All that
happened
before the
sacred date of '89 belongs to archaeological research,
and no bridge remains to connect to-day with
yesterday.
sacred date of '89 belongs to archaeological research,
and no bridge remains to connect to-day with
yesterday.
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
hathitrust.
org/access_use#pd-us
? What We Demand from France 123
heim gate, connecting the Westerreich, to use the
expression of our fathers, with the interior of Ger-
many. Where it crosses the river Hes Strassburg,
the Cologne of the Upper Rhine, with her Minster
visible as a landmark in a wide circuit of Upper
Germany, as the Cathedral of Cologne stands in the
districts of Berg. A glorious panorama of German
scenery! This thought has most assuredly sug-
gested itself to everyone who has stood, in the
freshness of morning, when the shreds of the mists
still cling to the rocky summits upon the walls of
Schlettstadt. High up on the mountains tower
the dark pine-forests, which are hardly known
in the woodless Gaulish country ; lower down those
bright chestnut-woods, which no man who has
once made the Rhine his home can bear to miss;
on the slopes, the gardens of the vines; and down
below, that undulating, odorous plain, the mere
recollection of which charmed from Goethe in his
old age glowing words of praise for his ''glorious
Alsace. " Even we of the younger generation,
who are more familiar with the beauty of the
mountains, and have a duller sense for the charms
of the plain than the people of the eighteenth
century, cannot help joining in the enthusiasm of
the old Master-poet, as he describes the broad
fruit-trees in the midst of the corn-field, the ancient
limes of the Wanzenau, and the play of the sunlight,
caught and broken at numberless openings of the
wide waving plain.
German story winds its wondrous network
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? 124 What We Demand from France
round the hundred castles of the Sundgau as
closely as the ivy twining round their walls. Here
by the rushing waterfall the giant's daughter
ascended to the castle of Nideck, carrying the
peasant wight in her apron, plough and horses and
all. There on Tronja dwelt the dread Hagen of
the Nibelungs; high up on the Wasgenstein raged
the wild conflicts of our Song of Waltharius. Here,
in the valley of the Zom, Fridolin went his way to
the forge. There, by the Bergkirche, flows a
fountain of the tears of Ottilia, saint of sorrow and
suffering, like unto that which flows on the other
bank in the quiet recess of the valley near Freiburg.
Everywhere in the merry little land, German
humour and German merriment and enjoyment of
life held their jousts. The Count of Rappoltstein
was the king of all singers and errants of the Holy
Empire, and every year he summoned the master-
less Guild of Jesters to a joyous Diet of Pipers. In
the town-hall of Miilhausen is preserved to this day
the chattering-stone {Klapper stein), which used
to be hung round the necks of quarrelsome women.
Without the golden wine of Rangen the delicate
spire of the Church of St. Theobald at Thann could
never have risen so boldly into the air; for it was a
prosperous vintage, and the grape-gatherers came
to the rescue of the despairing architect and mixed
fiery must with his mortar, lest the joists of the
airy edifice should fall asunder.
Alsace has always maintained an honourable
place in the earlier history of German Art. A
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? What We Demand from France 125
thousand years ago the famous Ottfried, in his
monk's cell at Weissenburg, wrote his Krist, the
most ancient great monument of old German
poetry which has come down to our time. Gott-
fried of Strassburg sang the passionate lay of
Tristan and Isolda, and Master Walther von der
Vogelweide proclaimed the poetic glories of Rein-
mar of Hagenau. Those marvels of Gothic archi-
tecture arose in Thann and Strassburg, and Martin
Schongauer painted his simple-minded pictures for
the good town of Colmar. Above all the jest and
the mocking play of wit have remained ever dear
to the joyous sons of our frontier-land. Nearly
all the noteworthy humorists of our earlier litera-
ture were natives of Alsace, or, at all events, soci-
ally connected with the district. In Strassburg
the liberal-minded and lovable wag, Sebastian
Brandt, wrote his Ship of Fools, and Thomas
Mumer his malicious satires against the Luther-
ans. George Wickram, who, in his Rollwagen
(country wagon) , collected the merriest conceits of
our ancestors, was a Colmar boy; and in Forbach
dwelt Fischart, the mightiest among the few
Germans who have manifested power amounting
to genius in comic poetry.
And what a busy mixture of political forces,
what power and boldness of German civic life,
there gathered in the little land in the days when
the lions of the Hohenstaufen still gazed down as
lords and masters from the royal citadel above.
Eleven free cities of the Empire, among them
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? 126 What We Demand from France
Hagenau, the favourite city of Barbarossa, which
he entrusted with the imperial jewels, and, out-
shining all the rest, Strassburg. What has the
capital of the Departement Bas-Rhin done, or seen
done, that might be even compared to the ancient
history -- great in its smallness, proud in its mod-
esty -- of the German Imperial city? Its episcopal
see was called the noblest of the nine great founda-
tions which came one after another along the
''priestly lane" (Pfaffengasse) of the Rhine; and
at all times loud praises were heard in the Empire
of the ancient German honesty and bravery of its
citizens. Thus Strassburg faithfully shared all the
fortunes of the Rhenish cities -- among them the
diseases which assailed the very heart and soul of
our civic life: the Black Death, and its fellow, the
Jews' gangrene (Judenbrand) . She firmly adhered
to the Rhenish Hansa; like Cologne, she strove
with her bishop in bitter feuds ; she saw the great
families of the Zoms and Mullnheims contending
for the upper hand, as Cologne did those of her
Weisen and Overstolzen; she witnessed the men of
the Guilds rise in insurrection against the great
families, until at last after their victory there
was inscribed in the Common Book of the city
that excellent constitution, which Erasmus com-
pared, as a living ensample of well-ordered govern-
ment, to the polity of Massilia. The frontier-city
loved to hear itself called the strong outwork
of the Empire ; its citizens looked down with deep
hatred upon their Gaulish neighbours; and they
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? What We Demand from France 127
marched into the field, with the Swiss, against
Burgundians, and beheaded the baiHff of Charles
the Bold at Colmar. Happy days, when the
strong PJenfiigthiirm could hardly contain the
treasure of its wealth, when Gutenberg was
venturing upon his first essays, when the fame
of the Strassburg mastersingers {Meister Sanger)
flew far and wide through the Empire, and the
architectural lodge of the Minster sat in judgment
over the fellows of its craft as far as Thuringia
and Saxony, when the friendly Zurichers, in
their fortunate vessel, bore the hot Porridge-Pot
(Breitopf) down the stream, and Bishop William,
of Hohenstein, held the pompous entry of which
the keen pen of Sebastian Brandt has left us so
charming a description.
The age of the Reformation supervened. Ger-
many reached, for the second time, as she is now
reaching for the third time, one of the crowning
summits of her national life ; and the population of
Alsace, too, with lofty consciousness, took part
in the great struggles of the German mind. In
Strassburg, in Schlettstadt and Hagenau, Dringen-
berg and Wimpfelingen conducted the learned la-
bours of the schools of the Humanists ; Gailer von
Kaiserberg preached in German in the Strassburg
Minster against the abuses of the Church. There
was a wealth of intellectual forces, of which the
Alsace of to-day has not the faintest conception.
The maltreated peasantry laid passionate hold of
the world-liberating teachings of Wittenberg. The
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? 128 What We Demand from France
peasants in Alsace affixed the Bundschuh (shoe-
symbol of union) to the pole, like the peasants hard
by in the district of Spires and the Schwarzwald.
Like the latter, they fought and suffered. At
Zabem the Bishop of Strassburg passed his cruel
judgment on the rebels, as the hard prelate of
Spires did at Grombach and on the Kastemburg.
In the towns, however, the evangelical doctrine
maintained its footing. Fourteen cities of the
Empire, with Strassburg at their head, subscribed,
at the Diet of Spires, the famous Protest of the
Seven Princes, which was to give its name to the
new faith. Hereupon Martin Bucer began his
productive work at Strassburg. The city stood in
a meditating position between the Lutheranism of
the North and the doctrine of Zwingli. She liber-
ally bestowed upon Protestantism those weapons
which have never failed it. She founded her li-
brary, her gymnasium, and, at a later date, her fa-
mous University, where Hedio and Capito taught.
When the Protestants professed their creed at
Augsburg, Strassburg, together with three other
cities of Upper Germany, handed in her freer con-
fession, the " Tetrapolitana. " After this the city,
like the other chief towns of Upper Germany, -- ?
like Augsburg, Ulm, and Nuremberg, -- was involved
in the evil fortunes of the Schmalkaldic League.
There remained yet one hope -- the aid of France.
But the German city disdained an alHance with the
arch-foe of the Empire. With death in his heart,
her burgomaster, Jacob Sturm, bent his knee be-
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? What We Demand from France 129
fore Charles V, for the Spaniard was the Emperor
after all. And when, six years later, the criminally
reckless among the German Protestants actually
concluded their offensive and defensive league with
France, and when King Henry II, as the Protector
of ''Germanic liberty," advanced his armies
towards the Rhine, Strassburg once more proved
true to Emperor and Empire, and shut her gates
against the French.
Are we to believe that that rich millennium of
German history has been utterly destroyed by two
centuries of French dominion? Only we Germans
who dwell in the upper country, which our ances-
tors were so fond of calling "the Empire" {das
Reich) , can thoroughly realize the terrible extent of
the criminal excesses of the Hunlike fury which was
directed against us by the French. How different
would be the aspect of our native land did we
possess, besides the glorious city types of ancient
Danzig, Liibeck, and Nuremberg, our ancient
Spires also, and our ancient Worms and Freiburg,
and Heidelberg -- those cities with proud towers
and lofty roofs, with which Merian was still
acquainted. In the Church of Landau the sepul-
chre still stands which Louis XIV caused to be
erected to his lieutenant-governor in Alsace, the
wild Catalan Montclar, the destroyer of the magni-
ficent Madenburg. The Christian virtue of the
ruthless brigand is lauded in grandiloquent Latin,
and the inscription thus unctuously concludes:
**Pass on thy way, O wanderer, and learn that it
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? 130 What We Demand from France
is only virtue which ennobles military glory. "
Was not such a blasphemous offence even more
shameful for us than for the wrongdoers them-
selves? But the law of nations knows of no
prescription.
The land of the Vistula in the possession of the
German order and the castle of its Grand Master,
the Marienburg, were once upon a time delivered,
by the treason of German Estates, into the hands
of the stranger. Three centuries passed away
before Germany felt herself to be strong enough to
demand back from the Poles that of which they
had despoiled her. With the same right we seek
justice to-day for the wrong committed by France
against our West two centuries ago.
As soon as the three Lorraine Sees had been
made over, by the treason of Maurice of Saxony,
to France, the Paris politicians, with cunning
calculation, directed their first efforts to obtain
Alsace; because the remnant of Lorraine, sur-
rounded on all sides by French domains, must
follow, after that, of itself. The unspeakable
meanness of the numberless petty sovereign lords,
among whom Alsace was parcelled out, offered the
most satisfactory basis of operations to the devices
of French intrigue during the rotten years of peace
which followed the religious pacification of Augs-
burg. On the ruins of Hoh-Barr may yet be
read how, in the year 1584, Johann von Mander-
scheidt. Bishop of Strassburg, erected hanc arcem
nulli inimicam -- the frontier - fortress against
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? What We Demand from France 131
France, hostile to no one ! Do not these two words
imply the bitterest of satires against the shameful
impotence of the sinking Germanic Empire? Do
they not recall the delightful inscription, "Grant
peace, Lord, in this our day, " which the valiant
army of the Prince-Bishop of Hildesheim wore on
their hats? Thus had the higher nobiHty of the
once great German nation been already shaken in
its moral forces, when the Elector of Bavaria, in
the Thirty Years' War, abandoned Alsace to the
French, upon which the instrument of the Peace
of Westphalia, in terms capable of divers inter-
pretations, transferred the rights which had pre-
viously belonged to the House of Austria to the
French Crown.
It was inevitable that the rigid unity of the
French State should next direct its activity towards
the final annihilation of those relics of German
petty- State life which still survived in its new
domain. French residents were fixed at Strass-
burg, and French pay was drawn by the three
notorious brothers Fiirstenberg, who governed
in Munich, in Cologne, and in Strassburg, and
whom their indignant contemporaries called the
Egonists. 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.
? What We Demand from France 123
heim gate, connecting the Westerreich, to use the
expression of our fathers, with the interior of Ger-
many. Where it crosses the river Hes Strassburg,
the Cologne of the Upper Rhine, with her Minster
visible as a landmark in a wide circuit of Upper
Germany, as the Cathedral of Cologne stands in the
districts of Berg. A glorious panorama of German
scenery! This thought has most assuredly sug-
gested itself to everyone who has stood, in the
freshness of morning, when the shreds of the mists
still cling to the rocky summits upon the walls of
Schlettstadt. High up on the mountains tower
the dark pine-forests, which are hardly known
in the woodless Gaulish country ; lower down those
bright chestnut-woods, which no man who has
once made the Rhine his home can bear to miss;
on the slopes, the gardens of the vines; and down
below, that undulating, odorous plain, the mere
recollection of which charmed from Goethe in his
old age glowing words of praise for his ''glorious
Alsace. " Even we of the younger generation,
who are more familiar with the beauty of the
mountains, and have a duller sense for the charms
of the plain than the people of the eighteenth
century, cannot help joining in the enthusiasm of
the old Master-poet, as he describes the broad
fruit-trees in the midst of the corn-field, the ancient
limes of the Wanzenau, and the play of the sunlight,
caught and broken at numberless openings of the
wide waving plain.
German story winds its wondrous network
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? 124 What We Demand from France
round the hundred castles of the Sundgau as
closely as the ivy twining round their walls. Here
by the rushing waterfall the giant's daughter
ascended to the castle of Nideck, carrying the
peasant wight in her apron, plough and horses and
all. There on Tronja dwelt the dread Hagen of
the Nibelungs; high up on the Wasgenstein raged
the wild conflicts of our Song of Waltharius. Here,
in the valley of the Zom, Fridolin went his way to
the forge. There, by the Bergkirche, flows a
fountain of the tears of Ottilia, saint of sorrow and
suffering, like unto that which flows on the other
bank in the quiet recess of the valley near Freiburg.
Everywhere in the merry little land, German
humour and German merriment and enjoyment of
life held their jousts. The Count of Rappoltstein
was the king of all singers and errants of the Holy
Empire, and every year he summoned the master-
less Guild of Jesters to a joyous Diet of Pipers. In
the town-hall of Miilhausen is preserved to this day
the chattering-stone {Klapper stein), which used
to be hung round the necks of quarrelsome women.
Without the golden wine of Rangen the delicate
spire of the Church of St. Theobald at Thann could
never have risen so boldly into the air; for it was a
prosperous vintage, and the grape-gatherers came
to the rescue of the despairing architect and mixed
fiery must with his mortar, lest the joists of the
airy edifice should fall asunder.
Alsace has always maintained an honourable
place in the earlier history of German Art. A
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? What We Demand from France 125
thousand years ago the famous Ottfried, in his
monk's cell at Weissenburg, wrote his Krist, the
most ancient great monument of old German
poetry which has come down to our time. Gott-
fried of Strassburg sang the passionate lay of
Tristan and Isolda, and Master Walther von der
Vogelweide proclaimed the poetic glories of Rein-
mar of Hagenau. Those marvels of Gothic archi-
tecture arose in Thann and Strassburg, and Martin
Schongauer painted his simple-minded pictures for
the good town of Colmar. Above all the jest and
the mocking play of wit have remained ever dear
to the joyous sons of our frontier-land. Nearly
all the noteworthy humorists of our earlier litera-
ture were natives of Alsace, or, at all events, soci-
ally connected with the district. In Strassburg
the liberal-minded and lovable wag, Sebastian
Brandt, wrote his Ship of Fools, and Thomas
Mumer his malicious satires against the Luther-
ans. George Wickram, who, in his Rollwagen
(country wagon) , collected the merriest conceits of
our ancestors, was a Colmar boy; and in Forbach
dwelt Fischart, the mightiest among the few
Germans who have manifested power amounting
to genius in comic poetry.
And what a busy mixture of political forces,
what power and boldness of German civic life,
there gathered in the little land in the days when
the lions of the Hohenstaufen still gazed down as
lords and masters from the royal citadel above.
Eleven free cities of the Empire, among them
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? 126 What We Demand from France
Hagenau, the favourite city of Barbarossa, which
he entrusted with the imperial jewels, and, out-
shining all the rest, Strassburg. What has the
capital of the Departement Bas-Rhin done, or seen
done, that might be even compared to the ancient
history -- great in its smallness, proud in its mod-
esty -- of the German Imperial city? Its episcopal
see was called the noblest of the nine great founda-
tions which came one after another along the
''priestly lane" (Pfaffengasse) of the Rhine; and
at all times loud praises were heard in the Empire
of the ancient German honesty and bravery of its
citizens. Thus Strassburg faithfully shared all the
fortunes of the Rhenish cities -- among them the
diseases which assailed the very heart and soul of
our civic life: the Black Death, and its fellow, the
Jews' gangrene (Judenbrand) . She firmly adhered
to the Rhenish Hansa; like Cologne, she strove
with her bishop in bitter feuds ; she saw the great
families of the Zoms and Mullnheims contending
for the upper hand, as Cologne did those of her
Weisen and Overstolzen; she witnessed the men of
the Guilds rise in insurrection against the great
families, until at last after their victory there
was inscribed in the Common Book of the city
that excellent constitution, which Erasmus com-
pared, as a living ensample of well-ordered govern-
ment, to the polity of Massilia. The frontier-city
loved to hear itself called the strong outwork
of the Empire ; its citizens looked down with deep
hatred upon their Gaulish neighbours; and they
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? What We Demand from France 127
marched into the field, with the Swiss, against
Burgundians, and beheaded the baiHff of Charles
the Bold at Colmar. Happy days, when the
strong PJenfiigthiirm could hardly contain the
treasure of its wealth, when Gutenberg was
venturing upon his first essays, when the fame
of the Strassburg mastersingers {Meister Sanger)
flew far and wide through the Empire, and the
architectural lodge of the Minster sat in judgment
over the fellows of its craft as far as Thuringia
and Saxony, when the friendly Zurichers, in
their fortunate vessel, bore the hot Porridge-Pot
(Breitopf) down the stream, and Bishop William,
of Hohenstein, held the pompous entry of which
the keen pen of Sebastian Brandt has left us so
charming a description.
The age of the Reformation supervened. Ger-
many reached, for the second time, as she is now
reaching for the third time, one of the crowning
summits of her national life ; and the population of
Alsace, too, with lofty consciousness, took part
in the great struggles of the German mind. In
Strassburg, in Schlettstadt and Hagenau, Dringen-
berg and Wimpfelingen conducted the learned la-
bours of the schools of the Humanists ; Gailer von
Kaiserberg preached in German in the Strassburg
Minster against the abuses of the Church. There
was a wealth of intellectual forces, of which the
Alsace of to-day has not the faintest conception.
The maltreated peasantry laid passionate hold of
the world-liberating teachings of Wittenberg. The
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? 128 What We Demand from France
peasants in Alsace affixed the Bundschuh (shoe-
symbol of union) to the pole, like the peasants hard
by in the district of Spires and the Schwarzwald.
Like the latter, they fought and suffered. At
Zabem the Bishop of Strassburg passed his cruel
judgment on the rebels, as the hard prelate of
Spires did at Grombach and on the Kastemburg.
In the towns, however, the evangelical doctrine
maintained its footing. Fourteen cities of the
Empire, with Strassburg at their head, subscribed,
at the Diet of Spires, the famous Protest of the
Seven Princes, which was to give its name to the
new faith. Hereupon Martin Bucer began his
productive work at Strassburg. The city stood in
a meditating position between the Lutheranism of
the North and the doctrine of Zwingli. She liber-
ally bestowed upon Protestantism those weapons
which have never failed it. She founded her li-
brary, her gymnasium, and, at a later date, her fa-
mous University, where Hedio and Capito taught.
When the Protestants professed their creed at
Augsburg, Strassburg, together with three other
cities of Upper Germany, handed in her freer con-
fession, the " Tetrapolitana. " After this the city,
like the other chief towns of Upper Germany, -- ?
like Augsburg, Ulm, and Nuremberg, -- was involved
in the evil fortunes of the Schmalkaldic League.
There remained yet one hope -- the aid of France.
But the German city disdained an alHance with the
arch-foe of the Empire. With death in his heart,
her burgomaster, Jacob Sturm, bent his knee be-
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? What We Demand from France 129
fore Charles V, for the Spaniard was the Emperor
after all. And when, six years later, the criminally
reckless among the German Protestants actually
concluded their offensive and defensive league with
France, and when King Henry II, as the Protector
of ''Germanic liberty," advanced his armies
towards the Rhine, Strassburg once more proved
true to Emperor and Empire, and shut her gates
against the French.
Are we to believe that that rich millennium of
German history has been utterly destroyed by two
centuries of French dominion? Only we Germans
who dwell in the upper country, which our ances-
tors were so fond of calling "the Empire" {das
Reich) , can thoroughly realize the terrible extent of
the criminal excesses of the Hunlike fury which was
directed against us by the French. How different
would be the aspect of our native land did we
possess, besides the glorious city types of ancient
Danzig, Liibeck, and Nuremberg, our ancient
Spires also, and our ancient Worms and Freiburg,
and Heidelberg -- those cities with proud towers
and lofty roofs, with which Merian was still
acquainted. In the Church of Landau the sepul-
chre still stands which Louis XIV caused to be
erected to his lieutenant-governor in Alsace, the
wild Catalan Montclar, the destroyer of the magni-
ficent Madenburg. The Christian virtue of the
ruthless brigand is lauded in grandiloquent Latin,
and the inscription thus unctuously concludes:
**Pass on thy way, O wanderer, and learn that it
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? 130 What We Demand from France
is only virtue which ennobles military glory. "
Was not such a blasphemous offence even more
shameful for us than for the wrongdoers them-
selves? But the law of nations knows of no
prescription.
The land of the Vistula in the possession of the
German order and the castle of its Grand Master,
the Marienburg, were once upon a time delivered,
by the treason of German Estates, into the hands
of the stranger. Three centuries passed away
before Germany felt herself to be strong enough to
demand back from the Poles that of which they
had despoiled her. With the same right we seek
justice to-day for the wrong committed by France
against our West two centuries ago.
As soon as the three Lorraine Sees had been
made over, by the treason of Maurice of Saxony,
to France, the Paris politicians, with cunning
calculation, directed their first efforts to obtain
Alsace; because the remnant of Lorraine, sur-
rounded on all sides by French domains, must
follow, after that, of itself. The unspeakable
meanness of the numberless petty sovereign lords,
among whom Alsace was parcelled out, offered the
most satisfactory basis of operations to the devices
of French intrigue during the rotten years of peace
which followed the religious pacification of Augs-
burg. On the ruins of Hoh-Barr may yet be
read how, in the year 1584, Johann von Mander-
scheidt. Bishop of Strassburg, erected hanc arcem
nulli inimicam -- the frontier - fortress against
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? What We Demand from France 131
France, hostile to no one ! Do not these two words
imply the bitterest of satires against the shameful
impotence of the sinking Germanic Empire? Do
they not recall the delightful inscription, "Grant
peace, Lord, in this our day, " which the valiant
army of the Prince-Bishop of Hildesheim wore on
their hats? Thus had the higher nobiHty of the
once great German nation been already shaken in
its moral forces, when the Elector of Bavaria, in
the Thirty Years' War, abandoned Alsace to the
French, upon which the instrument of the Peace
of Westphalia, in terms capable of divers inter-
pretations, transferred the rights which had pre-
viously belonged to the House of Austria to the
French Crown.
It was inevitable that the rigid unity of the
French State should next direct its activity towards
the final annihilation of those relics of German
petty- State life which still survived in its new
domain. French residents were fixed at Strass-
burg, and French pay was drawn by the three
notorious brothers Fiirstenberg, who governed
in Munich, in Cologne, and in Strassburg, and
whom their indignant contemporaries called the
Egonists. 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.
