It will again require the guillotine, the firebrand and the methods of violence employed during the French revolution to convert Alsace-Lorraine into a French possession. France has decisively declined to submit the question of the annexation to a plebiscite. The beautiful dream about the “redemption of our lost sons” has proved a delusion; hundreds of thousands of citizens have been transported by France in order to blot out the appearance that there was discontent. Abbe Wetterlé, once a member of the German Reichstag, and one of the leaders of the pro-French movement, in his lectures, compiled in his book, “Ce qu était l’Alsace-Lorraine et ce quelle cera; l’edition Francaise illustrée,” Paris, 1915, said: “Soldiers who had participated in the battles of 1914 and had invaded Alsace-Lorraine, returned painfully disappointed. They reported, and their stories agreed in establishingthem as reliable, that the civil population of the annexed provinces had betrayed them in the most outrageous manner.”
General Rapp, a descendant of Napoleon’s famous marshal, whose family has been a resident of the province for 600 years, in a manifesto signed by him as a member of the “Executive Committee of the Republic of Alsace-Lorraine,” and addressed to Sir James Eric Drummond, general secretary of the League of Nations, says: “We, the representatives of the sovereign people of Alsace-Lorraine, protest in the name of our people against the systematic ruin of our homeland. The French government has usurped the sovereignty of Alsace-Lorraine. The sovereign people of Alsace-Lorraine was not consulted concerning the constitutional status of the future. We, representing our people, personifying its sovereignty, assume the right to speak for the interests of the people of Alsace-Lorraine before the League of Nations. We are standing today at the parting of the ways in our history. The hour has come when the people are asking, ‘Shall it be revolution or self-determination?’ Before that question is decided we appeal to the good sense of the world, which must know that until the Alsace-Lorraine question is solved beyond the limits of our country, two great nations will never know peace.”
This manifesto, dated Basel, August 25, 1919, informs the world that millions of francs were taken out of the treasury of the French government to finance the reception committee of President Poincare and Premier Clemenceau in every city in Alsace-Lorraine, and for the payment of agents to inflame manifestations of joy, finding vent in shouts of “Vive la France;” that wagonloads of decorations for the receptions, French flags, banners and torches and Alsatian costumes especially manufactured in Paris, were imported for the occasion.
The meager dispatches which reach the public in spite of the iron hand of suppression which is wielded in Alsace-Lorraine teem with accounts of anti-French demonstrations and the arrest and deportation of citizens. The police in October were reported exercising a hectic energy in searching houses in Strasburg; all business houses were directed to discharge their German employes, by order of Commissary General Millerand. Hundreds of persons were arrested in Rombach, Hagendingen and Diedenhoefen. The people were taken in automobiles to Metz, and after passing the night in the citadel, were deported over the bridge at Kehl the next day.
A dispatch of October 27, 1919, says: “Another trainload of wounded Frenchmen has arrived at the main station at Mayence. They are said to come from the Saar Valley and Alsace-Lorraine. It is reported of the revolt in the Saar that the men sang, ‘We will triumph over France and die for Germany.’ The band which played ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland Ueber Alles’ was subjected to a heavy fine, which was immediately paid by a leading industrial, in consequence of which the commandant was relieved of his office.”In Sulzbach, on the Saar, the French issued the following proclamation:
“‘Every person guilty of uttering shouts or grinning at a passing troop will be arrested and brought before a court martial for insulting the army. Every German official with cap or arm-emblem who refrains from saluting officers will be arrested and after an examination will be released. His name will be reported to general headquarters of the division.’”
In the new electoral orders, 30 per cent. of the population of Alsace-Lorraine is disfranchised. The voters are divided into three classes, consisting of persons of French birth or pure French extraction; second, of children born of mixed marriages. In this class those only have the franchise who are the sons of French fathers married to German mothers. The third class, consisting of voters having a German father and an Alsatian mother, are completely disfranchised.
France is proceeding in Alsace-Lorraine as the English did in Acadia. “The Nation” of September 6, 1919, indicates the measures in the following article:
Military measures for the punishment of troublesome French citizens of Alsace-Lorraine are quoted in the following extract from “L’Humanité” of July 16:
“Citizen Grumbach spoke on Sunday, before the National Council, of the order issued recently at Strasbourg by M. Millerand, a decree under which any citizen of Alsace-Lorraine who notably appeared to be an element of disorder would be immediately turned over to the military authorities.