Was Alsace in truth a
connecting
link between
Germany and France?
Germany and France?
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
Yet while the nobility was thus weav-
ing the nets of France, German intellectual force
and German fidehty were long preserved to the
people in Alsace. It was at this very period that
the famous Philip Jacob Spener, who awakened
to a new life the moral force of Lutheranism, which
had waxed cold and dull, was growing up in
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? 132 What We Demand from France
Rappoltsweiler; and the people joyously hailed
the Brandenburger as he struggled with the French
on the Upper Rhine, and then routed the Swedes
at Fehrbellin on his own Marches. A popular
song, printed at Strassburg in 1675, ^o be sung to
the old Protestant tune of ''Gustav Adolf, high-
bom leader," commences thus:
With might the great Elector came,
Peace to secure right truly;
He seeks to break the Frenchman's pride,
So boastful and unruly,
All by his skill and art in war.
It was thus that the distant Western Marches
were the first to salute the first hero of the new
Northern Power by the title of the Great.
Meanwhile French statecraft bored more and
more deeply down into the rotten Empire. The
ten small imperial cities in Alsace were subjected
to the sovereignty of the King, when an act of
treason, the foul threads of which are to this day
hidden in obscurity, delivered Strassburg also into
the hands of Louis. What a day, that fatal 24th
of October, 1681, when the new master held his
entry! with the citizens of the free imperial city
swearing fidelity on their knees, while German
peasants were doing serf's labour outside in the
trenches of the citadel! At the porch of the
Minster, Bishop Francis Egon von Furstenberg
received the King, thanked him for having again
recovered the cathedral out of the hands of the
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? What We Demand from France 133
heretics, and exclaimed, ''Lord, now lettest Thou
Thy servant depart in peace, since he has seen his
Saviour ! " Meanwhile Rebenac, the King's envoy,
declared at Berlin that the King had not had the
least intention of breaking the peace of the Empire.
Cruel acts of maltreatment directed against the
Strassburg Protestants formed the worthy close
of this for ever shameful episode. Three times
over the dynastic policy of the Hapsburgs neglected
the fairest opportunities of recovering what had
been lost, and at last it sacrificed Lorraine also.
Slowly and cautiously the French began to
GalHcize their new territories. Years passed
before the independent administration of the
German Lorraine was done away with, and
more years before the German chancery at the
Court of Versailles was abolished. Yet it was
precisely in this period of foreign dominion that
Alsace sank deep into the heart of the German
nation. For there is no book more German than
that incomparable one which tells of the most
beautiful of all the mysteries of human existence,
of the growth of genius ; and there is no picture in
Goethe's life of greater warmth and depth than
the story of the bHssful days of love in Alsace. A
ray of love from the Sesenheim parsonage has
penetrated into the youthful dreams of every
German heart. That German home, threatened
with inundation by Gaulish manners and customs
seems to us all like a sanctuary desecrated. But
the merry folk of Alsace whom Goethe knew, fond
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? 134 What We Demand from France
of the song and the dance, lived carelessly on,
troubling themselves but little about their am-
biguous political existence, and coming rarely into
contact with foreign language and ways of life.
The Strassburg University, indeed, already began,
in French fashion, to insist more upon practical
usefulness than upon depth of knowledge, but it
still taught in the German tongue. Through its
ornaments, Schopflin and Koch, it maintained a
constant intercourse with German science, and it
was frequented by many young men from the
neighbouring parts of the Empire, by Goethe,
Herder, Lenz, Stilling, Mettemich. Even under
the oppressive superintendence of royal praetors,
the city adhered to its ancient constitution; and a
hundred years after its incorporation it remained
as little French, as Danzig was Polish tmder the
protection of the Crown of Poland.
It was the Revolution which first made the
Strassburgers part of the State, and caused them
to share the national feeling of the French. The
Revolution united to the French territory the
petty German sovereignties of Alsace which still re-
mained, and here, as everywhere else, it destroyed
the separate rights of the province. Even the
ancient glorious name of the country had to give
way before names characteristic of French vanity,
Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin -- the Lower Rhine where
the stream is not yet capable of bearing large
vessels! In the tempests of the great Revolution
the people of Alsace, like all the citizens of France,
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? What We Demand from France 135
learned to forget their past. And it is here that
the essential and fundamental feature of modern
French political sentiment, and the ultimate
source of the disease pervading the French State,
is to be sought. The nation has broken with its
history; it accounts what lies behind the Revolu-
tion as dead and done. Thirty years ago the city
of Strassburg began the publication of its straight-
forward old chronicles -- doubtless a work due to
the genuine love of home -- but the German, whose
past ages are still a living truth to him, reads with
an uncomfortable shudder the unsympathetic pre-
face composed by the maire Schutzenberger. The
glorious days of the imperial city are treated of
in precisely the same tone as the fact that the
Eighth Legion, once upon a time, was stationed at
Argentoratum. All that happened before the
sacred date of '89 belongs to archaeological research,
and no bridge remains to connect to-day with
yesterday.
Awful and abnormal events were necessary if so
radical a transmutation of political feeling was to
be achieved, and hardly anywhere else did the
Convention carry on its war of annihilation against
the Provinces after so bloody and so merciless a
fashion as at Strassburg. The loyal and ponderous
German burghers were unable to follow with suffi-
cient swiftness the whimsical spasms of the French
mind. The city was enthusiastically in favour of
the constitutional Monarchy; and it held fast to
its faith long after the Parisians had broken the
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? 136 What We Demand from France
Crown in pieces. Then it applauded with its
whole heart the rhetorical pathos of the Gironde,
after the Parisians had already donned the Jacobin
cap. When it fell at last into the power of the
Jacobins, a trait of German idealism and of a Ger-
man sense of equity survived after all in its native
demagogues, in Eulogius Schneider and in the
shoemaker Jung. Thus the Strassburgers were
suspected as Moderates by the Terrorists; and in
its rage for equality, and its mad passion for unity,
the Convention cast itself with loathsome savage-
ness upon the German city. St. Juste and Lebas
declared the guillotine en permanence, in order to
** nationalize" Alsace and to purify it from the
German barbarians. The German dress was pro-
hibited, the Minster was dedicated as a Temple of
Reason, the red cap was planted on its spire, and
the club of the Propaganda proposed in serious
earnest the deportation of every citizen not
speaking French.
Thus, while the obstinate resistance of the Ger-
man city passed away, amidst these sanguinary hor-
rors, the peasant population was gained for France
by the benefits of the Revolution. German "peas-
ant right" still obtained in the country; the peas-
ant still groaned under the harsh dues he owed to
the lord of the soil; in some cases he was still in a
condition of serfdom. The night of the 4th of
August suddenly made him a free landed proprie-
tor. In parts of the interior of France, on the other
hand, the system of metayers, or some other similar
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? What We Demand from France 137
oppressive system of land tenure, still prevailed,
and the new law made but little change in the
condition of the rural population. To these things
we owe it that the German peasants of France
blessed the Revolution, while the French peasantry
in the Vendee fought passionately against it.
The old obstinate love of liberty of the Alemanni
was reawakened; the peasants in Alsace hurried
to the standards of the Republic; and during the
struggles of those savage days they drank deep of
the new French ideas, which are closely connected
with that contempt for the past of which I have
spoken. Henceforth there burnt in them a fanati-
cal love of equality which loathes as feudalism any
and every advantage of birth, however innocent,
and the measureless self-consciousness of the
Fourth Estate, which in France is unable to forget
how the existence of the State once rested on the
points of its pikes. On the other hand. Count
Wurmser, who commanded the Austrian army
before the lines of Weissenburg, was an Alsatian
nobleman, deeply initiated into the secret intrigues
of discontented members of his order. He made
no secret of his intention that his good sword
should restore the glories of the squirearchy
{Junkerthum) . Thus the war against Germany
appeared in the eyes of the Alsatian peasantry to
be a war for the liberty of their persons and for
their bit of soil.
Finally the population gave itself up to the
charm of the fame of the soldiers' Emperor, who
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? 138 What We Demand from France
knew so thoroughly how to make use of the warlike
vigour of these Germans. The Germanic Empire
came to a miserable end. The Alsatians Pfeffel
and Matthieu acted as middlemen in the dirty
barter, when our princes shared the shreds of
the Empire among themselves. The last feeling
of respect for the German State was at an end.
When Germany rose at last, and the allies invaded
France, the people of Alsace once more deemed
the blessings of the Revolution to be in danger.
The fortified places, bravely defended by citizens
and soldiers, held out for a long time. Armed
bands of peasants carried on a guerilla warfare in
the Vosges ; they crucified captive German soldiers,
and perpetrated such inhuman abominations as
to make Riickert lament the ungermanized man-
ners and morals of the land. Numerous pictures
in the churches and old-fashioned burghers' houses
remain to recall this war of the people against the
Strangers. The wretched period of the raid upon
the demagogues in Germany followed. German
fugitives found protection and refuge in the land
across the Rhine, Strassburg presses printed what
the German censorship prohibited, and the man of
Alsace looked with contempt upon his ancient home
as upon a land of impotence and slavery. And
according to the constant law that an unnatural
condition of the people begets strange popular
diseases, it was precisely this conquered German
land which became the nursery of Chauvinism.
The course of the Rhine, the Saar, and the Moselle,
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? What We Demand from France 139
indicated intercourse with Germany as necessary
to these districts. They hungered after new con-
quests ; boasted of surpassing all other provinces of
France in "patriotism"; were specially fond of
sending their sons into the army ; and two years ago
the war-loving natives of Lorraine were alone ready
to accept the proposal of universal military service
which the self-love of the French rejected. A
clear picture, and one simply unintelligible to a
German, is presented of this French feeling in the
frontier-lands in the much-read "national novels'*
of the two natives of Alsace-Lorraine, Erckmann
and Chatrian, the apostles of peace among the
poets of France. What genuinely German men and
women are their Pf alzburgers ! In language and
sentiment they are Germans, but they have lost the
last trace of a remembrance of their ancient con-
nection with the Empire. They are enthusiastic
for the tricolore; they bitterly hate the Prussien;
and the narrators themselves -- write in French!
Well may we Germans be seized with awe when
we witness the reawakening of the blind fury of
18 1 5 in Gunstett and Weissenburg; when we find
these German men raving, in the German tongue,
against the "German dogs," the "stinking Prus-
sians," and raging like wild beasts against their
flesh and blood. And yet we have no right to sit
in judgment on this deluded population, wl ich,
notwithstanding everything, is among the most
vigorous of the German races. Amdt himself
found good reason for defending the men of Alsace
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? 140 What We Demand from France
against Rtickert's bitter complaints. What raises
our indignation in these unhappy men after all is
nothing else than the old German particularism,
the fatal impulse of every German to be something
else and something better than his German
neighbour -- to deem his own little country the
sacred land of the Centre, and to stand fast, with
blind fidelity, by standards which he has once
taken up. It is true that, in this case, our old
hereditary German disease appears in the most
revolting form possible, under circumstances of
the most unnatural character. Look at the
unhappy, misused men who fell like assassins at
Worth and Forbach, on the rear of the German
warriors. They are the Germans who have had no
share in the great resurrection of our nation during
the last two centuries, and we should all of us
be Hke them were there no Prussia in existence.
The man of Alsace is not a mere Frenchman; he
has no desire to be so; he views the Gaul with
suspicion, often with hatred; he feels self-conscious
as a member of the little chosen people, which sur-
passes all Frenchmen in industry and warlike
vigour, as it surpasses all Germans in the fact that
it is French. Other Germans, too, have been
known in other times to take pride in displaying
their German fidelity to the Kings of Poland,
Sweden, Denmark, or England; and the men of
Stettin fought once for the Swedish Crown,
against the great Elector, in even bitterer earnest
than the men of Alsace of to-day. It is only from
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? What We Demand from France 141
the hands of the Prussian State, as it grew into
its strength, that we have recovered the gift of a
common country.
And where were the people of Alsace to learn to
esteem our German ways of life? What sights
met them immediately outside their gates? The
ridiculous comedy of the petty States, and the
gambling- tables of Baden, at which German good-
nature bowed humbly down before French immor-
ality! The old Empire to which they had once
loyally adhered had disappeared; of the young
State which was arising in glory they knew nothing.
How long ago is it since public opinion, among
ourselves, deplored as the fall of Germany w^hat
was really Germany's awakening? How long since
there existed a French, and a Hapsburg, but not
a German view of German history? As recently
as the beginning of the century, the ordinary
German patriot used to seek the final cause of
German disunion in the genesis of the Prussian
State. And pray what was the picture of Ger-
many which our Radicals, following in the foot-
steps of Heine, were in the habit of sketching only
forty years ago? The German nation was sup-
posed to be partial to talking philosophy and
to drinking beer; but it was otherwise harmless,
and it had the tendencies of a lackey. Its petty
States were blessed with a few ideas of liberty
which they had picked up from the great Revolu-
tion and the great Napoleon, while in the north
there was imfortunately the State of the drill-
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? 142 What We Demand from France
sergeant and of feudalism -- the robber- State of
the Hoberaux. It is this caricature of Germany
which circulates to this day in France. The
Second Empire, which has performed so many
involuntary services to Germany, has, indeed, to
some extent shaken the self-consciousness of the
men of Alsace themselves. A few thinking men
have recognized the fact, which is clear as the light
of day, that any and every German State is at
present incomparably freer than Imperial France.
But the mass of the people, misguided by an inde-
scribably stupid provincial Press, was left without
any tidings of the immense change which was being
accompHshed in Germany, and lived on in its old
dreams.
Has a new and individual civiHzation come into
life in this German race, saturated with French
feelings and opinions? The people of Alsace,
accustomed after the manner of Germans to make
a virtue of necessity, often delight to declare that
their country forms the connecting link between
the Romance and the Germanic world, and that,
for this reason, it is of greater importance at the
present day to the progress of European culture
than formerly when it was a territory of the Ger-
manic Empire. No man has developed this idea
more delicately and felicitously than the highly
cultivated Miilhausener, Ch. Dollfus. About the
year i860 it appeared as if the province were really
about to fulfil this office of mediation. The
Revue Germanique, written chiefly by men from
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? What We Demand from France 143
Alsace, endeavoured to offer the French a faithful
picture of German science; the Temps also, con-
ducted by them, laboured to arrive at a fair
judgment of our political life. At that time even
Frenchmen of old Celtic blood remarked that
nothing but the imearthing of the Germanic forces
which had been half buried could supply the
French soil with new creative power; and we
Germans used to watch these unusual efforts
with honest delight. But all such attempts have
been utterly wrecked. It could not well have
been otherwise. The pleasure which the French
took in the works of the German intellect always
rested on the tacit assumption that we continued
to resemble the old caricature, that we were still a
people devoid of political organization, a people
of poets and thinkers. No sooner had the Bohe-
mian victories shown the power of the German
State than a change ensued in French Hfe, to
which we have failed to pay sufficient attention
here. The influence of German ideas halted;
the Revue Germanique died long ago; the Temps
has displayed precisely the same captiousness and
hostility against the new German Confederation
as has been shown by the rest of the French
papers; and after all the awful experiences of the
last few weeks we can expect nothing but a still
deeper estrangement for the immediate future.
Was Alsace in truth a connecting link between
Germany and France? A mutual giving and
taking is surely an indispensable element of such
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? 144 What We Demand from France
a connection. What have we received from the
people of Alsace? What have they been to us?
Their higher intellects were simply lost to German
national life, they became Frenchmen with a slight
colouring of German culture; like Dollfus himself,
they served the foreigner, not us. The loss of
the German provinces would be of infinitely more
importance to France than is implied in the dimi-
nution of the eighty-nine departements by three.
It would not only be a terrible moral blow -- for
these territories are the pride of the nation, the
oft-contested prize of ancient victories, the famed
terre classique de la France -- but a loss of intellect-
ual forces which it would be utterly impossible to
make good. It is astonishing to find in every
large town in France, everywhere and in every
station in life, the industrious, clever, and trust-
worthy sons of Alsace. The population of the
Departement Bas-Khin, although it is healthy and
fertile in the German fashion, considerably dimin-
ished during the decade from 1850 to i860, in
consequence of the emigration en masse into the
French cities. Are we to regard this regular
absorption of German forces by the French people
as a healthy action and reaction -- now that we
possess the power of putting an end to this morbid
state of affairs? Switzerland is really a land of
transition and of mediation. There, three nations,
united by means of a free and flexible constitution,
learn how to appreciate and deal considerately
with one another. But the centralization and the
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? What We Demand from France 145
domineering national spirit of France cannot allow
a province either an independent culture or a
separate language. Official statistics in France, as
their director, Legoyt, has often openly confessed,
disdain on principle to enquire into the rela-
tions between the different languages. The State
assumes that every Frenchman understands
French. The world is not permitted to learn
how many millions of Basques, Bretons, Proven-
gals, Flemings, and Germans have no acquaintance
with the language of the State ; the popular tongue
differing from it is to be degraded into a dialect,
into the speech of the uncultivated. The French
bureaucracy in Alsace has laboured in the direction
of this goal with a ruthless zeal, and so fanatically,
that Napoleon III was at times obliged to moder-
ate the clumsiness of his too eager officials. Supe-
rior education is entirely given in French. An
attempt has even been made recently, by the
introduction of French educational nurseries for
the young {Kindergarten) , to estrange the children
from their tenderest years from their mother-
tongue. Those who speak pure high- German may
sometimes find it easier to make themselves under-
stood by half-educated men in Alsace if they help
themselves out with French ; for people of this class
have lost the free and facile use of any form of
speech except the dialect of their native district.
The attempt to degrade the language of a nation
which is one of the standard-bearers of civilization,
into the rudeness of the Celtic patois of the Bretons,
10
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? 146 What We Demand from France
is sheer insanity and a sin against nature. The
proverb of our homely ancestors must remain
eternally true: "So German heart and Gaul-
ish tongue, strong man, lame steed, are suited
wrong. " The foreign language which has been
forced upon them has done unspeakable harm to
the upper classes of Alsace in their moral feeling
and in their spiritual life, and has impressed upon
the intellectual life of the province the character
of a bastard culture which is neither fish nor flesh.
What unhappy creatures these German boys are
who pass by in their gold-rimmed Lyceum caps
under the guardianship of an elegant ahhe, and
whose German souls are bidden to find edification
in Boileau and Racine, while they speak to the
servants in a horrible Gaulish perversion of their
native language, the language of Goethe.
In the struggle between the independent lang-
uages of highly civilized nations, flexibility of form
is unfortunately apt to gain the victory over depth
and thoroughness of culture. The national char-
acter of the rising generation ultimately depends
upon the mothers ; and women find it hard to with-
stand the charm of brilliant form. As a rule,
woman -- more loyal than man in good things as
well as in evil -- adheres more firmly than he does
to ancestral ways; the women of Alsace become
Gaulish faster than the men. This is proved by
ocular demonstration, and it is confirmed by
the returns reported from all the popular libraries
in the province, which show that the women hardly
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? What We Demand from France 147
read any books but French. The language of the
State, of good society, and of important commer-
cial transactions, is French. The language of the
books and newspapers is the same ; for it is better
to pass over in compassionate silence the barbar-
ous German translation which the Frenchman, M.
Schneegans, is in the habit of placing alongside
of the French text of his Cotirrier du Bas-Rhin.
Whoever has seen three generations of an Alsatian
family side by side must have had the growing
Gallicization of the upper classes brought palpably
before him. If one reminds these people of the
glorious German past, a confident "We are French-
men " helps them over all argument ; and if they are
men of learning, they are not unlikely, like the
maire Schutzenberger aforesaid, to add a few pro-
found phrases on the mutability of all things
human, as destructive even of national life. The
public service, the settlement of numerous French-
men in the province, and manifold family and
business connections, all hasten this unnatural
degeneration. Of the great families of the land,
some have crossed over to the right bank, like
the Schaumburgs, the Bocklins, the Tiirkheims;
the rest have, almost without exception, betaken
themselves to French ways, like the Keinachs,
the Andlaus, the Vogt von Hunolsteins. It was a
Zom von Bulach, a scion of the famous old house of
free imperial citizens {Reichshilrger), who recently
demanded, in a stormy Chauvinist speech in the
Corps Legislatif, the fortification of Huningen, to
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? 148 What We Demand from France
prevent the Fatherland falling a prey to the
Germans.
In contrast with this Gallicization of the edu-
cated classes, how glorious appears the faithful ad-
herence of the Alemannic peasant to the usages of
his ancestors. Here among the simple folk, where
culture is held of no account, and the whole intellec-
tual life is comprehended in the moral feelings, the
German tongue continues to hold unbounded sway,
and even among the higher classes it has frequently
remained the language of the feelings and of the
domestic hearth. The German wanderer, who
enters a village in the Vosges, is saluted at first by
some official ordinance or other in French, or by an
advertisement painted on the wall by the Great
Paris advertising firms, Chocolat Menier and Au
Pauvre Diahle. In the village itself everything is
German; red waistcoats, big fur caps, and three-
cornered hats, popular costumes of a primitive
antiquity which survive only in the remote valleys
of Schwarzwald. The name Gaulish (Wdlsch) is
often regarded even yet as a term of abuse. The
maire, the cantonnier , and a few of the younger
people whose wanderings as handicraftsmen have
carried them to a great distance, are frequently
the only persons who speak the foreign tongue
with facility. All the public decrees with which the
people are seriously meant to become acquainted
must be read out in both languages. To teach
the children in French is either impossible or they
forget in a few years what it has cost them so much
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? What We Demand from France 149
trouble to acquire. The peasant of the Sundgau
contemplates the stork's nest on his thatch with
the same pleasure as the Ditmarsher; he is on as
intimate terms with his stork as the other with his
Hadbar; and he receives the payment for lodging,
which the bird annually throws down, with equal
conscientiousness. If he reads anything at all,
he reads the jests of the "Hobbling Messenger"
{des hinkenden Boten), like his neighbour in the
Schwarzwald across the river. A rich mine of
primitive German legends and usages yet remains
among the woodmen up in the Wasgau, who push
the trunks of the trees, in the winter time, on
mighty sleighs {Schlitten), down the steep preci-
pice. The Gaul bestows on these sturdy fellows
the exquisite name of SchlitteMrs,
But the mightiest of all the forces at the root of
our German ways is Protestantism, which is the
strong shield of the German language and of Ger-
man life here, as in the mountains of Transylvania,
and on the distant shores of the Baltic. After all,
it is the free life of different creeds side by side
with one another which remains the strong root of
our modem German culture; and in this essential
characteristic, which distinguishes us both from
the Catholic south and the Lutheran north, Alsace,
which is divided between the confessions {parti-
tat esch), fully participates. So long as the peasant
continues to sing ^' Eiji feste Burg ist unser Gott/^
from a German hymn-book, German life will not
perish in the Wasgau. The loving and energetic
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? 150 What We Demand from France
spirit of old Spener, and, after him, of the worthy
Oberlin, the benefactor of the Stein thai, survives to
this day in the excellent evangelical pastors of
Alsace ; and perhaps they are the only men in the
country who secretly long for its return to Ger-
many. Any loyal love on the part of the shame-
fully persecuted Evangelical Church towards the
land of the Dragonnades, and of the War of the
Cevennes, must have been out of the question at
all times. German science -- the free and fearless
spirit of inquiry of the Tubingen school -- prevails
among the admirable scholars of the Protestant
Faculty at Strassburg, some of whom still lecture
in German. They owe nothing to the French but
an active practical sense, which seeks to impress
the truth which their own minds have recognized
on the life and constitution of their congregations.
What is it, . speaking generally, that is healthy
and energetic in Alsace? what is it that elevates
these districts above the dark mists of self-indul-
gence and priestly obscurantism which overhang
most of the remaining provinces of France? The
German nature of Alsace, and nothing else. The
active spirit of its inhabitants, and the ineradi-
cable impulse towards self-government, which
even the artifices of Napoleonic prefects could not
wholly banish, and which refused to bow its head
before the monarchical socialism of the Second Em-
pire, are German. Let the worthy members of So-
ciete Industrielle de Mulhouse believe as long as they
choose that they are Frenchmen in body and soul,
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? What We Demand from France 151
and set up the inscriptions Place Napoleon and Rue
Napoleon at the street-comers of their artisan town.
That admirable enterprise of free civic spirit could
only have arisen on Germanic soil, just as the
great city workhouse of Ostwald, near Strassburg,
could only have been founded by a German city.
The cites ouvrieres in French towns, in Lille, for
example, owe their origin to the State. The
active care of the communes and fathers of famiHes
for popular education, which has at least succeeded
in bringing about this result, that on an average
there are, of a hundred unmarried persons in the
Haut-Rhin, only from six to seven, and in the Bas-
Rhin only from two to three, unable to write, is
altogether German. This seems poor enough in
comparison with the state of things in Germany,
but it is brilliant in comparison with that in
France. The spirit of the popular libraries and
singing-clubs, which used to be constantly at feud
with the Prefects, is German. Notwithstanding
the Gaulish tongue which it uses, the scholarly
culture, which produces such good fruit in the
Revue Critique and in the works of the provin-
cial historians, is German. Even among the
French-speaking classes, have we not the more
natural, straightforward, youthful way of German
life, which has been infected indeed, but not yet
destroyed, by Celtic immorality? Are not the
military virtues of the man of Alsace German too?
Is the same thing not true of his loyalty and dis-
cipline -- of the close application to the military
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? 152 What We Demand from France
instruction of each individual soldier, and the de-
light in accurate firing, which make him alone,
among the soldiers of France, capable of an effec-
tive partisan war (Parteigdngerkrieg) , and which
have created a species of volunteer popular army --
the franC'tireurs -- in his part of the country alone?
But, alas! when we praise the indestructible
German nature of the man of Alsace, the subject of
our praise declines to receive it. He adheres to his
conviction that he is no Suabian, and that all
Suabians are yellow-footed. He was introduced
by France, sooner than we Germans have been,
into the grand activity of the modem economical
world. To France he owes a most admirable
organization of the means of commercial inter-
course, a wide market, the influx of capital on a
great scale, and a high rate of wages, which, to this
day, draws daily labourers in crowds at harvest-
time from the fields of Baden across the Rhine.
From the French he has learned a certain savoir-
faire; his industrial activity, upon the whole,
stands higher than that of his German neighbour;
and in special branches -- in nursery gardening,
for instance -- he presents a marked contrast to
the easy-going indifference of the natives of Baden.
The son of Alsace is bound to his great State not
merely by ancient loyalty and pride, but by mate-
rial bonds, the power of which we, in our freer
political life, generally fail duly to appreciate. A
bureaucratic centralization possesses this advan-
tage after all, among a thousand sins, that it
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? What We Demand from France 153
penetrates like a binding mortar into every joint
of the social edifice, and renders it unspeakably
difficult to break one of its stones out of the wall.
What labour will be requisite before the threads
which lead across from Strassburg and Colmar to
Paris are all cut! The jonction-nomanie of the
French, their anxiety to make a profit out of the
State, even were it by means of a bureau de tabac,
has penetrated as far as these frontier lands. A
countless host of officials, pensioners and veterans,
swarms in this province. All the great institu-
tions of intercourse and credit are in reality State
establishments. What a power lies in the hands
of the Great Eastern Railway [of France], which,
although a private company in name, is in fact
connected closely with the State ! If the district is
given up to Germany, and this railway remains
what it is, every pointsman and guard on the
line will contribute to the French propaganda.
The smallest amount of resistance will probably
be offered to the reconquest in Lower Alsace, where
a third of the population is Protestant, and where
a vigorous intercourse is carried on with Baden
and the Palatinate. The state of affairs on the
Upper Rhine is far less promising. A powerful
clergy is there, adding fuel to the hatred of the
lively and excitable people against Germany, and
it finds no counterpoise in the Protestant portion
of the population, which amounts only to a tithe.
The manufactories of Mulhausen have their chief
market in France, although a considerable busi-
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? 154 What We Demand from France
ness has been done in the calico and muslin trade
of the place at the Leipzig fairs since the recent
treaties of commerce. The German State is
repugnant to the old reminiscences of this Swiss
city. Its patrician families assiduously display
their French sentiments. Its masses of working-
men, thrown together from long distances, and
who come, for the most part, from Germany,
have always welcomed the hollow pathos of the
Paris demagogues. But it is in German Lorraine
that we are threatened by the most embittered
hostility. In a population almost exclusively
Catholic, German ways of thought and Hfe have
never found so grand a development as in Alsace ;
and for more than a century they have been
abused by all the evil artifices of the French
bureaucracy -- most cynically of all in the old
Luxemburg districts round Diedenhofen; besides
which their ordinar}^ intercourse takes the peas-
antry to two French towns, to Metz and Nancy.
Most assuredly, the task of reuniting there the
broken links between the ages is one of the heaviest
that has ever been imposed upon the political
forces of our nation. Capital and culture, those
faithful allies of the German cause in Posen and
in Schleswig- Hoist ein, are our opponents. Ger-
man ways of thought and life have been terribly
discredited in the upper classes of these western
marches. What we deem horrible, they deem
sacred. They remember with pride how it was at
Strassburg that Rouget de I'lsle once composed
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? What We Demand from France 155
those burning lines which threatened the enemies
of France, the Germans, with death and destruc-
tion; and how the soldiers' Emperor passed out
to his war against us through the gate of Auster-
litz. The city which fought as a heroine in the
spiritual battles of the Reformation boasts to-day
in her own phrase, De porter fierement Vepee de la
France. What appears ridiculous to us seems to
them to speak for itself. They are not ashamed
to call themselves ''Monsieur" Schwilgue or
Stockle. They allow the venerable names of their
towns to be changed into Gaulish perversions,
Hke Wasselonne, Cemay, and Selestat. They
obediently accept the indescribably absurd Ober-
nai (for Oberehnheim) , and consider it fine to
write "antwergmestres^* when they are speaking
in their French historical works of the masters of
the old guilds (Meister der alien Ziinfte). They
are astonished at our shrugging our shoulders as we
contemplate the monument in honour of the indus-
trial grandees of the place, on the market-place at
Rappoltsweiler, and see enumerated on it, in the
style of the tables issued from the Prefectures,
the names Meyer, Jaques, Muller, Etienne, etc.
What to us seems freedom, to them appears
oppression. While taking part in the life of a
State whose parties bow beneath despotism as
their taskmaster, without an exception, they
have lost all perception for the truth that every
healthy kind of freedom imposes burdens and
duties.
ing the nets of France, German intellectual force
and German fidehty were long preserved to the
people in Alsace. It was at this very period that
the famous Philip Jacob Spener, who awakened
to a new life the moral force of Lutheranism, which
had waxed cold and dull, was growing up in
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? 132 What We Demand from France
Rappoltsweiler; and the people joyously hailed
the Brandenburger as he struggled with the French
on the Upper Rhine, and then routed the Swedes
at Fehrbellin on his own Marches. A popular
song, printed at Strassburg in 1675, ^o be sung to
the old Protestant tune of ''Gustav Adolf, high-
bom leader," commences thus:
With might the great Elector came,
Peace to secure right truly;
He seeks to break the Frenchman's pride,
So boastful and unruly,
All by his skill and art in war.
It was thus that the distant Western Marches
were the first to salute the first hero of the new
Northern Power by the title of the Great.
Meanwhile French statecraft bored more and
more deeply down into the rotten Empire. The
ten small imperial cities in Alsace were subjected
to the sovereignty of the King, when an act of
treason, the foul threads of which are to this day
hidden in obscurity, delivered Strassburg also into
the hands of Louis. What a day, that fatal 24th
of October, 1681, when the new master held his
entry! with the citizens of the free imperial city
swearing fidelity on their knees, while German
peasants were doing serf's labour outside in the
trenches of the citadel! At the porch of the
Minster, Bishop Francis Egon von Furstenberg
received the King, thanked him for having again
recovered the cathedral out of the hands of the
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? What We Demand from France 133
heretics, and exclaimed, ''Lord, now lettest Thou
Thy servant depart in peace, since he has seen his
Saviour ! " Meanwhile Rebenac, the King's envoy,
declared at Berlin that the King had not had the
least intention of breaking the peace of the Empire.
Cruel acts of maltreatment directed against the
Strassburg Protestants formed the worthy close
of this for ever shameful episode. Three times
over the dynastic policy of the Hapsburgs neglected
the fairest opportunities of recovering what had
been lost, and at last it sacrificed Lorraine also.
Slowly and cautiously the French began to
GalHcize their new territories. Years passed
before the independent administration of the
German Lorraine was done away with, and
more years before the German chancery at the
Court of Versailles was abolished. Yet it was
precisely in this period of foreign dominion that
Alsace sank deep into the heart of the German
nation. For there is no book more German than
that incomparable one which tells of the most
beautiful of all the mysteries of human existence,
of the growth of genius ; and there is no picture in
Goethe's life of greater warmth and depth than
the story of the bHssful days of love in Alsace. A
ray of love from the Sesenheim parsonage has
penetrated into the youthful dreams of every
German heart. That German home, threatened
with inundation by Gaulish manners and customs
seems to us all like a sanctuary desecrated. But
the merry folk of Alsace whom Goethe knew, fond
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? 134 What We Demand from France
of the song and the dance, lived carelessly on,
troubling themselves but little about their am-
biguous political existence, and coming rarely into
contact with foreign language and ways of life.
The Strassburg University, indeed, already began,
in French fashion, to insist more upon practical
usefulness than upon depth of knowledge, but it
still taught in the German tongue. Through its
ornaments, Schopflin and Koch, it maintained a
constant intercourse with German science, and it
was frequented by many young men from the
neighbouring parts of the Empire, by Goethe,
Herder, Lenz, Stilling, Mettemich. Even under
the oppressive superintendence of royal praetors,
the city adhered to its ancient constitution; and a
hundred years after its incorporation it remained
as little French, as Danzig was Polish tmder the
protection of the Crown of Poland.
It was the Revolution which first made the
Strassburgers part of the State, and caused them
to share the national feeling of the French. The
Revolution united to the French territory the
petty German sovereignties of Alsace which still re-
mained, and here, as everywhere else, it destroyed
the separate rights of the province. Even the
ancient glorious name of the country had to give
way before names characteristic of French vanity,
Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin -- the Lower Rhine where
the stream is not yet capable of bearing large
vessels! In the tempests of the great Revolution
the people of Alsace, like all the citizens of France,
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? What We Demand from France 135
learned to forget their past. And it is here that
the essential and fundamental feature of modern
French political sentiment, and the ultimate
source of the disease pervading the French State,
is to be sought. The nation has broken with its
history; it accounts what lies behind the Revolu-
tion as dead and done. Thirty years ago the city
of Strassburg began the publication of its straight-
forward old chronicles -- doubtless a work due to
the genuine love of home -- but the German, whose
past ages are still a living truth to him, reads with
an uncomfortable shudder the unsympathetic pre-
face composed by the maire Schutzenberger. The
glorious days of the imperial city are treated of
in precisely the same tone as the fact that the
Eighth Legion, once upon a time, was stationed at
Argentoratum. All that happened before the
sacred date of '89 belongs to archaeological research,
and no bridge remains to connect to-day with
yesterday.
Awful and abnormal events were necessary if so
radical a transmutation of political feeling was to
be achieved, and hardly anywhere else did the
Convention carry on its war of annihilation against
the Provinces after so bloody and so merciless a
fashion as at Strassburg. The loyal and ponderous
German burghers were unable to follow with suffi-
cient swiftness the whimsical spasms of the French
mind. The city was enthusiastically in favour of
the constitutional Monarchy; and it held fast to
its faith long after the Parisians had broken the
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? 136 What We Demand from France
Crown in pieces. Then it applauded with its
whole heart the rhetorical pathos of the Gironde,
after the Parisians had already donned the Jacobin
cap. When it fell at last into the power of the
Jacobins, a trait of German idealism and of a Ger-
man sense of equity survived after all in its native
demagogues, in Eulogius Schneider and in the
shoemaker Jung. Thus the Strassburgers were
suspected as Moderates by the Terrorists; and in
its rage for equality, and its mad passion for unity,
the Convention cast itself with loathsome savage-
ness upon the German city. St. Juste and Lebas
declared the guillotine en permanence, in order to
** nationalize" Alsace and to purify it from the
German barbarians. The German dress was pro-
hibited, the Minster was dedicated as a Temple of
Reason, the red cap was planted on its spire, and
the club of the Propaganda proposed in serious
earnest the deportation of every citizen not
speaking French.
Thus, while the obstinate resistance of the Ger-
man city passed away, amidst these sanguinary hor-
rors, the peasant population was gained for France
by the benefits of the Revolution. German "peas-
ant right" still obtained in the country; the peas-
ant still groaned under the harsh dues he owed to
the lord of the soil; in some cases he was still in a
condition of serfdom. The night of the 4th of
August suddenly made him a free landed proprie-
tor. In parts of the interior of France, on the other
hand, the system of metayers, or some other similar
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? What We Demand from France 137
oppressive system of land tenure, still prevailed,
and the new law made but little change in the
condition of the rural population. To these things
we owe it that the German peasants of France
blessed the Revolution, while the French peasantry
in the Vendee fought passionately against it.
The old obstinate love of liberty of the Alemanni
was reawakened; the peasants in Alsace hurried
to the standards of the Republic; and during the
struggles of those savage days they drank deep of
the new French ideas, which are closely connected
with that contempt for the past of which I have
spoken. Henceforth there burnt in them a fanati-
cal love of equality which loathes as feudalism any
and every advantage of birth, however innocent,
and the measureless self-consciousness of the
Fourth Estate, which in France is unable to forget
how the existence of the State once rested on the
points of its pikes. On the other hand. Count
Wurmser, who commanded the Austrian army
before the lines of Weissenburg, was an Alsatian
nobleman, deeply initiated into the secret intrigues
of discontented members of his order. He made
no secret of his intention that his good sword
should restore the glories of the squirearchy
{Junkerthum) . Thus the war against Germany
appeared in the eyes of the Alsatian peasantry to
be a war for the liberty of their persons and for
their bit of soil.
Finally the population gave itself up to the
charm of the fame of the soldiers' Emperor, who
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? 138 What We Demand from France
knew so thoroughly how to make use of the warlike
vigour of these Germans. The Germanic Empire
came to a miserable end. The Alsatians Pfeffel
and Matthieu acted as middlemen in the dirty
barter, when our princes shared the shreds of
the Empire among themselves. The last feeling
of respect for the German State was at an end.
When Germany rose at last, and the allies invaded
France, the people of Alsace once more deemed
the blessings of the Revolution to be in danger.
The fortified places, bravely defended by citizens
and soldiers, held out for a long time. Armed
bands of peasants carried on a guerilla warfare in
the Vosges ; they crucified captive German soldiers,
and perpetrated such inhuman abominations as
to make Riickert lament the ungermanized man-
ners and morals of the land. Numerous pictures
in the churches and old-fashioned burghers' houses
remain to recall this war of the people against the
Strangers. The wretched period of the raid upon
the demagogues in Germany followed. German
fugitives found protection and refuge in the land
across the Rhine, Strassburg presses printed what
the German censorship prohibited, and the man of
Alsace looked with contempt upon his ancient home
as upon a land of impotence and slavery. And
according to the constant law that an unnatural
condition of the people begets strange popular
diseases, it was precisely this conquered German
land which became the nursery of Chauvinism.
The course of the Rhine, the Saar, and the Moselle,
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? What We Demand from France 139
indicated intercourse with Germany as necessary
to these districts. They hungered after new con-
quests ; boasted of surpassing all other provinces of
France in "patriotism"; were specially fond of
sending their sons into the army ; and two years ago
the war-loving natives of Lorraine were alone ready
to accept the proposal of universal military service
which the self-love of the French rejected. A
clear picture, and one simply unintelligible to a
German, is presented of this French feeling in the
frontier-lands in the much-read "national novels'*
of the two natives of Alsace-Lorraine, Erckmann
and Chatrian, the apostles of peace among the
poets of France. What genuinely German men and
women are their Pf alzburgers ! In language and
sentiment they are Germans, but they have lost the
last trace of a remembrance of their ancient con-
nection with the Empire. They are enthusiastic
for the tricolore; they bitterly hate the Prussien;
and the narrators themselves -- write in French!
Well may we Germans be seized with awe when
we witness the reawakening of the blind fury of
18 1 5 in Gunstett and Weissenburg; when we find
these German men raving, in the German tongue,
against the "German dogs," the "stinking Prus-
sians," and raging like wild beasts against their
flesh and blood. And yet we have no right to sit
in judgment on this deluded population, wl ich,
notwithstanding everything, is among the most
vigorous of the German races. Amdt himself
found good reason for defending the men of Alsace
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? 140 What We Demand from France
against Rtickert's bitter complaints. What raises
our indignation in these unhappy men after all is
nothing else than the old German particularism,
the fatal impulse of every German to be something
else and something better than his German
neighbour -- to deem his own little country the
sacred land of the Centre, and to stand fast, with
blind fidelity, by standards which he has once
taken up. It is true that, in this case, our old
hereditary German disease appears in the most
revolting form possible, under circumstances of
the most unnatural character. Look at the
unhappy, misused men who fell like assassins at
Worth and Forbach, on the rear of the German
warriors. They are the Germans who have had no
share in the great resurrection of our nation during
the last two centuries, and we should all of us
be Hke them were there no Prussia in existence.
The man of Alsace is not a mere Frenchman; he
has no desire to be so; he views the Gaul with
suspicion, often with hatred; he feels self-conscious
as a member of the little chosen people, which sur-
passes all Frenchmen in industry and warlike
vigour, as it surpasses all Germans in the fact that
it is French. Other Germans, too, have been
known in other times to take pride in displaying
their German fidelity to the Kings of Poland,
Sweden, Denmark, or England; and the men of
Stettin fought once for the Swedish Crown,
against the great Elector, in even bitterer earnest
than the men of Alsace of to-day. It is only from
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? What We Demand from France 141
the hands of the Prussian State, as it grew into
its strength, that we have recovered the gift of a
common country.
And where were the people of Alsace to learn to
esteem our German ways of life? What sights
met them immediately outside their gates? The
ridiculous comedy of the petty States, and the
gambling- tables of Baden, at which German good-
nature bowed humbly down before French immor-
ality! The old Empire to which they had once
loyally adhered had disappeared; of the young
State which was arising in glory they knew nothing.
How long ago is it since public opinion, among
ourselves, deplored as the fall of Germany w^hat
was really Germany's awakening? How long since
there existed a French, and a Hapsburg, but not
a German view of German history? As recently
as the beginning of the century, the ordinary
German patriot used to seek the final cause of
German disunion in the genesis of the Prussian
State. And pray what was the picture of Ger-
many which our Radicals, following in the foot-
steps of Heine, were in the habit of sketching only
forty years ago? The German nation was sup-
posed to be partial to talking philosophy and
to drinking beer; but it was otherwise harmless,
and it had the tendencies of a lackey. Its petty
States were blessed with a few ideas of liberty
which they had picked up from the great Revolu-
tion and the great Napoleon, while in the north
there was imfortunately the State of the drill-
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? 142 What We Demand from France
sergeant and of feudalism -- the robber- State of
the Hoberaux. It is this caricature of Germany
which circulates to this day in France. The
Second Empire, which has performed so many
involuntary services to Germany, has, indeed, to
some extent shaken the self-consciousness of the
men of Alsace themselves. A few thinking men
have recognized the fact, which is clear as the light
of day, that any and every German State is at
present incomparably freer than Imperial France.
But the mass of the people, misguided by an inde-
scribably stupid provincial Press, was left without
any tidings of the immense change which was being
accompHshed in Germany, and lived on in its old
dreams.
Has a new and individual civiHzation come into
life in this German race, saturated with French
feelings and opinions? The people of Alsace,
accustomed after the manner of Germans to make
a virtue of necessity, often delight to declare that
their country forms the connecting link between
the Romance and the Germanic world, and that,
for this reason, it is of greater importance at the
present day to the progress of European culture
than formerly when it was a territory of the Ger-
manic Empire. No man has developed this idea
more delicately and felicitously than the highly
cultivated Miilhausener, Ch. Dollfus. About the
year i860 it appeared as if the province were really
about to fulfil this office of mediation. The
Revue Germanique, written chiefly by men from
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? What We Demand from France 143
Alsace, endeavoured to offer the French a faithful
picture of German science; the Temps also, con-
ducted by them, laboured to arrive at a fair
judgment of our political life. At that time even
Frenchmen of old Celtic blood remarked that
nothing but the imearthing of the Germanic forces
which had been half buried could supply the
French soil with new creative power; and we
Germans used to watch these unusual efforts
with honest delight. But all such attempts have
been utterly wrecked. It could not well have
been otherwise. The pleasure which the French
took in the works of the German intellect always
rested on the tacit assumption that we continued
to resemble the old caricature, that we were still a
people devoid of political organization, a people
of poets and thinkers. No sooner had the Bohe-
mian victories shown the power of the German
State than a change ensued in French Hfe, to
which we have failed to pay sufficient attention
here. The influence of German ideas halted;
the Revue Germanique died long ago; the Temps
has displayed precisely the same captiousness and
hostility against the new German Confederation
as has been shown by the rest of the French
papers; and after all the awful experiences of the
last few weeks we can expect nothing but a still
deeper estrangement for the immediate future.
Was Alsace in truth a connecting link between
Germany and France? A mutual giving and
taking is surely an indispensable element of such
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? 144 What We Demand from France
a connection. What have we received from the
people of Alsace? What have they been to us?
Their higher intellects were simply lost to German
national life, they became Frenchmen with a slight
colouring of German culture; like Dollfus himself,
they served the foreigner, not us. The loss of
the German provinces would be of infinitely more
importance to France than is implied in the dimi-
nution of the eighty-nine departements by three.
It would not only be a terrible moral blow -- for
these territories are the pride of the nation, the
oft-contested prize of ancient victories, the famed
terre classique de la France -- but a loss of intellect-
ual forces which it would be utterly impossible to
make good. It is astonishing to find in every
large town in France, everywhere and in every
station in life, the industrious, clever, and trust-
worthy sons of Alsace. The population of the
Departement Bas-Khin, although it is healthy and
fertile in the German fashion, considerably dimin-
ished during the decade from 1850 to i860, in
consequence of the emigration en masse into the
French cities. Are we to regard this regular
absorption of German forces by the French people
as a healthy action and reaction -- now that we
possess the power of putting an end to this morbid
state of affairs? Switzerland is really a land of
transition and of mediation. There, three nations,
united by means of a free and flexible constitution,
learn how to appreciate and deal considerately
with one another. But the centralization and the
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? What We Demand from France 145
domineering national spirit of France cannot allow
a province either an independent culture or a
separate language. Official statistics in France, as
their director, Legoyt, has often openly confessed,
disdain on principle to enquire into the rela-
tions between the different languages. The State
assumes that every Frenchman understands
French. The world is not permitted to learn
how many millions of Basques, Bretons, Proven-
gals, Flemings, and Germans have no acquaintance
with the language of the State ; the popular tongue
differing from it is to be degraded into a dialect,
into the speech of the uncultivated. The French
bureaucracy in Alsace has laboured in the direction
of this goal with a ruthless zeal, and so fanatically,
that Napoleon III was at times obliged to moder-
ate the clumsiness of his too eager officials. Supe-
rior education is entirely given in French. An
attempt has even been made recently, by the
introduction of French educational nurseries for
the young {Kindergarten) , to estrange the children
from their tenderest years from their mother-
tongue. Those who speak pure high- German may
sometimes find it easier to make themselves under-
stood by half-educated men in Alsace if they help
themselves out with French ; for people of this class
have lost the free and facile use of any form of
speech except the dialect of their native district.
The attempt to degrade the language of a nation
which is one of the standard-bearers of civilization,
into the rudeness of the Celtic patois of the Bretons,
10
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? 146 What We Demand from France
is sheer insanity and a sin against nature. The
proverb of our homely ancestors must remain
eternally true: "So German heart and Gaul-
ish tongue, strong man, lame steed, are suited
wrong. " The foreign language which has been
forced upon them has done unspeakable harm to
the upper classes of Alsace in their moral feeling
and in their spiritual life, and has impressed upon
the intellectual life of the province the character
of a bastard culture which is neither fish nor flesh.
What unhappy creatures these German boys are
who pass by in their gold-rimmed Lyceum caps
under the guardianship of an elegant ahhe, and
whose German souls are bidden to find edification
in Boileau and Racine, while they speak to the
servants in a horrible Gaulish perversion of their
native language, the language of Goethe.
In the struggle between the independent lang-
uages of highly civilized nations, flexibility of form
is unfortunately apt to gain the victory over depth
and thoroughness of culture. The national char-
acter of the rising generation ultimately depends
upon the mothers ; and women find it hard to with-
stand the charm of brilliant form. As a rule,
woman -- more loyal than man in good things as
well as in evil -- adheres more firmly than he does
to ancestral ways; the women of Alsace become
Gaulish faster than the men. This is proved by
ocular demonstration, and it is confirmed by
the returns reported from all the popular libraries
in the province, which show that the women hardly
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? What We Demand from France 147
read any books but French. The language of the
State, of good society, and of important commer-
cial transactions, is French. The language of the
books and newspapers is the same ; for it is better
to pass over in compassionate silence the barbar-
ous German translation which the Frenchman, M.
Schneegans, is in the habit of placing alongside
of the French text of his Cotirrier du Bas-Rhin.
Whoever has seen three generations of an Alsatian
family side by side must have had the growing
Gallicization of the upper classes brought palpably
before him. If one reminds these people of the
glorious German past, a confident "We are French-
men " helps them over all argument ; and if they are
men of learning, they are not unlikely, like the
maire Schutzenberger aforesaid, to add a few pro-
found phrases on the mutability of all things
human, as destructive even of national life. The
public service, the settlement of numerous French-
men in the province, and manifold family and
business connections, all hasten this unnatural
degeneration. Of the great families of the land,
some have crossed over to the right bank, like
the Schaumburgs, the Bocklins, the Tiirkheims;
the rest have, almost without exception, betaken
themselves to French ways, like the Keinachs,
the Andlaus, the Vogt von Hunolsteins. It was a
Zom von Bulach, a scion of the famous old house of
free imperial citizens {Reichshilrger), who recently
demanded, in a stormy Chauvinist speech in the
Corps Legislatif, the fortification of Huningen, to
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? 148 What We Demand from France
prevent the Fatherland falling a prey to the
Germans.
In contrast with this Gallicization of the edu-
cated classes, how glorious appears the faithful ad-
herence of the Alemannic peasant to the usages of
his ancestors. Here among the simple folk, where
culture is held of no account, and the whole intellec-
tual life is comprehended in the moral feelings, the
German tongue continues to hold unbounded sway,
and even among the higher classes it has frequently
remained the language of the feelings and of the
domestic hearth. The German wanderer, who
enters a village in the Vosges, is saluted at first by
some official ordinance or other in French, or by an
advertisement painted on the wall by the Great
Paris advertising firms, Chocolat Menier and Au
Pauvre Diahle. In the village itself everything is
German; red waistcoats, big fur caps, and three-
cornered hats, popular costumes of a primitive
antiquity which survive only in the remote valleys
of Schwarzwald. The name Gaulish (Wdlsch) is
often regarded even yet as a term of abuse. The
maire, the cantonnier , and a few of the younger
people whose wanderings as handicraftsmen have
carried them to a great distance, are frequently
the only persons who speak the foreign tongue
with facility. All the public decrees with which the
people are seriously meant to become acquainted
must be read out in both languages. To teach
the children in French is either impossible or they
forget in a few years what it has cost them so much
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? What We Demand from France 149
trouble to acquire. The peasant of the Sundgau
contemplates the stork's nest on his thatch with
the same pleasure as the Ditmarsher; he is on as
intimate terms with his stork as the other with his
Hadbar; and he receives the payment for lodging,
which the bird annually throws down, with equal
conscientiousness. If he reads anything at all,
he reads the jests of the "Hobbling Messenger"
{des hinkenden Boten), like his neighbour in the
Schwarzwald across the river. A rich mine of
primitive German legends and usages yet remains
among the woodmen up in the Wasgau, who push
the trunks of the trees, in the winter time, on
mighty sleighs {Schlitten), down the steep preci-
pice. The Gaul bestows on these sturdy fellows
the exquisite name of SchlitteMrs,
But the mightiest of all the forces at the root of
our German ways is Protestantism, which is the
strong shield of the German language and of Ger-
man life here, as in the mountains of Transylvania,
and on the distant shores of the Baltic. After all,
it is the free life of different creeds side by side
with one another which remains the strong root of
our modem German culture; and in this essential
characteristic, which distinguishes us both from
the Catholic south and the Lutheran north, Alsace,
which is divided between the confessions {parti-
tat esch), fully participates. So long as the peasant
continues to sing ^' Eiji feste Burg ist unser Gott/^
from a German hymn-book, German life will not
perish in the Wasgau. The loving and energetic
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? 150 What We Demand from France
spirit of old Spener, and, after him, of the worthy
Oberlin, the benefactor of the Stein thai, survives to
this day in the excellent evangelical pastors of
Alsace ; and perhaps they are the only men in the
country who secretly long for its return to Ger-
many. Any loyal love on the part of the shame-
fully persecuted Evangelical Church towards the
land of the Dragonnades, and of the War of the
Cevennes, must have been out of the question at
all times. German science -- the free and fearless
spirit of inquiry of the Tubingen school -- prevails
among the admirable scholars of the Protestant
Faculty at Strassburg, some of whom still lecture
in German. They owe nothing to the French but
an active practical sense, which seeks to impress
the truth which their own minds have recognized
on the life and constitution of their congregations.
What is it, . speaking generally, that is healthy
and energetic in Alsace? what is it that elevates
these districts above the dark mists of self-indul-
gence and priestly obscurantism which overhang
most of the remaining provinces of France? The
German nature of Alsace, and nothing else. The
active spirit of its inhabitants, and the ineradi-
cable impulse towards self-government, which
even the artifices of Napoleonic prefects could not
wholly banish, and which refused to bow its head
before the monarchical socialism of the Second Em-
pire, are German. Let the worthy members of So-
ciete Industrielle de Mulhouse believe as long as they
choose that they are Frenchmen in body and soul,
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? What We Demand from France 151
and set up the inscriptions Place Napoleon and Rue
Napoleon at the street-comers of their artisan town.
That admirable enterprise of free civic spirit could
only have arisen on Germanic soil, just as the
great city workhouse of Ostwald, near Strassburg,
could only have been founded by a German city.
The cites ouvrieres in French towns, in Lille, for
example, owe their origin to the State. The
active care of the communes and fathers of famiHes
for popular education, which has at least succeeded
in bringing about this result, that on an average
there are, of a hundred unmarried persons in the
Haut-Rhin, only from six to seven, and in the Bas-
Rhin only from two to three, unable to write, is
altogether German. This seems poor enough in
comparison with the state of things in Germany,
but it is brilliant in comparison with that in
France. The spirit of the popular libraries and
singing-clubs, which used to be constantly at feud
with the Prefects, is German. Notwithstanding
the Gaulish tongue which it uses, the scholarly
culture, which produces such good fruit in the
Revue Critique and in the works of the provin-
cial historians, is German. Even among the
French-speaking classes, have we not the more
natural, straightforward, youthful way of German
life, which has been infected indeed, but not yet
destroyed, by Celtic immorality? Are not the
military virtues of the man of Alsace German too?
Is the same thing not true of his loyalty and dis-
cipline -- of the close application to the military
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? 152 What We Demand from France
instruction of each individual soldier, and the de-
light in accurate firing, which make him alone,
among the soldiers of France, capable of an effec-
tive partisan war (Parteigdngerkrieg) , and which
have created a species of volunteer popular army --
the franC'tireurs -- in his part of the country alone?
But, alas! when we praise the indestructible
German nature of the man of Alsace, the subject of
our praise declines to receive it. He adheres to his
conviction that he is no Suabian, and that all
Suabians are yellow-footed. He was introduced
by France, sooner than we Germans have been,
into the grand activity of the modem economical
world. To France he owes a most admirable
organization of the means of commercial inter-
course, a wide market, the influx of capital on a
great scale, and a high rate of wages, which, to this
day, draws daily labourers in crowds at harvest-
time from the fields of Baden across the Rhine.
From the French he has learned a certain savoir-
faire; his industrial activity, upon the whole,
stands higher than that of his German neighbour;
and in special branches -- in nursery gardening,
for instance -- he presents a marked contrast to
the easy-going indifference of the natives of Baden.
The son of Alsace is bound to his great State not
merely by ancient loyalty and pride, but by mate-
rial bonds, the power of which we, in our freer
political life, generally fail duly to appreciate. A
bureaucratic centralization possesses this advan-
tage after all, among a thousand sins, that it
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? What We Demand from France 153
penetrates like a binding mortar into every joint
of the social edifice, and renders it unspeakably
difficult to break one of its stones out of the wall.
What labour will be requisite before the threads
which lead across from Strassburg and Colmar to
Paris are all cut! The jonction-nomanie of the
French, their anxiety to make a profit out of the
State, even were it by means of a bureau de tabac,
has penetrated as far as these frontier lands. A
countless host of officials, pensioners and veterans,
swarms in this province. All the great institu-
tions of intercourse and credit are in reality State
establishments. What a power lies in the hands
of the Great Eastern Railway [of France], which,
although a private company in name, is in fact
connected closely with the State ! If the district is
given up to Germany, and this railway remains
what it is, every pointsman and guard on the
line will contribute to the French propaganda.
The smallest amount of resistance will probably
be offered to the reconquest in Lower Alsace, where
a third of the population is Protestant, and where
a vigorous intercourse is carried on with Baden
and the Palatinate. The state of affairs on the
Upper Rhine is far less promising. A powerful
clergy is there, adding fuel to the hatred of the
lively and excitable people against Germany, and
it finds no counterpoise in the Protestant portion
of the population, which amounts only to a tithe.
The manufactories of Mulhausen have their chief
market in France, although a considerable busi-
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? 154 What We Demand from France
ness has been done in the calico and muslin trade
of the place at the Leipzig fairs since the recent
treaties of commerce. The German State is
repugnant to the old reminiscences of this Swiss
city. Its patrician families assiduously display
their French sentiments. Its masses of working-
men, thrown together from long distances, and
who come, for the most part, from Germany,
have always welcomed the hollow pathos of the
Paris demagogues. But it is in German Lorraine
that we are threatened by the most embittered
hostility. In a population almost exclusively
Catholic, German ways of thought and Hfe have
never found so grand a development as in Alsace ;
and for more than a century they have been
abused by all the evil artifices of the French
bureaucracy -- most cynically of all in the old
Luxemburg districts round Diedenhofen; besides
which their ordinar}^ intercourse takes the peas-
antry to two French towns, to Metz and Nancy.
Most assuredly, the task of reuniting there the
broken links between the ages is one of the heaviest
that has ever been imposed upon the political
forces of our nation. Capital and culture, those
faithful allies of the German cause in Posen and
in Schleswig- Hoist ein, are our opponents. Ger-
man ways of thought and life have been terribly
discredited in the upper classes of these western
marches. What we deem horrible, they deem
sacred. They remember with pride how it was at
Strassburg that Rouget de I'lsle once composed
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? What We Demand from France 155
those burning lines which threatened the enemies
of France, the Germans, with death and destruc-
tion; and how the soldiers' Emperor passed out
to his war against us through the gate of Auster-
litz. The city which fought as a heroine in the
spiritual battles of the Reformation boasts to-day
in her own phrase, De porter fierement Vepee de la
France. What appears ridiculous to us seems to
them to speak for itself. They are not ashamed
to call themselves ''Monsieur" Schwilgue or
Stockle. They allow the venerable names of their
towns to be changed into Gaulish perversions,
Hke Wasselonne, Cemay, and Selestat. They
obediently accept the indescribably absurd Ober-
nai (for Oberehnheim) , and consider it fine to
write "antwergmestres^* when they are speaking
in their French historical works of the masters of
the old guilds (Meister der alien Ziinfte). They
are astonished at our shrugging our shoulders as we
contemplate the monument in honour of the indus-
trial grandees of the place, on the market-place at
Rappoltsweiler, and see enumerated on it, in the
style of the tables issued from the Prefectures,
the names Meyer, Jaques, Muller, Etienne, etc.
What to us seems freedom, to them appears
oppression. While taking part in the life of a
State whose parties bow beneath despotism as
their taskmaster, without an exception, they
have lost all perception for the truth that every
healthy kind of freedom imposes burdens and
duties.
