ALSACE-LORRAINE

The Tour de France has hit the Vosges mountains, and the Danish commentators are always going on about the fact that most of the town names seem to sound German rather than French. A look at history would show why that should be the case.

Lorraine is Lothringen in German, meaning "belonging to Lothair". It was part of the middle kingdom of Lotharingia, created by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the three surviving grandsons of Charlemagne split his empire between them. As the eldest of the three, Lothair took the imperial title and what were then the richest parts, namely the lands along the Rhine, plus Italy. Competition between the three successor states was compounded by defeats by the Vikings, an inability to hold the Italian lands, and a lack of legitimate male heirs to rule the remainder. However, in broad terms, the middle and eastern kingdoms eventually merged to become the Holy Roman Empire, while the western one eventually became France. Language reflected this division; the dialects along the western bank of the Rhine (including Swiss, Alsace, and Luxemburgisch) are all Germanic rather than derived from Latin.

The western kingdom became France, but was originally much smaller than the modern day country, lacking Brittany (Celtic), much of the south (Provence) and those lands west of the Rhine. However, as the power of the French kings gradually increased during the Middle Ages, the idea developed that France had "natural" borders; the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine. From the fifteenth century onwards, the latter idea coincided with the dynastic rivalry between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, the perennially elected Holy Roman emperors. Habsburg control over the lands of the Empire that were not their hereditary properties was not as absolute as that in France, and successive French kings and ministers spied an opportunity for expansion.

Their big break came during the Thirty Years War. France entered the war in 1635 as an ally of Sweden and against the Empire, despite the fact that it and the Habsburgs were staunchly Catholic and Sweden Protestant. At the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the war, France was awarded the bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, plus rights over ten imperial cities in Alsace. During the reign of Louis XIV, France used the foothold granted by the latter to extend power over the whole of Alsace. Subsequently, in the mid-eighteenth century, when the then Duke of Lorraine Francis Stephen was betrothed to Maria Theresa of Austria, France under Louis XV cut a deal whereby it got Lorraine in return for recognising Maria Theresa's inheritance to the Habsburg lands (not straightforward, since she was a woman) and supporting Francis Stephen as Emperor (who had to be a man; Francis Stephen got Tuscany as his personal property in recompense for Lorraine). By the time of the French revolution, Alsace-Lorraine was firmly part of France.  

In 1871 it was annexed by the new German Empire following the Franco-Prussian war; the use of the French language was forbidden, and large numbers of Germans came in as "colonists". France returned the favour when it got the provinces back at the end of the First World War. French became obligatory, German was banned, and a number of those colonists expelled. The pendulum swung back in 1940, when the Nazis conquered France. Alsace-Lorraine then reverted to France in November 1944, as the Allies approached Germany itself. It has remained there ever since.

Because Germany as a country didn't exist before 1871, Alsace-Lorraine is often thought of as being historically French. However, if you go back further in time, it has a much longer history of being, not German as such, but Germanic. That's why most of those place names tend to sound German, they have been there a long time.

Walter Blotscher