-Lorrainian territory, — and of these two bishoprics, directly, to the Holy See. (2) But, before this elegant solution intervened, the affair of the pastoral letter had produced a profound impression, and one which could make hesitate: one would no doubt be, in remaining, at the mercy of the new power, of a power whose political hostility would perhaps be aggravated by religious hostility, of a government which would have a heavy hand the day it should bring it down on Catholic functionaries, and which would know how to invent “state of siege in ecclesiastical affairs” (1): the era of the Kulturkampf was opening. Yet they remained. In the tempest, where the temporal was not alone in question, they felt weighing on them the great responsibilities of olden times; the tragic situation in which the little country was struggling recalled to all memories the traditional gestures of troubled times: since its sacred character is capable of forcing respect, of staying the menace of the victor, the priest does not abandon his unhappy flock. The bishop of Metz, who, at the inauguration of the monument in the cemetery of Chambière, (2) had ended his improvised allocution by recalling, amid the sobs of the crowd, Saint Paul’s recommendation to the faithful: that one must not “grieve as those who have no hope,” — the bishop of Metz, the admirable Dupont des Loges, would give the example of courageous tutelage over the faithful, of dignified correctness with regard to the government, without disowning anything of “fidelity to his past” and of “the religion of his memories.” (3)

[footnote: (1) By article 9 of the Additional Convention of December 11, 1871, and pending the definitive arrangements provided for by article 6 of the Treaty of Frankfurt, the bishops established in the dioceses crossed by the new frontier preserved “in all its extent their spiritual authority and remained free to provide for the religious needs of the populations entrusted to their care.”] [footnote: (1) F. Klein (abbé), Dupont des Loges, p. 341.] [footnote: (2) Pontifical decrees of July 10 and 14, 1874: “…ut Argentinensis seu Strasburgensis altera Metensis ecclesiae episcopales, quae in Alsatia-Lorena constitutae sunt, … paterna ex ejusdem Summi Pontificis benignitate salutarique in Domino providentia, nedum honorificentius, sed etiam consultius praeseferant immediatam, erga Sanctam Sedem apostolicam, in ecclesiasticis et spiritualibus subjectionem.” (Villefort, Recueil des traités, t. IV, p. 127.)] [footnote: (1) This witty expression is from canon Dacheux (Cathédrale de Strasbourg, p. 59).] [footnote: (2) September 3, 1871. Monument raised to the memory of the French soldiers who died during the siege of Metz.] [footnote: (3) F. Klein, Dupont des Loges: last words of the letter from Mgr. Dupont des Loges to Field-Marshal von Manteuffel, when he refused the cross of the Iron Crown (December 16, 1876).]

To be co-religionists of the new masters, and because there succeeded for them, to the inconvenience of having been a minority in the French Empire, the advantage of being, in the German Empire, of the religion of the State, the situation of Protestant ministers was only the more delicate. Protestants had been so much accused of suspect sympathy for Germany! Baron Pron, prefect of the Bas-Rhin, said, at the beginning of the war, that they held out their hands to the Prussians. (1) During the bombardment of Strasbourg, the rumor was that the Prussian batteries, whose shells rained on the cathedral, were sparing the quarter of their Saint-Thomas temple (2)… until the facts themselves belied this calumny. The pastors would therefore hold it the more an honor to proclaim their patriotic sentiments. And then, they knew well that the victors would not stop, in administrative matters, at considerations of common religion: there had been talk at once of suppressing the Protestant seminary, because this institution, which had no analogue in Germany, was relatively independent of the government, and of replacing it with courses at the new University, but of which the Saint-Thomas Foundation should bear the financial charge without having at the same time the right of appointment and of control. Certainly some lapses were going to occur, but exceptional ones; to remain would be, for some perhaps, to pay court to the new régime, to profit from the community of traditions to draw close to it; for the others, on the contrary, to prevent the invasion of pastors from beyond the Rhine, who would not fail to come, officiants in flight, to sanctify the result of this so-evangelical war. When, a few weeks after the entry of the Germans, opening in Strasbourg a series of conferences for the benefit of the victims of war in France, Sabatier, professor at the Faculty of Protestant theology, took as his subject: William the Silent, and ended with this peroration: “He himself summed up his life in his house’s device, which he bequeathed to Holland and to all oppressed peoples as the immortal protest of right bent beneath force: Je maintiendrai! He had only, to be what he was, to remain faithful to it”; (1) when, to the offers of the German University, Lichtenberger replied by going up one last time into the pulpit of Saint-Nicolas to deliver there his sermon on Alsace in Mourning, (2) the emotion of the pastors come in crowds to listen showed clearly that an intellectual sympathy for Protestants from beyond the Rhine did not necessarily carry the acquiescence of hearts, even if the Germans, surprised, were to testify at this hostility an additional irritation. (3)

[footnote: (1) Cf. G. Fischbach, Siège de Strasbourg, p. 65.] [footnote: (2) Cf. F. Lichtenberger, Alsace pendant la guerre, p. 28.] [footnote: (1) January 16, 1871. Cited by H. Dartigue, Auguste Sabatier à Strasbourg.] [footnote: (2) November 26, 1871.] [footnote: (3) Cf. Lichtenberger (F.), Protestantisme et Guerre de 1870, pp. 1–2.]

The rabbis, finally, had one more reason for suffering from the present misfortune. Born, nearly all, in the small villages of Alsace, having a very lively family sense of the steeple, instructed in the seminary at Metz, they were profoundly “of the country,” and grateful with ardor to France for what the Revolution had done for the Jews: annexation to Germany was a step backward, very far backward… The grand rabbi of Metz, the grand rabbi of Colmar, went away; the latter, in a final sermon before quitting his temple, expressed sentiments which he knew were those of all the others. He justified himself for “not remaining in the midst of his flock”: that he could not speak and act against his conscience, preach, as would surely be asked of him, “forgetfulness of the past, resignation to the fait accompli,” love of a fatherland which he himself could not feel; “in all hearts lives the hope of seeing right resume its empire, of seeing Alsace given back to the country… from which her soul shall never be detached; … this hope is mine, and when it shall be realized, oh! then, you will call me, will you not? my brothers; and I, wherever I shall be, will hasten…” (1) By this final word of hope, the rabbi who was leaving rejoined the great bishop who was remaining.

[footnote: (1) I. Lévy, Adieu à l’Alsace, p. 9–10. (3 July 1872)]

Ecclesiastics of all confessions, drawing from the State budget, are still functionaries. Others, who are not, have no less the right to rest upon the State, having bought by some contract its guarantee. Now, the internal mechanisms of two neighboring States are not necessarily identical, the cogs of the one may not exist in the other, or may function differently. Thus notaries, proprietors of their offices in France, functionaries in Germany. Would Germany recognize their right of property in the notaries of Alsace and Lorraine? or was she going, as rumor had it, to “smash the notariat” in the conquered territories? The French government succeeded in having this property recognized by the German plenipotentiaries; so, when, in consequence of the law of July 14, 1871, on the new judicial organization of Alsace-Lorraine, it was suppressed, the holders had a right to a compensatory indemnity; the indemnity would even be calculated equitably, on the average annual yield of the last five years, from July 1, 1865, to July 1, 1870 (the French government having asked that the five-year period begin early enough so that the bad years of the war should not at the other end be included in it). Recognition of a right, which, however, limited it, and justice sometimes unjust. The indemnity, for example, was menaced with a reduction of a third if, opting for France, the ceding party did not take care to present a capable successor knowing German, or if, remaining, he resigned his functions for any other reason than “incapacity of service duly verified.” Moreover, modifications of jurisdiction prejudicial to certain offices would diminish the profits during the time one should still exercise. And then, one would have to take an oath, no longer a professional oath, as in the French time, but the oath of functionaries: “before God all-powerful and all-knowing, fidelity and obedience to His Majesty the Emperor of Germany.” One would no longer be one’s own master, master of one’s office, master of ceding it when one wished, of transmitting it to one’s son… (1) But also, the other anguish, always the same: what new life could one create for oneself in returning to France?… Out of 376 notaries, only 172 remained in office… Yes, what new life, if one departed? See the avoués of Metz. The law of March 25, 1872, indeed authorized them to come and establish themselves near the Court of Appeal of Nancy. But, since 1865, the avoués of Nancy, whose Company then counted twelve members, had found themselves too numerous and had bought back, at successive deaths, three of the twelve offices, thus reducing themselves to nine. The new law was therefore going to re-establish in another form the old state of things, to bring back competition — grave competition, even if the newcomers brought some additional business. Hence a petition from the avoués of Nancy for the abrogation of the law, various proposals to prevent the installation in Nancy of their colleagues from Metz; at need, they would take partly upon themselves the reimbursement of these offices, by abandoning to that effect the proceeds of their new business born of the attachment to Nancy of the former Metz jurisdictions. (1)

[footnote: (1) Cf. Flach (G.), Notariat en Alsace-Lorraine; Bernard (G.), Réforme du Notariat en Alsace-Lorraine.] [footnote: (1) National Assembly, 23 May 1874, in: A. Villefort, Recueil des traités, t. III, p. 472.]

Notaries, avoués — great ones of the earth! These at least would receive indemnities, — compensations of present lost, advances on the future. Some others, neighbors of the State, they too, and sure of the morrow as functionaries are, had reason to disquiet themselves all the more at the thought of beginning, elsewhere, the trial of living: no robe nor bands, men of small uniform, honorable, modest, anonymous: all the personnel of the section ceded by the Eastern Company: the station-masters, despite the pressing solicitations of which they were the object, and nearly all the “commissioned” employees, even natives of the country, returning to France, (1) — the under-staff, bereft, small proprietors of a strip of field in the neighborhood of their crossing-gate or of their lamp-room, henceforth registered in a foreign, state, quasi-military administration, which would be under the direct authority of the chancellor of the Empire. (2)

[footnote: (1) Out of about 3,400 “commissioned” employees in this part of the network, only 800 remained in Alsace-Lorraine.] [footnote: (2) Decree of December 12, 1871. Cf. Em. Foehler, Exploitation des Chemins de fer…, p. 20.]

… And finally, behind these, who, belonging to very bourgeois companies or to powerful administrations, will perhaps find compensatory transfers, there is the multitude, the multitude of all those who are not framed and sustained, for whom there are no colleagues, comrades, esprit de corps, and whose existence — merchants, farmers, manufacturers — depends, without contribution or guarantee of the State, solely on the flow of their products. Over fifteen thousand square kilometers, factories and counting-houses “send out” toward the west, without obstacle of any kind, with all the boldness given them by relations long established and regularly maintained, taking account, for the setting of their prices and the direction of their travelers, of the other producing centers scattered over the rest of the territory; toward the east, on the contrary, a barrier — diminished business, or other business. Lift the barrier on the side where it is, carry it over to the side where it is not, and there you are perhaps, from one day to the next, in ruin.

First, there was a present situation to liquidate. The heads of establishments, “despite the crushing prices of coal, of cotton, and of all the other materials necessary for manufacture,” had not let their workshops lie idle; but, for lack of prompt outlets, production would inevitably halt; the crisis was imminent. (1) As early as March 8, 1871 — between the preliminaries and the definitive treaty — a “Commission for the defense of Alsatian interests” had formed, with the mission of obtaining certain temporary facilities for Alsatian industry: for example, that all manufactured products then in Alsace and whose French origin it would be possible to establish should be admitted to re-enter France without having to pay any duty; that a transitional and gradual period be set, during which Alsatian products, on condition of justifying their provenance, would still be admitted on the French market free of duties or with reduced duties. There was the less time to lose in acting, since the zeal of the fisc does not encumber itself with non-financial considerations, and since its agents, between two possible interpretations, apply by their own authority the one most advantageous to it: one day at the end of March, the customs administration of Bourg, through which many Alsatian goods passed, taking the Swiss route to enter France, had decided that Alsace-Lorraine, being, since the signing of the preliminaries, detached from French territory and incorporated into the German Empire, the shipments of these two provinces destined for France would henceforth be subjected to the conditions of the general tariff applied to merchandise originating from abroad. This incident having further excited the ardor of the threatened industrialists, they had ended by obtaining from the French government, first, the lifting of the interdict pronounced by the director of customs of Bourg; then, the right to introduce free of duty their products into French territory until the signing of the definitive treaty; finally, in the treaty, the insertion of article 9, which maintained “for a space of time of six months, from March 1, under the conditions made with the delegates of Alsace,” “the exceptional treatment accorded for the moment to the products of the industry of the ceded territories for importation into France.” However, as the difficulty of communications with France, the encumbering of the railways by military transports, the diminution and bad state of their matériel rendered this six-month period insufficient, and as moreover the date was now May 10 and the term starting March 1 was already much shortened, the Commission for the defense of Alsatian interests had at once undertaken a new campaign and provoked the Additional Convention of October 12, 1871, (1) which definitively fixed the customs régime under which the products of Alsace-Lorraine were to be imported into France, to wit: free entry from September 1 to December 31, 1871; quarter-duty from January 1 to June 30, 1872; half-duty from July 1 to December 31, 1872.

[footnote: (1) Cf. Lalance (L.), Notice historique et statistique, p. 12, sqq.] [footnote: (1) Cf. G. Bergmann, Rapport…, p. 10–17. See in the Annexes.]

But these steps, discussions, and regulations, which attenuated the present ill, did not assure the future. One had to concern oneself with that. We have already seen, in the discussions relative to the delimitation of the frontier, Hayange and Cirey advance economic considerations in favor of their being kept on French territory. From one day to the next, the forges and foundries, the manufactories of plate glass and of crystals of Lorraine, the Alsatian wool and cotton manufactories, which had occupied one of the first ranks in French production, would be obliged to weigh down with their new contribution German production. In the region of Mulhouse in particular — of Mulhouse which had become French in 1798 to unite herself not only with the French nation but with the French market — the cotton industry had taken since that epoch a development every day more intense. Now that she would count in the German statistic, the Mulhouse industry would have, by herself alone, an importance equal to two thirds of the cotton industry of the countries of the Customs Union. Consequences of the treaty for her: loss of former outlets, encumbering of the new market, difficulty of making a place in it — both because of this numerical competition and because the clientele was less familiar to her, being accustomed to other suppliers and to other supplies: “your fabrics are too well made, and last too long,” a Hamburg exporter said to an Alsatian representative.

Add that it is not always only a question of consumption, of directing, at the exit of a factory, products which, finished, are going to go off toward one market or another. Manufacture itself can be troubled by a territorial dislocation. Thus the Mulhouse industry, which was very complex. Textiles, chemicals, metallurgical — these diverse ambitions had only come to her, as is known, little by little, in the rapid succession, it is true, of years and successes, in the design of manufacturing herself both the fabrics on which she operated and the machines and dyes she needed: her beginning had been the painting of cloths entrusted to her from outside, and such was still one of the most important parts of her industry. Now, before the war, the Vosges and the Haut-Rhin formed an “inseparable assemblage of means of production which completed one another and merged in a common effort”; henceforth, numerous workshops of spinning and weaving — 800,000 spinning-spindles and 17,000 weaving looms — found themselves “all at once deprived of the means of giving their unbleached products the indispensable finishings of bleaching, of dyeing, and of printing…” (1)

[footnote: (1) Claude (des Vosges), Report to the National Assembly, December 1872. (Villefort, Recueil des traités, t. V, p. 101 sqq.)]

Here, in a rapid view, are some of the situations produced by the Treaty of Frankfurt in the departments it tore from France, some of the anguishes that troubled, between May 10, 1871, and September 30, 1872, those whom the green border, realized upon the ground, enveloped. I do not despair of one day returning to the examination of this situation, of investigating in more detail how a diplomatic act reacts upon the life of individuals: to follow the trace of some and others, on the two sides of the new frontier, to seek what they have become, over there or here, would be, if one succeeded in it, to write the history of the French soul in this crisis… Perhaps at least, by this brief review, I shall have shown how the conclusion of the peace did not only move with the general sadness the men of Alsace and of Lorraine, but further overturned, for a long time, — in some cases, forever, — their personal existences. Tragic struggle. Interest. Duty. And interest that knows how to take the forms of a duty: to safeguard the future of one’s own, not to aggravate, by abandoning them, the lot of the subordinates of whom one has charge. And the “categorical” of duty which attenuates itself, the intimate order of departure which makes itself less imperative, because, behind this first duty, another appears: instead of protesting by quitting the place, to protest by keeping it. But, having a more convenient air and one of lesser risk, this second duty seemed suspect then, in the feverish bitterness of the hour, to many of those who valiantly sacrificed all to the grandeur of the necessary gesture: to depart, in order not to undergo the contact of the victor. And so it was that, whatever the social category, the personal situation, the fears or the chances for the future, often, in the inner discussion, one argument arose, at once taking on a preponderant voice: not to see one’s sons become German soldiers. “He had sons, he left”: a simple expression, an elliptical syllogism, which was current at that period, and which, forty years later, is still in itself a sufficient explanation, when one speaks, among people from over there, of the departures at the time of the option. Then, in a surge in which there mingled, equally over-excited by the crisis, fidelity to the national word and aversion for the foreign non-word, (1)

[footnote: (1) Cf. E. Lavisse, Vue Générale, pp. 80–88, on the formation of the French soul during the Hundred Years’ War: the war “is hard, it is long, it is atrocious. From year to year, hatred of the Englishman grows. In contact with the foreigner, France comes to know herself, as the word does in contact with the non-word.”]

they went to the district headquarters to make their declaration of option, for themselves, for their children, and they took their dispositions for departure. The 30th of September was the deadline: from the 1st of October 1872, all those who, even having opted, had not actually departed, would be considered as Germans. Civil servants who wondered where France would send them, former ministerial officers who wished now only for a quiet end on some judge’s bench, lawyers and doctors who would try to remake a clientele at Nancy, at Dijon, at Paris, agents of the “Est” railway whom the Company would seek to reassign along its truncated network, industrialists of Mulhouse who were going to swarm off to Belfort, Bischwiller transporting itself en bloc to Elbeuf (1) — and all those for whom the future was still more mysterious: shopkeepers, peasants, who had sold their business stock or their corner of land at miserable prices, as best they could, in order to have a little ready money on leaving, — and all those who had nothing, to whom would be distributed the six millions of relief subscribed in France, (2) or whom the Society for the Protection of the Alsatians-Lorrainers was about to send, as settlers, to Algeria, into villages created for them (3): by the railway stations and the frontier roads, as the fatal date drew near, the exodus rushed on, enthusiastic and stricken.

[footnote: (1) Cf. Bourguignon, Bischwiller depuis cent ans, p. 235 sqq.] [footnote: (2) Cf. Villefort, Recueil des traités, vol. III, p. 628.] [footnote: (3) Cf. Guynemer, Colonies als.-lorr., p. 3 sqq.: Haussonville, Boukalfa, Camp-du-Maréchal. A law passed by the National Assembly, on the 15th of September 1871, on the motion of Keller, had promised 100,000 hectares of land to the Alsatians-Lorrainers who would come and settle in Algeria as colonists. By the end of 1875, there were 1,500 of them.]

On the 1st of October 1872, nearly 60,000 persons had left. (1) Many never saw again the smoke of the native rooftop. Many, wishing one day to make a brief visit to the “old folks,” ran up against an inexorable frontier. Many returned, impoverished, disillusioned at having been regarded sometimes, in the small towns of France, as competitors, as intruders, with a laughable accent: the Alsatians-Lorrainers have not always had the Frenchmen they deserved. Many, uprooted, vegetated, paying, until death, with their personal sadness and misery, the ransom of the vanquished homeland. — Others would pay it in another fashion: those without whom this protestation of departure would have had no continuation, those of whom the annexed country would one day have need to continue it, leaning upon all that they would carry within them of French sentiments and French culture voluntarily or unconsciously preserved: those who were going to remain, to remain and struggle to maintain, as the Taciturn would have said,

[footnote: (1) The number of declared options in Alsace-Lorraine rose to about 160,000, of which 100,000 were annulled for not having been followed by actual departure. (The emigration movement continued for a long time: it is reckoned that about 58,000 persons left from 1875 to 1880, 60,000 from 1880 to 1885, 57,000 from 1885 to 1890, 72,000 from 1890 to 1895: cf. Statist. Jahrb. für E.-L.)]

V — SINCE

Prussia had led the conquest; she directed the organization of the conquered country. Sovereigns of a “German State founded outside the frontiers of Germany,” (1) it is — no less than by war and politics — by their administrative sense, their rigorous and tenacious method, their lofty idea of the State and their admirable devotion to that master superior to all, (2) that the kings of Prussia, for two centuries, had enlarged their own territory and extended their authority over the whole of Germany. Passionate for administration, they were going to administer in Alsace-Lorraine even before it was Alsace-Lorraine. From the morrow of the first victories, without waiting for any diplomatic regularization, convinced that the occupied country would be the annexed country, the king of Prussia wished that, in the wake of the victorious armies, a new state of things should replace the old, immediately. Thus the royal ordinances which, a few days after Frœschwiller, constituted the general government of Alsace, made of the governor, Count von Bismarck-Bohlen, the head of the whole administration, attaching to him a civil commissioner provided with all the powers that French law conferred on ministers. The governor thus considered himself the new sovereign, in the name of Germany, of a new German State:

[footnote: (1) E. Lavisse, Études sur l’Histoire de Prusse, Foreword, p. 1.] [footnote: (2) “I am the minister of war and finances of the king of Prussia,” said King Frederick-William I. (Id., ibid., p. 5.)]

“Inhabitants of Alsace!” he said in his Haguenau proclamation (30 August 1870), “the events of the war having brought about the occupation of a part of French territory by the forces of the allied German Powers (durch die hohen verbündeten deutschen Mächte), these territories find themselves by that very fact withdrawn from imperial sovereignty [the sovereignty of Napoleon III], in place of which is established the authority of the German Powers. It is in their name that I am called to exercise the power in the departments of the Haut- and the Bas-Rhin, as well as in the new department of the Moselle comprising the arrondissements of Metz, Thionville, Sarreguemines, Château-Salins and Sarrebourg, in the capacity of Governor General of Alsace…” (1)

[footnote: (1) Mur. d’Als.-Lorr., p. 223.]

It was a somewhat hasty seizure, for, in the eyes of international law, the occupier is generally only a substitute or interim administrator, and must content himself with ensuring the functioning of the services in the name of the former master, without regulating things as he pleases as though he were definitively the new one. (2) Division — which subsisted — of the general government into three departments (Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, (3) Lorraine) and twenty-two arrondissements, appointment, at their head, of German prefects and sub-prefects, regulation of the supplies to be delivered by the occupied countries for the upkeep of the occupying army, levying of a single tax replacing the direct and indirect contributions: these measures could at least pass for corollaries of the state of war. But the king of Prussia and his governor did not content themselves with that. In wishing to impose, as we have seen, upon the French magistracy of the occupied territory the obligation of rendering justice in the name of Germany, they claimed to consecrate immediately by a kind of legalization, even unilateral, the situation of fact which they had acquired. By authority equally, through public education, they engaged the future. The peace was not yet signed when the civil commissioner had already, for several weeks, submitted public education to his administration, (1) invited the primary schoolmasters to reopen their classes, and struck French almost completely from the curricula. Shortly after, the salaries of the schoolmasters had been raised, (2) and primary education — whose obligation existed only for a certain number of communes and for the Protestant portion of the population of the two departments — rendered obligatory for all. (3) The king of Prussia doubtless remembered having, in 1866, after Sadowa, a preparatory triumph for other triumphs, rendered thanks to his ancestors “whose paternal foresight, in spreading popular instruction with such zeal, sowed the seeds whose fruits we are today reaping.” (1) And in his turn, with an impatient hand, he was sowing the same seed.

[footnote: (2) Ph. Gerber, Cond. de l’Al.-L., p. 15.] [footnote: (3) Henceforth: Lower Alsace and Upper Alsace.] [footnote: (1) A. Dumont, Adm. et propag., pp. 21–22: 21 September 1870.] [footnote: (2) A. de Rappoltstein, Als.-Lorr., p. 10: 21 March 1871.] [footnote: (3) A. Dumont, Adm. et propag., p. 118: 18 April 1871.] [footnote: (1) Cited by A. de Rappoltstein, Als.-Lorr., p. 13.]

The proclamation of the Governor General, in the month of August 1870, had been able to reassure:

“The maintenance of the existing laws,” he said after announcing his taking possession, “the re-establishment of a regular order of things, the resumption of activity of all branches of the administration, this is the goal toward which the efforts of my government will tend within the limits of the necessities imposed by military operations. The Religion of the Inhabitants, the Institutions and customs of the country, the lives and property of the inhabitants will enjoy entire protection…” (2)

[footnote: (2) Mur. d’A.-L., p. 225.]

But certain subsequent ordinances were, as we have just seen, of a nature to disquiet: what was going to become, in truth, of “the institutions and customs of the country”? A disquiet all the more natural in that France, to mark that she was yielding only to force in ceding Alsace and Lorraine, had specified nothing as to their German future. Germany was therefore mistress of their new destiny. What would she make of them? Under what form would she incorporate them into the reconstituted German Empire?

From that moment there manifested themselves in Alsace-Lorraine the two tendencies which, ever since, for long years, have disputed there for influence and for votes. They were indeed only the political forms of the inner drama which had just played itself out in each conscience. Some — the protesters — would wish to be only “vanquished, entirely strangers to the making and application of the laws which it pleases the conqueror to impose upon us”; (1) and they would set above any other consideration their will to protest against violated right: a protestation of dignity, and of hope as well, for, by dint of being repeated, it cannot but triumph one day. The others — the autonomists — would protest equally against the accomplished fact, but, having protested, they would wish to act, not to let themselves be invaded and governed by the conqueror solely as he pleased, to give to Alsace-Lorraine, “within the limits of the constitution of Germany, the direction of its own affairs.” (2) A struggle difficult, still and always, for if the valor of the ones could be practically sterile, having for sole effect to abandon the place to Germans disdainful of these cries of right, the skill of the others risked making their submission to the fact pass for an acceptance of the fact, of seeming too prompt (was France not soon to return?) or even, for a few, personally interested: the maneuver of a widow still in mourning, but already consolable, and whose suitor was very powerful.

[footnote: (1) La Ligue d’Alsace, no. of 1st July 1881: Rev. Alsac. illustrée (June 1909).] [footnote: (2) A. Schnéegans, Pro Domo, p. 30.]

From March–April 1871, at Colmar, at Strasbourg, (3) “notables” of the Haut-Rhin and the Bas-Rhin assembled: de Peyerimhoff, mayor of Colmar, Hartmann, Chauffour, Ch. Gérard, — Jules Klein, deputy acting as mayor of Strasbourg, Flach, Jacques Kablé, Lauth: inspired by the autonomist spirit, or at least seeking to see whether one could count upon the imminent realization of the autonomist idea, even should they later be reclaimed — this was the case with more than one — by the spirit of protest. They agreed on the necessity of presenting wishes to Berlin: that the lot of the two provinces should not be divided, that no parcel of their territory should be detached for the profit of one or several of the Germanic powers, a partition in the Polish manner that would leave nothing subsisting of the past nationality; that, on the other hand, Alsace-Lorraine should not become, purely and simply, the chattel of Germany, exploitable at will; that French legislation and the French language should be maintained, the state of siege lifted, the young Alsatians-Lorrainers, for the longest possible delay, dispensed from German military service. Bismarck gave the delegates encouraging words: that Alsace would become a kind of self-administering republic; but, in reality, their wishes weighed scarcely at all on the imperial decisions. Only their fear of seeing some particular German sovereign lay hand on their country, or several share it among themselves, was about to dissipate.

[footnote: (3) The 23rd of March at Colmar, the 16th of April at Strasbourg.]

Alsace-Lorraine, indeed, being “the prize of the combats in which all the German States shed their blood, the pledge of the unity of the German Empire conquered by united forces,” (1) must belong, not to one alone, but to all. The law of the 9th of June 1871, which constituted her, made of the emperor the holder of public authority in Alsace-Lorraine. Alsace-Lorraine is henceforth a kind of joint property of the German Empire represented by the emperor — the “Empire Land,” as she will be called: Reichsland, — a memorial of his founding and as it were a guarantee of his duration. But, by being imperial, and not Prussian or Badenese, Alsace-Lorraine was scarcely more mistress of her political life. Save for laws that would engage the finances of the Empire, and concerning which the Parliament of the Empire would be consulted, the laws particular to Alsace-Lorraine will be elaborated by the Federal Council, which is an assembly of delegates from the German sovereigns, and to which Alsace-Lorraine will delegate no one; the emperor will moreover have an absolute right of veto. To realize the subjection into which she was about to fall, one must recall what the German Empire is, and that Alsace-Lorraine was passing without transition from a unitary State to a federative State. (1) Now, each of the German States, though enveloped in the unity of the Empire, preserved some personality, some autonomy. They abandoned to the Empire only a part of their sovereign rights. The emperor is the manager of the interests of the community, he is not the head of the particular organisms that compose it; each of them preserves its own Constitution and the right to legislate for itself in certain matters: thus the organization of education, for example, or the régime of the Churches, differs according to the States, at the will of each of them: an independent legislative power which the constitutive law of Alsace-Lorraine gave, not to herself, but in her place, to the Federal Council — where she had no representative — and to the emperor: the Empire Land shall not be a State, but a subject-country of the entire Empire, “das Reichsland ist kein Staat, sondern Unterthanenland des Reiches.” (1)

[footnote: (1) Exposé des motifs of the law of 9 June 1871: cited by A. de Rappoltstein, Als.-Lorr., p. 12.] [footnote: (1) Cf. Ph. Gerber, Cond. de l’Als., p. 23 sqq.] [footnote: (1) Das Staatsrecht des deutschen Reiches, by Dr. Philipp Zorn, cited by A. Laugel, Avenir intell., p. 251.]

The administrative organization of Alsace-Lorraine, fixed six months later (law of 30 December 1871), showed still better in what close dependence on the Empire the Reichsland would be. The governor-general gave way to a President-Superior, residing at Strasbourg, but who depended directly on Berlin: on the Chancellor of the Empire and on a division of the chancellery specially charged with the affairs of Alsace-Lorraine… Here, something of France was going to remain, and even too much: her administrative law, in the state in which the French Empire had left it, and in hands that would apply it without indulgence: thus, when the German administration made the weight of its authority bear upon Alsace-Lorraine, it would often be — and it did not displease it to insist on this irony — by virtue of old French laws, and even excepting her sometimes (for the press, for instance) from the benefit of more liberal legislation applicable to the whole Empire. Law of 6 June 1868 (2) submitting meetings (political or religious) to the approval of the sub-prefect, (3) with right of entry into the hall for a delegate of the administration, who can, in certain cases, dissolve the meeting; law of 10 April 1834 and decree of 15 March 1852 leaving associations free up to twenty members, submitting them from the twenty-first onward to the necessity of an administrative authorization which can always be withdrawn thereafter; press law of 11 May 1868 (caution-money, etc.): all these French laws remained in force; and it is around our law on the state of siege — a law “dating from the stormy period of 1849,” as Abbé Winterer said one day — that the famous Paragraph of the Dictatorship was formed. (1) “In case of danger to public safety, the President-Superior is authorized to take all the measures he shall judge necessary to forestall this danger. He is, in particular, authorized to exercise, on the exposed territory, the powers which the law of 9 August 1849 confers on the military authorities in case of a state of siege. (2) He shall immediately inform the Chancellor of the dispositions taken. He has the right to requisition, for the execution of these measures, all the troops which are on the territory of Alsace-Lorraine.” Thus, by these dispositions which aggravated the French law while leaning upon it, the President-Superior had the right to grant himself, whenever he himself should judge it necessary, and without limitation of place or duration, powers which, in France, could have been delegated only by a special law, for a determined time and place, and to an authority different from the one delegating them. There was even, in the text of the German Paragraph, an “all the measures” which permitted the President-Superior to give the broadest extension to the article of the French law, and to expel citizens even if they were neither “convicts” nor domiciled elsewhere than “in the places submitted to the state of siege.”

[footnote: (2) Ph. Gerber, ibid., p. 145 sqq.] [footnote: (3) It has been seen above that the organization into prefectures and sub-prefectures (departments and arrondissements) had been maintained by the Governor-General; it was also maintained by the law of 30 December, and still subsists.] [footnote: (1) People have grown accustomed to designate by this name article 10 of the law of 30 December 1871.] [footnote: (2) Article 9 of the law of 9 August 1849: “The military authority has the right: to make perquisitions by day and by night in the homes of citizens; to remove convicts and individuals who have not their domicile in the places submitted to the state of siege; to order the surrender of arms and ammunition, and to proceed to their search and removal; to prohibit the publications and meetings which it judges of a nature to excite or maintain disorder.”]

The introduction of the Constitution of the Empire into Alsace-Lorraine, from the 1st of January 1874, brought two modifications to the organization of the country, such as it resulted from these two laws of the 9th of June and the 30th of December 1871. Henceforth, instead of being promulgated by the emperor with the sole assent of the Federal Council, the laws particular to Alsace-Lorraine would have to receive also the assent of the Reichstag. (1) Furthermore, the Empire Land would have the right to send, like the States of the Empire, deputies to the Reichstag. The first Parliament of the Empire, which had been sitting since the 21st of March 1871, had just been dissolved, and new elections were being prepared.

[footnote: (1) Cf. P. Eccard, Const. de l’A.-L., p. 20.]

One understands without difficulty what must have been at that moment the moral state of the Alsatians-Lorrainers. The new régime had largely distributed the causes of discontent. The démarche of the notables had served for nothing: autonomy had not come from Berlin. The article of the Treaty of Frankfurt relating to the option had been, as we have seen, applied in the narrowest spirit. Imposed upon the Alsatians-Lorrainers without delay, from the “class of 1874” onward, the obligation of German military service had driven from the country thousands of young men who had taken the road to France, left their families, perhaps forever, run the risks of sequestration and fine, rather than submit to it. (1) The President-Superior had still further aggravated the dispositions relating to public education taken by the Governor-General. When the teaching of French is not entirely suppressed, it is relegated to a strange place, as in this curriculum of the professional school of Mulhouse, cited at the Reichstag, (2) which prescribes the teaching “of history in German, of geography in German, of calligraphy in French (Laughter), of drawing in French (Laughter).” The Saint-Clément School at Metz, the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine at Beauregard (near Thionville) were closed by superior order; the Redemptorist Fathers of Teterchen, near Boulay, dispersed, the Alsatian houses of the Jesuit Fathers dissolved. The police was so well organized — a director-general at Strasbourg, directors at Colmar and at Metz, cantonal directors, all with very extensive attributions — that every day new incidents irritated minds.

[footnote: (1) Cf. Ch. Grad, Correspondant, 1870 to 1874, on 121,132 young men whom the official reports counted for the three departments of Alsace-Lorraine, only 33,927 were present at their homes at the time of the formation of the rolls. Of these 33,927, the review boards moreover found only 10,011, over four years, who were immediately fit for service: many infirm and sickly had remained, not having the same reason to leave.] [footnote: (2) Speech of Deputy Sonnemann, of Frankfurt, 16 May 1872 (Cf. Ristelhueber, Bibliogr. alsac., 1873, p. 33), who was one of the few German opponents to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by force (one recalls, in this small group, the names of Dr. Jacoby, of Ch. Vogt, of Bebel, of Liebknecht, — and Dr. Krüger, deputy of North-Schleswig at the Reichstag, whose country had suffered the same wrong in 1866).]

For having founded an association that the authority suspected of turning children away from school and of meaning to occupy itself with political elections, Rapp, vicar-general of the bishopric of Strasbourg, had been forced to choose within twenty-four hours between expulsion and the fortress (March 1873). Aug. Sabatier had received the order to leave the territory, following a lecture in which he treated “of the influence of women on French literature”: a subject which is not at all subversive… it is true that it ended with the recall of a celebrated invocation by Sainte-Beuve to “the charming and light spirits, who have ever been the grace and honor of the land of France,” and who must, at the moment when “brutal science, violent politics invade us,” save us “once again from barbarism.” (1) At the same time, Ernest Lauth, the successor of Kuss at the mayoralty of Strasbourg, not having concealed his sentiments from the prefect — “Do you then hope for the return of the French?” “Certainly!” (2) — the prefect had revoked the mayor, then named in his place the director of the police as extraordinary commissioner charged with the municipal administration; then, the municipal council having protested against this appointment, the prefect had suspended the council (— which would be dissolved a few months later and re-established only in 1886 —). And when the administration had decided, in 1873, to reconstitute the conseils généraux, since the names of the elected left no doubt as to their hostile dispositions, it had recalled, a few weeks before the meeting of these assemblies, that, still by virtue of a French law, the new elected officials must take the oath of obedience and fidelity to the head of State — and therefore to the emperor of Germany; immediately, numerous resignations followed… In the course of time, the old Alsatian spirit of independence had developed regularly: the spirit of the “Ten Free Cities,” of the Republic of Strasbourg and the Republic of Mulhouse, the particular traditions relatively respected by the French monarchy, the Revolution carrying Alsace along because it went in the direction (1) of Alsatian democratism, (2) all these memories, all these tendencies had traversed the nineteenth century from liberation to liberation,

[footnote: (1) Auguste Sabatier. De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature française (Paris, Sandoz et Fischbacher, in-8°, 1873). — It is even said that the orator’s allusions did him less harm than a misconstruction in the German translation: opposing the German woman to the English woman, he had said that, “like the mystics, she aspires to strip herself of herself,” that “her individuality has something of wax, which is well capable of receiving, but not of giving an imprint”: now, “wax” (cire) had become “soft paste” (pâte molle) for the editor, and “fat paste” — eine fette Pastete — for the translator of the official Courrier du Bas-Rhin. H. Dartigue, Aug. Sabatier à Strasbourg, p. 56.] [footnote: (2) Rev. alsac. ill., 1901, Chronique, p. 83.] [footnote: (1) “France became what we had been; what we wished to be, we have become again through her and with her.” (F. Schweighäuser, Courrier du Bas-Rhin of the 21st of October 1862, cited by Le Roy, Année géogr., p. 228.)] [footnote: (2) Cf. W. Willich, Einst. National…, p. 91: “Even now, after thirty years, the Alsatian remains almost without interest in

the face of the political and social state of Germany, and every political current coming from Germany must, in order to have a chance of obtaining some success in Alsace, be democratically inspired”; — H. Lichtenberger, Quest. d’Als.: “The Alsatian is republican by temperament. Never has he been subject to the authority of a national dynasty… What made the French army popular among the Alsatian was its democratic organization…”]

(1830, 1848) to arrive, at the very moment when the mother-country was becoming a Republic, at the closest dependence vis-à-vis a foreign administration, the harshest there was, — and one which had done nothing, for three years, to soften among the “annexed” the bitterness of the catastrophe.

It was under these conditions that the elections to the Parliament took place. All the protestation candidates were elected. Union had been made on their names, without distinction of confession, and although confessional questions had almost always played a role in the politics of this country; even seven Catholic ecclesiastics (the two bishops, four parish priests, and an abbé, superior of a convent) were part of the deputation, — an honor they owed not only to the ardor of a patriotism which was common to them with their lay colleagues, but also to the confidence that the oppressed willingly places in the moral authority of the priest vis-à-vis the oppressor, and to the desire too, among the Catholics of Alsace-Lorraine, to mark their indignation toward the vexations of which the clergy was the victim in Prussia (1); more than one reason had designated them for the votes of the electors, and the Ligue d’Alsace, which was above all composed of Protestants, had warmly supported their candidacies. It is known moreover that at Metz it was this League which had put forward the candidacy of Mgr. Dupont des Loges, and that it was an Israelite, Edmond Goudchaux, who had been charged with asking him for his acceptance. (2)

[footnote: (1) Cf. Ed. Teutsch, Notes, p. 33.] [footnote: (2) Cf. Eur. nouv., June 1909. — G. d’Elstein, Als.-Lorr., p. 187, reports this saying of an old Jewish woman who, on the eve of the election, in the rue de l’Arsenal, the Jewish quarter of Metz, had exclaimed, to the applause of her neighbors and co-religionists: “I shall make my man vote for our bishop!”]

The fifteen protestation deputies (1) agreed to lay down the following proposition, which one of them, Edouard Teutsch, deputy of Saverne, would be charged with developing:

May it please the Reichstag to decide: That the populations of Alsace-Lorraine, incorporated without their consent into the Empire of Germany by the Treaty of Frankfurt, shall be called to pronounce themselves in a special manner upon this incorporation.

Edouard Teutsch sustained the proposition at the tribune of the Reichstag, on the 18th of February:

The populations of Alsace-Lorraine, of whom we are the representatives at the Reichstag, have entrusted to us a special and most grave mission, which we have at heart to fulfill without delay. They have charged us to express to you their thought on the change of nationality which has been violently imposed upon them in consequence of your war against France…

Your last war, ended to the advantage of your nation, incontestably gave the latter rights to a reparation. But Germany has exceeded her right as a civilized nation, in constraining vanquished France to the sacrifice of a million and a half of her children…

If, in distant and relatively barbarous times, the right of conquest could sometimes transform itself into effective right, if, even today, it succeeds in being absolved when it is exercised on ignorant and savage peoples, nothing of the kind can be opposed to Alsace-Lorraine. It is at the end of the nineteenth century, of a century of light and progress, that Germany conquers us; and the people whom she reduces to slavery, — for annexation without our consent constitutes for us a veritable moral slavery, — this people is one of the best in Europe, the one perhaps that carries highest the sentiment of right and of justice.

Will you argue from the regularity of the treaty that consecrates the cession, in your favor, of our territory and of its inhabitants? But reason, no less than the most vulgar principles of right, proclaims that such a treaty cannot be valid. Citizens having a soul and an intelligence are not a merchandise of which one can make commerce; nor is it permitted, then, to make them the object of a contract. Furthermore, granting even, what we do not acknowledge, that France had the right to cede us, the contract you oppose to us is of no value. A contract, indeed, has value only by the free consent of the two contracting parties. Now, it is with the sword at her throat that France, bleeding and exhausted, signed our abandonment. She was not free; she bowed under violence; and our codes teach us that violence is a cause of nullity for conventions tainted with it.

To give to the cession of Alsace-Lorraine an appearance of legality, the least you should have done was to submit this cession to the ratification of the ceded people.

A celebrated jurisconsult, Professor Bluntschli, of Heidelberg, in his International Law Codified, page 285, teaches this: “For a cession of territory to be valid, there must be the recognition by the persons inhabiting the ceded territory and enjoying there their political rights. This recognition can never be passed over in silence or suppressed; for the populations are not a thing without right and without will, of which one transmits the property.”

… You see it, Gentlemen, we find in the teachings of morality and of justice nothing, absolutely nothing, that can make our annexation to your empire be forgiven; and our reason finds itself on this in agreement with our heart. Our heart, indeed, feels itself irresistibly drawn toward our French homeland. Two centuries of life and of thought in common create, between the members of a single family, a sacred bond, that no argument and still less violence can destroy…

In choosing us all, every one of us, our electors have, above all, wished to affirm their sympathy for their French homeland and their right to dispose of themselves…

When Teutsch came down from the tribune, Mgr. Raess, bishop of Strasbourg, deputy of Schlestadt, suddenly made a singular declaration, the causes of which have never been completely explained, (1) believing himself obliged, “in his conscience,” to say that “the Alsatians-Lorrainers of his confession have in no way the intention of putting in question the Treaty of Frankfurt, concluded between two great nations,” — a declaration which provoked, immediately, the disavowal of his Catholic colleagues, and, the next day, the indignation of the priests of Strasbourg… Teutsch’s eloquence and argumentation, even the strange condescension of Mgr. Raess, left the Reichstag hostile to the motion. It was rejected, and, if one judges by the account of the session, one cannot even say that the Reichstag listened to the orators with the respect due to the vanquished, which would have done it honor in itself: the Gazette de Francfort protested the next day against the tumult and the ironic laughter that had accompanied the protest. (1) After the session, Teutsch and seven of his colleagues, Mgr. Dupont des Loges, Abel, Germain, Haeffely, Lauth, Pougnet, and the abbé Soehnlin, resolved to leave the Parliament and not return, while the others took the part of remaining at Berlin and continuing to follow the sessions.

[footnote: (1) Klein (abbé F.), Dupont des Loges, p. 351: ”… Whether by age…, whether he yielded unawares to the distant influences of his German education, or finally whether there occur cases in which, if it does not consult the heart, reason itself ceases to have reason, he had compromised beyond recall… his personal repose… and his influence as a bishop… It sometimes happened, in his cathedral, that the faithful, on his passing, turned their heads aside so as not to receive his blessing.”] [footnote: (1) Cf. Ed. Teutsch, Notes…, p. 57.]

Neither the éclat of the protestation of 1874, nor the activity of the autonomists, who did not lose heart, modified perceptibly the policy of the Empire vis-à-vis Alsace-Lorraine. Doubtless a decree of the 29th of October 1874 instituted the Delegation of Alsace-Lorraine (Landesausschuss). But its very origin made it suspect to the Alsatians. One remembers that, after the election of the Conseils généraux, the President-Superior had recalled to the elected the obligation of the oath and had thus provoked numerous resignations; these resignations had been followed by new elections, in which were elected candidates already sworn under other titles, often less independent and more disposed to follow the indications of the government; now, it is from these Conseils généraux, by way of delegation (whence its name; ten per council, thirty members in all), that the new body issued. An equivocal origin, which was not raised by the role devolved upon it: a simple consultative committee, to whose opinion could be submitted bills whose examination was not reserved to the Empire, including the budget of the Reichsland.

More important were the laws of 1879. Despite some successes won at the elections of 1877, the autonomists were not sure of the morrow: on the one hand, ill-advised démarches at Berlin had cast suspicion on some among them, and the others were seeking to free themselves from a compromising neighborhood; on the other hand, the protesters understood that one could no longer content oneself with pure and simple protestation, that one had at least to try to obtain a Constitution. Jacques Kablé was the link between the two parties; his formula: Protestation et action, became at once popular; an autonomist by origin, he was elected at Strasbourg against an autonomist (1878). And perhaps the agitation of that moment made the government understand that it was still better to give to the Alsatians-Lorrainers a beginning of satisfaction than to throw them completely toward the protesters because the autonomists would have obtained nothing. — It was thus that the “Constitution of 1879” was voted: law of 4 July, which replaces the President-Superior, whose function consisted particularly in transmitting all affairs to the chancellery of Berlin, by a Statthalter, or lieutenant-governor, who will be at once a delegate of the emperor with the powers of the head of State and a sort of special chancellor for the affairs of Alsace-Lorraine, being countersigned by his ministry in the first case, countersigning the emperor in the second; the Statthalter is in fact assisted by a ministry (four ministerial departments: interior and public instruction; justice and religious affairs; finances; commerce, agriculture and public works), ministers appointed by the emperor (with the countersign of the Statthalter), without responsibility before the Delegation, responsible in fact before the emperor alone. At the same time the Delegation was modified on two points. Already, since 1877, its voice was no longer merely consultative: although the laws particular to Alsace-Lorraine could always be enacted by the Reichstag, the Delegation, save for this threat of intrusion, (1) supplied the Parliament of Berlin for the laws of the Empire Land. The law of the 3rd of July 1879 brought two new modifications to the Landesausschuss: — as to its role: its members may henceforth lay down bills, but it will be no more than before an independent Parliament for what concerns the particular legislation of the country, as are the Diets of Bavaria, of Baden or of Württemberg: the laws voted by the Delegation will no longer need, as has been seen, since 1877, the approval of the Reichstag, but they will always need that of the Federal Council, where Alsace will still not be represented; — as to its formation: from thirty members, the number is raised to fifty-eight: thirty-four issued from the three Conseils généraux, four issued from the municipal councils of the great cities, twenty appointed by a two-tiered suffrage in the twenty rural arrondissements: a complicated electoral mode, “sifted,” as has been said many times, which will never make of the Delegation a veritable representation of the country. (2) — By this Constitution of 1879, the government made concessions to the spirit of autonomy, — it did not concede autonomy. And it is this Constitution that has continued to govern the Empire Land.

[footnote: (1) Cf. P. Eccard, Const. de l’Als.-Lorr., p. 21: “In fact, all the laws of Alsace-Lorraine have been voted, since 1877, save for rare exceptions, by the Landesausschuss, but the Reichstag remains a scarecrow that the government can wave before the representatives of the country, when they do not wish to obey its will.”] [footnote: (2) Since 1882, the sessions of the Delegation are public and the German language obligatory in the debates.]

The Statthalter appointed was Field-Marshal von Manteuffel. In his already long career, he had been at once soldier and diplomat, even in the course of the events of 1870–1871: after fighting in the north and the east, he had, the treaty signed, received the command of the army of occupation at Nancy: delicate functions which he had discharged with much tact, conscientious but conciliating, showing deference to the vanquished, sometimes tempering among his subalterns the pride of victory. (1) Such was he in his new post, and he would have succeeded, if anyone could have succeeded. But if his amenities for the “notables,” his bonhomie when he visited the schools, his application to speaking and writing French outside of official circumstances, won him many personal sympathies; if he had the great merit of understanding the resistances of the population and of not taking offense even when the bishop of Metz refused to receive the “Order of the Crown, second class, with star,” which he transmitted to him on behalf of the emperor, (2) he had, on the other hand, a duty to fulfill toward his sovereign, — a duty which was not only of superficial pacification, but also of close surveillance and of Germanizing action; so that between the Germans who reproached him for his moderation and the Alsatians-Lorrainers who made it difficult for him, he lost patience, and proceeded to severities. Jacques Kablé, the deputy of Strasbourg, was the representative of a French insurance company; the Statthalter accused other agents of these companies of occupying themselves like him with politics, and with the same politics; he expelled these companies from Alsatian-Lorraine territory, despite article 11 of the Treaty of Frankfurt, which included in the rule of “reciprocal treatment on the footing of the most favored nation” “the admission and treatment of the subjects of the two nations as well as their agents.” Other measures made no less noise: suppression of the Presse d’Alsace et de Lorraine (1881), of the Elsässisches Volksblatt (1882), of the Union d’Alsace-Lorraine, of the Oberrheinblatt, of the Écho de Schiltigheim (1884), newspapers which did not all occupy themselves equally with politics, but which, in the eyes of the administration, were equally guilty of exciting the population against the German idea; (1) — prohibition of the deputy of Metz, Antoine, the ardent protester, from publishing his projected newspaper, Metz, although he had fulfilled all the legal formalities in view of this publication (August 1883), perquisitions at Antoine’s, publication in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of private letters which the judicial authority had seized in these perquisitions; a few weeks later, his arrest under a charge of high treason, which after fourteen months the Supreme Court of Leipzig was to declare unfounded… And the electors continued to send to the Reichstag the candidates of the protest.

[footnote: (1) G. May, Occup. du territ., p. 37.] [footnote: (2) Cf. Klein (F.), Dupont des Loges, pp. 421 and 432.] [footnote: (1) “Deutschthum.” Cf. Débats sur l’Abel., p. xj sqq. “The German idea,” said the abbé Winterer, “does it exist in the dispositions of the Treaty of Frankfurt? In what way have the suppressed newspapers violated this treaty? Does the German idea exist in the laws which govern Alsace-Lorraine or the Empire? Have the suppressed newspapers violated these laws more than the other newspapers?… I ask you, Gentlemen, can one suppress newspapers by virtue of an expression so vague or of an idea so little defined?”]

Manteuffel died in 1885. (1) The moderator gone, no one was left to oppose the system of coercion. For a long time, Bismarck had lost his “youthful love for the Reichsland,” “the enthusiastic hope” that had inspired him at the outset, “the joy of seeing these ancient lands of the Empire recovered by Germany,” and he thought no more than of the “safety of the Empire itself.” (2) Violent facts then came in a rush, direct or indirect testimonies of the irritation from above. Never, since 1871, had France, Alsace-Lorraine, Germany, the three personages of the eternal drama, vibrated so intensely as in this period. The aggravation of the military charges demanded by the government from the Reichstag, the formidable pressure exercised on Alsace-Lorraine in view of the elections of the 21st of February 1887 from which might issue peace or war — the words of the Statthalter, the threatening articles with which the official-leaning newspapers were filled, left no doubt to the Alsatians-Lorrainers as to the responsibilities they were about to assume; (3) —

[footnote: (1) His successors were: Prince Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1885–1894), Prince Hermann of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1894–1907), Count von Wedel, since 1907.] [footnote: (2) Speech to the Reichstag (21 March 1885). Cf. Matter, Bismarck, vol. III, p. 491.] [footnote: (3) On the 9th of February, Hohenlohe, the Statthalter, at the end of a banquet offered to the Delegation, had said that the vote of the military Septennat would be the only guarantee of peace. Cf. J. Heimweh, Quest. d’Als., pp. 3–4.]

the fifteen protestation candidates elected, all the same, (1) by 247,000 votes — 82,000 more than in 1884 —; Antoine expelled, the 31st of March; (2) against Lalance, of Mulhouse, an order of expulsion as well, but which was suspended, (3) then replaced by judicial proceedings (4) and by a draconian administrative measure which constrained him to leave; (1) the brutal arrest, on annexed territory, of Schnaebelé, special commissary of the French railway station of Pagny-sur-Moselle, by his German colleague of Novéant who had summoned him on service matters (20 April 1887), and the emotion the incident provoked during several days throughout Europe; a few weeks later (24 September), at Vexaincourt, on French territory, two peaceable hunters, one killed, the other wounded, by shots fired upon them, from annexed territory, by a soldier charged with a surveillance of poaching that in France would have been entrusted to gendarmes or to customs officers — steadier men; (2) — then the institution of career mayors imposed on recalcitrant communes (June 1887); and the dissolutions of societies, the Association of the Choral Societies of Alsace, the Sellenick Fanfare, the Mulhouse Circle, including its botany and zoology sections; (3) four Alsatians condemned (out of eight accused) by the Supreme Court of Leipzig as affiliated to the Ligue des Patriotes (June 1887); the arrest of the valiant Ch. Appell, dyer at Strasbourg, former mobile of the siege, military medalist, accused of high treason against the Empire (January 1888); the coincidence of these events with the popularity of General Boulanger in France — and in Alsace; then, that vexatious régime and, for many, terribly cruel, of passports, which constituted still another violation of article 11 of the Treaty of Frankfurt: the obligation for any person who wished to enter Alsace-Lorraine by the French frontier, but for every Frenchman who wished to enter it by any frontier whatever, to present a passport visa-stamped by the German embassy in Paris, a visa whose validity was one year for foreigners, eight weeks for Frenchmen, — which dispensed foreigners, but not Frenchmen, from a declaration of residence to be made within twenty-four hours, — which the embassy, finally, delivered rapidly to foreigners, and generally refused to Frenchmen, after having made them wait for weeks for an answer which had been requested, in their honor, as far as Berlin;… (1) and, in spite of everything, in 1890, elections still of protest: (2) for four years it was a daily struggle, oppression and fever, the perpetual waiting, of anguish or of hope…

[footnote: (1) Winterer (constituency of Altkirch), Guerber (Guebwiller), Simonis (Ribeauvillé), Germain (Sarrebourg) — protesters of 1874, always reelected, — de Dietrich (Haguenau), Goldenberg (Saverne), Ch. Grad (Colmar), Kablé (Strasbourg-ville), Lalance (Mulhouse), Lang (Schlestadt), Mühleisen (Strasbourg-campagne), Sieffermann (Molsheim), Antoine (Metz), Jaunez (Sarreguemines), de Wendel (Thionville). “Grandiose manifestation against the Treaty of Frankfurt,” wrote the Landeszeitung (official). One of the most significant elections was that of Dr. Sieffermann — against Zorn von Bulach, outgoing deputy, of an old family of the country, noble, influential, but who, alone of the Alsatian-Lorraine deputation, had voted for the Septennat. “Only three days separated us from the ballot,” said Sieffermann in thanking his electors, “when I made up my mind, on the urgings of my friends, to give you my name, in default of another more authorized, to allow you to affirm your opinion. I would have wished to tell you, in a proclamation which had the misfortune of not finding a printer, that I too found your charges, in soldiers as in money, sufficiently heavy and that they ought not to be increased at any price. My success must be, for the known and unknown friends who have voted for me, a reward all the greater in that they have contributed to weld back the link of the Alsace-Lorraine deputation, one of whose rings had been broken. My election will restore to it its former cohesion.” (Le Temps, 24 and 27 February 1887.)] [footnote: (2) “His name alone is a whole program,” said of him M. von Puttkamer, who would only accept the office of secretary of State (president of the ministry) of Alsace-Lorraine if the expulsion of the deputy of Metz were granted him.] [footnote: (3) Following the objections of several of his colleagues — German — at the Reichstag, who were stirred, after the expulsion of Antoine, by this new manifestation of governmental arbitrariness toward a deputy.] [footnote: (4) The imperial procurator, applying to him a French law of the Empire, charged him with the offense of false news, on the pretext that he had said in his electoral manifesto: “French has been suppressed in the schools, and yet the knowledge of the two languages is necessary in a frontier country,” — whereas French was only to be considered as “suppressed” in the primary schools.] [footnote: (1) Suppression of the “temporary admission” of foreign fabrics into the dyeing and printing factory directed by M. Lalance, a measure rescinded as soon as he had given his resignation as manager and left Alsace.] [footnote: (2) ”… These regrettable facts… are a consequence of our institutions,” said the note delivered, on the 7th October 1887, by the German government to the French government. Cf. É. Lavisse, Quest. d’Als., p. 81 sqq.] [footnote: (3) Cf. J. Heimweh, Quest. d’Als., p. 188–190.] [footnote: (1) Cf. J. Heimweh, Régime des pass., p. 55 sqq.] [footnote: (2) Eleven protesters elected (fifteen seats to fill).]

This crisis made for the Alsatians-Lorrainers a new conscience. Twenty years had passed. Neither the ardent protestation of 1887, nor the Schnaebelé affair, nor the question of the passports had done anything to it. The dawn had not risen, that so many men had seen in dream. It was necessary, more and more, to live in the reality of the day, to count less and less on a liberating tomorrow. Bismarck, irritated, had spoken of suppressing the Delegation, as well as the deputation of Alsace-Lorraine at the Reichstag, of

partitioning the Empire Land between Prussia, Bavaria and Baden. (1) Perhaps the chancellor, in demanding from the Statthalter “so many vexatious measures,” had had some ulterior motive: “to push the Alsatians-Lorrainers to despair and insurrection, in order to be able to declare that civil government is worth nothing and to proclaim the state of siege.” (2) Terror reigned: “the peace of the cemeteries,” as one day, at the Reichstag, in speaking of this period, the deputy Preiss, of Colmar, said. More than any other measure, the brutal blow of the passports had stunned them. The four non-protesters who had got themselves elected in 1890 owed their success only to the bewildered weariness of their electors: voting for candidates “of conciliation,” like Zorn von Bulach, in the constituency of Molsheim, in 1890, or, in 1893, for official candidates, district directors, in their own arrondissements, like Pöhlmann at Schlestadt, or Alexander of Hohenlohe at Haguenau, had scarcely any other sense than a cry for mercy: (3) to give the government the deputy it wished, that in exchange it might loosen the bonds, let

[footnote: (1) Conversation of the 18th March 1885, cited by Matter, Bismarck, vol. III, p. 521.] [footnote: (2) Memoirs of Hohenlohe, at the date of 8 May 1888: cited by Messag. d’Als.-Lorr., 3 November 1906.] [footnote: (3) Cf. J. Heimweh, Régime des passep., p. 87 sqq. — In 1893, while Petri, native but governmental, and Bebel, German but socialist and consequently disagreeable to the government, were disputing the seat of Strasbourg-ville, it was currently said, in the native bourgeoisie of Strasbourg, that one must vote for Petri because “if Petri is elected, Appell will be pardoned.” Petri was moreover not elected, and Appell was not pardoned. — These elections of 1893 gave, out of 214,000 votes expressed, 31,000 votes to the government candidates, 163,000 to the opponents (Alsatians-Lorrainers, 117,000; socialists, 46,000). Cf. Haas, Situat. en 1895, p. 107.]

return the relatives, the friends, the clients of France, let in a little free air… They now understood how Germany held them, how much she could do against them, against their interests, against their sentiments! Yet they were a people, and one that had rights. More separated from France than they would perhaps have believed, but not more drawn close to Germany, this was no reason to die in the ditch, between the two nations, nor even to allow themselves to be constrained and absorbed by the stronger. And if it was necessary to come, not indeed to the attitude, certainly, but to the idea of the autonomists, it was, honor safe, after twenty years gone by, some hopes disappointed, and a rude trial endured. Thus was born the consciousness of a nationality of one’s own, but still faithful to the memories of the French past.

Alsace led the action. Alsace was a more proper ground than Lorraine for that resurrection of a patriotism of the small homeland. First of all, it is always in the bourgeoisie of the great cities that these first tremors of a new morality and activity appear, and Metz, from which more had emigrated, into which more had immigrated, was more adulterated than Strasbourg, than Colmar above all or Mulhouse, by the foreign element. On the other hand, the Lorrainers had taken the habit of resisting by their mere presence: their language, their mores, their relations with their provincial brothers separated from them, all this made of their existence an existence beside that of the conqueror, without their having the least effort to make for the proof of it to be visible. Finally, their very past was broken: Nancy, and Stanislas, Lunéville, and Voltaire, Bar-le-Duc, and Ligier-Richier, they had left too much history, too much literature and art on the other side of the frontier, their memories no longer belonged to themselves alone, and, thus divided, this source of inspiration no longer had all its virtue. Alsace, on the contrary, annexed entire, was one, had her own history, hers alone, a long history of revolts and of wars for the conquest or defense of her liberties. Moreover, for the Alsatians, who were less visibly French, the gesture of independence and pride was constantly necessary, if they did not wish to be confused with the Germans. And then, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Colmar had in great part preserved their bourgeoisie, — men of action and of direction, instructed and proud of the past of their country. The Lorrainers were better suited to continue purely and simply France in foreign earth; but Alsace, by her character, by her recent as by her old history, was more prepared for her role, when it was a question of animating a provincial conscience.

One can put at the origin of this movement, which began in the years 1892–1897, neither an exact date nor a name. The necessity of it imposed itself more precisely on certain minds; others followed, sensing that aspirations until then confused in themselves were about to take shape. Confidence was permitted: these were not vague reveries or constructions on sand: the Alsatians-Lorrainers were still at home in Alsace-Lorraine. Certainly, an army of functionaries had come, from across the Rhine, to take the direction of the affairs of the country, to occupy the places which, on the morrow of the war, the pride of the Alsatians had refused; but all of them, Prussians, Bavarians, Württembergers, agreeing wonderfully in making of Alsace-Lorraine “a field of experiments where pan-Germanism trains itself to govern,” (1) left, by that very fact, the natives indifferent or hostile. Certainly, Alsace-Lorraine had been impoverished, from 1871 to 1890, by emigration of about 200,000 persons, but this figure, considerable, yet represented only about one-eighth of the population of 1871; (2) and if those leaving had been replaced, even in surplus, by foreigners to the country, the native element nevertheless constituted six to seven eighths of the population, (3) and without the foreign element having penetrated it sufficiently to modify its spirit. Action would therefore lean upon a solid base. — And the objects would not be lacking for this action. Even outside periods of crisis and the incidents which excite the general attention, the Alsatians-Lorrainers had had only too much experience of this: although they were at home, others were their masters. Whether it was a question of obtaining the abrogation of a repressive law, the authorization to organize a theatrical representation in French or to repaint an old French sign, (4) the inscription of Jean — and not Johann, — of René — and not Renatus, — on the register of births: the field of claims extended to infinity, since nothing, of the great things nor of the lesser, had escaped the grasp of this vigilant and methodical administration. It is true that the Germans had often risen above this role of superior policemen, — and the Alsatians are not unjust: one recalls that passage in Au Pays du Rhin, where J.-J. Weiss, to translate the state of mind of the Alsatians, set on stage, in a brewery of the country, a peasant and his notary, who, with a fist-blow on the table, send all those Germans to the devil, but recognize, between two oaths, that “not everything is so bad in the German law… it has greatly shortened the ceremonies in our offices… they have all the same sent us from Paderborn an excellent justice of the peace…” Well! doubtless the German administrative order did not lack a certain beauty in its force, doubtless the means of communication had multiplied, cities had been enlarged, embellished… But they had made themselves so dearly paid for in fright, that one would have feared even their gifts. Was it always a generous solicitude for Alsace-Lorraine that had inspired Germany? Was it indeed for the Alsatians-Lorrainers that the Germans had taken, from the five billions of the war indemnity, 200 millions to affect to the “Alsace-Lorraine and Wilhelm-Luxembourg railways”? (1) Was it indeed for them that the Reichstag had wished to participate in the construction costs of that sumptuous University of Strasbourg which was to be, in the spirit of its founders, a German University of the first rank, a focus of “German spirit” and of “German science”? (2) Among these new buildings, too many barracks, to lodge the 70,000 soldiers who occupied the Empire Land, (3) too many “Fort Moltkes” and “Fort Kronprinzes”; in these new stations, too many embarkation platforms; behind the plan of these wide avenues, a directing thought sometimes too visible: to substitute for an ancient city, full of memories, a new city symbolic of a new state of things… It was high time that Alsace-Lorraine should affirm her will that she be occupied with for her own sake, or better still, that she be left to occupy herself alone.

[footnote: (1) A. Laugel, Avenir intell. de l’Als., p. 264.] [footnote: (2) Bevölk. in E.-L. (A: Textl. Th., p. 5 sqq.).] [footnote: (3) Stat. Jahrb. für E.-L., 1908: according to the census of 1905: as to nationality: 1,492,000 persons (I cite in round figures) belong to the Alsatian-Lorraine nationality (a part of these, it is true, but doubtless not more than 250,000, are foreigners to Alsace-Lorraine, having acquired this nationality after their immigration), 160,000 to the Prussian nationality, 119,000 to the Badenese, Saxon, Württemberger, etc., nationalities, 30,000 to non-German nationalities; — as to birth: among the persons registered in Alsace-Lorraine, 216,000 are born in Germany, but outside Alsace-Lorraine; 73,000 in non-German countries.] [footnote: (4) The examination of signs in Alsace-Lorraine does not fail to amuse one in passing: not only because of certain administrative oddities, of which the most celebrated is the one which authorizes “Friseur” and forbids “Coiffeur”; but also because the language employed contributes to determining, at first sight, the age of the firm: first studies of epigraphy recommended to curious tourists. There has been more than one courageous resistance, and many shops have preferred to take on a grave look of something already old, rather than to rejuvenate themselves German-style in conformity with the police regulations.] [footnote: (1) 121,615,651 marks: Villefort, Recueil des traités, vol. III, p. 302.] [footnote: (2) “Es soll in Strassburg eine deutsche Universität ersten Ranges, eine würdige Bildungsstätte deutschen Geistes und Pflegerin deutscher Wissenschaftlichkeit begründet werden…” — ”… dieses nicht nur im Landesinteresse, sondern im politischen Gesammtinteresse Deutschlands liegenden Institutes…” Cited by Strassmann, Die Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität…, p. 16. Cf. Treitschke and Maurenbrecher, cited in the same work, p. 21. — Moreover the University of Strasbourg receives, every year since 1876, a subvention of 400,000 marks from the budget of the Empire. (Cf. what Professor Du Bois-Reymond said on 5 August 1870: “The University of Berlin, quartered (einquartiert) opposite the king’s palace, is the intellectual bodyguard of the house of Hohenzollern”: cited by E. Lavisse, Fondation Univ. de Berlin.)] [footnote: (3) At the period in which we place ourselves in this chapter: 67,000 in 1890 and 72,000 in 1895. — Today (1909), 83,000 men. The progression has been constant since 1871 (61,000). (Cf. Capt. V. Duruy, Armée et A.-L.) — “It is not for Alsace-Lorraine,” said Bismarck in 1874, “it is in the interest of the Empire that we have conquered this country…, in order to have a glacis that we can defend before they [the French] attack the Rhine.”]

This Alsatian personality has manifested itself in very diverse forms. The Alsatian Theater: pieces in the Alsatian dialect, played by young men of good will, all of the country: D’r Herr Maire, D’r Candidat, E Demonstration, (1) amusing parades of characters and pleasantries of the soil, which do not lack either true psychology or even, discreetly, political irony. Thus, that hostility between the old retired adjutant, (2) who has “eaten horse in Mexico, mule in Algeria, rat during the Commune,” who “has conquered a part of the world,” and who now groans, in his motley language, at not being able to finish with the “conquest vun d’r (3) mademoiselle Marguerite,” his former fiancée left back home, — and the German of the local Kriegerverein (4), who, in a solemn tone, decorates with patriotic and Germanizing motifs his interested marriage project with the Alsatian woman. Thus, in D’r Herr Maire, (5) the whole character of the principal personage: the “functionary such as arbitrary governments create him.” (6)

“Without boasting,” gravely says of himself Monsieur le Maire, “I am mayor for twenty-five years, I have had five prizes at agricultural competitions, I am part of the Society of Old Soldiers, I have always recommended artificial fertilizer, I salute the gendarme, I never miss the official banquet on the emperor’s feast-day, I always work for the government candidate… (Aside:) It is true that I never vote for him, but that, no one knows… Yet, would my adversaries on the Council have spoken ill of me to the prefect? Would it be known that I have a second cousin who is a French officer?… that I caught my rheumatism during the war, in the mobile guard, at Strasbourg?…”

[footnote: (1) These titles alone already smack of dialect: D’r for Der, E for Eine; moreover neither Maire nor Demonstration (= manifestation) are German words, but French words fallen into the Alsatian dialect.] [footnote: (2) E Demonstration, by G. Stoskopf, Strasbourg, Librairie du Théâtre alsacien, 1903.] [footnote: (3) For von der: “of the.”] [footnote: (4) Association of former military men.] [footnote: (5) D’r Herr Maire, by G. Stoskopf, Strasbourg, Schlesier and Schweikhardt, editors, 1898.] [footnote: (6) Rev. alsac. ill., 1901, Chronique, p. 50.]

La Revue Alsacienne, of Dr. Pierre Bucher, above the popular movement maintained by the theater, reaches the directing bourgeoisie, encourages the study of Alsatian history, literature, and art, seeks to disengage the deep reasons for the attachment of the Alsatian to his soil and for his fidelity to his traditions, recalls by every means, articles of the Revue, the Alsatian Museum, lectures, festivals, that this side of that Germanic past, to which the Germans like to go back without troubling themselves with the interval, Alsace has a more recent past, — the one that made her what she was in the nineteenth century and which still vibrates in Alsatian blood. — And the satirists: Zislin, of Mulhouse, Hansi, of Colmar, who, without fear of fine and prison — which are not vain words in this country — will know how to burst forth the broad laughter of their fellow-citizens at the expense of the “non-self”: the scene takes place, at the summit of the Vosges, at the French Hotel of the Schlucht, tables d’hôte astride the frontier: couple of Germans in mountain dress, he, rubicund, eyeglasses, Tyrolean hat, she, tall, surly, and… “rigged up,” God knows how! Legend: “How then could the maître d’hôtel have known that we are Germans?…” Then, descent to Gérardmer, walk along the lake; an officer passes, in full uniform, a lieutenant, epaulet on the left, counter-epaulet on the right: at once, a high lesson in morality: “Will these French always be so negligent? Look at that epaulet which has no fringes…” The next day, they climb back up through the woods to regain the Alsatian slope; they have met compatriots, the two women open the march, the two men, a few paces behind, are discoursing: “The Frenchwomen we saw at the Hotel of the Schlucht were very prettily dressed; you will concede, however, very honored colleague, that out of doors, in nature, particularly in a German forest, the so becoming woolen dress of the Germanic woman pleases the soul far better.” (1)

[footnote: (1) Vogesenbilder, by Hansi, two in-4° albums, Ch. Paly, editor, at Mulhouse.]

Bourgeois or popular comedies, historical and sociological publications, satirical prints: so many gestures of encouragement for the politicians. Doubtless the group of fifteen Alsace-Lorraine deputies at the Reichstag is no longer a bloc, an opposition bloc always taut. From the moment when there was to be, no longer protestation against a fact, but real and practical participation in affairs, the unity of opinion and of action was impossible. And then, the agitations of French interior politics have echoed upon the Alsatian-Lorraine electoral body, — which well shows, said in passing, from what heart the rhythm of these distant pulsations always starts; and it is a little of ourselves and our disputes that we recognize, on the eve of elections, on the walls of our old frontier cities. For fifteen years, then, elections are no longer made, as is said, on protestation; but, more than once, between the lines of the proclamations, in the heat of the ripostes, it appears, and not always incognito: “Alsatians-Lorrainers,” wrote a socialist in a Strasbourg journal, at the approach of the last elections, “remember what has happened to you since 1870 under the domination of Prussian Germany. They have wished to ignore that for two hundred years we belonged to France, in order to try to Prussianize us by force. It is true that at school they speak to us of German goodness, of German honorability, of German generosity, but until now we have learned to know only Prussian pride, Prussian arbitrariness, Prussian arrogance!” (1) And a Catholic, in a Colmar journal: ”… That will not prevent them [the Catholics] from keeping for their old homeland, which they know very well how to distinguish from the men who represent her at this hour, sympathies of which they make no mystery. That will not prevent them either from bearing, on the fact of annexation without preliminary consultation of the population of the country, a judgment in which they have not varied…” (2) The true electoral questions have been of local interest or of general politics (struggle of “socialism” and “clericalism”), sometimes signifying the necessity of compounding together to live, but never reconciliation; even when there is, for a moment, by some campaign-combination, a kind of alliance with the German party of corresponding opinion, the differentiation does not take long to be made. When in 1900 the prince of Loewenstein opened, at Strasbourg, the Catholic congress, he cried out, enthusiastic and seductive: ”… And if the Alsatians come with us, it will be a great joy in heaven and on earth!” One cannot say that, for any party, the wish formulated here at the address of the Catholics has been realized. As soon as it is a matter of Alsace-Lorraine, the politicians become Alsatians-Lorrainers again, differently perhaps, but Alsatians-Lorrainers; and there is always a moment when the Journal d’Alsace-Lorraine of M. Léon Boll and the Nouvelliste of the abbé Wetterlé end by understanding one another. (1)

[footnote: (1) Freie Presse, 27 January 1903: trans. by Messag. d’Als.-Lorr., 2 February 1907.] [footnote: (2) Journal de Colmar, cited by the Messager (same no.).] [footnote: (1) “It is very accurate that in 1896 M. Blumenthal and several of his friends had dreamed of creating a great Alsatian party, rallying men of the most diverse opinions. It is unfortunately just as true that, for the greatest satisfaction of the common adversary, we then fought one another fiercely. After a very long detour, we have come back, a little bruised, the ones and the others, to our starting point and we have all been surprised to note that an understanding, requiring the sacrifice of no principle from any of the allies, would be equally profitable to us. That is how M. Blumenthal, who has remained a democrat, and we others, who have sacrificed nothing of our ‘clericalism,’ have agreed no longer to tear one another to pieces, but to try to find a common ground of action for the questions that unite us, leaving us free to separate again when the moment comes to pose the questions that divide us.” (The abbé Wetterlé, in the Nouvelliste of Colmar, cited by the Messager d’A.-L. of 16 October 1909.) Whence, emotion of the German journals: “Already at Colmar, Wetterlé has succeeded in constituting something analogous to the Alsatian bloc. It remains to be seen whether the democrats of Mulhouse and Strasbourg will follow him in this way and put out the door the immigrant democrats, according to the principle: ‘Alsatians above all.’ The visible development of a particularism unfavorable to German interests should find its counterweight in a campaign directed against these tendencies.” (Metzer Zeitung, cited by Messag. d’A.-L. of 13 November 1909.)]

What is the result of this long effort? what modifications have been brought to the administration of Alsace-Lorraine and to the political life of the Alsatians-Lorrainers? — A new Imperial law has happily modified the conditions of the right of assembly and association (1907), and the Paragraph of the Dictatorship has been abolished (1902). The rigors have, presently, been softened. They keep watch as much as ever, (1) but they arrest and expel less. The “refractories” do not venture any more to cross back the frontier, but those who left, before seventeen years of age, with their act of emigration in order, obtain residence permits a little longer. They authorize, sometimes, in certain quite exceptional circumstances, the Marseillaise. Public functions, in some branches of the administration, begin to be half-opened to the Alsatians-Lorrainers, who, moreover, in their offices, like to remain among themselves, to chat among themselves, stiffen when the German colleagues arrive. Two Alsatians are even ministers (in Alsace-Lorraine): — but much contested, — because the practice of the “autonomist” requires tact, that to profit from autonomy does not necessarily mean that one has fought for it, and that finally, according to the hour, the circumstances, the degree of honors and the figure of the salary, one appears “autonomist,” or “rallié.”

[footnote: (1) One recalls the scandal raised in 1908 by the publication of Stephany’s brochure, ex-commissioner of police in Alsace-Lorraine: Germanisierung, Willkürregierung und Polizeiwirthschaft (in-8°, Schmidt, Zurich). The under-secretary of State at the interior had to acknowledge before the Delegation the exactness of some of the facts unveiled in this book: the existence of secret lists, kept up to date, on which are inscribed certain persons suspected of sympathies for France, and whose names would be turned over to the military authority in case of conflict.]

Despite these improvements, of right and of fact, the Alsatians-Lorrainers have still obtained nothing as to the essentials of their claims. The Delegation is still not a Parliament. The Empire Land still has no representative on the Federal Council. (1) Administrative high-handedness has not disappeared, which gladly treats the Empire Land as a colony to be taxed and put to forced labor. It is not so long ago that it was discovered that the special fund placed at the disposition of the Statthalter (Dispositionsfond) on the budget of the Empire Land for subsidizing certain works of interest to the country and its inhabitants (encouragement to the arts, travel grants, etc.) had been used excessively (200,000 francs) to swell the too-meager receipts of the subscription for the projected monument of Wilhelm I on the Kaiserplatz of Strasbourg, (2) — and that the committee finally restored the 200,000 francs. Recently again, the Delegation raised the question, very controverted, it is true, of the customs duties and indirect taxes accruing to the Empire, for the collection of which Alsace-Lorraine spends 4 million marks and receives, in return, only an indemnity of two and a half millions; while, on the other hand, the Empire, not only refuses to pay the industrial tax for the railways which it operates in the two provinces, but moreover requires from the Delegation a subvention of 40,000 marks for each kilometer of railway even of strategic character, instead of the Empire,

[footnote: (1) Cf. P. Eccard, Const. de l’Als.-Lorr., p. 24: the Statthalter is only authorized to appoint commissioners who may attend, with merely consultative voice, the sessions of the Federal Council devoted to the affairs of the Empire Land.] [footnote: (2) “The sums of the Dispositionsfond of which the Statthalter has the administration must serve the general good of the country. It would be an abuse (missbräuchliche Verwendung) of these funds to employ so high a sum for a monument… If one cannot succeed in gathering, by voluntary gifts, the sum necessary for the erection of a monument to Wilhelm I, it would have been preferable to renounce it.” (Gazette de Francfort, 17 August 1900.)]

in the confederated States, subsidizing the strategic lines of poor commercial yield. (1) It is true that the Dictatorship is no more, but the dictatorial spirit appears still frequently: (2) at the same time “pan-Germanism” keeps watch, and it does not spare its attacks against the administration of Alsace-Lorraine because it lets the Alsatian-Lorraine students hold their annual monôme around the statue of Kléber, French lecturers maintain in the Empire Land the prestige of our literature, the Souvenir français inaugurate, at Noisseville, at Wissembourg, monuments to the French soldiers fallen for the homeland; some even, it is said, would like to go back upon the generous discretion of the conquerors of 1871 and suppress the French statues which the latter had left upon their pedestals. This is how the question of names to be inscribed in the civil-status registers still gives rise, from time to time, to heroi-comic incidents; how one must deploy as much skill as energy if one wishes to continue to call oneself commercially Dupont frères instead of being Germanized into Gebrüder Dupont; how, barely a few weeks ago, a shopkeeper had to change on his sign Liquidation totale, which is French, to Totale Liquidation, which is German; how, on the eve of the recent inauguration of the Wissembourg monument, the government required the suppression of the four emblems sculpted at the corners of the pedestal: the sun which recalled Louis XIV, the lilies of Louis XV, the revolutionary axe and fasces, the eagle of Napoleon; this is how, at the end of last summer, the cavalry maneuvers took place in Alsace-Lorraine instead of the Grand Duchy of Baden, because the state of the harvest was less advanced in Baden than in Alsace, — and the hunt was opened in the Grand Duchy before being so in Alsace, because the state of the harvest was less advanced in Alsace than in Baden: an amusing administrative incident but in which one can see as a proof in miniature of what the two affairs that in these last years have most keenly moved Alsace-Lorraine have just demonstrated: that of the Rhine lateral canal and that of the teaching of French.

[footnote: (1) Journal de Colmar, 31 August and 6 September 1908.] [footnote: (2) The word was said at the Reichstag by M. Blumenthal, mayor of Colmar, deputy of Strasbourg-campagne in the preceding legislature.]

The first proved to Alsace-Lorraine that, in questions where there is involved a State of the Empire at the same time as herself, the interests of the Empire Land weigh less than those of the confederated State. (1) — France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, without letting herself be stopped by the cost (more than 100,000,000 francs) or by the technical difficulties, had endowed her Eastern provinces with a vast system of canals, admirable for the period. Thus, the outflow of the products of Alsatian industry being more and more toward the center of France, the attention of Strasbourg had little by little been turned away from the Rhine. But, separated from France by the annexation to Germany, the city had had to think of creating new outlets for itself, and her thought had naturally turned toward her river, which had long no more interested her: it is a city of the Grand Duchy of Baden, Mannheim, that had inherited the old river activity of the Alsatian capital. There unloaded the boats coming from the North, from Belgium and Holland, to take the Badenese railway line which then transported their merchandise toward the South, — there were transshipped, vice versa, from wagons to boats, the cargoes coming from the south of France and from Italy bound for the Lower Rhine.

[footnote: (1) Lettres d’Alsace, in: Journal des Débats, 29 May and 30 June 1904; H. Haug, Navig. intér.; Paul Léon, Port de Str.; Ph. Gerber, Condit. Als.-Lorr., p. 238 sqq.]

From the end of 1871, the Chamber of Commerce of Strasbourg had asked the public powers for the creation of a canal lateral to the Rhine, which, starting from Strasbourg, would lead to Ludwigshafen, a Bavarian port situated opposite Mannheim. Mannheim immediately felt threatened, and Ludwigshafen also, and the Grand Duchy of Baden with Mannheim, and Bavaria with Ludwigshafen. Faced with the opposition of the two States, the Empire renounced creating the canal at its expense, and Alsace-Lorraine thought of substituting for the project of a German enterprise that of an exclusively Alsatian enterprise. The preparatory studies had not yet reached a conclusion when, in 1890, a Badenese engineer set himself to demonstrating that one could arrive without a lateral canal at the desired result, that a regularization of the Upper Rhine would permit the creation, at a much smaller expense, of a way open almost all year round. This regularization would be less advantageous for Alsace-Lorraine than a lateral canal, because the latter alone could assure in a certain manner the permanence of the traffic, since the Upper Rhine, despite all dredging, would doubtless be only temporarily navigable, that the maintenance costs would rise to a very high figure, and that the Grand Duchy of Baden could always, after the regularization, make disastrous competition by a lateral canal that it would dig on its own territory. However, since Baden and Bavaria consented to participate in the cost of the regularization, and thus regularization appeared as the best means of obtaining rapidly a practical result, the government of Alsace-Lorraine, on the initiative of the Delegation, entered into relations with the kingdom and the grand duchy. Eight years were spent in exchanges of views and projects. Finally, a convention was signed between Alsace-Lorraine and the Grand Duchy of Baden, on the 28th of November 1901: Baden took upon itself 40% of the costs that the regularization of the Upper Rhine would occasion. But the Baden Chamber, reworking the government’s project, consented to inscribing in the budget the expenses necessary to this participation only by reducing it to 30% and on the condition that the Alsace-Lorraine railways would raise their tariffs.

The Chamber of Commerce of Strasbourg then declared, energetically, that the Badenese conditions were unacceptable, that it had interested itself in the regularization project only because it had appeared rapidly realizable, that it now ceased to interest itself in it, and that one must come back to the lateral canal (1903). A society was created, under the auspices of the Chambers of Commerce of Strasbourg and Metz, “for the improvement of navigable waterways in Alsace-Lorraine.” It was calculated that a canal that would be only Alsatian, that is to say entirely dug on Alsatian territory and ending at an Alsatian port (Lauterbourg, near the old French frontier between Alsace and the Palatinate), would already improve the traffic, the Rhine being navigable 256 days a year up to Lauterbourg, only 190 to Strasbourg. But the interest of the project would be still more considerable if — even without thinking any more of reaching Mannheim — the canal were prolonged by 8 kilometers beyond Alsace, on the territory of the Palatinate, to lead to Maximiliansau (275 days of navigability) or 28 kilometers, as far as Sondernheim, also a Bavarian port (300 days). The Delegation therefore invited (May 1904) the Alsace-Lorraine government to enter into relations with Bavaria — which, on its side, had become less hostile to the lateral canal — so that it might cross Bavarian territory. Then the Grand Duchy of Baden, whom this project, even arrested at Sondernheim, that is to say well short of Mannheim, still inconvenienced, intervenes again, makes act against the project certain Badenese, functionaries in Alsace-Lorraine, and the emperor himself, who one day marked, brutally, to the mayor of Strasbourg the repugnance with which “this stupid canal” inspired him… (1) So that the government of Alsace-Lorraine purely and simply adjourned its reply to the invitation of the Delegation (November 1904), under the pretext that Baden was taking up the regularization project again; that the under-secretary of State for public works, Zorn von Bulach, refused to the Chamber of Commerce to occupy itself with the canal project; that the Statthalter opposed to a similar démarche a similar refusal; and that works of management of the river have begun, which (because of certain details of the projects under execution, the examination of which would lead us too far) will profit first Karlsruhe, later only and in a more problematic fashion, Strasbourg.

[footnote: (1) Lettres d’Alsace, in: Journal des Débats, 30 June 1904.]

While the question of the canal interested two confederated States at the same time as the Empire Land, that of the teaching of French interested only her, and one might have believed her more mistress to act. But the event has proven that if the questions were not the same, the administrative manner of studying them, of understanding them, of putting off their solution, scarcely differed. — France had never imposed on Alsace the exclusive teaching of French. (1) Naturally, in the early times that followed the treaties of 1648, there was scarcely any question of schools, and still less of curricula. At the end of the eighteenth century, the efforts of the Convention, (2) then, at the beginning of the nineteenth, under the First Empire, the foundation of the first Normal School, at Strasbourg, by the prefect Lezay-Marnesia, doubtless exercised a favorable influence. But it is only following the putting into force of the Guizot law (1833) that the government stopped at school regulations in which French had the first place, without however German being neglected. And even when the efforts of the inspectors became more pressing, under the Duruy ministry, they had always for object to favor the teaching of French, not to exclude that of German. It is thus that the generation raised in the primary schools of that period learned both languages at once.

[footnote: (1) Journ. d’A.-L., 18-19-22-23 June 1899; Messag. d’A.-L., 1908, 1909.] [footnote: (2) Cf. the project of Arbogast (4 October 1792), the report of Lanthenas (5 November), and the third heading of the draft decree on the primary schools.]

Quite other was the manner of Germany. If she had timidly dosed the teaching of French in the higher primary or secondary establishments, from the primary schools she had completely banished it; and the consequences of this ostracism threatened to become more and more grave for the future since the obligation of French had disappeared from the curriculum of the Normal Schools. Bolder as the consciousness of their particular rights grew in them, many Alsatians were stirred. And a motion (the Kübler motion) presented to the Delegation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1908, asking for the obligatory teaching of French in all the primary schools of Alsace-Lorraine, was voted there almost unanimously… But, above the Delegation, independent of her and not necessarily seeking in her its inspirations, there is the government; even if the government were to let itself yield to some condescension, there would still be the Federal Council… Although the author of the motion had placed himself on purely economic ground — the practical utility for a frontier population of knowing both languages — the motion did not please the government, and M. Kübler had to ask it, in March 1909, what follow-up it had given to it. The replies of M. Zorn von Bulach, president of the ministry (— the teaching personnel is lacking — there are regions where French would be useless — etc.), did not satisfy the Delegation. Another motion, more restricted (the Back motion), was then laid down: French would be taught in the primary schools of all the localities where the municipal council would request this teaching. At once the municipalities of the great cities took advantage of the occasion offered them to occupy themselves with the question; and all have pronounced, with or without restrictions, for the affirmative. Finally, the 12th of May last, the president of the ministry read to the Delegation a declaration in four paragraphs, in which he said at the same time that the government does not combat, in principle, the teaching of the French language, but that the French language should be taught in the primary school only in localities close to the frontier, that outside this zone the teaching of French would do harm to the general teaching, that for particularly capable pupils there always remained the higher primary schools, to which the government would continue to consecrate a particular attention: refusal of admission, the discretion of which displeased some Germans, but whose sharpness did not escape the Alsatians.

M. Kübler and several other members of the Delegation having declared that the government’s proposition did not satisfy them, a special commission was named, with M. Kübler as president and the abbé Wetterlé as secretary, to study the various motions presented. This commission concluded (12 July 1909) in asking the government to favor by every means the necessary teaching of the French language: by instituting the obligatory teaching of French, with a minimum of four hours a week, in the upper classes of the primary schools; in not restricting the private teaching of French by persons not belonging to the school personnel more than in the confederated States; in authorizing the primary schoolmasters to teach French, outside of their classes, without restriction on the number of pupils; in authorizing the communes to organize, outside of the primary schools, the teaching of French at their expense and under the surveillance of the school authority; in taking measures so that in the Normal Schools French should be sufficiently taught to be a condition of the obtaining of the certificates. The ministry can make it that this resolution be of no effect, but its intervention has not prevented its being voted unanimously, less one voice… A passionate affair, fertile in incidents: M. Gneisse, director of the lycée of Colmar, makes himself the spokesman of the Germanizers, protests against the motions; Hansi (J.-J. Waltz) publishes the caricature of a German schoolmaster in which Gneisse believes he recognizes himself; prosecution; Hansi condemned to 500 marks fine (14 July 1909); the abbé Wetterlé discovered by the considering clauses of the judgment; (1) Gneisse against Wetterlé; Preiss, Blumenthal, members of the Delegation and counsel for Wetterlé, recalling the question that forms the substance of the trial: “on the one hand, the entire people and the Parliament who claim this teaching; on the other hand, a clan of pan-Germanists, the Gneisses and consorts,” who oppose themselves to it; Wetterlé finally condemned (13 October 1909) to two months in prison… Alsace-Lorraine will teach French at home when other wills than her own permit her to do so.

[footnote: (1) ”… [The accused] are not the true authors and directors of the publications prosecuted; he who provoked and directed the press campaign is another.”]

No one will be astonished that, under the political, administrative, and moral conditions in which Alsace-Lorraine has lived for nearly forty years, the demarcation should subsist between the two elements of the population. Has the German régime sincerely striven to make it disappear? Severe to the point of harshness and even of violence, as it has long been, or of a continual, active distrust, with fits of “dictatorial” humor, as it still is, one knows only that it has scarcely succeeded in it. Between the immigrants and the natives, there is superposition, or juxtaposition, — there is no fusion. (1) Those who have come from beyond the Rhine to “colonize” the Empire Land have above all been attracted by the great cities. And there, between natives and immigrants, marriages are not frequent; habits differ, the places of meeting are not the same. As for the villages, scarcely any other Germans are known there than the postal employees, the station-master, and the gendarme. Close and numerous bonds always tie to France the “separated brothers” of their old family, while the new one, which would like to take them back, is still strange to them. Material bonds. In vain, as a result of the war and also of the protectionism of France since the war, is Alsace economically attached to Germany, “a close economic bond still subsists between Alsace and France,” says Dr. Werner Wittich, an eminent German professor of the University of Strasbourg: (1) export still considerable destined for France, great import of wines, of luxury articles, many Alsatians owners of industrial enterprises in France, the greatest part of the country’s movable fortune placed in French securities. Moral bonds, more still. It is still Paris that attracts them, or Nancy, not Karlsruhe or Berlin; it is in France that they have their alliances and their friendships; it is in France rather than in Germany that the education of their children will be perfected. French culture appears to them always superior to German culture, — and not only to them: the German poet Friedrich Hebbel, in 1843, before the statue of Strasbourg, in Paris, said: “I like to see them grouped here, all these fortresses of France… even Strasbourg, for I suppose that we have only put that young girl in a French boarding-school, to come and fetch her one day, when we shall have need of a governess for our other children”; (2) today, often, the young German functionaries, born in the country, cease to stack up beer mugs, in the evening, around the brasserie tables, smile at the stiffness of the lieutenants, and already say: “We Alsatians-Lorrainers.” “Instead of Germanizing, we are Frenchifying ourselves,” a judge confided to an officer. (1) Captive Greece seduced her fierce conqueror: a pretty classical reminiscence, to which one should not give too much credit, but which, in certain cases, does not impose itself on the mind without reason. (2)

[footnote: (1) Cf. A. Laugel, Aven. intell., p. 264: “The difficulties of the present moment come, in sum, from the struggle between the Germanizing thought which directs the acts of the administration, and the nationalist thought which directs the tacit but peremptory resistance of the population.”] [footnote: (1) W. Wittich, Génie National…, p. 92.] [footnote: (2) H. Albert, Force française…, p. 70.] [footnote: (1) Id., ibid., p. 50.] [footnote: (2) Cf. W. Wittich, Génie National…, p. 97: “It is not so much from the movement of the Alsatian genius in the direction of the German genius as from the evolution of the German genius in the direction of the French genius that the more or less rapid disappearance of the differences that separate the Alsatian genius from Germany will depend.”]

It is true that above even these intimate bonds with the present France, whose persistence could not facilitate a contrary penetration, something more powerful still contained the administrative action of Germany: beyond what counts and measures itself, the vigorous force of the “imponderables” faithfully transmitted. Between the German and the Frenchman, whether this Frenchman be of Alsace, of Lorraine or of elsewhere, there were in 1870 — and there still are — differences that doubtless were not suspected by those who, on the eve and on the morrow of the war, from beyond the Rhine looking toward the Vosges, already glimpsed the satisfied submission of the “reconquered.” Even if, terrified by the present, anxious for the future, the Alsatian had to set himself one day to speaking a little more of Alsace than of France, Bismarck had been mistaken in believing that this particularism would bring the Alsatian closer to the German: he counted too much on the reminiscences of a distant and confused past that was nothing to the Alsatian of today, while in him there continued to live, no longer an Alsace of Barbarossa or of Habsburg, but that of Kellermann, of Kléber and of Lefèvre, of Dollfus, of Risler and of Koechlin, of all her French glories and all her French interests. He did not think of all that separates them and will still long separate them… Contrasts of every instant, that a word, an attitude, a gesture brings out… In the suburbs of Strasbourg, near Neuhof, a whole family of German excursionists gets down from the tram. A row of new barracks stretches out at the side of the road; at the gates, between two sculpted cannon mouths, the not-yet-expired menace of the antique formula: Ultima ratio. At the sight of these brand-new buildings, the family stopped: from the father’s mouth a single word fell, grave, solemn, repeated three or four times by himself, then by the wife, by the children, with a kind of emotion: Riesengebäude! Riesengebäude! (1) No philosophical reflection on the evil of eternal war, no saddened irony on the destination of these barracks, nothing but a religious admiration for the force that has raised them, for the force that will occupy them… I go back to town; toward me, in the rue du Vieux-Marché-aux-Poissons, comes a Strasbourger, one of those who have not known French Strasbourg; we speak, on what subject I no longer know, of the latest passage of Wilhelm II in Alsace; he tells me of the arrival at Strasbourg, the reception by the municipality, the emperor on horseback, surrounded by his thundering bands, the mayor on foot, at respectful distance, obliged, visibly, to shout himself into apoplexy that something of his harangue might reach the imperial ears: “Ah! he was too kind, d’r Schwander, (1) my man continued in his savory dialect; he ought to have said to him: ‘Make your drums and fifes be silent, if you want me to speak to you! I cannot continue like this!’ And all that, because His Majesty (he amused himself jocosely by designating the emperor by the initial letters of the protocolary appellation: Seine Majestät)… because H. M. wanted to spend an hour at Strasbourg!”… Small facts, I know, which would not be worth founding the philosophy of this history upon, but which are worth illustrating it: the man whose admirations rose gravely toward the inspiring power of the Neuhof barracks is not, cannot be the same as the one whose modesty of condition does not prevent him from smiling in speaking of H. M. himself… Between the immigrant masters, authoritarian, disciplined with passion, of whom the least functionary tends to consider himself as a direct representative of the German emperor, — and these Lorrainers, of Metz, of Château-Salins, of Sarrebourg, whom nothing distinguishes from their neighbors of Lunéville or of Nancy, these Alsatians jealous of independence, of free and willingly ironic spirit toward the powers, — the past rises with the present, the oppositions are difficult to reduce, and difficult to efface the still-living memory of the French time: men have not felt with a single heart the enthusiasm of the French Revolution and fought with a single élan to defend her, without being “acted upon” by that common memory even into distant descendants. (1) Thus “the conquering people” has itself come, says Werner Wittich, to that observation “that the elements of the German genius foreign to the population cannot be imposed upon it by force by any power in the world.” (2) — And, when injustice was at the origin, when there are between men such deep differences of history and of soul, time itself wears down only very slowly the resistances of the successive generations to assimilations which they do not wish.

[footnote: (1) Riesengebäude: “Gigantic constructions!” Properly: constructions of giants.] [footnote: (1) For: der Schwander, “the Schwander”: M. Schwander, present mayor of Strasbourg.]

[footnote: (1) Cf. W. Wittich, Civilis. et Patriot., p. 18: “Even the inauguration of the restored Haut-Koenigsbourg or the aerial raid of Count Zeppelin above Strasbourg and Alsace cannot produce on the spirit of the people an impression comparable to the taking of the Bastille or to the victories of the Republican or Imperial armies.”] [footnote: (2) Id., Génie national…, p. 94.]

It is difficult, for a Frenchman, — especially when he has, as is vulgarly but energetically said, attachments to this country, — to write of it without letting anything appear of his emotion between the dates and the facts. I shall at least have endeavored to do so. As well, I shall not defend myself from it: in the course of my task, often, from the very texts which passed before my eyes, more than one old memory, more than one recent impression has arisen, which encouraged me to persevere. For they are not made only, our Alsatian sensibilities, of melancholy returns toward the past because it is the past, of those thousand bonds of the heart to vanished things, — which moreover would have their respectable rights. There enters into them still a feverish need to see and to hear, to observe and to reflect, to seize all that appears of the past in the present, to act also, that the least possible of it may be lost despite the years. Within the limits of what once was the green border, one cannot walk about with the simple curiosities of a tourist. There, nothing is indifferent. Battlefields, tombs, commemorative monuments, there are some elsewhere, on territory that remained French; but, between Wœrth, Frœschwiller and Reichshoffen, between the Kronprinz Friedrich, colossal horseman who dominates the valley, and that bronze infantryman who, at the edge of the road from Wœrth to Morsbronn, dashes forward, fierce, to give “the example to future generations,” (1) the thought cannot be one of peaceful sadness, of serene and as it were repentant philosophy: there fell the French illusion, there rose the German greatness, it is from there that she installed herself, all around, as a mistress always present; elsewhere French life has resumed its rights, it has passed over those painful days, like the wave over mounds of sand; but, driven out from here, no reflux has brought it back, and, from this funereal soil, the last French visions that rise in the air are of names already historical and of uniforms already out of fashion… Frontier posts, customs visits, the childish pleasure of setting one’s watch to the new hour, foreign words and gestures one mocks on returning to one’s train, this is seen elsewhere than at Avricourt or at Novéant. But, this frontier here, thousands of men crossed it, by fidelity of heart to the vanquished homeland, and many came back, up to it, who were stopped there, a quarter of an hour from “home,” contracted, sobbing, unable to pass… A bugle-call, a military march, that is nothing to us, to our superior ironies that the banal irritates. But, over there, because the German regiments have fifes and have no bugles, bugle resounds France, while fife announces Germany; (1) and when, on Sunday morning, through the streets of Colmar, the young men go off to the station, bugles sounding, to take

[footnote: (1) Monument of the Infantry Regiment of Nassau no. 88: “Den Gefallenen zum Gedächtnis — den Lebenden zur Anerkennung — und künftigen Geschlechtern zur Nachahmung.”] [footnote: (1) The Strasbourgers who lived through the period of the bombardment — and the authors who have written of it — recall that the two most painful impressions were, first, the great silence which succeeded suddenly to the thirty-one days of shells, on the 27th of September, when the white flag of capitulation had been hoisted on the cathedral, — then, the next day, the light gaiety of the fifes that one distinguished in the music of the German regiments which made their entry into the city. — A few weeks ago (no. of 22 August 1909), the Journal d’Alsace-Lorraine, publishing a filet on the subject of an appeal for subscription launched by some Germanizing society, entitled it: The first sounds of the fife.]

the train toward Munster and the Schlucht, — that has a meaning; when, on an evening of 1900, at Strasbourg, on the Place Broglie, an Alsatian music society had its voice drowned out by the orchestra of the neighboring military casino which was intentionally playing “The Entry of the Germans into Paris,” and the natives replied by a Sambre-et-Meuse whose memory still made the witnesses who recounted the story vibrate two months later, — that had a meaning… A scrap of conversation, in a shop, while buying a cigar or a postcard, what is that? But when the man says to you: “My son is at Nancy, where he is preparing for Saint-Cyr,” — or else: “Yes, you are right, sir, the quarter has greatly changed since the war, they have made a great boulevard, there, opposite, and business is going well… but… there is not only business,” — that is not listened to coldly. To ask one’s way of the urchins playing in front of the doors, what is more simple? But, when one has lost oneself the whole morning in the high streets of old Metz, when one wants to go to the Place Saint-Louis, and these children — born thirty years after the war — answer you: “Tnes, desecudez par là, là ousqu’y a un jet d’eau…” these manifest forms of an unlearned French are not without interest. A moral distich at the door of a small country house, what is more ordinary? But when it signifies in its patois that this country is a blessed country from which one does not wish to leave once one has come there, (1) — that is not without malice. A commemorative inscription

[footnote: (1) “Im Elsass geht’s wie in dem Hüss — Kummt einer ’nin, der will nimm ’rüss.” Cf. this pleasantry whose suppression the censorship required in a recent piece of the Alsatian Theater: “The greatest misfortune for us,” says an Alsatian character, “is for a German to come and die here. — … Yet…, does that not make one fewer of them? — No, for his whole family comes from Germany for the burial, and, as they find themselves well in Alsace, they will no longer go away!”… — And also this remark which was current at Strasbourg, last year, when the announcement of an imminent attempt by Count Zeppelin and his dirigible in the direction of Alsace had excited public curiosity: ”… He is the only German one has waited for…” And these pleasantries circulate with numerous variants, equally popular.]

at the gates of a city, is there in that matter for emotion? But when, on the ramparts of Vauban, (1) two words and two dates stand out from the wall in enormous characters: Erbaut 1908 Deutsch 1870, — that is not without arrogance. What is a small circle of bourgeois in the chief town of a canton — two brewers, three big farmers, the doctor, the pharmacist, the banker, the notary? and what can well be, at the end of the fiscal year, a deliberation on the use of the kitty? Nothing, certainly, less than nothing: a country outing to the Hohwald or to Sainte-Odile? or a fine dinner at Strasbourg? But the Nancy Exposition is in full swing, one of these gentlemen proposes to go there to break open the common piggy-bank, all approve, except one, the only German of the circle, perhaps the only German of the village, — who opposes the trip to Nancy, prinzipiell, “on principle.” And that too is not without giving food for reflection… Flags on public buildings, one does not look at them, one scarcely sees them, elsewhere… But, when they are in the German colors, when more than one of these buildings bears the elegant mark of the French eighteenth century, when the city, around them, leads its everyday life, without banners or rejoicings, and a passer-by, questioned, answers you: “Today?… Ah! yes!… 2nd September, Sedan… it is doubtless Sedan that they are celebrating… Treason delivered us, and surprise made them proud,” — that moves one painfully. — Perpetual struggle that is not near ending, between the self and the non-self, the obstinate independence of the one, the haughty security of the other… Then, recalling these “things seen,” it seemed to me that my task would perhaps not be useless if I had contributed, for my modest part, to showing not only what was the tormented history of these men through the centuries and what an anguishing destiny the last war made for them, but also the effort in which they persevere to “maintain” what, of us, remains over there, — what is, in them, most deeply themselves. A recent day, going from Metz to Ban-Saint-Martin, I met a young workman who accompanied me to the sad villa where Bazaine had established his headquarters. As I marveled that he should speak so easily and so purely French, he told me that everyone around him, young as old, spoke it thus; and he added simply: “French does not get lost so quickly”… Since then, I have often thought of this simple and touching answer; and at the same time, I saw again, in my memory, the three words that are engraved on the little commemorative obelisk of Morsbronn, above the village, at the place where one of the charges of the 6th of August fell: “Defuncti adhuc loquuntur.” “The dead speak still”… One must well believe, as my young Lorrainer workman would say, that what comes from France does not die so quickly, and that many things live in them, that always speak to them of her.

[footnote: (1) At Neu-Brisach.]

ANNEXES

I

Declaration of the representatives of Alsace and Lorraine to the National Assembly (Bordeaux, 16 February 1871) (1)

NATIONAL ASSEMBLY Session 1871 Annex to the procès-verbal of 16 February 1871

PROPOSITION relative to the declaration of the deputies of the departments of the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin, the Moselle, the Meurthe and the Vosges, with regard to Alsace and Lorraine,

PRESENTED By Messrs. Léon Gambetta, Grosjean, Humbert, Küss, Saglio, H. Varroy, Titot, André, Kablé, Tachard, Rolin, Edouard Teutsch, Dornès, Hartmann, Ostermann, La Flize, Deschange, Billy, Hardon, Viox, Albrecht, Alfred Koechlin, Charles Boersch, Grandpierre, Chauffour, Rencker, Meisheim, Keller, Bûce, Berlet, Schnéegans, Ed. Bamberger, Noblot, A. Boell, Scheurer-Kestner, Ancelon.

[footnote: (1) According to the document that had belonged to M. Scheurer-Kestner, senator, and bearing the signatures gathered by him at Bordeaux.]

We, the undersigned, French citizens chosen and deputed by the departments of the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin, the Moselle, the Meurthe and the Vosges, to bring to the National Assembly of France the expression of the unanimous will of the populations of Alsace and Lorraine, after having assembled and deliberated thereon, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration their sacred and unalterable rights, so that the National Assembly, France, and Europe, having before their eyes the wishes and resolutions of our constituents, may not consummate nor allow to be consummated any act of a nature to bring harm to the rights of which a formal mandate has confided to us the guardianship and defense.

DECLARATION

I. — Alsace and Lorraine do not wish to be alienated.

Associated for more than two centuries with France in good as in bad fortune, these two provinces, ceaselessly exposed to the blows of the enemy, have constantly sacrificed themselves for the national grandeur; they have sealed with their blood the indissoluble pact that attaches them to French unity. Today put in question by foreign pretensions, they affirm through all obstacles and all dangers, under the very yoke of the invader, their unshakeable fidelity.

All unanimous, the citizens remaining in their homes as the soldiers come running under the flags, the ones by voting, the others by fighting, signify to Germany and to the world the immutable will of Alsace and Lorraine to remain French soil.

II. — France cannot consent to nor sign the cession of Lorraine and Alsace.

She cannot, without putting in peril the continuity of her national existence, herself strike a mortal blow to her own unity by abandoning those who have conquered by two hundred years of patriotic devotion the right to be defended by the country as a whole against the enterprises of victorious force.

An Assembly, even issued from universal suffrage, could not invoke its sovereignty to cover or to ratify exigencies destructive of national integrity; it would arrogate to itself a right which does not belong even to the people, assembled in its comices. Such an excess of powers, which would have the effect of mutilating the common mother, would denounce to the just severities of history those who would render themselves guilty of it.

France can endure the blows of force; she cannot sanction its decrees.

III. — Europe cannot permit nor ratify the abandonment of Alsace and Lorraine.

Guardians of the rules of justice and of the law of nations, the civilized nations cannot remain any longer insensible to the lot of their neighbor, under pain of being, in their turn, victims of the outrages they shall have tolerated. Modern Europe cannot let a people be seized like a vile herd; she cannot remain deaf to the repeated protestations of menaced populations; she owes it to her own conservation to interdict such abuses of force. She knows, moreover, that the unity of France is today, as in the past, a guarantee of the general order of the world, a barrier against the spirit of conquest and of invasion. Peace made at the price of a cession of territory would be only a ruinous truce and not a definitive peace. It would be for all a cause of intestine agitations, a legitimate and permanent provocation to war.

In sum, Alsace and Lorraine protest aloud against any cession; France cannot consent to it, Europe cannot sanction it.

In faith whereof we take our fellow-citizens of France, the governments and peoples of the entire world, to witness that we hold in advance for null and void all acts and treaties, vote or plebiscite, which should consent to the abandonment, in favor of the foreigner, of all or part of our provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

We proclaim, by these presents, forever inviolable the right of the Alsatians and Lorrainers to remain members of the French nation, and we swear, both for ourselves and for our constituents, our children and their descendants, to reclaim it eternally and by all means against and despite all usurpers.

PROPOSITION

The undersigned, representatives to the National Assembly, lay upon the desk of the Chamber the following proposition:

“The National Assembly takes into consideration the unanimous declaration of the deputies of the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin, the Moselle, the Meurthe and the Vosges.”

II

Treaty of Frankfurt

PRELIMINARIES OF THE PEACE (1) (26 February 1871)

Between the Chief of the Executive Power of the French Republic, M. Thiers, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Jules Favre, representing France,

On the one side;

And on the other,

The Chancellor of the Germanic Empire, M. the Count Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen, provided with the full powers of H. M. the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia;

The Minister of State and of Foreign Affairs of H. M. the King of Bavaria, M. the Count Otto von Bray-Steinburg;

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of H. M. the King of Württemberg, M. the Baron Auguste von Wächter;

The Minister of State, president of the Council of Ministers of H. R. H. Monseigneur the Grand-Duke of Baden, M. Jules Jolly, representatives of the Germanic Empire;

The full powers of the two Contracting Parties having been found in good and due form, the following has been agreed, to serve as preliminary basis for the definitive peace to be concluded later:

[footnote: (1) The texts of the Preliminaries of Peace, Treaty of Peace, Additional Articles and Additional Convention (customs and territorial), are borrowed from Villefort, Recueil des Traités, vol. I, pp. 91, 95, 73 and 82.]

ARTICLE 1

France renounces in favor of the German Empire all her rights and titles over the territories situated to the east of the frontier hereinafter designated.

The line of demarcation begins at the northwest frontier of the canton of Cattenom, toward the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, follows southward the western frontiers of the cantons of Cattenom and of Thionville, passes through the canton of Briey, skirting the western frontiers of the communes of Montois-la-Montagne and of Roncourt, as well as the eastern frontiers of the communes of Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes, Saint-Ail, Habonville, reaches the frontier of the canton of Gorze, which it crosses along the communal frontiers of Vionville, of Bouxières and of Onville, follows the southwest frontier respectively south of the arrondissement of Metz, the western frontier of the arrondissement of Château-Salins as far as the commune of Pettoncourt, of which it embraces the western and meridional frontiers, to follow the crest of the mountains between the Seille and the Moncel up to the frontier of the arrondissement of Sarrebourg south of Garde. The demarcation thereafter coincides with the frontier of this arrondissement up to the commune of Tanconville, whose frontier it reaches to the north; thence, it follows the crest of the mountains, between the sources of the Sarre blanche and the Vezouze up to the frontier of the canton of Schirmeck, follows the western frontier of this canton, embraces the communes of Saales, Bourg-Bruche, Colroy-la-Roche, Plaine, Ranrupt, Saulxures and Saint-Blaise-la-Roche, of the canton of Saales, and coincides with the western frontier of the departments of the Bas-Rhin and of the Haut-Rhin up to the canton of Belfort, whose meridional frontier it leaves not far from Vourvenans, to cross the canton of Delle, at the meridional limits of the communes of Bourogne and of Froide-Fontaine, and to reach the Swiss frontier, skirting the western frontiers of the communes of Joncherey and Delle.

The German Empire shall possess these territories in perpetuity, in full sovereignty and property. An international commission, composed of representatives of the High Contracting Parties in equal number on both sides, shall be charged, immediately after the exchange of ratifications of the present Treaty, with executing on the ground the tracing of the new frontier, in conformity with the preceding stipulations.

This commission shall preside over the division of the real estate and capital that have hitherto belonged in common to districts or communes separated by the new frontier. In case of disagreement on the tracing or the measures of execution, the members of the commission shall refer the matter to their respective Governments.

The frontier, such as has just been described, is marked in green on two conforming copies of the map of the territory forming the general government of Alsace, published at Berlin, in September 1870, by the geographical and statistical division of the general staff, and one copy of which shall be joined to each of the two expeditions of the present Treaty.

However, the indicated tracing has undergone the following modifications by agreement of the two Contracting Parties: in the former department of the Moselle, the villages of Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes, near Saint-Privat-la-Montagne, and of Vionville, west of Rezonville, shall be ceded to Germany. In return, the city and fortifications of Belfort shall remain to France, with a radius which shall be determined later.

ARTICLE 2

France shall pay to H. M. the Emperor of Germany the sum of five billion francs.

The payment of at least one billion francs shall take place in the course of the year 1871, and that of all the rest of the debt within a space of three years from the ratification of the present.

ARTICLE 3

The evacuation of French territories occupied by the German troops shall begin after the ratification of the present Treaty by the National Assembly sitting at Bordeaux.

Immediately after this ratification, the German troops shall leave the interior of the city of Paris as well as the forts situated on the left bank of the Seine, and within the briefest possible delay, fixed by an understanding between the military authorities of the two Countries, they shall entirely evacuate the departments of Calvados, of Orne, of Sarthe, of Eure-et-Loir, of Loiret, of Loir-et-Cher, of Indre-et-Loire, of Yonne, and, furthermore, the departments of Seine-Inférieure, of Eure, of Seine-et-Oise, of Seine-et-Marne, of Aube and of Côte-d’Or, as far as the left bank of the Seine. The French troops shall withdraw at the same time behind the Loire, which they shall not be able to cross before the signature of the definitive Treaty of peace.

Excepted from this disposition are the garrison of Paris, whose number shall not exceed forty thousand men, and the garrisons indispensable for the safety of fortified places.

The evacuation of the departments situated between the right bank of the Seine and the Eastern frontier by the German troops shall operate gradually after the ratification of the definitive Peace Treaty and the payment of the first half-billion of the contribution stipulated by article 2, beginning with the departments closest to Paris, and shall continue as the payments of the contribution are effected. After the first payment of a half-billion, this evacuation shall take place in the following departments: Somme, Oise and the parts of the departments of the Seine-Inférieure, Seine-et-Oise and Seine-et-Marne situated on the right bank of the Seine, as well as the part of the Seine department and the forts situated on the right bank.

After the payment of two billions, the German occupation shall comprise only the departments of the Marne, of the Ardennes, of the Haute-Marne, of the Meuse, of the Vosges, of the Meurthe, as well as the fortress of Belfort with its territory, which shall serve as pledge for the three remaining billions, and where the number of German troops shall not exceed fifty thousand men. H. M. the Emperor shall be disposed to substitute for the territorial guarantee consisting in the partial occupation of French territory a financial guarantee, if it be offered by the French Government in conditions recognized as sufficient by H. M. the Emperor and King for the interests of Germany. The three billions whose discharge shall have been deferred shall bear interest at five per cent from the ratification of the present Convention.

ARTICLE 4

The German troops shall abstain from making requisitions, whether in money or in kind, in the occupied departments. In return, the alimentation of the German troops who shall remain in France shall be at the expense of the French Government, in the measure agreed upon by an understanding with the German military intendency.

ARTICLE 5

The interests of the inhabitants of the territories ceded by France, in all that concerns their commerce and their civil right, shall be regulated as favorably as possible, when the conditions of the definitive peace shall be settled. There shall be fixed, for this purpose, a space of time during which they shall enjoy particular facilities for the circulation of their products. The German Government shall bring no obstacle to the free emigration of the inhabitants of the ceded territories, and shall not be able to take against them any measure affecting their persons or their properties.

ARTICLE 6

The prisoners of war who shall not have already been set at liberty by way of exchange shall be returned immediately after the ratification of the present Preliminaries. In order to accelerate the transport of the French prisoners, the French Government shall place at the disposition of the German authorities, within German territory, a part of the rolling stock of its railways, in a measure to be determined by special arrangements and at the prices paid in France by the French Government for military transports.

ARTICLE 7

The opening of the negotiations for the definitive Treaty of peace to be concluded on the basis of the present Preliminaries shall take place at Brussels, immediately after the ratification of the latter by the National Assembly and by H. M. the Emperor of Germany.

ARTICLE 8

After the conclusion and ratification of the definitive Treaty of peace, the administration of the departments still to remain occupied by the German troops shall be returned to the French authorities; but the latter shall be bound to conform to the orders that the commanders of the German troops shall believe themselves obliged to give in the interest of the safety, maintenance and distribution of the troops.

In the occupied departments, the collection of taxes, after the ratification of the present Treaty, shall be effected on behalf of the French Government and by the means of its employees.

ARTICLE 9

It is well understood that the present cannot give to the German military authority any right over the parts of the territory which it does not currently occupy.

ARTICLE 10

The present shall be immediately submitted to the ratification of the French National Assembly sitting at Bordeaux and of H. M. the Emperor of Germany.

In faith whereof the undersigned have affixed to the present preliminary Treaty their signatures and seals.

Done at Versailles, on the 26th of February 1871.

(L. S.) A. THIERS. (L. S.) JULES FAVRE. (L. S.) V. BISMARCK.

The kingdoms of Bavaria and Württemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden having taken part in the present war as allies of Prussia and now forming part of the Germanic Empire, the undersigned adhere to the present Convention in the name of their respective Sovereigns.

Versailles, the 26th of February 1871.

Count von BRAY-STEINBURG. MITTNACHT. Baron von WAECHTER. JOLLY.

TREATY OF PEACE (10 May 1871)

M. Jules Favre, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the French Republic, M. Augustin-Thomas-Joseph Pouyer-Quertier, Minister of Finance of the French Republic, And M. Marc-Thomas-Eugène de Goulard, member of the National Assembly,

Stipulating in the name of the French Republic, on the one side;

On the other,

Prince Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Chancellor of the Germanic Empire, Count Harry von Arnim, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of H. M. the Emperor of Germany to the Holy See,

Stipulating in the name of H. M. the Emperor of Germany,

Having agreed to convert into a definitive Treaty of peace the Treaty of the preliminaries of peace of the 26th of February of the current year, modified as it shall be by the provisions which follow,

Have decreed:

ARTICLE 1

The distance from the town of Belfort to the frontier line, such as it was first proposed during the negotiations at Versailles, and such as is marked on the map annexed to the ratified instrument of the Treaty of preliminaries of the 26th of February, is considered as indicating the measure of the radius which, by virtue of the relevant clause of the first article of the Preliminaries, must remain to France with the city and fortifications of Belfort.

The German Government is disposed to enlarge this radius so that it comprises the cantons of Belfort, of Delle and of Giromagny, as well as the western part of the canton of Fontaine to the west of a line to be traced from the point where the Rhône-Rhine canal leaves the canton of Delle, south of Montreux-le-Château, to the northern boundary of the canton between Bourg and Felon, where this line would join the eastern boundary of the canton of Giromagny.

The German Government, however, shall only cede the above-indicated territories on condition that the French Republic, on her side, will consent to a rectification of frontier along the western limits of the cantons of Cattenom and of Thionville which shall leave to Germany the terrain east of a line starting from the Luxembourg frontier between Hussigny and Redingen, leaving to France the villages of Thil and of Villerupt, prolonging itself between Errouville and Aumetz, between Beuvillers and Boulange, between Trieux and Lommerange, and joining the old frontier line between Avril and Moyeuvre.

The international commission of which mention is made in article 1 of the Preliminaries shall proceed to the ground immediately after the exchange of ratifications of the present Treaty, to execute the works incumbent upon it and to trace the new frontier, in conformity with the preceding dispositions.

ARTICLE 2

French subjects originating from the ceded territories, currently domiciled in this territory, who shall intend to preserve French nationality, shall enjoy until the 1st of October 1872, and by means of a prior declaration made to the competent authority, the faculty of transporting their domicile to France and of settling there, without this right being able to be impaired by the laws on military service, in which case the quality of French citizens shall be maintained for them.

They shall be free to preserve their real estate situated on the territory united to Germany.

No inhabitant of the ceded territories may be prosecuted, troubled or sought after in his person or in his goods on account of his political or military acts during the war.

ARTICLE 3

The French Government shall remit to the German Government the archives, documents and registers concerning the civil, military and judicial administration of the ceded territories. If some of these documents had been displaced, they shall be restored by the French Government on the demand of the German Government.

ARTICLE 4

The French Government shall remit to the Government of the German Empire within a term of six months, dating from the exchange of ratifications of this Treaty:

1. The amount of the sums deposited by the departments, the communes and the public establishments of the ceded territories;

2. The amount of the enlistment and substitution premiums belonging to the soldiers and sailors originating from the ceded territories who shall have opted for German nationality;

3. The amount of the sureties of the State accountants;

4. The amount of the sums paid for judicial deposits, in consequence of measures taken by the administrative or judicial authorities in the ceded territories.

ARTICLE 5

The two nations shall enjoy equal treatment as concerns navigation on the Moselle, the Marne-Rhine canal, the Rhône-Rhine canal, the Sarre canal and the navigable waters communicating with these ways of navigation. The right of floating shall be maintained.

ARTICLE 6

The High Contracting Parties being of opinion that the diocesan circumscriptions of the territories ceded to the German Empire must coincide with the new frontier determined by article 1 above, shall consult after the ratification of the present Treaty, without delay, on the measures to be taken in common to this effect.

The communities belonging, whether to the Reformed Church, or to the Augsburg Confession, established on the territories ceded by France, shall cease to depend on French ecclesiastical authority.

The communities of the Church of the Augsburg Confession established in French territories shall cease to depend on the superior consistory and on the director sitting at Strasbourg.

The Israelite communities of the territories situated to the east of the new frontier shall cease to depend on the central Israelite consistory sitting at Paris.

ARTICLE 7

The payment of five hundred millions shall take place within the thirty days that shall follow the re-establishment of the authority of the French Government in the city of Paris. A billion shall be paid in the course of the year and a half-billion on the 1st of May 1872. The three last billions shall remain payable on the 2nd of March 1874, as has been stipulated by the preliminary Peace Treaty. From the 2nd of March of the current year, the interest on these three billions of francs shall be paid each year on the 3rd of March, at the rate of five per cent per annum.

Any sum paid in advance on the three last billions shall cease to bear interest from the day of the payment effected.

All payments may only be made in the principal commercial cities of Germany, and shall be effected in metal, gold or silver, in notes of the Bank of England, notes of the Bank of Prussia, notes of the Royal Bank of the Netherlands, notes of the National Bank of Belgium, in promissory notes or in negotiable bills of exchange, of first order, value at sight.

The German Government having fixed in France the value of the Prussian thaler at three francs seventy-five centimes, the Government accepts the conversion of the currencies of the two countries at the rate indicated above.

The French Government shall inform the German Government three months in advance of any payment it intends to make to the cash offices of the German Empire.

After the payment of the first half-billion and the ratification of the definitive Peace Treaty, the departments of the Somme, the Seine-Inférieure and the Eure shall be evacuated insofar as they still find themselves occupied by German troops. The evacuation of the departments of the Oise, of Seine-et-Oise, of Seine-et-Marne and of the Seine, as well as that of the forts of Paris, shall take place as soon as the German Government shall judge the re-establishment of order, both in France and in Paris, sufficient to ensure the execution of the engagements contracted by France.

In any case, this evacuation shall take place upon the payment of the third half-billion.

The German troops, in the interest of their security, shall have the disposition of the neutral zone situated between the German line of demarcation and the enclosure of Paris, on the right bank of the Seine.

The stipulations of the Treaty of the 26th of February relative to the occupation of French territories after the payment of the two billions shall remain in force. None of the deductions that the French Government would be entitled to make may be exercised on the payment of the first five hundred millions.

ARTICLE 8

The German troops shall continue to abstain from requisitions in kind and in money in the occupied territories; this obligation on their part being correlative to the obligations contracted for their maintenance by the French Government, in case, despite repeated reclamations of the German Government, the French Government should be in arrears in executing the said obligations, the German troops shall have the right to procure what shall be necessary for their needs, by levying taxes and requisitions in the occupied departments, and even outside of them if their resources are not sufficient.

Concerning the alimentation of the German troops, the régime currently in force shall be maintained until the evacuation of the forts of Paris.

By virtue of the Convention of Ferrières of the 11th of March 1871, the reductions indicated by this Convention shall be put into execution after the evacuation of the forts.

As soon as the effective strength of the German army shall be reduced below the figure of five hundred thousand men, account shall be taken of the reductions effected below this figure to establish a proportional diminution in the cost of upkeep of the troops paid by the French Government.

ARTICLE 9

The exceptional treatment currently accorded to the products of the industry of the ceded territories for importation into France shall be maintained for a space of time of six months, from the 1st of March, in the conditions made with the delegates of Alsace.

ARTICLE 10

The German Government shall continue to repatriate the prisoners of war, in agreement with the French Government. The French Government shall send back to their homes those of these prisoners who are eligible for release. As for those who have not completed their time of service, they shall withdraw behind the Loire. It is understood that the army of Paris and Versailles, after the re-establishment of the authority of the French Government in Paris and until the evacuation of the forts by the German troops, shall not exceed eighty thousand men. Until this evacuation, the French Government shall not be able to make any concentration of troops on the right bank of the Loire; but it shall provide for the regular garrisons of the cities placed in this zone, according to the necessities of the maintenance of order and public peace.

As the evacuation operates, the chiefs of corps shall agree together upon a neutral zone between the armies of the two Nations.

Twenty thousand prisoners shall be directed without delay to Lyon, on condition that they shall be immediately sent to Algeria, after their organization, to be employed in this colony.

ARTICLE 11

The commercial treaties with the different States of Germany having been annulled by the war, the French Government and the German Government shall take as the basis of their commercial relations the régime of reciprocal treatment on the footing of the most favored nation.

Are included in this rule the entry and exit duties, transit, customs formalities, the admission and treatment of the subjects of the two Nations as well as of their agents.

However, shall be excepted from the aforesaid rule, the favors that one of the Contracting Parties, by commercial treaties, has accorded or shall accord to States other than the following: England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Russia.

The treaties of navigation, as well as the convention relative to the international service of railways in its relations with customs, and the convention for the reciprocal guarantee of the property of works of mind and art, shall be put back into force.

Nevertheless the French Government reserves the faculty of establishing on German ships and their cargoes duties of tonnage and flag, on the reservation that these duties shall not be higher than those which shall burden the ships and cargoes of the above-mentioned nations.

ARTICLE 12

All expelled Germans shall preserve the full and entire enjoyment of all the goods they have acquired in France.

Those of the Germans who had obtained the authorization required by French laws to fix their domicile in France are reinstated in all their rights and may, in consequence, again establish their domicile on French territory.

The delay stipulated by French laws to obtain naturalization shall be considered as not having been interrupted by the state of war for the persons who shall profit from the faculty mentioned above to return to France within a delay of six months after the exchange of ratifications of this Treaty, and account shall be taken of the time elapsed between their expulsion and their return to French territory, as if they had never ceased to reside in France.

The above conditions shall be applied in perfect reciprocity to French subjects residing or wishing to reside in Germany.

ARTICLE 13

The German ships which were condemned by the prize councils before the 2nd of March 1871 shall be considered as definitively condemned.

Those which had not been condemned at the date indicated shall be returned with the cargo insofar as it still exists. If the restitution of the ships and the cargo is no longer possible, their value, fixed according to the price of the sale, shall be returned to their owners.

ARTICLE 14

Each of the two Parties shall continue on its territory the works undertaken for the canalization of the Moselle. The common interests of the separated parts of the two departments of the Meurthe and of the Moselle shall be liquidated.

ARTICLE 15

The High Contracting Parties mutually engage to extend to the respective subjects the measures they may judge useful to adopt in favor of those of their nationals who, in consequence of the events of the war, would have been placed in the impossibility of arriving in useful time at the safeguarding or conservation of their rights.

ARTICLE 16

The two French and German Governments engage reciprocally to have the tombs of the soldiers buried on their respective territories respected and maintained.

ARTICLE 17

The settlement of the accessory points on which an agreement must be established, in consequence of this Treaty and of the preliminary Treaty, shall be the object of later negotiations which shall take place at Frankfurt.

ARTICLE 18

The ratifications of the present Treaty by the National Assembly and by the Chief of the Executive Power of the French Republic, on the one side,

And, on the other, by H. M. the Emperor of Germany,

Shall be exchanged at Frankfurt within the delay of ten days, or sooner if it can be done.

In faith whereof the respective Plenipotentiaries have signed it and have affixed to it the seal of their arms.

Done at Frankfurt, the 10th of May 1871.

(L. S.) Jules FAVRE. (L. S.) V. BISMARCK. (L. S.) POUYER-QUERTIER. (L. S.) ARNIM. (L. S.) E. DE GOULARD.

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES

ARTICLE 1

§ 1. — Between now and the period fixed for the exchange of the ratifications of the present Treaty, the French Government shall make use of its right of redemption of the concession given to the company of the Eastern railway. The German Government shall be subrogated to all the rights that the French Government shall have acquired by the redemption of the concessions, as regards the railways situated in the ceded territories, whether completed or under construction.

§ 2. — Shall be included in this concession:

1. All the lands belonging to the said company, whatever their destination, as well as: railway and station establishments, sheds, workshops and storehouses, track-guards’ houses, etc., etc.;

2. All the immovables that depend on them, as well as: barriers, fences, switch-points, points, turntables, water intakes, hydraulic cranes, fixed machines, etc., etc.;

3. All materials, fuels and supplies of every kind, station furnishings, tools of the workshops and stations, etc., etc.;

4. The sums due to the company of the Eastern railways by way of subventions accorded by corporations or persons domiciled in the ceded territories.

§ 3. — Excluded from this cession shall be the rolling stock. The German Government shall remit the part of the rolling stock, with its accessories, that may be in its possession, to the French Government.

§ 4. — The French Government engages to free toward the German Empire entirely the ceded railways, as well as their dependencies, from all rights that third parties might assert, namely the rights of bondholders. It engages also to substitute itself, as the case may be, for the German Government with regard to claims that might be raised against the German Government by the creditors of the railways in question.

§ 5. — The French Government shall take upon itself the claims that the company of the Eastern railways might raise against the German Government or its agents in connection with the operation of the said railways and the use of the objects indicated in paragraph 3, as well as the rolling stock.

The German Government shall communicate to the French Government, at its request, all documents and indications that might serve to establish the facts upon which the above-mentioned claims shall rest.

§ 6. — The German Government shall pay to the French Government, for the cession of the rights of property indicated in paragraphs 1 and 2, and as equivalent for the engagement taken by the French Government in paragraph 4, the sum of three hundred and twenty-five million (325,000,000) francs.

This sum shall be deducted from the war indemnity stipulated in article 7.

§ 7. — Since the situation that served as the basis for the convention concluded between the company of the Eastern railways and the royal grand-ducal society of the Wilhelm-Luxembourg railways, dated the 6th of June 1857 and the 21st of January 1868, and that concluded between the Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the societies of the Wilhelm-Luxembourg and French Eastern railways, dated the 5th of December 1868, has been essentially modified, in such a way that they are not applicable to the state of things created by the stipulations contained in paragraph 1, the German Government declares itself ready to substitute itself for the rights and charges resulting from these conventions for the company of the Eastern railways.

In the case where the French Government should be subrogated, whether by the redemption of the concession of the Eastern company, or by a special agreement, to the rights acquired by this society by virtue of the above-indicated conventions, it engages to cede gratuitously, within a delay of six weeks, its rights to the German Government.

In the case where the said subrogation shall not be effected, the French Government shall accord concessions for the railway lines belonging to the Eastern company and situated in French territory only on the express condition that the concessionnaire shall not operate the railway lines situated in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

ARTICLE 2

The German Government offers two millions of francs for the rights and properties which the company of the Eastern railways possesses on the part of its network situated on Swiss territory, from the frontier to Basel, if the French Government conveys its consent to it within a delay of one month.

ARTICLE 3

The cession of territory near Belfort offered by the German Government in article 1 of the present Treaty, in exchange for the rectification of frontier requested west of Thionville, shall be augmented by the territories of the following villages: Rougemont, Leval, La Petite-Fontaine, Romagny, Felon, La Chapelle-sous-Rougemont, Angeot, Vauthiermont, La Rivière, La Grange, Reppe, Fontaine, Frais, Foussemagne, Cunelières, Montreux-le-Château, Bretagne, Chavannes-les-Grandes, Chavanatte and Suarce.

The road from Giromagny to Remiremont passing by the Ballon d’Alsace shall remain to France in its entire course and shall serve as boundary insofar as it is situated outside the canton of Giromagny.

Done at Frankfurt, the 10th of May 1871.

(L. S.) JULES FAVRE. (L. S.) V. BISMARCK. (L. S.) POUYER-QUERTIER. (L. S.) ARNIM. (L. S.) E. DE GOULARD.

III

Additional Convention to the Treaty of Peace between France and Germany (customs and territorial) (12 October 1871)

M. Augustin-Thomas-Joseph Pouyer-Quertier, member of the National Assembly, Minister of Finance, and specially constituted and appointed by letter of the President of the French Republic, dated the 9th of October 1871, plenipotentiary of the French Republic, stipulating in the name of France,

On the one side;

On the other,

Prince Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Chancellor of the Germanic Empire, And Count Harry von Arnim, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of H. M. the Emperor of Germany to the Holy See,

Stipulating in the name of the German Empire,

Have decreed the following:

ARTICLE 1

The products manufactured in Alsace-Lorraine shall be admitted into France under the conditions hereinafter fixed:

1. From the 1st of September to the 31st of December of the present year, exempt from any customs duty;

2. From the 1st of January to the 30th of June 1872, one quarter; and from the 1st of July of the same year to the 31st of December 1872, one half of the duties that are or may be applied to Germany, by virtue of the treatment of the most favored nation, which has been conceded to her by the Treaty of Peace.

Shall be excluded from the benefit of the dispositions stated under no. 2 of the present article alimentary commodities such as wines, alcohol, beer, etc.

ARTICLE 2

In the case where new taxes should be established in France on raw materials and on dyestuffs entering into the composition or fabrication of the products originating in Alsace-Lorraine, supplementary duties shall be established on these same products by way of compensation for the new charges that would weigh on the French manufacturers.

ARTICLE 3

French products such as pig iron, iron in bars or sheet, steel in bars or sheet, cotton yarn and fabrics, woolen yarns or fabrics and other products of the same nature destined to receive a complement of workmanship in Alsace-Lorraine, shall be admitted free of customs duties in the said ceded territories, and placed under the régime of temporary admission, such as is regulated by German legislation.

ARTICLE 4

The products manufactured in the conditions indicated by article 3 must, on their re-importation into France, acquit, on the basis of the duty applicable to products manufactured in Alsace-Lorraine, the quota relating to the supplement of labor received in the ceded territories.

ARTICLE 5

French products such as starch, potato starch, dyestuffs, chemical products and other analogous materials suitable for finishing, introduced into the works or factories of Alsace-Lorraine and destined to be incorporated into the finished products, shall be admitted free of duty until the 31st of December of the present year and submitted, from the 1st of January 1872 until the 30th of June of the same year, to one quarter, and from the 1st of July 1872 to the 31st of December 1872, to one half of the duties which, in general, are or may be applied in Germany to products of the same nature. The quantities to be introduced into the works or factories of Alsace-Lorraine shall be limited to the needs of the said works or factories.

It is agreed that the above-indicated products may only be entered into Alsace-Lorraine through the customs offices that shall be designated by the German authority.

ARTICLE 6

It also remains understood that the duties that shall have been paid or deposited, up to the putting into force of the present Convention, on the importation of the products to which articles 1 and 5 of the present Convention apply, shall be reciprocally reimbursed.

ARTICLE 7

In order to prevent fraud and to limit to the products manufactured in Alsace-Lorraine alone the benefit of the foregoing stipulations, there shall be instituted in Alsace-Lorraine syndicates of honor in sufficient number to exercise an effective surveillance. They shall be elected by the chambers of commerce and exclusively composed of Alsatians and Lorrainers; they shall furthermore be approved by the French Government.

These syndicates shall:

1. See to it that the products of Alsace-Lorraine that shall be imported into France by virtue of article 1, and the French products designated in article 5 of the present Convention, which shall be imported from France into the ceded territories, do not exceed in quantity the limits to be ascertained by the said syndicates of the commerce that existed between the two countries in the year 1869;

2. Deliver to each establishment certificates of origin;

3. Supervise the works in such a way that no fraud may occur, whether by augmentation of the quantities inscribed in the certificates of origin, or by employment of foreign materials other than the raw materials.

4. See to the exactness and sincerity of the declarations.

The certificates of origin shall be nominative and not negotiable.

ARTICLE 8

The said syndicates are bound to signal to the injured Government any infraction of the above-indicated conditions, as well as of the statutes of the syndicates, which have already been approved by the French Government.

The injured Government may deprive the head of the establishment guilty of the infraction of the benefit of the preceding clauses.

ARTICLE 9

During the duration of the present Convention, the contracts concluded by Alsatian and Lorrainer manufacturers with Frenchmen, before or during the war, shall enjoy, for their execution, the exemptions enacted by paragraph 1 of article 1 of the present Convention.

The same régime shall be conceded, by way of reciprocity, to the French products designated in article 5 of the present Convention, objects of contracts concluded by Alsatian and Lorrainer manufacturers in France before or during the war.

ARTICLE 10

The German Government shall retrocede to France:

1. The communes of Raon-lès-Leau and of Raon-sur-Plaine, exclusively of all domanial property as well as of communal and particular properties enclaved in the reserved domanial territory;

2. The commune of Igney and the part of the commune of Avricourt situated between the commune of Igney, up to and including the railway from Paris to Avricourt, and the railway from Avricourt to Cirey.

The French Government shall take upon itself the costs of a railway station to be built on the terrain chosen by the German Government, and which shall suffice for the military and commercial interests as much as that of Avricourt.

The estimates of this construction shall be made by common agreement; the German Government shall take care to have it executed as soon as possible.

Until the completion of the new station, the German Government reserves the right to keep occupied the commune of Igney as well as the part of the commune of Avricourt above-indicated.

The commission of delimitation shall be charged with determining the new frontier.

ARTICLE 11

The two High Contracting Parties have agreed to put back in force article 28 of the Treaty concluded, on the 2nd of August 1862, between France and the Zollverein, concerning trademarks and designs of factory.

ARTICLE 12

The present Convention shall be ratified by H. M. the Emperor of Germany after the consent of the Federal Council and of the Parliament of the Empire, on the one hand, and the President of the French Republic, on the other, and the ratifications of it shall be exchanged in the space of the current month of October, at Versailles.

In faith whereof, the Plenipotentiaries have signed the present Convention and have affixed to it the seal of their arms.

Done at Berlin, the twelfth of the month of October of the year one thousand eight hundred and seventy-one.

(L. S.) POUYER-QUERTIER. (L. S.) V. BISMARCK. (L. S.) ARNIM.

IV

I believe I should cite here the three passages of Albert Sorel, of Fustel de Coulanges and of Ernest Lavisse to which the notes of page 51 refer, because in them seems to me to sum up most clearly the whole French thought on the fact of 1871:

ALBERT SOREL. — Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande, vol. I, pp. 209–210:

“When Alsace and later Lorraine had become French, the idea of German unity had not yet penetrated into Germany, the principle of nationalities was taught by no one, and the States practiced a public law that resembled in nothing that which one has attempted to apply in Europe following the French Revolution.”

FUSTEL DE COULANGES. — Is Alsace German or French?, pp. 6–9:

“You invoke the principle of nationality, but you understand it otherwise than all Europe. According to you, this principle would authorize a powerful State to seize a province by force, on the sole condition of affirming that this province is occupied by the same race as that State. According to Europe and good sense, it authorizes simply a province or a population not to obey, in spite of itself, a foreign master. I explain myself by an example: the principle of nationality did not permit Piedmont to conquer by force Milan and Venice; but it permitted Milan and Venice to free themselves from Austria and to join voluntarily with Piedmont. You see the difference. This principle can well give Alsace a right; but it gives you none over her.

”… It is not what you believe. It constitutes a right for the weak; it is not a pretext for the ambitious. The principle of nationality is not, under a new name, the old right of the strongest.”

ERNEST LAVISSE. — Vue générale sur l’histoire politique de l’Europe, p. 215:

“It is difficult to make foreigners understand why France cannot resign herself to the loss of her provinces: ‘It is the law of war,’ say the Germans. This language would have surprised no one in the last century; even today, it seems natural to the politicians of the old régime. But France, in this century, represents another politics.

“Among all the nations of the world, she is rationalist and sensitive. She professes that it is not permitted to treat a population of men like a herd of beasts. She believes in the existence of the souls of peoples. She has suffered painfully with the sufferings of the victims of force. She has wept over Athens, over Warsaw and over Venice, and has not given only her tears to the ‘oppressed.’ If we helped the United Provinces to free themselves in the seventeenth century, it was only by a happy effect of the politics of our kings; but it is by a willed effort of our new sentiments that we delivered, by giving our blood, the United States, Greece, Belgium and Italy.

“The Peace of Frankfurt has not left us only the humiliation of defeat. It has not only opened our frontier, and put our country in a state of intolerable insecurity. By taking from us souls that were and wished to remain ours, the conqueror has wounded us in our faith… he has simply used the old right of force. This is what determines the character of the Alsatian question. It puts in presence two states of civilization, and we have, in defeat, a singular honor: the redress of the wrong that has been done us would be a satisfaction given to reason and to the most generous sentiments of our time.”

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— — Civilisation et patriotisme en Alsace-Lorraine (translated and prefaced by Henri Lichtenberger, Strasbourg, Édition de la Revue alsacienne illustrée, 1909).

— — L’Alsace-Lorraine sous le régime allemand (in Revue des Deux-Mondes, 15 March 1878).

— — L’Alsace-Lorraine et l’Empire germanique (in-18, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1881).

L’Alliance franco-allemande, by an Alsatian (in-8°, Nancy, Berger-Levrault, 1883).

Die Bevölkerung in Elsass-Lothringen (A. Textlicher Teil) (in-8°, Strasbourg, Bull, 1908).

Les Débats sur l’abolition de la dictature en Alsace-Lorraine (Reichstag session of the 28th of January 1886) (small in-8°, Strasbourg, Fischbach, 1885).

En Alsace-Lorraine (in Revue Bleue, 30 December 1899).

Les Murailles d’Alsace-Lorraine (in-4°, Paris, Le Chevalier, 1871).

Notice sur l’industrie et le commerce de l’Alsace (Vienna Universal Exposition) (in-32, Strasbourg, Maurice Schauenbourg, 1873).

Organisation du gouvernement — Alsace-Lorraine (General Assembly of mayors and notables, at Strasbourg, the 16th of April 1871) (Piece, Strasbourg, Schauenbourg, 1871).

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

Statistisches Jahrbuch für Elsass-Lothringen (in-8°, Strasbourg, Schultz, 1908).

Annuaire de Législation étrangère (published by the Société française de législation comparée) (in-8°, Paris, since 1872).

L’Europe nouvelle (Paris, 13, quai Voltaire; monthly). Editorial secretary: M. Georges-Durant.

Le Journal d’Alsace-Lorraine (Strasbourg, 3, place Saint-Thomas, daily). Editor-in-chief: M. Léon Boll.

Le Messager d’Alsace-Lorraine (Paris, 10, rue du Regard; weekly). Director: M. Henri Albert.

La Revue alsacienne illustrée (Strasbourg, 2, rue Brûlée; quarterly). Director: Dr. Pierre Bucher.

TABLE

THE MAP WITH THE GREEN BORDER	i
Forty years have passed, and this corner of the earth……	3
FOREWORD.	5
I. — A LITTLE HISTORY	13
1. — Before there was either Alsace or Lorraine.	15
2. — From the Holy Roman Empire to the Revolution	19
a). — Alsace	20
b). — Lorraine	31
3. — Since the Revolution	39
II. — THE WILL OF GERMANY	47
III. — THE FACT OF 1871	67
IV. — THE ALSATIANS-LORRAINERS, “RANSOM” OF FRANCE	93
V. — SINCE.	127
It is difficult, for a Frenchman.	183
Annexes	189
I. — Declaration of the representatives of Alsace and Lorraine to the National Assembly of Bordeaux…	191
II. — Treaty of Frankfurt	195
III. — Additional Convention to the Treaty of Peace between France and Germany (customs and territorial)	214
IV.	219
Index of the principal works and articles consulted.	221
Table	229

Imp. Kktr, Paris.