"FRANCE renounces, in favor of the German Empire, all rights and tides to the territories situated east of the frontier designated below.
"The German Empire shall possess these territories forever, in full sovereignty and ownership."
Such was Article I of the peace preliminaries, confirmed by the Treaty of Frankfort of May 10, 1871, which dosed the Franco-German war, a treaty which the French Government was compelled to sign and the French Assembly to ratify under compulsion as peremptory as any nation has experienced in modem times. That treaty terminated a war which Bismarck, in his autobiography, claims the honor of having caused, a treaty which he handed as a brilliant and substantial trophy to the new German Empire, proclaimed in the great Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles on January 18, 1871, an empire therefore less than four months old. This memorable birthday gift was destined to exert a decisive and enduring influence upon the character of the young recipient and to prove a heavy heritage for modem Europe. It was to set an indelible mark upon all subsequent history, covering the face of the earth with its menace, exacting a continuous and increasing tribute of costly sacrifice from mil-lions and millions of human beings who have paid it in fear and trembling.
There were at the time Frenchmen of hi a h standing in the realm of thought and action who urged the Assembly never to sign this fateful document; Gambetta, soul of the national defense, flaming, dynamic embodiment of the resolution of a people at bay, who had accomplished prodigies during the war, but not quite prodigies enough, and who demanded war to the bitter end, believing that that end would be less bitter than the alternative now offered; Louis Blanc who appealed, in vain, for a people's war, for a repetition of the epic of 1793 when the nation rose en masse and threw back the invader, a kind of war which the German General Staff feared above everything, as it later admitted; Edgar Quinet who called the attention of the Assembly to the new frontier as both illogical and dangerous, a veritable dagger pointed at the heart of France; and who correctly prophesied the future, war always latent, immanent in the nature of things, ruinous armaments heavier in the long run than any present efforts would be; and who pointed out the shameful dishonor in this buying of peace by the cession of three departments, the abandonment of a part of the nation that the rest might be free.
But these were not the voices heard above the tumult of the times. The Assembly of Bordeaux took counsel of an imperative situation. The unparalleled and comprehensive disasters of the war left it no alternative, if it would avoid the complete annihilation of the independence of the country. Swift submission to the demands of an enemy everywhere triumphant seemed to the great majority the only method of keeping open the door of the future for the stricken country. Otherwise short shrift would be made of the victim now in the hands of a state it was powerless to repel, and the future con-dition of the nation would be worse than the present. Mutilation was preferable to extinction. Believing the dilemma inexorable, and holding that discretion was the truer wisdom, as well as the greater heroism, the Assembly, with a heavy heart, ratified the treaty by a vote of 433 to 98.
Thus were ceded to Germany all of Alsace, save Belfort, and a considerable put of Lorraine, in all 1,694 villages, towns and cities, 1,597,538 human beings, 5,600 square miles of territory, a region nearly as large as Connecticut and Rhode Island. The boundary had been traced months before which was now substantially followed. As early as September, 1870, before the bombardment of Strasburg, before the capitulation of Metz, a map had been published in Berlin which had been prepared by the geographical and statistical division of the General Staff. It was the famous map "with the green border." With slight modification, the green border stood on the maps appended to the Treaty of Frankfort practically as in this initial sketch. During the negotiations of the final terms of peace, the French had pressed intensely for a better boundary; but their efforts had been in vain. Concessions are made to the strong, not to the weak.
Such was the famous transaction—the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. The result of a war, incorporated in a treaty bearing a definite date and containing an explicit definition of the thing transferred, it was a fait accompli. Thus was projected into European politics a most vexatious problem, the question of Alsace-Lorraine, a question the very existence of which, however, official and popular Germany has steadily denied. Planting herself firmly upon Article 1 of the Treaty of Frankfort, Germany has stood immovable, and as if impregnable. For her there was henceforth "nothing to discuss" concerning these territories, now cut oflf from France. For her "the question of Alsace-Lorraine does not exist.'' In 1892, the Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro^ had the futile idea of questioning a number of important Germans about this matter. Here is the reply of the President of the Reichstag, Herr von Levetzow. "In your letter of the 24th of last January, you were so kind as to honor me with a series of inquiries concerning the possibility of a peaceful solution of the 'question of Alsace-Lorraine.'
"All these inquiries are answered by the provision of the first article of the peace preliminaries, confirmed by the treaty of May 10, 1871, between France and the German Empire and according to which the regions designated as the territory of Alsace-Lorraine are ceded forever, in complete sovereignty and possession, to the German Empire.
"In referring to this clause of the treaty, I have the honor to beg you to accept the expression of my high esteem."
On August 16,1888, in inaugurating a monument in honor of Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, the Emperor, William II, who had just ascended the throne, spoke as follows:
"There are those who have shamelessly asserted that my father wished to give back what he and Prince Frederick Charles had together conquered with the sword. We have all known him too well to keep silent for a moment in the face of this insult to his name. He thought, as we think, that none of the conquests of that great period can be abandoned. I believe that we all know that there is only one opinion on that subject, and that we would leave our eighteen army corps dead upon the field of battle rather than yield a single stone of what was won by my father and Prince Frederick Charles."
Between that day and this, there has been with Emperor and with people no variableness, neither shadow of turning, upon this subject. Their attitude has been one of resolute determination, of rigid, uncompromising finality.
Yet it does not take two to raise a question, one will suffice. Despite the studied silence of the victors, tempered now and then with a curt and crushing reference to the Treaty of Frankfort, there is a question of Alsace-Lorraine, and there has been one since May 10, 1871. This question has dominated the policy of every nation of Europe, including very particularly the one for which it "does not exist." Its shadow has covered the world. Repeatedly this unwelcome ghost has appeared while the feast has been proceeding, and has frozen the hearts of the revellers with its terrible, mute protest, its demand for expiation.
If, from the German point of view, this question does not exist, why has it been so ardently discussed by those who constantly deny; why, in the lengthy and lengthening bibliography of the subject are there so many German titles? The question was not settled in 1871, it was merely raised. And there are reasons to believe that it will not be settled until it is settled right. The present age ought not to have to be told the elementary truth that nothing is stable which is unjust. If in doubt, it might reflect upon the present status of the question of Poland, supposed to have been "settled" in 1772, 1793 and 1795.
If a treaty gives inalienable and infrangible rights how does it happen that those which France could dte in support of her claims to Alsace and Lorraine, treaties running over two centuries and a half, could be so lightly disregarded? Why should a single treaty alone be definitive? If we refer only to the principal ones we have the following list:
Peace of Cateau-Cambresis, 1559.
Peace of Westphalia, 1648.
Peace of the Pyrenees, 1659.
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1668.
Peace of Nimwegen, 1678.
Peace of Ryswick, 1697.
Peace of Utrecht, 1713.
Treaty of Vienna, 1738.
Treaties of Basel, 1795.
Peace of Luneville, 1801.
Treaties of 1814 and 1815.
Do treaties differ from one another in validity? Is one at liberty to be eclectic in this field and to pick and choose according to one's taste? Even so, one should be reasonably prudent and circumspect and studiously refrain from tearing up one's own title deeds. A war between two nations abrogates all treaties between those two. By declaring war on France in August, 1914, Germany annihilated the Treaty of Frankfort and shattered that boasted support. At least since then there has been, by action of the beneficiary herself, a question of Alsace-Lorraine.
But there has been such a question since 1871. The Armed Peace of 1871-1914 and the World War since 1914, are indubitable proofs of its existence, its virility and its implacability. It has been kept open all these years because it is more than a local question; because it epitomizes in dear and definite fashion the most absorbing preoccupation of the modem world, the aspiration for liberty, for the recognition and establishment of popular rights. The cause of Alsace-Lorraine is the cause of humanity.
The Treaty of Frankfort is a turning point in modem history. Its specific provisions, its underlying doctrine, its import and significance, have had incalculable and most unhappy consequences. That treaty was a sharp and peremptory denial of the modem democratic principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that a people is entitled to be the captain of its own destinies. It was a blunt assertion of the absolute right of physical force in the world, of the good old principle that those shall take who have the power and those shall keep who can.
Against this act, and its primitive philosophy, the people most directly concerned issued a flaming and impotent protest. It was by action of the victims themselves that the question of Alsace-Lorraine was first raised, and with such poignant emphasis that it has ever since haunted the conscience of the world.
The Germans asserted that the incident was closed as soon as the Treaty of Frankfort was signed and ratified. The people of Alsace-Lorraine, on the other handy asserted that that very act created a question, that it ended nothing, that it enthroned wrong in triumph in the world and was therefore a negation of the moral law, that no wrong can create a right. By the sharpness of the challenge, by the passionate, though unavailing, denudation of the deed, the people of Alsace-Lorraine defined the issue as one of supreme international morality. They thus rendered a service to humanity in the age-long struggle for justice similar to that rendered in 1914 by the Belgians in their magnificent loyalty to the cause of right.
Even before the official beginnings of the negotiations for the peace between France and Germany, and on February 17, 1871, the deputies in the National Assembly from the menaced departments declared solemnly in the Assembly "The immutable will of Alsace and Lorraine to remain French territory," asserted that France could not agree to or sign the cession of Alsace and Lorraine, that the French people did not have the right to accept such a mutilation, that France might "experience the blows of force, but could not sanction its decrees," that Europe could "neither permit nor ratify the abandonment of Alsace and Lorraine," that it could not allow "the seizure of a people as a common herd'' nor permit a peace which would be "a legitimate and permanent provocation to war." The conclusion of this protest was as follows: "Wherefore we call our fellow-citizens of France and the governments and peoples of the entire world to witness in advance that we hold to be null and void every act and treaty, vote or plebiscite, which would consent to the abandonment, in favor of the foreigner, of all or of any part of our provinces of Alsace and Lorraine."
Two weeks later, on March i, 1871, immediately after the ratification of the preliminaries of peace by the National Assembly, the representatives of the sacrificed provinces again solemnly protested against outraged right This famous protest, whose passion and whose pathos have since moved all right-thinking men for two generations and ought to arrest and fix the attention of the world to-day, should be read in full.
''The representatives of Alsace and Lorraine submitted to the Assembly, before peace negotiations were begun, a declaration affirming in the most formal way, in the name of the two provinces, their will and their right to remain French.
"Handed over, in contempt of all existice and by an odious abuse of force, to the domination of foreigners, we now have a final duty to perform.
''We declare once more null and void a compact which disposes of us without our consent.
"Henceforth and forever each and every one of us will be completely justified in demanding our rights in whatever way and manner our consciences may approve.
"At the moment of leaving the chamber where our dignity no longer permits us to sit, and in spite of the bitterness of our grief, the supreme thought which we find at the bottom of our hearts is a thought of gratitude to those who, for six months, have not ceased to fight in our defense, and our unalterable attachment to France from which we are torn by violence.
"We shall follow you with our wishes and we shall await with entire confidence in the future, the resumption by a regenerated France of the course of her great destiny.
"Your brothers of Alsace and Lorraine, now cut off from the common family, will preserve for France, absent from their hearths, a filial affection until the day when she shall resume her rightful place there once more."
Three years later, on February 18, 1874, Alsace-Lorraine registered another protest, this time in the very capital of the victor, in Berlin. For three years Germany had ruled with an iron hand this country which she pretended to have "liberated," this home of her long-lost "brothers." Scores of thousands of Alsatians and Lorrainers had left their native land and scores of thousands of Germans had entered it. Yet in the very first elections to the Reichstag after the war, Alsace and Lorraine, entitled to fifteen members in the Reichstag, elected fifteen men whose first act after they reached Berlin was to protest formally before the Reichstag against the change of nationality forced upon them by the conqueror.
This protest was preceded by a proposition, to wit: "May it please the Reichstag to decide:
"That the people of Alsace-Lorraine, incorporated without their consent in the German Empire by the Treaty of Frankfort, be called upon to pronounce themselves upon this incorporation."
The protest itself was in the following words: "The people of Alsace-Lorraine, whom we represent in the Reichstag, have entrusted us with a special and very weighty mission, which we wish to discharge at once. They have charged us with expressing to you their thought in regard to the change of nationality which has been violently imposed upon them as a result of your war with France.
"Your last war, which ended to the advantage of your nation, gave it incontestably the right to reparation. But Germany has exceeded her right as a civilized nation in forcing conquered France to sacrifice a million and a half of her children.
"If, in times remote and comparatively barbarous, the right of conquest has sometimes been transformed into effective right; if, even to-day, it is pardoned when exercised on ignorant and savage peoples, nothing of this sort can be applied to Alsace-Lorraine. It is at the end of the nineteenth century, of a century of light and progress, that Germany conquers us, and the people whom she has reduced to slavery—for annexation without our consent is for us a veritable moral slavery—this people is one of the best of Europe, perhaps the people which is most devoted to the sentiment of right and justice.
"Do you argue that the treaty ceding to you our territory and its inhabitants was concluded regularly and in due form? But reason, no less than the most ordinary principles of right, declares that such a treaty cannot be valid. Citizens, possessed of souls and of intelligence, are not merchandise to be traded and therefore it is not lawful to make them the subject of a contract Moreover, even admitting— what we do not admit—that France had the right to cede us, the compact which you cite against us possesses no validity. A contract is only valid when it represents the free will of the contracting parties. Now it was only when the knife was at her throat, that France, bleeding and exhausted, signed the treaty abandoning us. She was not free, she yielded only to force, and our codes of law inform us that violence nullifies any agreements tainted by it.
"To give an appearance of legality to the cession of Alsace-Lorraine, the least that you ought to have done would have been to submit that cession to the ratification of the people ceded.
"A celebrated jurist, Professor Bluntschli of Heidelberg, in his International Law (p. 285) says; 'In order that a cession of land be valid, the recognition by the people inhabiting the land ceded and in the possession of political rights is necessary. This recognition can never be omitted or suppressed, because peoples are not things without rights or wills of their own, whose property may be disposed of by others."
"You see, Gentlemen, that we find nothing in the teachings of morality and justice, absolutely nothing, which can pardon our annexation to your empire; and in this our reasons are in harmony with our sentiments. Our hearts, are in fact, irresistibly attracted toward our French fatherland. Two centuries of life and of thought together create, between the members of the same family, a sacred bond which no argument and much less any act of violence can destroy.
"By choosing us, feeling as we all do, our electors have above everything else desired to affirm their sympathy for their French fatherland and their right to dispose of themselves."
Such was the unanimous protest of the fifteen delegates of Alsace-Lorraine to the first Reichstag in which they sat. It was not even listened to with the respect due the vanquished. Laughter, guffaws, and interruptions, which almost prevented the spokesman from being heard, revealed the amount of magnanimity possessed by the members of the Reichstag. Men who do not honor others do not honor themselves. The next day the Frankfurter Zeitung protested against the disgraceful tumult, the ironical laughter that had accompanied the reading of the protest.
In July, 1917, a Socialist deputy of the Reichstag is reported to have said: "In the eyes of all Socialists what occurred in 1871 was nothing else than the return of these fundamentally German provinces into the bosom of the great German family. During the entire course of the war, that party to which I belong has considered as a self-evident principle that the total or the partial cession of Alsace-Lorraine was not at all open to discussion. For every German Socialist, the question of Alsace-Lorraine was definitely settled in 1871."
But in 1871 the leaders of the Socialist party, Bebel and Liebknecht, to their everlasting credit, protested against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. They were forthwith put in prison for having maintained their opinion m speeches and in writings.
By Germany's insistence upon the cession of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, and by these repeated protests of the people of Alsace-Lorraine against that act, a new and highly disturbing element was introduced into the history of Europe, nor has it yet been eliminated.
What was this country, now transferred as a war prize, in its essential character, in its fundamental nature? Was it German or was it French? The question has received two answers. The Germans have asserted that it was German, the French that it was French. The opinion of those most intimately concerned, the people of Alsace and Lorraine themselves, was just as explicit as either of these. They asserted, as we have seen, that they were French and wished to remain French, and that the document that pretended to transfer them was from the start and would forever remain null and void.
What light did history throw upon this problem, if it was a problem? It is impossible within the confines of this volume to recount with any fulness the crowded annals of this people. The story does not easily lend itself to compression, it is so long, so varied, and so involved. Nevertheless, out of its bewildering intricacies, a few features in the slow evolution may profitably be noticed. They may serve to indicate with reasonable certitude the individuality of these provinces, which was the product of manifold forces, operating, sometimes obscurely, sometimes clearly, through the course of many centuries. For, that Alsace and Lorraine had personalities of their own is obvious to any frank and serious student, and even a brief analysis of the various strains of experience that entered into the formation of them ought to prove instructive.
Who the first inhabitants were of these regions between the river Meuse, the Vosges mountains, and the Rhine, it is idle to inquire. In the dim background of European history groups of human beings flit obscurely, appearing and then disappearing, leaving only a few tantalizing and dubious traces of their passage. Ethnology gives us only an elusive guidance through those remote mazes of time. But with the coming of the Romans, we find ourselves on fairly solid ground. Thanks to Julius Caesar, to his victories and his writings, these regions of Europe pass out of the penumbra into the light of authentic history. And Caesar lived in the first century before Christ.
He found there a population that was Celtic, which had, however, even before he appeared upon the scene, experienced the repeated shock of attempted invasion from beyond the Rhine by another branch of the great Aryan race, the Teutonic. Caesar's conquests added Gaul to the Roman Empire and fixed its boundary at the river Rhine. For nearly five centuries the Rhine remained the boundary between Gaul and independent and barbarous Germania. The "Roman Peace" was thus imposed upon what we know to-day as Alsace and Lorraine.
It was under such illustrious auspices that these lands made their real debut into history. With this Celtic-Roman population some German elements were mingled, in what proportion it would be impossible to say. Roman colonists, governmental, military, and commercial, brought with them the characteristic elements of Roman civilization. Here, as elsewhere, some of the great routes, over which men still travel, were Roman roads. Agriculture, industry, and commerce felt the vivifying touch of Rome. Roman deities came to compete with older and cruder principalities and powers in the favor of myth-making men. Some they chased away, others they absorbed and transformed. Roman cities were founded which are still the busy haunts of men, Metz, Toul, Verdtm, Strasburg, Saveme. From the third century vines were planted, whose product was consumed in the country or sold to the neighboring Germans across the Rhine. Pottery, arms, textiles were exchanged for other things with the various tribes that lived along the river courses. Roman officials, Roman soldiers, Roman inn-keepers and money-changers, Roman mariners, plied their various trades in these lands which were then and have always been considered exceptionally endowed by nature. The population naturally lost all independent existence, absorbed in the mighty and universal empire. From the third century onward Chrisrtianity gradually penetrated these plains and valleys.
From the third century also dated the renewal of attacks from Germany. Rome, in the long run, did not have the necessary strength to defend the frontiers of Gaul and with the fifth century the boasted ramparts of her power, the Rhine and the Danube, gave way. The Teutonic floods poured in, wave after wave, and the face of Europe was changed.
These Teutonic invasions continued intermittently for several centuries. Southward to the Mediterranean, westward to the Atlantic came tribe after tribe, each seeking a warmer, a more congenial place in the sun. When these torrential incursions of primitive barbarism were over, the face of Europe was profoundly and permanently altered. With the native stocks of western and southern Europe were blended new racial strains. With the creation of a changed population, resulting from the fusion of conquerors and conquered, came also new ideas and customs which transformed, in the domains of politics and society, the older, more orderly, more elaborate and more rational civilization of ancient Rome. The first rough and uncertain outlines of new nations were gradually sketched against a background of moving, restless, obscure masses of human beings which had hitherto played no ascertainable historical role but which were now cooperating in strange, blind, stumbling ways in the inauguration of a new phase of history. Out of the chaos and the darkness of this Wandering of the Peoples a new cosmos gradually emerged. From this infiltration of Teutonic racial elements and peculiar Teutonic institutions into an empire of different racial elements and different institutions proceeded in time the turbid, turbulent stream of history which we call that of the Middle Ages, an absorbing and difficult chapter, a few only of whose outstanding features can be considered here.
The country between the Vosges and the Rhine, with whose destinies we are particularly concerned, was inundated by these floods. The ancient Roman civilization, and probably the incipient Christianity, of Alsace were swept away- The ancient population either fled to the comparatively safe valleys of the Vosges, or was reduced to slavery or serfdom by the conquerors. Alsace relapsed into its former state of primitive barbarism.