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.
In order to insure immediate and full effect to these articles, the provisions respecting guarantees of the whole treaty involve the occupation of this very region. German territory west of the Rhine, together with the Rhine bridgeheads, is to be held for fifteen years by Allied and Associated troops. In case of faithful execution of the treaty, this region is to be evacuated by these troops in three successive zones at intervals of five years; in case of non-execution, the territory may be reoccupied and the period of occupation extended.[36] A further agreement, of even date with the treaty, provides for the administration of the occupied territory under a civilian Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission representing France, Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States, subject to whose authority the German local administration is maintained. Neither the military occupation nor the civilian Commission covers the demilitarized zone on the Right Bank, a gap between the two systems of administration which was to prove particularly serious in the region of the Ruhr, the principal source of the coal on which France and other Allies had an option under other clauses of the treaty, a district liable to serious industrial disturbances for the suppression of which the German government would demand the right to use troops.
Finally, as a more positive and direct guarantee of the country which had borne the brunt of Germany’s aggression, Great Britain and the United States agreed to come to the aid of France in case of an unprovoked attack by Germany.[37] Designed to offer adequate assurance during the transitional period while the League of Nations was getting under way, this supplementary treaty recognized not only the peculiar dangers of France, exposed directly to the full force of a German offensive, but also the general interest in her full security and protection. To the French this was an essential part of the peace settlement, and without it they would have insisted on more direct and more material guarantees of their own.
Another matter affecting the Left Bank came into prominence at the conference, namely the valley of the Saar. From one point of view this was a phase of the question of Alsace-Lorraine, for a portion of the Saar basin had once been a part of Lorraine and the recovery of the lost provinces revived the question of their historic boundaries. It was also part of the problem of the Left Bank, for the territory belonged to Prussia and Bavaria and was inhabited by a population of predominantly German affinities, and any annexation here was subject to the same objections as elsewhere on German soil. Lastly, the coal mines of the valley raised a more special question, for they adjoined immediately the new boundary of France, and thus offered an easy source of reparation for the destruction and devastation of French territory.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution neither Alsace nor Lorraine possessed a clearly defined frontier toward the north. In each case the boundary had arisen historically, without any large measures of readjustment or delimitation, in a region of minute subdivisions and overlapping claims; and the result was a tortuous, broken line, with enclaves on either side, which defied geographical and administrative convenience. At certain points the limits of sovereignty were in dispute, and the boundary cannot everywhere be defined with certainty. In Alsace, beyond the present limit of the river Lauter, lay the enclave of Landau, an old Alsatian city which had passed to France in 1648, while the intervening territory obeyed the bishop of Speier, the duke of Zweibrücken, or the Elector Palatine. To the north of Lorraine Louis XIV had established French influence on the Saar and constructed his new town of Saarlouis, as an outpost to insure the military control of the valley. The acquisition in the eighteenth century of the duchy of Lorraine, already traversed and cut up by pieces of French territory, carried the French frontier well to the north and east of Saarlouis, while at the same time it left the German county of Saarbrücken astride the Saar on either side of the town of the same name. A glance at the map will show the impossible character of the resulting frontier, which had not been greatly improved when the armies of the Revolution poured over it and added the whole region to France. That its incorporation was not a simple act of violence appears from various petitions of 1797 asking for the privileges of French citizenship, among them a long list of signers from the canton of Saarbrücken.[38]
In 1814 the first treaty of Paris had as its primary task to reëstablish the limits of France. As the basis of its work it took the frontier of January 1, 1792, as anterior to the revolutionary wars of conquest. In this region, this did not differ from the frontier of 1789. It was, however, recognized that the old frontier had become an impossibility in the region of Alsace-Lorraine, and required straightening and adjustment to adapt it to modern conditions. Accordingly enclaves were abandoned on either side. Toward the Rhine the new arrangement took away certain French dependencies in the neighborhood of Wissembourg and Landau, but left France those towns and added a connecting strip of territory extending east to the Rhine. In the region of the Saar France lost the outlying lands to the north and gained the valley of the river above Saarlouis, including Saarbrücken and the region round about. In area the adjustments roughly balanced, but in resources France had received an advantage because of the coal deposits thus retained. As a geographic frontier, the new line of 1814 was a great improvement, but it was never laid out on the spot or put into actual effect.
In the frontier imposed upon her in 1815 France paid the penalty for Napoleon’s Hundred Days of glory. Toward the Rhine Landau was taken, and her territory was cut back to the Lauter. In Lorraine she lost the whole middle and lower portion of the Saar valley, including not only the new acquisitions about Saarbrücken but the town of Saarlouis, which had been French since its foundation. In theory the frontier of 1815 was to reëstablish the France of 1789. In fact it left France smaller than in 1789. And what was taken was given, not to the former rulers, still less to the inhabitants, but to Prussia. Whatever may be said against the claims of France in this region, Prussia had no rights there of any sort. Her nearest Rhenish possessions in 1789 had been a hundred and fifty miles away. She was established on the Rhine, not because the people wanted her, but because she wanted territory—Saxony, if possible, if not, something else—and because the Allies wanted somebody to watch France.
So the reasons of the boundary line of 1815 are not far to seek. Landau and Saarlouis were fortresses of Vauban, defences of which it was thought prudent to deprive France, and this strategic argument has always been emphasized. We now know that the coal of the Saar was also a reason. This was openly stated by German historians before the war, and is supported by the correspondence of Heinrich Böcking, an agent of the German family of Stumm, still one of the great manufacturing firms of the region. Made commissioner of the mines in 1814, he followed the Prussian commissioners to Paris in the following year, and urged large annexations for Prussia at the expense of the Palatinate and France. In 1802 the French had opened a mining school at Geislautern, near Saarbrücken, and developed considerably the mines and industries of the region. Their careful surveys of the coal field were insistently demanded by the Prussians, and finally acquired in 1817. Some petitions from the inhabitants were received by the Prussians from Saarbrücken, but then there had been petitions in the opposite sense in 1797.
The loss of the frontier of 1814 to Prussia remained a sore point with France until it was swallowed up in the greater loss of 1871. When the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 revived the question of their former boundaries, it was natural to inquire what the intervening century had brought forth. In the region of Landau there has been little change. A town of 5000 in 1815, it had grown only to 18,000 in 1910. The surrounding region of farm and forest had likewise altered little. The Saar valley, on the other hand, had shared the industrial development of the most prosperous parts of the Rheinprovinz. Its coal mines, and those of the neighboring villages of the Palatinate, had come to produce eight per cent of the huge output of the German empire. About this supply of fuel had grown up numerous industrial establishments—pottery and glassware to some extent, but especially blast furnaces and great iron and steel plants at Dillingen, Völklingen, Burbach, and Neunkirchen, busy on tasks of war as well as on those of peace. Great names in the German iron and steel industry stand out as the proprietors—Böcking, Röchling, Mannesmann, Stumm. Saarbrücken, a town of perhaps 5000 in 1815, had a population of 105,000 in 1910. To the north and to the west the lines of industrial towns were almost unbroken. 355,000 people now lived between the Saar frontiers of 1814 and 1815; and as many more in the adjoining regions which depended on the valley’s coal and manufactures. The Prussian railroad system threw its network over the basin. Prussian legislation provided houses and schools and social insurance for the workmen. Save perhaps for the beautiful state forests which ran to the edge of the towns and the mines, the whole character of the country recalled the great industrial region of the lower Rhine. Over the border of the Palatinate matters moved a bit more slowly, after the Bavarian fashion. The towns were not quite so spick-and-span, the model dwellings were not so much in evidence, the local capital, Zweibrücken, preserved the flavor of a Residenzstadt of the old regime. But the flavor was German not French. In the western part of the valley French names could still be found, notably in Saarlouis, which kept much of the appearance of an old French town, with its hôtel de ville, its great public square, and along the river front the remains of its fortifications built by Vauban. And there were those who had not wholly forgotten that Saarlouis was the birthplace of Marshal Ney.
In France, at least, there were many who had not forgotten. The demand for the frontier of 1814 was noticeably greater than that for other parts of the Left Bank. It was partly historic, a desire to reclaim what had once been French and had played its part in the great deeds of French history. This was not confined to partisans of the old regime: Aulard, historian and upholder of the Revolution, urged the return of Saarlouis and Landau on the ground that they had sworn the great revolutionary covenant of 1790 and had been torn from France by violence in 1815, as were Alsace and Lorraine half a century later.[39] Popular interest would have been greater if the frontier of 1814 had been a real line separating peoples for a term of years, instead of a provision on paper. And the historic frontier of 1792, the actual boundary during the eighteenth century, had become impossible; no one asked for that. The best historic argument for the frontier of 1814 was that it had then been considered a just and practical equivalent for the line of 1792; in that sense it represented the peace of justice, while the line of 1815 was clearly the peace of violence.
Stronger than the historic argument was the economic: France, a country poor in coal, had been forcibly despoiled of the Saar mines in 1814; she needed them back; and her need was now much greater since the wanton and systematic destruction of her mines in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais by the Germans. The two arguments did not entirely coincide, so far as the Saar was concerned. The historic argument was strongest in respect to the district of Saarlouis, where there was little coal. Saarbrücken, the centre of the coal field, had been French only for a brief period, 1793-1815. Moreover, the frontier of 1814 did not cover the whole of the mining area, perhaps a third of which lay to the north toward Ottweiler and to the east in the Palatinate, and its reëstablishment would have disrupted the economic life of the region.
Many Frenchmen were genuinely opposed to any annexations of territory beyond the Alsace-Lorraine of 1871, as contrary to the principles on which the war had been fought. They had not, they said, been fighting for the Rhine or the Saar. This was the Socialist contention, and it was shared by many Republicans who were not Socialists. All, however, who looked facts in the face felt the need of the coal. “If we could only get the coal without the people,” said a distinguished Socialist early in the winter. “We must have the coal, and we must find some arrangement to get it without annexing the population,” a great historian said a little later.
The people were overwhelmingly German. A considerable directing element of capitalists, engineers, and officials had come from other parts of the empire, but the great majority were natives of the region. The mining population of 56,000 included surprisingly few foreigners or even Germans from a distance. Many had their cottages with a plot of ground about, going to and fro daily on workmen’s trains or returning home for the week-end. The ruling element was strongly Prussian, a part of the great administrative machine directed from Berlin. The regular local administration existed, but only as a part of the Rheinprovinz and of a Regierungsbezirk administered from Trier. The adjoining portions of the Palatinate were governed from Munich and Speier. The economic unity of the region had no corresponding political organization, as was admitted by German officials. The mass of the people were particularly interested in their labor organizations and in their rights under German labor legislation. If they had been consulted, they would doubtless have voted to remain with Germany. But it was at least debatable whether they had a right at the same time to vote to Germany the mines which she had taken in 1815 without consulting anybody. The control of key deposits of minerals by the small population which happens to live over them is not a necessary part of the principle of self-determination, particularly when this population forms part of a state which has been destroying the mines of others. The separation of mines from people may sometimes be governed by international considerations.
The coal field of the Saar is the northern outcrop of a considerable deposit which extends in a southwesterly direction across Lorraine to the Moselle in the neighborhood of Pont-à-Mousson. Toward the southwest, however, the strata dip so deep as to be unworkable. The practicable part of the field is in the Saar valley, partly on the edge of annexed Lorraine, chiefly in Rhenish Prussia, with a small strip in the adjoining part of the Palatinate. The total output in 1913 was seventeen and a half million tons, of which two-thirds was mined between the frontiers of 1814 and 1815. It was understood, however, that production had been artificially restricted in the interest of the Westphalian field, and the proportion of the actual coal reserve was much greater. Any estimates of reserves are necessarily approximate, but in 1913 it was calculated that the Saar field contained seventeen billion tons, equal to 22% of the total German reserve, and more than the whole known supply of France, a country relatively poor in coal. No wonder the French found it hard to forget the loss of 1815! Moreover, all the mines in operation lay within a dozen miles of the new French frontier in Lorraine.
France not only needed this coal, she had a strong claim to it. The chief French mines, those of Lens and Valenciennes on the Belgian border, had been in German hands for more than four years and had been deliberately flooded and rendered unworkable by the occupying armies. The period of restoration was variously estimated; it has since been fixed by German engineers at eight years at the least, and the total property loss has been estimated at eighty per cent. For this definite reparation in kind could be exacted in the Saar field. But that was not all. Germany had agreed to compensate for all damage done to the civilian population and their property, yet conservative estimates of the bill for general reparation in northern France far exceeded any available means of payment on Germany’s part, even when the payment was spread over a long series of years and thus reduced in actual restorative power. Proposals to take over German enterprises like railroads or factories were impracticable, not only because of the political difficulties of operating them on German territory but because this would interfere with Germany’s ability to earn her annual payments of indemnity. The Saar mines, on the contrary, lay on the outer edge of Germany; they were already linked with the industries of Lorraine, henceforth French; they were, with two exceptions (Frankenholz and Hostenbach), the property of the Prussian and Bavarian states. Always supposing that they were properly credited on the reparation account, no better means of payment could be found for a debt which Germany had agreed to pay.
Accordingly, it was agreed in principle, late in March 1919, that the full ownership of the coal mines of the Saar basin should pass to France, to be credited on her claims against Germany for reparation. With full and unencumbered property in the mines the treaty gave the fullest economic facilities for their exploitation, including the acquisition of all subsidiaries and dependencies, freedom of transportation and sale, exemption from other than local taxes, and full mobility of labor. The mines were placed within the French customs union, and payment in connection with their operation might be made in French money. The elementary justice of this transfer of the mines to France has become increasingly clear in the past few months. Out of the crumbling uncertainties of reparation for war damage, France secures one solid asset, and she secures it in a form absolutely essential for the revival of her wrecked industries. Those who have urged that she ought to have been satisfied with a coal contract instead, a claim for delivery rather than mines to be worked, have been refuted by the decreasing production of coal in Germany and the growing unwillingness of the Germans to make the deliveries of coal to which they obligated themselves in the treaty. A mine in hand is worth many contracts to deliver.
The transfer of the Saar mines and their appurtenances to the French state raised a difficult question of administration. If the German government retained the full power to fix the conditions of exploitation, transportation, and sale, and if German legislation was to be carried out by Prussian officials, the conditions of operation could easily be made impossible, and the ownership of the mines prove nugatory. On the other hand, if the government were handed over, either temporarily or permanently, to France, the inhabitants lost their political rights and were subjected to an alien rule. It was the old question, how to transfer the mines without subjecting the people.
The solution of this conflict of rights and interests was found in the international organization of the League of Nations. Germany agreed to hand over the government of the territory, but not the ultimate sovereignty, to the League of Nations as trustee, and the League is to administer it through an international Governing Commission. This commission consists of five members, one a native inhabitant of the Saar territory, one a Frenchman, the others representing other nations. Sitting in the territory, it has all powers of government hitherto belonging to the German empire, Prussia, and Bavaria, and full power to administer the local public services. It must maintain the existing system of courts and local officials, and must consult an elective assembly with respect to new taxes or legislation. Subject to its control, “the inhabitants will retain their local assemblies, their religious liberties, their schools, and their language.” They keep also their German nationality, their rights under German labor legislation, their pension rights and accrued pensions. They lose only their right to vote for representatives in the Reichstag and the Prussian and Bavarian diets; their participation in self-government is much greater than that of the inhabitants of the District of Columbia! They gain the advantages of a governing body resident in the territory and familiar with its special needs, in place of an administration from Berlin and Munich. They also gain exemption from military service and other than local taxes, and from contribution to the German war indemnities, besides favorable adjustments of customs duties.
This system will have a fifteen years’ trial, at the end of which the people are to be called on to vote, district by district, as to their future political status. The alternatives will be reunion with Germany, union with France, or continuance under the League of Nations with such modifications of the regime as may be necessary to adapt it to permanent use. Voting is open to all of the age of twenty who were resident in the territory at the date of the signature of the treaty of Versailles, and to these only, so that all temptation to colonize voters is thus removed, whether on the French or on the German side. The League of Nations shall take the necessary measures to put these votes into effect, making such decisions as may be necessary to adjust boundaries, etc. In any portion of the territory which votes to return to Germany, the German government shall buy back the mines, so as to remove any danger of friction over their operation. No such purchase is required in territory which may become French or remain under the League.[40]
The territory of the Saar basin thus created by the treaty of Versailles and governed by the International Commission covers 700 square miles with a population of 650,000—more than the population of Rhode Island, with two-thirds the area. Its boundaries were carefully drawn so that, while following as far as possible the lines of existing administrative divisions, they should include only the region economically dependent on the coal of the basin. It takes in the valley of the Saar from the point below Sarreguemines where its right bank ceases to be French territory to Saarhölzbach, where the narrows of the mountains close in and the workmen’s trains stop. To the north it covers only the area for which coal concessions have been granted and within which local industries live from the coal, the whole being belted by a connecting series of railroad lines. On the east it enters the Palatinate sufficiently to include the coal mines along the border and the railroad junction of Homburg which links up the railroads of the eastern part of the basin. The territory has an economic unity, ignored by its previous administrative organization, but recognized by those familiar with local conditions. Petitions to join the Saar basin have since been made to the League of Nations by inhabitants of Britten, Losheim, Wadern, and Weisskirchen, which adjoin the district on the north in Prussia.
Whether the lot of the Saar territory will appear enviable to other neighboring districts, it is still too soon to say. In spite of the misrepresentation of this chapter of the treaty by German and pro-German writers, an examination of its provisions shows that the rights and interests of the inhabitants have been carefully safeguarded under international guarantees. Indeed their position has so many advantages as compared with their neighbors in France and Germany that there were those at Paris who predicted that the plebiscite of 1935 would declare for the maintenance of an independent status under the League of Nations, free from outside responsibilities, both military and fiscal. Undoubtedly the issues will be economic as well as political, and much of the success of the new regime will depend on the economic and social policy of the Governing Commission. During the delays of ratification and organization the labor legislation of the district necessarily stood still at the point reached at the time of the Armistice, and a considerable task of readjustment and reconstruction falls on the new Commission, in a region inhabited by a concentrated mining and industrial population with a strong local organization of its own. It should be noted that, besides the general obligation to consult a local legislative assembly, it is provided that “in fixing the conditions and hours of labor for men, women, and children, the Governing Commission is to take into consideration the wishes expressed by the local labor organizations, as well as the principles adopted by the League of Nations,”[41] so that a progressive policy is clearly laid down. Moreover, by virtue of its geographical position, the labor of the Saar should be able to secure conditions at least as favorable as in adjoining regions, while, with a plebiscite in view, the French state administration of the mines will have every reason to maintain good relations with the mining population. At the same time neither France nor the Commission will have any reason for holding back the production of coal or the general industrial development of the district in favor of the mines and factories of Westphalia. In any event the people of the Saar will be in a position to decide for themselves, district by district, after actual experience of the new regime; nor are they likely to welcome the proposal of an ardent revisionist of the treaty of Versailles, who, while admitting that the arrangements respecting the Saar should stand for ten years, would take away from the inhabitants all opportunity of voting as to their future.[42] If government by the League of Nations is as “odious” as the German delegates declared at Versailles, then ten years of it is as indefensible in principle as fifteen. But if perchance the League’s Commission should prove less odious than its enemies anticipate, the fact will be worth recording for the sake of the League as well as of the people directly concerned.
The government of the Saar basin by a commission of the League of Nations is a very interesting experiment in international administration. Granted the prompt organization of a League such as the treaty contemplates, this experiment in commission government has a fair chance of success, and while the difficulty has been rendered greater by delay, it is not insoluble. By its success or failure in such matters the League will be in large measure judged in western Europe. There is reason to believe that its effectiveness depends likewise largely upon such permanent activities. Its Assembly will meet rarely, its Council not frequently, only its secretariat and its administrative organs will be constantly at work, and it is their action that will bring the League home to the peoples under its immediate control. Curiously enough, those who were most eager for the programme of an ambitious League were the first to criticise the creation of such commissions and their tasks. But if one of the chief objects of such an organization is to promote world peace, surely the Franco-German frontier is an important point for it to watch. And if the League can ease the strain here by acting as a sort of shock-absorber, protecting at the same time the property rights of France and the personal rights of the inhabitants, it will serve another interest no less important than peace, namely the cause of justice. If the League is not ready for this test, it is certainly not ready to become a super-state. The super-state can wait, but justice and peace are matters of today.
The Saar Commission, the Governing Commission for the occupied territory, the new Central Rhine Commission, all are manifestations of international interest in the Franco-German frontier, and efforts to relieve the strain in this area of high national tension. The demilitarization of the Left Bank and the river and the guarantee of France against unprovoked aggression from the east are likewise plainly in the interest of international peace. Even the most definitely national measure of all, the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, was called for, according to President Wilson, not only to right the wrong done by Prussia in 1871, but “in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.” The League of Nations in the valley of the Rhine is the symbol of a new order.