The internal history of this half-century of German rule is a most interesting chapter, which we must pass over in order to gain time for an analysis of the question about which that history revolved. Taken as a whole, the period must be regarded as an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the rulers to assimilate by force an unwilling population. The German government had great resources on its side—compulsory education on the German model and in the German tongue, the repressive measures of the greatest army and the strongest administrative system in Europe, the influx of immigrants from beyond the Rhine, the development of communication with the other parts of the empire, an extraordinary material prosperity in which the Reichsland shared. Its policy alternated between harsh repression and clumsy efforts to win the people’s good will. There were periods when it seemed to be making headway, by the mere lapse of time and the apparent hopelessness of resistance, if by nothing else; the argument from prosperity had its effects; the protesting leaders turned toward more immediate measures of amelioration within the empire. Then an episode like the Zabern affair of 1913 would occur to show that the country was still governed by military force, and the pro-French feeling would blaze out again.
The relative strength of the French and German parties was a subject of acrimonious and inconclusive debate. The fact remained that there was a large French party, just how large nobody knew, which maintained a vigorous tradition of French speech and sympathies, by the fireside, among the clergy, in intercourse with France itself. Its existence was shown in the midst of the war by a project brought before the Reichstag for colonizing Alsace-Lorraine with ‘reliable’ subjects. The survival of this French party through fifty years of persecution is one of the finest public examples of the triumph of the inner over the outer life. A peasant who was waving an old French flag at Strasburg at the great reception to the French troops in November 1918 was asked how he had obtained it. “My father,” he said, “in 1871 put this under a plank of his barn, and every Sunday of his life he knelt over it in prayer for the return of Alsace to France. When he died, he handed on the charge to me to keep until that day should come.” The two elements in the population are well illustrated at Metz, where a German-speaking majority of soldiers, officials, and tradesmen came in, and a new quarter sprang up about the railroad station in the latest and heaviest style of neo-German architecture, but the old French town still remained, with its narrow streets, its mediaeval gates (especially that great eastern portal called the ‘German Gate’), its hôtel de ville, and its Gothic cathedral. And the three ages of Metz may be typified by this French cathedral of the thirteenth century, with the statue of William II as a prophet filling a niche in one of its portals, and the final inscription below this figure, attached by handcuffs after the armistice, “Sic transit gloria mundi!”
For more than half a century the problem of Alsace-Lorraine has been debated back and forth with arguments which have had no effect on the opposite sides of the controversy.
To Germans the Reichsland is a German country, save for the French-speaking strip along the western border. It was occupied by German tribes in the fifth century; its speech is German; it was a portion of the mediaeval Empire until violently torn away in the seventeenth century; in 1871 Germany was simply reclaiming her lost provinces. Furthermore, as stated in 1871, Metz and the Vosges were a necessary defence of the Fatherland against French aggression, which had been experienced under the two Napoleons and might be expected again. Finally, as stated now but not openly in 1871, the iron of Lorraine was absolutely necessary to the economic life of modern Germany. Germany held Alsace-Lorraine by right of nationality and by right of conquest, the symbol of her national unity achieved in the war by which it was recovered; it was a part of Germany, not an international question, and she would not give it up or discuss giving it up.
To the French Alsace and Lorraine had become and remained fundamentally French, having been assimilated gradually and without violence in the eighteenth century, French most of all by having entered fully into the spirit of the French Revolution and taken an active part therein. They begged to remain a part of France in 1871, as the unanimous protests of their representatives show, and they continued French at heart against the strongest pressure in the opposite direction. In spite of differences of language, such as exist in other parts of France, Alsace and Lorraine were French in social structure, in political ideals, and in the sympathies of the population. Without these lost provinces France was a mutilated country, not fully France. Furthermore, the possession of Metz and the Vosges by a military power like Germany constituted a standing menace to a peaceful country like the French Republic; it also menaced the economic life of France and its defence by making possible, as in 1914, immediate seizure of the richest part of its iron supply. France was robbed of these provinces by force in 1871, and the wrong had to be righted, not only in the interest of France but for the sake of the inhabitants.
There was a growing disposition to recognize that the problem of Alsace-Lorraine concerned not merely France and Germany and the inhabitants of the territory itself, but the world at large. The settlement of this question became of international moment partly as it affected the military and economic balance of power between France on the one hand and a Germany dangerous to international peace on the other; partly as a vindication of international right, violated by the forcible annexation of the two provinces in 1871 in defiance of the express protests of the population; partly in order to eliminate, in the interests of permanent international order, an issue which had “unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Whatever the solution, international interests had to be guarded.
Of the arguments which have been brought forward in support of the respective points of view, that of race is the least significant. It is true that most German writers have urged that the people of Alsace-Lorraine are of Germanic race, akin to the other peoples of the German empire; but this view lacks support from the anthropologist. Neither the tall, fair-haired Teuton nor the short, round-headed Alpine type dominates Alsace-Lorraine. The population is clearly mixed, with racial affinities reaching in both directions and resulting from the survival of an original Gallo-Roman substratum in the uplands along with a considerable infiltration of Teutonic invaders in the valleys. Whatever the exact percentage of the two races in Alsace-Lorraine, the fact has no demonstrable historical or political importance. Both Germany and France are, racially considered, strongly mixed peoples, all three races being well represented in France, and the non-Teutonic type in Germany being marked in the southwest and also in the Slavic regions of the east. To argue from race on either side proves either too much or too little—too much, if all people of Teutonic type (as in England, Scandinavia, and northern France) are claimed for the German empire; too little, if either Germany or France were to be limited to the regions where the Teutonic or the Alpine type respectively predominates.
The question of language is more difficult. It is the German view that Alsace and Lorraine (at least that larger part of Lorraine which speaks German), as German-speaking countries, ought to belong to Germany. The French point out that this theory breaks down in principle in the French-speaking districts of Lorraine; they emphasize the importance of the French-speaking minority in Alsace as a leading force and the strong pro-French feeling in a large part of the German-speaking population; and they deny that language is the proper test of political allegiance.
By a curious paradox, language is one of the most changeable and one of the most permanent facts in European history. It is changeable in that it can be quickly learned or unlearned, especially from one generation to another, as is convincingly illustrated by European immigrants to the United States. It is permanent in that the line of demarcation in the open country shows surprisingly little variation over a period of several centuries. Hence it is highly important to distinguish conditions in the towns and among the more conservative peasant population.