All this changed with the armistice and the requirement of evacuation of the Reichsland by German troops and officials. The whole of Germany became suddenly enamored of the virtues of a plebiscite. President Wilson’s programme was invoked, on the alleged ground that the wrong done to France in 1871 lay simply in not calling for a popular vote, and the German government declared itself ready to right the wrong now by means of such a vote. The alternatives proposed for the voting were union with Germany, union with France, and an independent state free to form a customs union with either country. If Germany could not keep the Reichsland itself, she might perhaps thus keep its iron and its trade! To such proposals the French turned a deaf ear. Those who had opposed a plebiscite before the victory were not likely to support it now, and doubt disappeared before the reception which Strasburg gave the French troops and the President and Premier. “This is the best of plebiscites,” said President Poincaré in the midst of his tumultuous welcome by the Alsatians, and there were few to deny it. The Germans were genuinely surprised at the warmth of the popular enthusiasm, and began to ask themselves why after fifty years they had failed to get the sympathy of the people.
During the war the idea of a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine had been popular with certain sections of Allied and neutral opinion, both as a form of self-determination and as a means of settling finally and conclusively this ancient dispute. Such a decision would be democratic, and it would be final. Against it had been urged the grave practical difficulties which stood in the way of any free expression of the real opinion of the real inhabitants, particularly in view of the emigration of about half a million since 1871, the coming in of some hundreds of thousands from Germany, and the wholesale condemnations and deportations during the war. A popular vote under these conditions would have opened a wide field to bribery, intimidation, and influence of every sort, and would have engendered great bitterness and recrimination. A serious objection of principle was also raised on the part of the French, who felt they would thus be recognizing Germany’s legal right in the Reichsland. The will of the people, they said, had been expressed by the unanimous declarations of their elected representatives in the French Parliament in 1871 and in the German Reichstag in 1874, yet it had been openly flouted by Germany so long as she had any chance of retaining the Reichsland by other means. Germany could not be permitted to ignore a principle at one moment and to invoke it at another when it might possibly be manipulated in her favor, a system of “heads I win, tails you lose.” Such a proceeding was plainly unfair to France, and it also set a bad example of international morality by leaving Germany a chance to profit by her violation of international right in 1871. Under the guise of popular rights this would really sanction an international wrong. Some even maintained that, the treaty of Frankfort having been torn up by Germany in 1914, Alsace and Lorraine therewith reverted to France, ipso facto disannexed. To accept a plebiscite as the basis of restoration was to admit the lawfulness of the act of violence by which they had been seized.
These arguments were hard to answer save on the ground of a strongly expressed demand on the part of the people of Alsace-Lorraine, and, whatever their opinion, no such general demand was forthcoming. Certainly Germany’s record of oppression and failure as a ruler was sufficient to forfeit whatever claims she might justly have had upon the Reichsland, and she had formally accepted President Wilson’s demand that “the wrong done to France in 1871 should be righted.” That wrong consisted, not in failing to hold a plebiscite, but in contemptuously disregarding the unmistakable expressions of popular opinion then and thereafter expressed.
French Socialist opinion still wanted a plebiscite, but the purpose was plainly to satisfy a theoretical scruple, which required a popular vote for any change of sovereignty. For good or ill, Alsace-Lorraine came back to France without a popular consultation; it was administered by France in the interval between the armistice and the treaty of peace; and the treaty recognized French sovereignty as beginning with the armistice, November 11, 1918. The deed of Frankfort was thus undone. A plebiscite seemed impracticable, unless as a mere matter of form, and in that case it was unnecessary. There was something to be said for summoning a popular assembly for other purposes which might easily have expressed the opinion of the people, but this again would have been chiefly a matter of form, to forestall future objections.
So the fundamental provisions of the treaty which concern Alsace-Lorraine consist merely of a preamble by which the high contracting parties, Germany thus included, recognize “the moral obligation to redress the wrong done by Germany in 1871 both to the rights of France and to the wishes of the population of Alsace and Lorraine,” and the article[29] restoring to France the territories ceded by the treaty of Frankfort. The other articles[30] are, essentially, consequences and applications of this act of restoration. Some of them merely reproduce, in the opposite sense, clauses of the treaty of 1871. In general, however, the Paris articles are fuller and more complicated, partly because they had to be adapted, either by reference or by way of exception, to the other provisions of the instrument in which they are contained, partly because the restoration of territory after half a century necessarily raises questions not involved in the original cession.
Such a question was that of citizenship, which is regulated by an elaborate annex, adjusted to the complex conditions of citizenship and nationality which had arisen in the Reichsland. The general principle adopted is, broadly speaking, that French nationality is acquired ipso facto by those who had lost it in 1871 and by their descendants, except the offspring of a native mother and a German father who had come to the Reichsland subsequently to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war; that it may be claimed before the French authorities by all others save Germans and the descendants of Germans who have come in since 1870; and that such German immigrants and their descendants can acquire French citizenship only by the process of naturalization. The purpose of the whole was to admit on the basis of domicile before 1870, and to exclude, for the present, the Germans, with their descendants, who had come to the Reichsland in large numbers since the German conquest.
The economic provisions had to consider not only the status of such individual matters as debts and contracts, pensions and suits at law, but also the new relations created in the region as a whole. Thus France acquired the public property, including the railroads, without any payment, and no share of the German public debt or war indemnity was attached to the transferred territory—arrangements which offset in some measure the principal and interest of the five milliards of war indemnity imposed by Germany in 1871. German economic penetration is restricted not only by the liquidation of existing enterprises but by the right to prohibit new participation in public utilities, mines, quarries, and metallurgical establishments. Important temporary provisions guard against the effects of a sudden interruption of relations between the Left and Right Banks in such matters as ports, terminals, and water power, and in respect to customs tariffs, a period of five years being set during which free exportation is permitted into Germany and free importation of textile materials from Germany into Alsace and Lorraine. This last is particularly important, for the Reichsland enjoyed profitable markets in Germany, and its economic prosperity was constantly urged as an argument for remaining under German rule. Whether or not France can furnish equally good outlets for local manufactures, she must at least provide a reasonable period for readjustment of the lines of trade.
The largest economic question involved in the return of the lost provinces to France is not mentioned in the treaty, namely the enormous transfer of mineral resources. By securing the potash of Upper Alsace France halves the German supply and thus breaks the German monopoly of the world’s mineral potash; by joining the iron of Lorraine to the iron of Briey, Longwy, and Nancy, France obtains, save for the small share of Luxemburg, full control of the greatest iron field in Europe. The minette ore is no longer shared between France and Germany, it is monopolized by France. If France had Germany’s coal, she might try to establish an economic supremacy as great as that possessed by Germany at the outbreak of the war. Late in 1918 one began to hear suggestions for some sort of condominium in Lorraine, or for a guarantee of German participation in its mine and furnaces; but such proposals found no favor with the French government. No such arrangements had been made for the benefit of France in 1871, and she saw no reason for making them now. And if other great powers had pointed out the danger of so great a monopoly in the world, the French might have replied that they had little coal, less oil, and no copper. After all, the nub of the situation is that France needs coal and Germany needs iron, and sooner or later it will be necessary to exchange one for the other. The sooner this natural necessity is recognized in a modus vivendi, the better for all concerned. If the compelling forces of trade are not allowed to assert themselves with reasonable freedom, the matter may well cause grave international difficulty.
Nor did the conference concern itself with other internal matters which had been much discussed before the armistice. During the forty-seven years of separation, France and the Reichsland had necessarily diverged in many matters of institutions, legislation, and social conditions, so that several difficult problems of readjustment were presented. The law of the new German civil code of 1900, the German organization of local government, the German systems of taxation and social legislation were well established in Alsace-Lorraine, and could not immediately be rooted up, if indeed their abolition was always desirable. Perhaps the most striking point of divergence was to be found in the relations of church and state. The Reichsland had preserved the system of the Concordat of 1801 and analogous measures for the Protestant and Jewish religious bodies, so that the government maintained religion from public funds and exercised direct authority over the appointment of the clergy. In France the Separation Laws of 1905 and 1907 had carried through the complete separation of church and state, so that the state relinquished the nomination of the higher clergy and discontinued the payment of clerical salaries, at the same time taking over ecclesiastical property. France had also suppressed the teaching religious orders and put all education into lay hands in so-called ‘neutral schools.’ These measures were viewed with grave disapproval in Alsace-Lorraine, a deeply religious country where the great majority of the schools are under the control of religious bodies and much of the lower education is still in the hands of nuns. Serious difficulty would be encountered in extending the French system to Alsace-Lorraine, and in this, as in other fields, some measure of local independence is required, at least for the present.