[11] Articles 34-39, with official map.
[12] Articles 32, 33.
[13] Articles 40, 41.
[14] Article 361.
[15] Article 9, § 2.
III
ALSACE-LORRAINE
The fate of Alsace-Lorraine was, in general, a problem of the war rather than of the Peace Conference. Nothing had done more, in President Wilson’s phrase, “to unsettle the peace of the world for nearly fifty years”; nothing was more earnestly discussed throughout the World War; nothing was settled more simply and quickly once the war was over. The completeness of the Allied victory and the immediate evacuation of Alsace-Lorraine required by the terms of the armistice left no doubt of the return of the lost provinces to France. The Peace Conference had only to determine certain necessary details. “The territories which were ceded to Germany in accordance with the Preliminaries of Peace signed at Versailles on February 26, 1871, and the Treaty of Frankfort of May 10, 1871, are restored to French sovereignty as from the date of the Armistice of November 11, 1918.” So runs Article 51 of the treaty of Versailles, and the rest follows from that.
Nevertheless, no account of the territorial problems of the Peace Conference would be complete which did not treat the question of Alsace-Lorraine and its background, and treat it with sufficient fulness to give the proper perspective to this major issue of the war. Moreover, Alsace-Lorraine is the necessary basis for any consideration of the whole matter of the Franco-German frontier, with its specific issues of the Rhine, the Left Bank, and the Saar valley. Let us begin with a minimum of history and description, followed by a fuller analysis of the recent aspects of the problem.
Alsace-Lorraine (German Elsass-Lothringen) was an imperial territory (Reichsland) of the German empire formed in 1871 by the union of the two districts then taken from France. It had an area of 5600 square miles (Connecticut and Rhode Island 6000) and a population in 1910 of 1,874,000 (Connecticut and Rhode Island 1,657,000). On the east the Rhine separates it from the grand duchy of Baden; on the south it touches the Swiss frontier; on the north it was bounded by the Palatinate, Prussia, and the grand duchy of Luxemburg. The French frontier on the west was formed in the south by the summit of the Vosges and farther north by an artificial line of demarcation drawn in 1871.
Geographically considered, Alsace consists of the eastern slopes of the Vosges and the rich plain of the valley of the Rhine and its tributary the Ill, Lorraine of a plateau cut in the west by the Moselle. Alsace is a rich agricultural region, producing grain, potatoes, hay, tobacco, and wine; it has also important manufactures in its towns, cottons being a specialty of Mulhouse and other towns of Upper Alsace. Lorraine is less productive in agriculture but richer in mineral resources and the furnaces and iron mills which these support. Alsace has important oil wells at Pechelbronn, and one of the richest potash deposits in the world at Wittelsheim. Lorraine has important salt mines, and valuable coal fields lie on its border in the valley of the Saar; and on its western edge it shared with France the ‘minette’ iron field, the greatest iron deposit in Europe, from the German portion of which before the war came 74 per cent of all the iron mined in the German empire.