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.
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.
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
org/access_use#pd-us
? 112 What We Demand from France
fertility with wealthy Normandy, the luxurious
plains of England, and the teeming corn-fields of
the interior of Russia. But here, in Alsace, there
is a real German district, the soil of which, under
favouring skies, is rich with blessings such as only
a very few spots in the Upper Rhenish Palatinate
and the mountain country of Baden enjoy. The
unusual configuration of the country has made it
possible to pierce canals through gaps in the
mountains -- magnificent waterways, from the
Rhine to the basin of the Rhone and of the Seine --
such as German ground scarcely ever admits.
We are by no means rich enough to be able to re-
nounce so precious a possession.
Everything, in fact, is as clear as day. None of
the foreign statesmen who interfered with our
plans at the time of the Second Peace of Paris
ever attempted to meet the arguments of Hum-
boldt. Jealousy of the growing greatness of
Germany, and the opposition which dominated all
that period between the policies of England and
of Russia -- which vied with each other in showing
favour to France -- were decisive. England had
already secured her war prizes in her colonies, and
Russia hers in her Polish territories ; Germany was
left alone to make her further demands.
The full cynicism of this jealous statesmanship
is revealed in the words which the Czar Alexander
permitted himself in a thoughtless moment,
"Either I must have a hand in this pie, or the pie
shall not be baked at all. " Freiherr von Stein
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? What We Demand from France 113
said, sorrowfully, "Russia decides that we are to
remain vulnerable! " What a difference there is
between then and now! We are not now so
exhausted in money and in men as not to be able
to defy the opposition of the whole of Europe.
The neutral Powers might have stopped this
French attempt at robbery by one strong and
timely word. They failed to utter it, and they
cannot complain to-day because we alone decide
what we shall take as the prize of the victory
which we alone have won. We owe it to the clear-
sighted audacity of Count Bismarck that this war
was begun at the right time -- that the Court of
the Tuileries was not allowed the welcome respite
which would have permitted it to complete the
web of its treacherous devices. And as the war
began as a work of clear and statesmanlike calcu-
lation, so it will end. If, during its prosecution,
we have been magnanimous, almost to a fault -- if
we turned aside from the revolting ill-usage of
our countrymen in France, and disdained to re-
quite with a like brutality the loathsome threats
directed against the women of Baden, we are all
the more bound, at all hazards, to be firm about
the terms of peace, and to complete the work of
1 8 13 and of 1815. What lay in all our hearts as a
far-off vision of longing desire has suddenly sprung
up a practical fact, to be dealt with by a nation un-
prepared for it. Occasion urges us ; the wonderful
favour of Destiny bends down to offer us, in
the grey dawn of German unity, the wreath
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? 114 What We Demand from France
which we hardly hoped to have won in the mid-day
splendour of the German Empire. Let us grasp
it with courageous hands, that the blood of the
dear ones who have died for us may not again cry
out against our faint-heartedness.
II
ALSACE AND LORRAINE PAST AND PRESENT
Where lies the frontier which we are justified in
demanding? The answer is simple; for since the
French nation made itself prominent in the Celto-
Romance world, its national life and ours have at
all times stood toughly and sharply opposed to one
another. The two peoples dwelt side by side, not
cast together like the nations which a geographical
necessity forces to mingle at various points in
Eastern Europe. Our West and South have,
for a long period, received more culture than they
gave, and yet the French boundary of language has
been able, in the course of centuries, to advance
no farther than a few hours' march. It became a
source of trouble to both peoples when an arbitrary
system of creating new states wedged the Lor-
raine-Burgundian Empire in between their natural
frontiers, to become an apple of unceasing contests ;
while both made a termination of the struggle
difficult to themselves by an aberration of the
national imagination. To this day the French-
man continues to glance across the Rhine with
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? What We Demand from France 115
feelings like those of the ancient Romans under
C^sar. He has never forgotten the days when
gorgeous Treves was the capital of Gaul; his
school-books describe those first centuries of the
Middle Ages, in which no French nation yet ex-
isted, as a period of French dominion. The German
Karl is the Frenchman's Charlemagne; in numer-
ous inscriptions in Alsatian towns the memory of
the Merovingian Dagoberts is purposely freshened
up in order to recall the ancient power of France.
Already in the fifteenth century, when the Armag-
nacs were bringing fire and sword into Upper
Germany, the longing for the Rhine frontier
found expression in France. Above all, since the
days of Louis XIV and Napoleon I, State and
Society, Press and School, have run a race of
rivalry in perverting history; and the whole of
France laments the enormous breach between
Lauterburg and Dunkirk, which the grasping greed
of Germany is declared to have made in the natural
boundaries of France. We Germans, on the other
hand, are unwilling to forget the supreme rights
which the Holy Roman Empire once possessed
over the Burgundian kingdom of the Arelat.
We must hasten to relinquish cheerfully this
dreaming of antiquated dreams. As it is our
intention to force the French to renounce their
vision of the Rhine frontier, to give up to us
what is ours, to recognize the European necessity
of the two intermediate States on the Lower
Rhine and on the Scheldt, we must concede to
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? ii6 What We Demand from France
them what is their due, and frankly confess that
the conquering poHcy of France, directed against
the Burgundian territories, obeyed, in its begin-
nings, a well-justified national instinct. After-
wards, indeed, deluded by easy successes, it passed
all bounds. More than 50,000 square miles of
the Holy Empire belong at this day to the French
State, and by far the greater part of them most
justly. The Southern Provinces of the Burgund-
ian kingdom were French, beyond a doubt. When
Charles V endeavoured at the Peace of Madrid
to sever them from France, the Estates of Bur-
gundy unanimously vowed that they were French-
men, and Frenchmen they would remain; and the
history of three centuries has justified their de-
claration. The fact that the ancient one-headed
eagle of our Empire once stood gorgeous on the
town-hall of Lyons, over the same gate where we
see the equestrian statue of Henry IV to-day; the
fact that the same eagle once gazed down upon
the glorious amphitheatre of Aries; and all similar
facts, are but historical reminiscences which
concern us little, and which are of no more value
for the present policy of Germany than the ancient
feudal rights of our Emperors in Italy.
We desire to renew the power and glory of the
Hohenstaufens and the Ottos, but not their World-
Empire. Our new State owes its strength to the
national idea. Its intention is to be an honest
neighbour to every foreign nationality, a grasping
adversary to none ; and for this reason it finds its
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? What We Demand from France 117
western frontier indicated to it by the language
and manners and life of the rural population.
Every State is kept fresh and young from below.
New forces never cease to arise out of the healthy
depths of the peasant class, while the population
of the towns swiftly changes, and the families of
the upper classes either fall away or are carried off
into other habitations. We Germans still con-
tinue to make this experience in the colonies of our
eastern frontier. Wherever we have succeeded in
Germanizing the peasant, our national life stands
erect; wherever he has remained non-German,
German ways of life wage to this day a struggle for
their existence. Applying this standard, we shall
find German and French nationality separated by
a line which may be roughly described as leading
along the ridge of the Vosges to the sources of
the Saar, and thence to the north-west towards
Diedenhofen and Longwy. What lies beyond is
Gaulish. This boundary-line, hard to be per-
ceived in the hilly districts of Lorraine, is drawn
with mathematical precision at several points of
the Wasgau hills. Wandering westward from the
busy little town of Wesserling in Upper Alsace, one
first ascends through leafy woods, enjoying the
view into the smiling valley of the Thur, and
reaching at Urbes the river boundary, the frontier
of the departement of the Upper Rhine. There the
road leads through a long tunnel, and the moment
the traveller passes out of the dark into the
departement of the Vosges, he sees that the country
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? ii8 What We Demand from France
and its inhabitants have undergone a complete
change. The woods of Germany have vanished,
and naked hills surround the valley of the infant
Moselle. True, it is possible to guess, from the
aspect of the tall peasants, from whom the French
army draws so many fine-looking Cuirassiers,
that many a drop of Germanic blood may flow
in the veins of the population ; but down at Bous-
sang no word of German is spoken. The poorer
fashion in which the houses are built, the wooden
shoes, and the cotton night-cap, at once betray
French civilization. It is nothing short of German
Chauvinism which makes a few newspapers already
gratify themselves by restoring to Remiremont,
which is entirely French, the name of Reimers-
berg. What is it to us that the geographers
of the sixteenth century called Plombieres the
Plumbersbad? that lovely Pont-a-Mousson once
formed an imperial county named Muselbruck?
that no further back than eighty years ago the
Duchy of Lorraine was mentioned under the name
of Nomeny in the Diet at Ratisbon ?
So, too, it is possible, even in Nanzig (Nancy)
to discover faint traces of German reminiscences.
At the railway-station the German traveller is
cheered to observe the comfortable inscription
*'Trinkstube" by the side of the inevitable "Bu-
vette. *' But the capital of Lorraine is French in
manners and in language. This second and more
charming Versailles received its architectural
character from the French regime of its Stanislas le
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? What We Demand from France 119
Bienfaisant, and four years ago it was both sincere
and justified in celebrating the centenary jubilee
of its incorporation in France.
Hardly the tithe of those French provinces
which once upon a time belonged to the Ger-
manic Empire -- a territory comprising about 5000
square miles, with rather less than a million and a
half of inhabitants -- can at this day be reckoned
as German land. It is not the business of a wise
national policy to go very far beyond this extent
of territory; but, at the same time, such a policy
ought not to cling with doctrinaire obstinacy to the
boundary of language as a limit which must in no
case be crossed. There is no perfect identity
between the political and the national frontier in
any European country. Not one of the great
Powers, and Germany no more than the rest
of them, can ever subscribe to the principle that
"language alone decides the formation of States. '*
It would be impossible to carry that principle into
effect. From a military point of view, the German
territory in France is secured by two strongholds,
which lie a few miles beyond the line of language.
The fortress of Belfort commands the gap in the
mountains between the Jura and the Vosges, which
has so often been the gateway through which
invading hosts have passed into or out of France.
The upper part of the course of the Moselle, again,
is covered by Metz, which is at this day, like
Belfort, almost entirely French, in spite of its
ancient traditions as an Imperial city {Reichstadt) ,
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? I20 What We Demand from France
in spite of the German inscriptions which still
appear here and there, on a wagoner's hostelry in
the high-roofed '' German street" {Deutsche Gasse),
in spite of the bad French dialect spoken by its
citizens, in spite of the two thousand German
inhabitants, to whom sermons used to be preached
in German only a few years ago. Are we to
renounce these two strongholds for the sake of an
untenable dogma? Renounce the strong walls of
Metz, which are trebly necessary to us since, in our
good-natured desire for peace, we relinquished the
rock nest of Luxemburg? No! right and prudence
support our moderate claims when we simply de-
mand the German territory in the possession of
France, and so much Gaulish territory as is neces-
sary for securing its possession; in other words,
something like the Departements Haut-Rhin and
Bas-Rhin in their entirety, the greater part of Mo-
selle, and the lesser part of Meurthe. The Virgin im-
age, which so long stood boastfully over the arms of
Metz, and which defied even the hosts of Charles V,
shall be struck to the ground by our good sword
to-day. The brave Saxon troops were permitted
to aid in reconquering the fortress with the sacri-
fice of which the Saxon Maurice commenced the
long period of German humiliation. It ill befits a
people rising to new greatness to abandon the
spot where the justice of its destiny has so visibly
prevailed. The comfort of the French at Metz is
of little importance compared with the necessity
of securing its natural capital, and a strong bul-
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? What We Demand from France 121
wark, for the province of Lorraine. In the pro-
gress of time, German ways of Hfe will find a home
once more in the ancient episcopal city. As for
measures of force against their nationality: they
need no more be feared by the Gauls of Lorraine
and the inhabitants of the few Gallic-speaking
villages of the Vosges, than they have had to be
feared by the brave Walloons in Malmedy and
Montjoie, who at this day rival their German
fellow-citizens in faithful self-devotion.
If a livelier sense of their common duties and
interests prevailed in the family of European
States, the arrogant disturber of their peace would
have to be humbled far more deeply. He would
be forced to give up Savoy and Nice to Italy, and
West Flanders, famous from of old, with Dun-
kirk, with Lille -- the ancient Ryssel -- with Douai,
on whose town-hall the Flemish lion still brand-
ishes the weather-flag, to Belgium. But the vis
inerticE, the fear which fills Europe at the thought
of any violent change, and the secret mistrust with
which all the States regard the new Germany, will
hardly permit so thorough a reconstruction of
the political system of Europe.
The German territory which we demand is ours
by nature and by history. It is true that here,
where the Rhine still rushes along as an untamed
stream from the glaciers, changing its bed accord-
ing to its will, the people on its opposite banks
maintain no such lively intercourse as below
Mainz. The traveller who passes from an Alsatian
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? 122 What We Demand from France
village towards the Rhine has often to make long
detours through bushes and rolHng stones, past
morasses in which the Rhine formerly had its bed,
and he is not unf requently detained for an hour by
the riverside, until a wretched boat ferries him
across to one of the castles of the KaiserstuhL
But, after all, no greater difficulties beset the in-
tercourse between the high-lying lands of Baden
and the Uberrhein than that between the Baden
and the Bavarian Palatinate, or between Starken-
burg and Rhenish Hesse. Nature herself meant
that the plain of the Upper Rhine should have a
common destiny, and has environed it with mount-
ain walls of the same formation. On either bank
the moimtain range reaches its greatest height to
the south; for the peasant of the Breisgau, the
Ballon d'Alsace serves as a weather-glass, just as
the Sundgau man on the other side gazes upon the
Schwarzwald Belchen and the Blue Mountain
(dem Blauen). On either bank the lovely scenery
displays its full beauty where a cross valley comes
forth out of the mountain-chain, where the
Engelsburg commands the entrance to the valley
of the Thur, where the three castles of Rappolt-
stein look down into the narrow gorge, where the
ancient fastness, Hoh-Barr, rises from the red
rock of the valley of the Zom -- just as on the
opposite side at Freiburg, Offenburg, and Baden.
A trade-road of hoar antiquity crosses the middle
of the plain, passing through the Wasgau at the
Zabem Stair, through the Schwarzwald at Pforz-
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? 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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? 112 What We Demand from France
fertility with wealthy Normandy, the luxurious
plains of England, and the teeming corn-fields of
the interior of Russia. But here, in Alsace, there
is a real German district, the soil of which, under
favouring skies, is rich with blessings such as only
a very few spots in the Upper Rhenish Palatinate
and the mountain country of Baden enjoy. The
unusual configuration of the country has made it
possible to pierce canals through gaps in the
mountains -- magnificent waterways, from the
Rhine to the basin of the Rhone and of the Seine --
such as German ground scarcely ever admits.
We are by no means rich enough to be able to re-
nounce so precious a possession.
Everything, in fact, is as clear as day. None of
the foreign statesmen who interfered with our
plans at the time of the Second Peace of Paris
ever attempted to meet the arguments of Hum-
boldt. Jealousy of the growing greatness of
Germany, and the opposition which dominated all
that period between the policies of England and
of Russia -- which vied with each other in showing
favour to France -- were decisive. England had
already secured her war prizes in her colonies, and
Russia hers in her Polish territories ; Germany was
left alone to make her further demands.
The full cynicism of this jealous statesmanship
is revealed in the words which the Czar Alexander
permitted himself in a thoughtless moment,
"Either I must have a hand in this pie, or the pie
shall not be baked at all. " Freiherr von Stein
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? What We Demand from France 113
said, sorrowfully, "Russia decides that we are to
remain vulnerable! " What a difference there is
between then and now! We are not now so
exhausted in money and in men as not to be able
to defy the opposition of the whole of Europe.
The neutral Powers might have stopped this
French attempt at robbery by one strong and
timely word. They failed to utter it, and they
cannot complain to-day because we alone decide
what we shall take as the prize of the victory
which we alone have won. We owe it to the clear-
sighted audacity of Count Bismarck that this war
was begun at the right time -- that the Court of
the Tuileries was not allowed the welcome respite
which would have permitted it to complete the
web of its treacherous devices. And as the war
began as a work of clear and statesmanlike calcu-
lation, so it will end. If, during its prosecution,
we have been magnanimous, almost to a fault -- if
we turned aside from the revolting ill-usage of
our countrymen in France, and disdained to re-
quite with a like brutality the loathsome threats
directed against the women of Baden, we are all
the more bound, at all hazards, to be firm about
the terms of peace, and to complete the work of
1 8 13 and of 1815. What lay in all our hearts as a
far-off vision of longing desire has suddenly sprung
up a practical fact, to be dealt with by a nation un-
prepared for it. Occasion urges us ; the wonderful
favour of Destiny bends down to offer us, in
the grey dawn of German unity, the wreath
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? 114 What We Demand from France
which we hardly hoped to have won in the mid-day
splendour of the German Empire. Let us grasp
it with courageous hands, that the blood of the
dear ones who have died for us may not again cry
out against our faint-heartedness.
II
ALSACE AND LORRAINE PAST AND PRESENT
Where lies the frontier which we are justified in
demanding? The answer is simple; for since the
French nation made itself prominent in the Celto-
Romance world, its national life and ours have at
all times stood toughly and sharply opposed to one
another. The two peoples dwelt side by side, not
cast together like the nations which a geographical
necessity forces to mingle at various points in
Eastern Europe. Our West and South have,
for a long period, received more culture than they
gave, and yet the French boundary of language has
been able, in the course of centuries, to advance
no farther than a few hours' march. It became a
source of trouble to both peoples when an arbitrary
system of creating new states wedged the Lor-
raine-Burgundian Empire in between their natural
frontiers, to become an apple of unceasing contests ;
while both made a termination of the struggle
difficult to themselves by an aberration of the
national imagination. To this day the French-
man continues to glance across the Rhine with
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? What We Demand from France 115
feelings like those of the ancient Romans under
C^sar. He has never forgotten the days when
gorgeous Treves was the capital of Gaul; his
school-books describe those first centuries of the
Middle Ages, in which no French nation yet ex-
isted, as a period of French dominion. The German
Karl is the Frenchman's Charlemagne; in numer-
ous inscriptions in Alsatian towns the memory of
the Merovingian Dagoberts is purposely freshened
up in order to recall the ancient power of France.
Already in the fifteenth century, when the Armag-
nacs were bringing fire and sword into Upper
Germany, the longing for the Rhine frontier
found expression in France. Above all, since the
days of Louis XIV and Napoleon I, State and
Society, Press and School, have run a race of
rivalry in perverting history; and the whole of
France laments the enormous breach between
Lauterburg and Dunkirk, which the grasping greed
of Germany is declared to have made in the natural
boundaries of France. We Germans, on the other
hand, are unwilling to forget the supreme rights
which the Holy Roman Empire once possessed
over the Burgundian kingdom of the Arelat.
We must hasten to relinquish cheerfully this
dreaming of antiquated dreams. As it is our
intention to force the French to renounce their
vision of the Rhine frontier, to give up to us
what is ours, to recognize the European necessity
of the two intermediate States on the Lower
Rhine and on the Scheldt, we must concede to
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? ii6 What We Demand from France
them what is their due, and frankly confess that
the conquering poHcy of France, directed against
the Burgundian territories, obeyed, in its begin-
nings, a well-justified national instinct. After-
wards, indeed, deluded by easy successes, it passed
all bounds. More than 50,000 square miles of
the Holy Empire belong at this day to the French
State, and by far the greater part of them most
justly. The Southern Provinces of the Burgund-
ian kingdom were French, beyond a doubt. When
Charles V endeavoured at the Peace of Madrid
to sever them from France, the Estates of Bur-
gundy unanimously vowed that they were French-
men, and Frenchmen they would remain; and the
history of three centuries has justified their de-
claration. The fact that the ancient one-headed
eagle of our Empire once stood gorgeous on the
town-hall of Lyons, over the same gate where we
see the equestrian statue of Henry IV to-day; the
fact that the same eagle once gazed down upon
the glorious amphitheatre of Aries; and all similar
facts, are but historical reminiscences which
concern us little, and which are of no more value
for the present policy of Germany than the ancient
feudal rights of our Emperors in Italy.
We desire to renew the power and glory of the
Hohenstaufens and the Ottos, but not their World-
Empire. Our new State owes its strength to the
national idea. Its intention is to be an honest
neighbour to every foreign nationality, a grasping
adversary to none ; and for this reason it finds its
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? What We Demand from France 117
western frontier indicated to it by the language
and manners and life of the rural population.
Every State is kept fresh and young from below.
New forces never cease to arise out of the healthy
depths of the peasant class, while the population
of the towns swiftly changes, and the families of
the upper classes either fall away or are carried off
into other habitations. We Germans still con-
tinue to make this experience in the colonies of our
eastern frontier. Wherever we have succeeded in
Germanizing the peasant, our national life stands
erect; wherever he has remained non-German,
German ways of life wage to this day a struggle for
their existence. Applying this standard, we shall
find German and French nationality separated by
a line which may be roughly described as leading
along the ridge of the Vosges to the sources of
the Saar, and thence to the north-west towards
Diedenhofen and Longwy. What lies beyond is
Gaulish. This boundary-line, hard to be per-
ceived in the hilly districts of Lorraine, is drawn
with mathematical precision at several points of
the Wasgau hills. Wandering westward from the
busy little town of Wesserling in Upper Alsace, one
first ascends through leafy woods, enjoying the
view into the smiling valley of the Thur, and
reaching at Urbes the river boundary, the frontier
of the departement of the Upper Rhine. There the
road leads through a long tunnel, and the moment
the traveller passes out of the dark into the
departement of the Vosges, he sees that the country
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? ii8 What We Demand from France
and its inhabitants have undergone a complete
change. The woods of Germany have vanished,
and naked hills surround the valley of the infant
Moselle. True, it is possible to guess, from the
aspect of the tall peasants, from whom the French
army draws so many fine-looking Cuirassiers,
that many a drop of Germanic blood may flow
in the veins of the population ; but down at Bous-
sang no word of German is spoken. The poorer
fashion in which the houses are built, the wooden
shoes, and the cotton night-cap, at once betray
French civilization. It is nothing short of German
Chauvinism which makes a few newspapers already
gratify themselves by restoring to Remiremont,
which is entirely French, the name of Reimers-
berg. What is it to us that the geographers
of the sixteenth century called Plombieres the
Plumbersbad? that lovely Pont-a-Mousson once
formed an imperial county named Muselbruck?
that no further back than eighty years ago the
Duchy of Lorraine was mentioned under the name
of Nomeny in the Diet at Ratisbon ?
So, too, it is possible, even in Nanzig (Nancy)
to discover faint traces of German reminiscences.
At the railway-station the German traveller is
cheered to observe the comfortable inscription
*'Trinkstube" by the side of the inevitable "Bu-
vette. *' But the capital of Lorraine is French in
manners and in language. This second and more
charming Versailles received its architectural
character from the French regime of its Stanislas le
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? What We Demand from France 119
Bienfaisant, and four years ago it was both sincere
and justified in celebrating the centenary jubilee
of its incorporation in France.
Hardly the tithe of those French provinces
which once upon a time belonged to the Ger-
manic Empire -- a territory comprising about 5000
square miles, with rather less than a million and a
half of inhabitants -- can at this day be reckoned
as German land. It is not the business of a wise
national policy to go very far beyond this extent
of territory; but, at the same time, such a policy
ought not to cling with doctrinaire obstinacy to the
boundary of language as a limit which must in no
case be crossed. There is no perfect identity
between the political and the national frontier in
any European country. Not one of the great
Powers, and Germany no more than the rest
of them, can ever subscribe to the principle that
"language alone decides the formation of States. '*
It would be impossible to carry that principle into
effect. From a military point of view, the German
territory in France is secured by two strongholds,
which lie a few miles beyond the line of language.
The fortress of Belfort commands the gap in the
mountains between the Jura and the Vosges, which
has so often been the gateway through which
invading hosts have passed into or out of France.
The upper part of the course of the Moselle, again,
is covered by Metz, which is at this day, like
Belfort, almost entirely French, in spite of its
ancient traditions as an Imperial city {Reichstadt) ,
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? I20 What We Demand from France
in spite of the German inscriptions which still
appear here and there, on a wagoner's hostelry in
the high-roofed '' German street" {Deutsche Gasse),
in spite of the bad French dialect spoken by its
citizens, in spite of the two thousand German
inhabitants, to whom sermons used to be preached
in German only a few years ago. Are we to
renounce these two strongholds for the sake of an
untenable dogma? Renounce the strong walls of
Metz, which are trebly necessary to us since, in our
good-natured desire for peace, we relinquished the
rock nest of Luxemburg? No! right and prudence
support our moderate claims when we simply de-
mand the German territory in the possession of
France, and so much Gaulish territory as is neces-
sary for securing its possession; in other words,
something like the Departements Haut-Rhin and
Bas-Rhin in their entirety, the greater part of Mo-
selle, and the lesser part of Meurthe. The Virgin im-
age, which so long stood boastfully over the arms of
Metz, and which defied even the hosts of Charles V,
shall be struck to the ground by our good sword
to-day. The brave Saxon troops were permitted
to aid in reconquering the fortress with the sacri-
fice of which the Saxon Maurice commenced the
long period of German humiliation. It ill befits a
people rising to new greatness to abandon the
spot where the justice of its destiny has so visibly
prevailed. The comfort of the French at Metz is
of little importance compared with the necessity
of securing its natural capital, and a strong bul-
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? What We Demand from France 121
wark, for the province of Lorraine. In the pro-
gress of time, German ways of Hfe will find a home
once more in the ancient episcopal city. As for
measures of force against their nationality: they
need no more be feared by the Gauls of Lorraine
and the inhabitants of the few Gallic-speaking
villages of the Vosges, than they have had to be
feared by the brave Walloons in Malmedy and
Montjoie, who at this day rival their German
fellow-citizens in faithful self-devotion.
If a livelier sense of their common duties and
interests prevailed in the family of European
States, the arrogant disturber of their peace would
have to be humbled far more deeply. He would
be forced to give up Savoy and Nice to Italy, and
West Flanders, famous from of old, with Dun-
kirk, with Lille -- the ancient Ryssel -- with Douai,
on whose town-hall the Flemish lion still brand-
ishes the weather-flag, to Belgium. But the vis
inerticE, the fear which fills Europe at the thought
of any violent change, and the secret mistrust with
which all the States regard the new Germany, will
hardly permit so thorough a reconstruction of
the political system of Europe.
The German territory which we demand is ours
by nature and by history. It is true that here,
where the Rhine still rushes along as an untamed
stream from the glaciers, changing its bed accord-
ing to its will, the people on its opposite banks
maintain no such lively intercourse as below
Mainz. The traveller who passes from an Alsatian
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? 122 What We Demand from France
village towards the Rhine has often to make long
detours through bushes and rolHng stones, past
morasses in which the Rhine formerly had its bed,
and he is not unf requently detained for an hour by
the riverside, until a wretched boat ferries him
across to one of the castles of the KaiserstuhL
But, after all, no greater difficulties beset the in-
tercourse between the high-lying lands of Baden
and the Uberrhein than that between the Baden
and the Bavarian Palatinate, or between Starken-
burg and Rhenish Hesse. Nature herself meant
that the plain of the Upper Rhine should have a
common destiny, and has environed it with mount-
ain walls of the same formation. On either bank
the moimtain range reaches its greatest height to
the south; for the peasant of the Breisgau, the
Ballon d'Alsace serves as a weather-glass, just as
the Sundgau man on the other side gazes upon the
Schwarzwald Belchen and the Blue Mountain
(dem Blauen). On either bank the lovely scenery
displays its full beauty where a cross valley comes
forth out of the mountain-chain, where the
Engelsburg commands the entrance to the valley
of the Thur, where the three castles of Rappolt-
stein look down into the narrow gorge, where the
ancient fastness, Hoh-Barr, rises from the red
rock of the valley of the Zom -- just as on the
opposite side at Freiburg, Offenburg, and Baden.
A trade-road of hoar antiquity crosses the middle
of the plain, passing through the Wasgau at the
Zabem Stair, through the Schwarzwald at Pforz-
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? 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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