[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 It is true, they sadly admit, that the upper third of the valley has been in course of time almost wholly withdrawn from Germany to fall under Swiss domination, but this still remains, in culture if not in politics, almost purely Germanic, like the lower Rhine in Holland.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.