‘question’ in all its aspects. Convenient accounts in English are B.
Cerf, _Alsace-Lorraine since 1870_ (New York, 1919); C. D. Hazen,
_Alsace-Lorraine under German Rule_ (New York, 1917); C. Phillipson,
_Alsace-Lorraine_ (London, 1918); and E. A. Vizetelly, _The True
Story of Alsace-Lorraine_ (London, 1918). Examples of the literature
are: H. and A. Lichtenberger, _La question d’Alsace-Lorraine_ (Paris,
1915), by two fair-minded Frenchmen of Alsatian origin; the various
books of the Alsatian nationalist, Abbé E. Wetterlé; S. Grumbach,
_Das Schicksal Elsass-Lothringens_ (Neuchâtel, 1915), by an Alsatian
Socialist; D. Schäfer, _Das Reichsland_ (Berlin, 1915), Pan-German;
H. Wendel, _Elsass-Lothringen und die Sozial-Demokratie_ (Berlin,
1916), Social Democrat; H. Ruland, _Deutschtum und Franzosentum
in Elsass-Lothringen_ (Colmar, 1908); E. Florent-Matter, _Les
Alsaciens-Lorrains contre l’Allemagne_ (Paris, 1918). The brilliant
statement of the French case in the letter of Fustel de Coulanges to
Mommsen (now in his _Questions historiques_, Paris, 1893, pp. 505-512)
has lost none of its point with time. A. Schulte, _Frankreich und das
linke Rheinufer_ (Stuttgart, 1918), is an historical polemic against
French claims.
A good manual of the government under German rule is O. Fischbach,
_Das öffentliche Recht des Reichslandes_ (Tübingen, 1914).
The human geography of the whole region is admirably discussed in P.
Vidal de la Blache, _La France de l’Est_ (Paris, 1917). There is a
good general article by L. Gallois in the _Geographical Review_, vi,
pp. 89-115 (1918). There are excellent discussions of resources, as
well as of frontiers, by eminent geographers and historians in the
first volume of the _Travaux du Comité d’Etudes: L’Alsace-Lorraine et
la frontière du Nord-est_ (Paris, 1918).
On the iron of Lorraine see _The Iron Resources of the World_
(Stockholm, 1910); the _Atlas of Mineral Resources_ of the U. S.
Geological Survey; E. Gréaux, _Le fer en Lorraine_ (Paris, 1908);
F. Engerand, _L’Allemagne et le fer_ (Paris, 1916); H. Schumacher,
_Die westdeutsche Eisenindustrie_ (Leipzig, 1910); P. Krusch, in
Petermann’s _Mitteilungen_, lxiii, pp. 41-44 (1917).
* * * * *
The formation of Alsace and Lorraine is traced, from the point
of view that they are naturally German, in Boeckh and Kiepert,
_Historische Karte von Elsass und Lothringen_ (Berlin, 1870); and in
Droysen, _Historischer Handatlas_ (1886), no. 41. For the changes of
1789-1815, the _Atlas_ of the Comité d’Etudes is convenient, as also
for mineral resources. There is a good map of the _minette_ field in
Petermann’s _Mitteilungen_, 1917, plate 8. The linguistic maps of
C. This will be found in _Beiträge zur Landes- und Volkskunde von
Elsass-Lothringen_, parts 1 and 5 (1887, 1888); those of H. Witte,
showing the modifications of the linguistic frontier, in _Forschungen
zur deutschen Landes- und Volkskunde_, viii, x. A percentage map based
on the German census of languages is given by Langhans, in _Deutsche
Erde_, 1910, plate 1; cf. 1909, plate 3. See also Gallois’ maps in
_Annales de géographie_, ix, nos. 4, 5; and Gröber, _Grundriss der
romanischen Philologie_ (Strasburg, 1904-1906), i, end.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Laband, _Deutsches Reichsstaatsrecht_ (Tübingen, 1912), p. 190.
[17] R. Reuss, _L’Alsace au xviiᵉ siècle_ (Paris, 1898), i, p. 720; ii,
p. 186.
[18] Edition of 1890, i, p. 383, removed from later editions.
[19] _Questions historiques_ (Paris, 1893), p. 509.
[20] Lorenz and Scherer, _Geschichte des Elsass_ (Berlin, 1872), p. 441.
[21] Quoted as the opinion of a liberal German advocate of Mainz, who
had “a perfect knowledge of Alsace,” in _Memoirs of Sir Robert Morier_
(London, 1911), ii, p. 184.
[22] _Memoirs of Sir Robert Morier_, ii, pp. 185 ff.
[23] Printed from the original in _Revue historique_, cxxvii, p. ii
(1918).
[24] _Die politischen Reden_, vi, p. 201; see also v, p. 56; vi, pp.
31, 32, 167; xiii, p. 347.
[25] _Die politischen Reden_, xiii, pp. 375, 26, 27; vii, p. 414.
[26] “Unfortunately the theory [that only a zone of two kilometres
was workable] was held by the German geologists who were consulted in
fixing the frontiers of the treaty of Frankfort, and hence led to the
present course of the Franco-German frontier.” H. Schumacher, _Die
westdeutsche Eisenindustrie_ (Leipzig, 1910), p. 147; and in Grumbach,
_Das annexionistische Deutschland_, p. 172.
[27] Annexation to Prussia was even urged, as by Laband, in _Deutsche
Revue_, June 1917, much as by Treitschke in 1870 (_Preussische
Jahrbücher_, xxvi, pp. 398 ff.).
[28] Facsimile in _L’Illustration_, January 3, 1920.
[29] Article 51.
[30] Articles 52-79 and annex.
IV
THE RHINE AND THE SAAR
If Alsace-Lorraine occupied the attention of the Peace Conference in
far less measure than it had occupied the attention of Europe during
the preceding half-century, quite the contrary is true of the related
questions of the Rhine, the Left Bank, and the Saar valley. By the
recovery of Alsace France found herself once more on the Rhine; she
demanded a corresponding voice in Rhenish affairs. By regaining her
boundaries of 1870, she was in a position to reopen the question of
her boundaries of 1814, of those northern appendages of Alsace and
Lorraine which she had lost to Prussia in 1815 and which contained the
coal so much needed for the restoration of France. By defeating Germany
decisively she was able to demand military guarantees on the Left Bank
against another German invasion, perhaps even special privileges as
well. French imperialism, French reparation, French self-defence were
all in some degree involved in these problems of the Rhine and the
intervening lands.
Let us look at these matters in their historical setting. To German
geographers and historians the Rhine is a German river, by nature and
by history, its valley forming a physiographic unity, itself the great
highway of Germany. It is true, they sadly admit, that the upper third
of the valley has been in course of time almost wholly withdrawn
from Germany to fall under Swiss domination, but this still remains,
in culture if not in politics, almost purely Germanic, like the lower
Rhine in Holland. The common German view was summed up a century ago in
the phrase of Arndt, so often repeated in 1870, “Der Rhein Deutschlands
Strom, nicht Deutschlands Grenze.”
Since the seventeenth century there have not been lacking in France
certain historians and geographers who have maintained that the Rhine
was the natural frontier of France, as it had been of Roman Gaul.
“Rhenus finis Germaniae,” said the contemporaries of Louis XIV, while a
century later Carnot and Danton spoke of the Rhine as the natural limit
of France. Scholars of this way of thinking have insisted upon the
fundamentally Celtic character of the Left Bank, if not of the Rhine
itself--is not _der Rhein, der deutsche Rhein_, originally a Celtic
word?--and have emphasized French elements in Rhenish culture and
French influence upon its political life. During the war men of this
school organized the Comité de la Rive Gauche du Rhin and published
a fair amount of propagandist literature which sought to reclaim the
Left Bank for France; but while the group included some scholars of
eminence, it cannot be considered representative of the great body of
French historians.
To one who approaches the matter without any nationalistic
prepossessions the fate of the Rhine valley seems to have been
determined, not by any geographic necessity, but by the vicissitudes of
history. France has no such clearly marked frontier on the northeast
as it possesses in other directions, for the Rhine, like other rivers,
unites more than it divides, while a mountain range like the Vosges,
strongly recommended by German writers in the region of Alsace, fails
as we proceed northward. As a matter of history, whatever value the
Rhine frontier possessed in Roman days disappeared with the Germanic
invasions, and ever since the partitions of the Frankish empire in
the ninth century the lands between the Rhine and the Meuse have been
debated between France and Germany. There is no racial frontier,
for the region is one of mixed Teutonic and Alpine types, whose
distribution was more affected by highland and valley than by any
considerations of east and west. There is a linguistic frontier, which
has scarcely changed in the open country since the early Middle Ages,
and French and German speech have naturally been the vehicles of
their respective civilizations; but the linguistic and the political
frontiers have rarely coincided, and “the linguistic frontier has never
determined the political.”[31] The decisive considerations have been
political pressure and military force, and in the more recent period
political affinities and economic relations.
At first Germany had the advantage, if we mean by Germany that loose
congeries of tribal duchies and later of feudal principalities which
made up the mediaeval Empire. Thus the partition of Meersen (870),
which you will seek in vain in the text of Freeman’s _Geography_ or in
Schrader’s _Atlas historique_, is often cited by German scholars as
fixing a permanent line of demarcation to Germany’s advantage, and was
even invoked by Brockdorff-Rantzau in May 1919 as the original basis
of the German title to the Saar valley. Yet this same line would give
to France Maestricht, Liège, and the mouths of the Rhine! After the
disintegration of the Empire in the later Middle Ages, French advance
began actively in the sixteenth century in the region of the Three
Bishoprics. In the seventeenth century Louis XIV intrenched himself on
the Saar at Saarlouis, and piece by piece gained possession of Alsace.
The Revolution carried the tricolor down the Rhine from Landau to the
Dutch border. Then came the treaty of Vienna, setting France back to
the limits of 1789 and even farther, and the treaty of Frankfort by
which France lost all contact with the Rhine. The victory of 1918 again
put France on the Rhine. A German medal of 1917 represents an exhausted
France driven to her death by England at Verdun, while on the obverse
under the insignia of peace the German Rhine flows calmly on--“und
ruhig fliesst der Rhein.” The French flag now floats not only over
Verdun but over Metz and Strasburg as well. The Rhine still flows on
but in its Alsatian portion it is no longer the German Rhine; it is
“Deutschlands Grenze, nicht Deutschlands Strom.”
* * * * *
With France once more a Rhine power, the perspective requires certain
readjustments. First of all, there is the question of navigation.
Freedom of commerce on the Rhine was established in 1815 by the treaty
of Vienna, but it has been exercised for the benefit of the states
bordering on the river, who drew up in 1868 at Mannheim the convention
which has since regulated navigation on the river. France was one of
the signatories, but dropped out with the loss of her riparian status
in 1871, when a representative was assigned to the Reichsland. Of
the others,--Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, Holland, and Prussia--Holland
and Prussia were the most important, but the small states were in
a position to delay and hinder. The executive organ, the Central
Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, sat semiannually at
Mannheim, but had little coercive power over members. Complaint was
made of discrimination against the vessels of other states and against
certain cities, notably Strasburg. Switzerland, obviously a Rhine
power, asked in vain for admission. In spite of the enormous growth
of trade on the Rhine, the whole system belonged to an earlier age,
and its reform was required in the general interest as well as in the
interest of France.
Besides the general provisions of the Paris treaty securing freedom
of transit and travel across German territory and prohibiting
discrimination against the nationals of the Allied and Associated
Powers in German ports and German rivers, a special chapter deals with
the Rhine and its tributaries.[32] Pending the making of a general
convention relating to international waterways, the convention of
Mannheim is modified by granting France representation equal to the
total number of delegates of the German riparian states (four), as well
as an additional member as President of the Commission, while to the
two representatives of the Netherlands are added an equal number from
Switzerland and from Belgium, whose interests in the Rhine are thus
recognized, and from two outside powers of large commercial interests,
Great Britain and Italy. At the same time the jurisdiction of the
Commission is extended to cover the upper Rhine between Basel and Lake
Constance, if Switzerland consents, the lower Moselle, and tributary
canals and artificial channels. The headquarters of the Commission
are transferred from Mannheim to Strasburg, which is evidently meant
to play a large part in the future development of the river. In order
that Strasburg may not suffer while its port and terminal facilities
are being developed to correspond to the new needs, the opposite port
of Kehl in Baden is combined for seven years into a single port with
Strasburg, the whole under the supervision of the Central Rhine
Commission.[33]
Another problem of the upper Rhine is that of its water power, a
matter which had proved difficult to adjust between Baden and the
Reichsland and was likely to make greater trouble between two sovereign
and antagonistic states. Alsace had complained that the Grand Duchy
opposed plans for the utilization of the Rhine, and France proposed
to take no chances of future disagreement. So Germany agrees that,
subject to the approval of the Central Commission, France may build
dams and take water from the Rhine on the whole course of the river
between the extreme points of the French frontier, acquiring for proper
compensation the necessary supports and rights of way on the Right
Bank, with the understanding that Germany has a right to the value
of half the power thus produced. Germany binds herself not to derive
canals from the Rhine opposite the French frontiers.[34] Henceforth the
Rhine is to be harnessed to serve the needs of Alsace.
* * * * *
If participation in the affairs of the upper Rhine was incidental to
the recovery of Alsace, the lower course of the river was quite another
matter. Between the Rhine and the Franco-Belgian frontier lay a belt of
German territory, varying in breadth from fifty to one hundred miles,
with an area of about 10,000 square miles, and a population of five
and a half millions. Of these, nearly a million were in the Bavarian
Palatinate, 50,000 in the principality of Birkenfeld, about 400,000
in Hesse; the rest, the great majority, were in the Rheinprovinz of
Prussia. Practically all of them spoke German. They had been under
their existing governments for at least a century; they had been under
some sort of German government far longer.
Down to 1789 this region was parcelled out among a great number of
petty principalities, lay or ecclesiastical, from the considerable
dominions of the archbishoprics of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, and the
bishoprics of Speier and Worms, to the minute lay states of a few
villages which can scarcely be distinguished on the map. A careful
historian has counted ninety-seven such independent states on the Left
Bank in 1789. Swept away by the Revolution, most of them were never
restored. The chief exception was the Palatinate, which had passed
about from one branch of the reigning family to another, and came back
to Bavaria in 1815 as a well rounded territory under the house of
Zweibrücken. The Congress of Vienna also handed over the valley of the
Nahe to Hesse-Darmstadt, and gave the duke of Oldenburg a compensation
of 25,000 souls to be furnished by Prussia, 20,000 of which were found
on the Left Bank and formed into the principality of Birkenfeld.
The great gainer by the new arrangements was Prussia. Before the
Revolution her only possessions on the Left Bank, namely Cleves,
Mörs, and Prussian Guelders, were on the lower Rhine. At Vienna, as a
compensation for the Saxony which was refused her, she was given the
greater part of the Left Bank, her territory now reaching from the
valley of the Saar to the Dutch border. For the first time Prussia and
France were neighbors. However German these lands may have been, they
had never been Prussian, and the bargain by which they were handed
over to Prussia took no account of past history or the desires of the
population. If the Paris Conference was to undo the historic wrongs
perpetrated at Vienna, it could well begin here.
A wrong a hundred years old, however, is not easily undone, and its
undoing may constitute an even greater wrong. Particularist at the
outset, the Rhineland had been assimilated by Prussia and by the
new German empire, partly through the agencies of government and
administration, still more perhaps through its participation in the
great economic development of modern Germany. It had become the seat
of world industries: iron and steel mills, sugar refineries, textile
manufactories, and chemical plants. It was served by an excellent
railroad system, and by the shipping of the Rhine and its tributaries.
Its rapidly growing cities lay on both banks of the river. It was
in the closest connection with Westphalia, Prussia’s other great
industrial province. Since 1815 the population of the Rheinprovinz had
quadrupled, until it was one of the most densely peopled regions of
Europe. Under Prussia it had prospered and waxed fat, and prosperity
had reconciled differences. Then, if the Rhineland was to be taken from
Prussia, to whom could it be given? No one wanted to return to the
feudal lords, lay or spiritual, of the old regime and the simple life.
Could the land go back to France?
For twenty years only had the Left Bank belonged to France, from 1794
to 1814. These years, however, were a period of rapid and far-reaching
change. In place of the ninety-seven petty principalities four French
departments had been organized and then incorporated into France,
in many instances upon the petitions of the inhabitants themselves.
Feudalism and ecclesiasticism had given way to democracy, the local
laws had been superseded by the Code Napoléon, which survived on the
Rhine till 1900. The younger generation learned French and looked
toward France. The Prussians in 1814 were by no means generally
welcomed. Small wonder that, when a new victory opened the way to the
Rhine, the memories of a French Rhineland should suggest that the work
of 1794 might be repeated and the new generation taught once more to
turn to France. Small wonder that there were French who forgot, not
only how quickly the French traditions had faded out after 1815, but
also how the great industrial development of the nineteenth century
had bound the Left Bank to the Right by bands of steel which only
military force could destroy. Such force some were willing to apply,
but others trusted still to the influence of the French language
and the popularity and adaptability of a French occupation. They
needed to ponder the prudent words of a French historian: “If it is
well for public men to know a bit of history, this should be only on
condition that they do not allow themselves to be dominated by their
recollections of the past.”[35] He is a wise man indeed who can always
distinguish between things as they are and things as he wishes them to
be.
In the French projects respecting the Left Bank there was of course
something more than sentiment, and there was also something more than
mere imperialism, whether economic or political. It was in this region
that France must needs seek something of that reparation for the
devastation of war which Germany seemed unable to furnish elsewhere.
And it was here that France would also seek means of defence and
guarantees against a new German invasion. For any particular plan
more than one of these reasons might be urged, and it was not always
possible to distinguish what was imperialistic by nature from what was
necessary to the restoration and protection of France. It was not the
least of the services performed for France by that shrewd old man,
Georges Clémenceau, that he refused to be swept on by the extremists
and limited his ultimate demands to the substantial results which the
treaty secured.
Comparatively few Frenchmen demanded the outright annexation of the
Left Bank, nor was the number large of those who wished to prepare for
it by an indefinitely prolonged military occupation. Nevertheless,
the annexationist group was much in evidence, and conducted an active
campaign. It was a Conservative and Nationalist body, whose opinion was
expressed by journals like the _Echo de Paris_ and the _Libre Parole_.
It had also strong support in high military quarters, which desired
a long military occupation of the country, particularly of the Rhine
itself and its bridges. It was urged that, however the historical
question might lie, the Rhine was the obvious military frontier of
France, the one advanced line which could not be turned and which
guaranteed France against invasion. It was even maintained that this
was the real frontier of all the Allies, the front line that must be
held at all cost against Germany. It need not even be held in force,
for Allied control of the nine great Rhine bridges would suffice to
prevent invasion. Germany must lose her springboard for jumping into
France!
As to the intervening territory, a favorite French solution was that
of an independent buffer state under French protection. And since such
a state, in spite of its great resources, would not be large enough
to maintain its economic independence, it was thought preferable that
it should lie within the French customs zone. The political status of
such a state was variously viewed as one of entire independence, as
a French or Allied protectorate, or as a federal state of the German
empire entirely detached from Prussia. At one time there were even
signs of a movement toward separation, for the Catholic Rhineland
was inclined to resist the programme of the Majority Socialists, and
there were French Catholics who would have welcomed its affiliation to
France. Separatist tendencies were not, however, encouraged by England
and the United States, and they never reached serious proportions. The
most notable example of such a movement was in the Palatinate, where
French troops were in possession. Moreover an economic protectorate
recalled too directly the history of the German Zollverein, and even
certain economic aims of Germany during the world war. The only
definite advance which France made in this direction was the severance
of Luxemburg from the German customs union by the treaty, and its
subsequent entry into the French customs union by popular vote of its
inhabitants the following September.
However little sympathy might be felt with the various projects for the
military or economic aggrandizement of France on the Left Bank, there
was one French argument that was unanswerable: the Left Bank and the
Rhine must not be made the basis of a new attack against France and
thus against the world’s peace. Here Prussian militarism had used its
opportunities to the full. The Rhine valley was covered with munition
factories, with forts and garrisons and parade grounds, with bridges
and strategic railroads, furnished with long detraining platforms in
the open country or great camps like Elsenborn on the Belgian frontier.
And the campaign of 1914 had shown to what use all this could be put in
sudden attack. “Not another German soldier on the Rhine,” was a common
form of the French demand. The demilitarization of the Left Bank was an
elementary demand of national, and international, security.
The clauses to this effect in the treaty are brief but full of meaning:
Article 42.
Germany is forbidden to maintain or construct any fortifications
either on the left bank of the Rhine or on the right bank to the west
of a line drawn 50 kilometres to the East of the Rhine.
Article 43.
In the area defined above the maintenance and the assembly of armed
forces, either permanently or temporarily, and military manoeuvres
of any kind, as well as the upkeep of all permanent works for
mobilization, are in the same way forbidden.
Article 44.
In case Germany violates in any manner whatever the provisions of
Articles 42 and 43, she shall be regarded as committing a hostile act
against the Powers signatory of the present Treaty and as calculated
to disturb the peace of the world.