At first Germany had the advantage, if we mean by Germany that loose congeries of tribal duchies and later of feudal principalities which made up the mediaeval Empire. Thus the partition of Meersen (870), which you will seek in vain in the text of Freeman’s Geography or in Schrader’s Atlas historique, is often cited by German scholars as fixing a permanent line of demarcation to Germany’s advantage, and was even invoked by Brockdorff-Rantzau in May 1919 as the original basis of the German title to the Saar valley. Yet this same line would give to France Maestricht, Liège, and the mouths of the Rhine! After the disintegration of the Empire in the later Middle Ages, French advance began actively in the sixteenth century in the region of the Three Bishoprics. In the seventeenth century Louis XIV intrenched himself on the Saar at Saarlouis, and piece by piece gained possession of Alsace. The Revolution carried the tricolor down the Rhine from Landau to the Dutch border. Then came the treaty of Vienna, setting France back to the limits of 1789 and even farther, and the treaty of Frankfort by which France lost all contact with the Rhine. The victory of 1918 again put France on the Rhine. A German medal of 1917 represents an exhausted France driven to her death by England at Verdun, while on the obverse under the insignia of peace the German Rhine flows calmly on—“und ruhig fliesst der Rhein.” The French flag now floats not only over Verdun but over Metz and Strasburg as well. The Rhine still flows on but in its Alsatian portion it is no longer the German Rhine; it is “Deutschlands Grenze, nicht Deutschlands Strom.”
With France once more a Rhine power, the perspective requires certain readjustments. First of all, there is the question of navigation. Freedom of commerce on the Rhine was established in 1815 by the treaty of Vienna, but it has been exercised for the benefit of the states bordering on the river, who drew up in 1868 at Mannheim the convention which has since regulated navigation on the river. France was one of the signatories, but dropped out with the loss of her riparian status in 1871, when a representative was assigned to the Reichsland. Of the others,—Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, Holland, and Prussia—Holland and Prussia were the most important, but the small states were in a position to delay and hinder. The executive organ, the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, sat semiannually at Mannheim, but had little coercive power over members. Complaint was made of discrimination against the vessels of other states and against certain cities, notably Strasburg. Switzerland, obviously a Rhine power, asked in vain for admission. In spite of the enormous growth of trade on the Rhine, the whole system belonged to an earlier age, and its reform was required in the general interest as well as in the interest of France.
Besides the general provisions of the Paris treaty securing freedom of transit and travel across German territory and prohibiting discrimination against the nationals of the Allied and Associated Powers in German ports and German rivers, a special chapter deals with the Rhine and its tributaries.[32] Pending the making of a general convention relating to international waterways, the convention of Mannheim is modified by granting France representation equal to the total number of delegates of the German riparian states (four), as well as an additional member as President of the Commission, while to the two representatives of the Netherlands are added an equal number from Switzerland and from Belgium, whose interests in the Rhine are thus recognized, and from two outside powers of large commercial interests, Great Britain and Italy. At the same time the jurisdiction of the Commission is extended to cover the upper Rhine between Basel and Lake Constance, if Switzerland consents, the lower Moselle, and tributary canals and artificial channels. The headquarters of the Commission are transferred from Mannheim to Strasburg, which is evidently meant to play a large part in the future development of the river. In order that Strasburg may not suffer while its port and terminal facilities are being developed to correspond to the new needs, the opposite port of Kehl in Baden is combined for seven years into a single port with Strasburg, the whole under the supervision of the Central Rhine Commission.[33]
Another problem of the upper Rhine is that of its water power, a matter which had proved difficult to adjust between Baden and the Reichsland and was likely to make greater trouble between two sovereign and antagonistic states. Alsace had complained that the Grand Duchy opposed plans for the utilization of the Rhine, and France proposed to take no chances of future disagreement. So Germany agrees that, subject to the approval of the Central Commission, France may build dams and take water from the Rhine on the whole course of the river between the extreme points of the French frontier, acquiring for proper compensation the necessary supports and rights of way on the Right Bank, with the understanding that Germany has a right to the value of half the power thus produced. Germany binds herself not to derive canals from the Rhine opposite the French frontiers.[34] Henceforth the Rhine is to be harnessed to serve the needs of Alsace.
If participation in the affairs of the upper Rhine was incidental to the recovery of Alsace, the lower course of the river was quite another matter. Between the Rhine and the Franco-Belgian frontier lay a belt of German territory, varying in breadth from fifty to one hundred miles, with an area of about 10,000 square miles, and a population of five and a half millions. Of these, nearly a million were in the Bavarian Palatinate, 50,000 in the principality of Birkenfeld, about 400,000 in Hesse; the rest, the great majority, were in the Rheinprovinz of Prussia. Practically all of them spoke German. They had been under their existing governments for at least a century; they had been under some sort of German government far longer.
Down to 1789 this region was parcelled out among a great number of petty principalities, lay or ecclesiastical, from the considerable dominions of the archbishoprics of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, and the bishoprics of Speier and Worms, to the minute lay states of a few villages which can scarcely be distinguished on the map. A careful historian has counted ninety-seven such independent states on the Left Bank in 1789. Swept away by the Revolution, most of them were never restored. The chief exception was the Palatinate, which had passed about from one branch of the reigning family to another, and came back to Bavaria in 1815 as a well rounded territory under the house of Zweibrücken. The Congress of Vienna also handed over the valley of the Nahe to Hesse-Darmstadt, and gave the duke of Oldenburg a compensation of 25,000 souls to be furnished by Prussia, 20,000 of which were found on the Left Bank and formed into the principality of Birkenfeld.
The great gainer by the new arrangements was Prussia. Before the Revolution her only possessions on the Left Bank, namely Cleves, Mörs, and Prussian Guelders, were on the lower Rhine. At Vienna, as a compensation for the Saxony which was refused her, she was given the greater part of the Left Bank, her territory now reaching from the valley of the Saar to the Dutch border. For the first time Prussia and France were neighbors. However German these lands may have been, they had never been Prussian, and the bargain by which they were handed over to Prussia took no account of past history or the desires of the population. If the Paris Conference was to undo the historic wrongs perpetrated at Vienna, it could well begin here.
A wrong a hundred years old, however, is not easily undone, and its undoing may constitute an even greater wrong. Particularist at the outset, the Rhineland had been assimilated by Prussia and by the new German empire, partly through the agencies of government and administration, still more perhaps through its participation in the great economic development of modern Germany. It had become the seat of world industries: iron and steel mills, sugar refineries, textile manufactories, and chemical plants. It was served by an excellent railroad system, and by the shipping of the Rhine and its tributaries. Its rapidly growing cities lay on both banks of the river. It was in the closest connection with Westphalia, Prussia’s other great industrial province. Since 1815 the population of the Rheinprovinz had quadrupled, until it was one of the most densely peopled regions of Europe. Under Prussia it had prospered and waxed fat, and prosperity had reconciled differences. Then, if the Rhineland was to be taken from Prussia, to whom could it be given? No one wanted to return to the feudal lords, lay or spiritual, of the old regime and the simple life. Could the land go back to France?