Moreover, it is important to note that the present German empire is not a continuation of the mediaeval Empire or a successor thereto. The old Empire came to an end in 1806, when Francis I laid aside the imperial crown and assumed the title of emperor of Austria. The modern German empire was created by Prussia in 1871 as a federation of German states from which Austria was carefully excluded. If the mediaeval Emperors had a legitimate successor, it was the Hapsburgs, not the Hohenzollerns, who were in the days of the older Empire merely one of many lines of feudal and electoral princes. The Hapsburgs made over to France their claims to Alsace and Lorraine, to Alsace and Metz in 1648, to the duchy of Lorraine in 1738.

On the other hand the cultural ties between Germany and Alsace, and in some measure between Germany and Lorraine, were stronger than the political. Alsace had its share in the literary and artistic development of the Rhine valley, and this, while affected by the French influences which spread eastward in the later Middle Ages, was preponderantly German. In the matter of speech French historians admit that “Alsace at the beginning of the seventeenth century was an absolutely German country,” and its local dialect was the vehicle of its vigorous local traditions. “At the moment when it passed under French rule it belonged to Germany in language, habits, institutions, and feeling.”[17]

The French government from 1648 to 1789 was tender to the traditions of the conquered territory. Except for the prescription of French in the courts, no restrictions were put on the use of the German language, although French naturally made rapid progress in the towns. There was little change in local institutions. In spite of its centralized monarchy, France itself abounded in local customs, privileges, and jurisdictions, and it was natural and prudent to allow even greater toleration in a newly conquered territory. Subject to the Sovereign Council and the intendant, local affairs went on very much in their old way and in large measure in the German tongue. Much was accomplished for the material wellbeing of the country, and the inhabitants came to recognize certain advantages in French rule. The old regime was a period of gradual assimilation without violence.

The institutions which the old regime tolerated in Alsace, the Revolution swept away. German historians naturally emphasize the excesses and violence of the Revolution, French historians its social and political reforms; but there is general agreement that it took long and rapid strides in the direction of making the country French. “It made an end of all the German mediaeval institutions which remained,” is the sad summary of Meyer’s Handlexikon.[18] The Revolution destroyed privilege, abolished seigniorial rights and jurisdictions, and established a democratic social order as fully in Alsace and Lorraine as in the rest of France. There was of course opposition, and the anti-religious policy of the Revolution was steadily resisted by this strongly Catholic population, but in general Alsace and Lorraine moved with the new movement. The Marseillaise was first sung at Strasburg; Alsatians served in great numbers in the armies which carried the principles of 1789 across Europe; and names like Kléber and Ney illustrate the share of these provinces in the wars of the Napoleonic era. The acceptance of the Revolution in Alsace and Lorraine made them at last one with France. “It is the Revolution, not Louis XIV, which made Alsace French,” wrote Fustel de Coulanges in 1870. “Since that moment Alsace has followed all our destinies, it has lived our life. It has shared all our thoughts and feelings, our victories and defeats, our glory and our defects, all our joys and all our sorrows.”[19] By 1813, confess the German historians of Alsace, “all feeling for Germany had been lost,” and “no trace remained of the ancient community of race between the Alsatians and their German brothers.”[20]

This participation in the life and ideals of France continued until 1871. There was, it is true, a considerable feeling of particularism in Alsace, and to a lesser extent in Lorraine, as well as some natural sympathy between the Protestant minority in Alsace and the Protestants beyond the Rhine; but there was no movement for separation from France and no desire manifested therefor. Toward 1870 the desire for the recovery of these ‘lost provinces’ became more pronounced in Germany, and it was fanned into flame as the war of 1870 progressed; but this nationalistic movement found little or no response among the Alsatians whom it claimed as long-lost kinsmen. If they were still German “socially and ethically,” “politically and nationally they were thoroughly French.” They were Germans as members of the family, Frenchmen as members of the nation.[21] The Germans freely admitted in 1871 that the Alsatians did not yet desire reunion with Germany, but this was laid to their French education, and time and experience of the blessings of German rule were expected to work a rapid change in their desires. The state of opinion in Alsace at the time of the Franco-Prussian war is excellently shown by an outside observer, Sir Robert Morier, then British secretary of legation at Darmstadt, whence he had opportunity to follow closely the events of the war and the course of German opinion. Strongly pro-German and anti-French throughout, he made it his business to inquire from the best German sources whether there was any party in Alsace which desired annexation to Germany, and the answer was uniformly in the negative. Among others he interrogated the Grand Duke of Baden, who had led an army in Alsace, and “had given himself the greatest trouble to ascertain the feeling of the population in regard to Germany and ... had come to the conclusion that not only no annexationist party existed, but that the strongest possible national French feeling pervaded the whole population.”[22]

The usual German justification of the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine may be summed up in the words of the historian Ranke in 1870, “We are fighting Louis XIV.” These provinces had been taken from Germany in the seventeenth century; they must now be taken back by their rightful owner. To many people this is still the essence of the problem of Alsace-Lorraine. Now if the world had not moved in the interval between Louis XIV and 1871, there would be little to say in answer to this argument. In the seventeenth century lands and peoples were passed from one sovereign to another like pieces on a chessboard, and what had been lost in one game might well be retaken in the next. But as regards this question the world had changed in three important respects:—

  1. Germany had changed. The Germany which lost these provinces to Louis XIV was, as we have seen, a jumble of small states, loosely united under the ineffective headship of the Hapsburgs. The Germany which reclaimed them was a Hohenzollern empire from which much of the old empire, including the Hapsburgs, had been separated or excluded.
  2. Alsace and Lorraine had changed. They had lost their German institutions and political sympathies and had become in all political respects French as the result of two centuries of membership in the French state, and especially of their share in the French Revolution.
  3. European public opinion had changed through the growth of nationality, and was coming to regard peoples as entitled to determine their own destiny, or at least to be consulted regarding it. To tear away people from the country of which they formed a part in order to unite them with a state to which they had belonged two centuries before was becoming an anachronism.

It is quite true, then, that Germany in 1871 was fighting Louis XIV, but in the spirit of Louis XIV rather than that of the later nineteenth century. Its appeal to history was in reality a denial of the facts of historic change, in that it asserted the predominance of the older historic tradition against the newer and more vital historic tradition created during the union of Alsace and Lorraine with France. Only a clear pronouncement of the inhabitants themselves in favor of such a transfer could justify it to the thinking of a later age. Yet a popular vote was neither permitted nor desired by Germany in 1871 or at any time between 1871 and 1918.

In all such discussions of the affinities of Alsace and Lorraine, the outsider is struck with the failure of French and German to meet each other’s arguments. The truth seems to be that the disputants move in different realms of thought and feeling. To the Germans the German character of Alsace is accepted as self-evident, so that any connection with France appears unnatural and contrary to all national life. To the French the community of political and social ideas gained by long union with France seems the determining element, and subjection to Germany seems something monstrous.

In spite of all that has been written about the supposed affinities and desires of the population of Alsace-Lorraine, it must not be forgotten that the national interests of Germany and France are vitally concerned in its possession, not merely in the general sense of the desire to keep or to recover something which has been fought over as a matter of national honor, but in the very definite respects of military advantage and economic power. And there have been times when these considerations were put nakedly in the foreground as the dominant motives. Thus Emperor William I wrote to Empress Eugénie October 26, 1870: “The required cessions of territory have no other purpose than to set back the point of departure of the French armies which will come to attack us in the future.”[23] German blood, said Bismarck, “was shed not for the sake of Alsace-Lorraine, but for the German empire, its unity, and the protection of its frontiers.”[24] Stern treatment of its people he defended on the ground that it was the glacis of a fortress, to be used for the benefit of the Fatherland behind it, irrespective of the desires of the conquered.[25]