Article 44.
In case Germany violates in any manner whatever the provisions of Articles 42 and 43, she shall be regarded as committing a hostile act against the Powers signatory of the present Treaty and as calculated to disturb the peace of the world.
In order to insure immediate and full effect to these articles, the provisions respecting guarantees of the whole treaty involve the occupation of this very region. German territory west of the Rhine, together with the Rhine bridgeheads, is to be held for fifteen years by Allied and Associated troops. In case of faithful execution of the treaty, this region is to be evacuated by these troops in three successive zones at intervals of five years; in case of non-execution, the territory may be reoccupied and the period of occupation extended.[36] A further agreement, of even date with the treaty, provides for the administration of the occupied territory under a civilian Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission representing France, Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States, subject to whose authority the German local administration is maintained. Neither the military occupation nor the civilian Commission covers the demilitarized zone on the Right Bank, a gap between the two systems of administration which was to prove particularly serious in the region of the Ruhr, the principal source of the coal on which France and other Allies had an option under other clauses of the treaty, a district liable to serious industrial disturbances for the suppression of which the German government would demand the right to use troops.
Finally, as a more positive and direct guarantee of the country which had borne the brunt of Germany’s aggression, Great Britain and the United States agreed to come to the aid of France in case of an unprovoked attack by Germany.[37] Designed to offer adequate assurance during the transitional period while the League of Nations was getting under way, this supplementary treaty recognized not only the peculiar dangers of France, exposed directly to the full force of a German offensive, but also the general interest in her full security and protection. To the French this was an essential part of the peace settlement, and without it they would have insisted on more direct and more material guarantees of their own.
Another matter affecting the Left Bank came into prominence at the conference, namely the valley of the Saar. From one point of view this was a phase of the question of Alsace-Lorraine, for a portion of the Saar basin had once been a part of Lorraine and the recovery of the lost provinces revived the question of their historic boundaries. It was also part of the problem of the Left Bank, for the territory belonged to Prussia and Bavaria and was inhabited by a population of predominantly German affinities, and any annexation here was subject to the same objections as elsewhere on German soil. Lastly, the coal mines of the valley raised a more special question, for they adjoined immediately the new boundary of France, and thus offered an easy source of reparation for the destruction and devastation of French territory.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution neither Alsace nor Lorraine possessed a clearly defined frontier toward the north. In each case the boundary had arisen historically, without any large measures of readjustment or delimitation, in a region of minute subdivisions and overlapping claims; and the result was a tortuous, broken line, with enclaves on either side, which defied geographical and administrative convenience. At certain points the limits of sovereignty were in dispute, and the boundary cannot everywhere be defined with certainty. In Alsace, beyond the present limit of the river Lauter, lay the enclave of Landau, an old Alsatian city which had passed to France in 1648, while the intervening territory obeyed the bishop of Speier, the duke of Zweibrücken, or the Elector Palatine. To the north of Lorraine Louis XIV had established French influence on the Saar and constructed his new town of Saarlouis, as an outpost to insure the military control of the valley. The acquisition in the eighteenth century of the duchy of Lorraine, already traversed and cut up by pieces of French territory, carried the French frontier well to the north and east of Saarlouis, while at the same time it left the German county of Saarbrücken astride the Saar on either side of the town of the same name. A glance at the map will show the impossible character of the resulting frontier, which had not been greatly improved when the armies of the Revolution poured over it and added the whole region to France. That its incorporation was not a simple act of violence appears from various petitions of 1797 asking for the privileges of French citizenship, among them a long list of signers from the canton of Saarbrücken.[38]
In 1814 the first treaty of Paris had as its primary task to reëstablish the limits of France. As the basis of its work it took the frontier of January 1, 1792, as anterior to the revolutionary wars of conquest. In this region, this did not differ from the frontier of 1789. It was, however, recognized that the old frontier had become an impossibility in the region of Alsace-Lorraine, and required straightening and adjustment to adapt it to modern conditions. Accordingly enclaves were abandoned on either side. Toward the Rhine the new arrangement took away certain French dependencies in the neighborhood of Wissembourg and Landau, but left France those towns and added a connecting strip of territory extending east to the Rhine. In the region of the Saar France lost the outlying lands to the north and gained the valley of the river above Saarlouis, including Saarbrücken and the region round about. In area the adjustments roughly balanced, but in resources France had received an advantage because of the coal deposits thus retained. As a geographic frontier, the new line of 1814 was a great improvement, but it was never laid out on the spot or put into actual effect.
In the frontier imposed upon her in 1815 France paid the penalty for Napoleon’s Hundred Days of glory. Toward the Rhine Landau was taken, and her territory was cut back to the Lauter. In Lorraine she lost the whole middle and lower portion of the Saar valley, including not only the new acquisitions about Saarbrücken but the town of Saarlouis, which had been French since its foundation. In theory the frontier of 1815 was to reëstablish the France of 1789. In fact it left France smaller than in 1789. And what was taken was given, not to the former rulers, still less to the inhabitants, but to Prussia. Whatever may be said against the claims of France in this region, Prussia had no rights there of any sort. Her nearest Rhenish possessions in 1789 had been a hundred and fifty miles away. She was established on the Rhine, not because the people wanted her, but because she wanted territory—Saxony, if possible, if not, something else—and because the Allies wanted somebody to watch France.
So the reasons of the boundary line of 1815 are not far to seek. Landau and Saarlouis were fortresses of Vauban, defences of which it was thought prudent to deprive France, and this strategic argument has always been emphasized. We now know that the coal of the Saar was also a reason. This was openly stated by German historians before the war, and is supported by the correspondence of Heinrich Böcking, an agent of the German family of Stumm, still one of the great manufacturing firms of the region. Made commissioner of the mines in 1814, he followed the Prussian commissioners to Paris in the following year, and urged large annexations for Prussia at the expense of the Palatinate and France. In 1802 the French had opened a mining school at Geislautern, near Saarbrücken, and developed considerably the mines and industries of the region. Their careful surveys of the coal field were insistently demanded by the Prussians, and finally acquired in 1817. Some petitions from the inhabitants were received by the Prussians from Saarbrücken, but then there had been petitions in the opposite sense in 1797.