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The Franco—German Boundary of 1871

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Richard Hartshorne
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Extract

In the history of wars and diplomacy in the Western state system of the past several centuries, the most important single boundary is surely that of northeastern France. Since the unification of both Germany and Italy in the last century, the one territorial problem within western Europe that has most seriously endangered the peace of Europe and the world is that of Alsace-Lorraine. While the Germans regarded the annexation of 1871 as a restoration of areas once a part of Germany, they did not return to any previously established boundary, but rather created one that was newly drawn for the purpose. What factors influenced them to place the boundary—the international boundary from 1871 to 1919—precisely where they did place it?

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , January 1950 , pp. 210 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1950

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References

1 Blache, Paul Vidal de la, in La France de l'Est (Lorraine-Alsace), Paris, 1901, p. 152.Google Scholar

3 Poschinger, Heinrich, Bismarck Portefeuille, Stuttgart, 1898–1900, III, 24.Google Scholar

4 This decree of the King of Prussia, as leader of the North German Confederation, was agreed upon at a Council of War held at Pont-à-Mousson immediately following the great battles in the environs of Metz, but still twelve days before the decisive surrender at Sedan.

In form, the decree merely revised the areas of the two military governments that had been announced during the previous week, one for Alsace and one for Lorraine (though Strasbourg and Metz were still in French hands): five arrondissements (administrative districts) in northern Lorraine were detached from the general government of Lorraine and added to that of Alsace. The purpose of the change was to put under one administration the area that the Germans intended to annex. The population of the area concerned was told by the Official News for Alsace on September 27, “ on the basis of decisions recently resolved upon in Headquarters,” that “Prussia and the allied German states will under all conditions insist upon the annexation of this area with Germany as a defensive zone against future French attacks.” (Quoted in Petermann's Mitteilungen, XVI [1870], 433; cf. also May, Gaston, La Traité de Francfort, Paris, 1909, pp. 87–100.)Google Scholar

5 In the decree of August 21, 1870, it was defined simply in terms of the French political subdivisions of the time—i.e., those drawn up during the Revolution with little reference to the historic past. It consisted of the two (Alsatian) departments of the Upper and Lower Rhine; three of the four arrondissements of the department of Moselle, namely, Sarregue-mines, Thionville, and Metz; and two of the five arrondissements of the department of Meurthe: Sarrebourg and Chateau-Salins. The reader should not be confused by the subsequent change in names of the French departments. The portions of both departments that remained to France after 1871 were united in the single department of Meurthe-et-Moselle which has not since been altered. When Lorraine Annexée was regained after the first World War, it was established without territorial change as the department of Moselle.

6 Laussedat, A., La Delimitation de la Frontière Franco-Allemande, Paris, 1901, p. 24.Google Scholar This famous “green line” had apparently been tentatively agreed upon by the Prussian authorities in the previous fall, but had been subject to repeated debates since then which were finally settled just before the meeting with the French representatives. Certainly it ia an error to conclude, as have various students, both French and German, from the phraseology in the treaty that the “green line” was printed and published in September 1870; the meaning is clear that the line had been added, presumably by hand, to two copies of a map previously published.

7 May, op. cit., pp. 114–23.

8 Abeken, Heinrich, Ein schlichtes Leben in bewegter Zeit, aus Briefen zusammengestellt, Berlin, 1898Google Scholar, letter of November 29, 1870.

9 Bismarck, , “Politische Schriften,” Die gesammelten Werke, Berlin, 1931, Bd. 6b, p. 448.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 450.

11 Bismarck, , “Gespräche,” Die gesammelten Werke, Band 7–8, Berlin, 1924, 1926, I, 393.Google Scholar

12 Boeckh, Richard, Der deutschen Volkszahl und Sprachgebiet in den Europäischen Staaten, Berlin, 1869, pp. 17f.Google Scholar The sections covering Alsace and Lorraine constitute 20 pages of text and 14 pages of tables. Boeckh introduced his study with a significant exposition of the “principle of nationality,” not as a necessary criterion of the limits of a state, but as a right of every folk-group to full freedom in the use and development of its own language and culture, even though that be different from the major language of the state in which the group was included. Since, however, the Germans were convinced that the French government had used every means possible to repress the use of German in Alsace and Lorraine, this exposition did not deter them from using his data in 1870–71 to measure the area of Lorraine that should be added to Germany.

13 Petermann, using Boeckh's data, showed these newer French districts as “mixed” in language in marking the language boundary on the map of the General Government of Alsace (Petermann's Mitteilungen, XVI [1870], Tafel 22). The official count subsequently taken in the region in December 1871, showed that this zone in which French had replaced German was somewhat wider than either Boeckh or Kiepert had supposed, as the latter frankly recognized in “Der Sprachgrenze in Elsass-Lothringen,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, IX (1874), 307–20, with map.

14 In the Vosges highlands, the green line, drawn evidently along the drainage divide, was believed to coincide roughly with the linguistic divide—though subsequent information demonstrated that a narrow strip of French-speaking territory was to be found east of the drainage divide and one or two small districts of German language west of the crest were left in France. Where the boundary turned to the west opposite Strasbourg, the Bruche valley was believed to be German in its lower portion, French in the higher part, whereas in fact it had become largely French throughout. As a part of the department of Vosges, rather than Bas-Rhin, this area had not been originally included in the General Government of Alsace but was added to it in November of 1870, and was annexed entirely to Germany. Controlling routes to Strasbourg across a broad easy saddle in the Vosges, it would no doubt have been included for strategic reasons regardless of language. At the southern end of the Vosges, the lowland around Beifort was recognized as French, but, presumably because of its strategic importance no change was made here until the negotiations at Versailles, when Bismarck granted to the French the city of Belfort and a part of the surrounding French area.

West of the Vosges, the green line as adopted at Versailles followed for some distance the drainage divide between the Saar and the Meurthe, which was also approximately the linguistic divide, but from Avricourt west and northwest it departed radically from that to include the greater part of the predominantly French-speaking arrondissements of Cha-teau-Salins and Metz. By cutting off minor parts of the French-speaking portions of these arrondissements, the green line of February 1871 decreased to some extent the area of French language that had been included in the decree of the previous August.

On the northwest corner, near Thionville, no change was made in the line that had been proclaimed in August, even though that left in France a strip of seven or eight formerly German-speaking communes, some of which were believed to be still predominantly German.

15 From Thionville north there are two alternative routes: one follows the Moselle itself which cuts a wide gap through the ridge bordering the plain on the east; the other continues along the plain to the city of Luxemburg, thence eastward to rejoin the Moselle route at Treves, above the beginning of the gorge.

16 A “cuesta“ is defined as an asymmetrical hill, steep on one side and gently sloping onthe other.

17 Quoted by Lorenz, Ottkar in Kaiser Wilhelm und die Begrundung des Reiches, Jena, 1902, p. 523.Google Scholar

18 Busch, Moritz, Tagebuchblätter, Leipzig, 1899Google Scholar, entry for September 6, 1870.

19 The inclusion of Chateau-Salins served to cover the routes across the open country southeast of Metz toward the Saar.

20 The detailed information on the iron industry is taken largely from two conten poraneous reports: the manuscript report prepared in August 1870 by the German minir engineer, Wilhelm Hauchecorne, as translated and published many years later by Engerand, Femar in Les Frontières Lorraine et la Force Allemande, Paris, 1916, pp. 289–305Google Scholar; an an article originally published in Moniteur des intérêts matériels, April 23 and 30, 187 extracted as “Influence de la cession de l'Alsace-Lorraine á l'Allemagne sur l'industr métallurgique,” in Revue Universelle des Mines, de la Métallurgie, etc., 1871, pp. 241–25 The production data for 1869, which apparently were not published until 1872, are given 1 Engerand, , op. cit., pp. 171 ff.Google Scholar

21 Engerand, Fernand, Le Fer sur une frontière la politique métallurgique de l'Et allemand, Paris, 1919, pp. 129, 145.Google Scholar

22 It is perfectly possible, as some French writers have suggested, that the Ruhr industrialists may have taken an opposing position. The Ruhr-Lorraine connections that were to become of such transcendant importance had not yet developed, and the Ruhr industrialists may have regarded a Saar-Lorraine combination as undesirable competition.

23 Cf. the map in Petermann's Mitteilungen, 1870, Tafel 22.

24 See footnote 20.

25 It seems more likely that the Civil Commissioner received it subsequently and one would suppose that he would have shown it to his military superior, the Governor-General of Alsace, since much of the area it discussed had been included in that General Government, or that, as a document significant for the question of determining the ultimate boundary of Germany, he would have called it to the attention of his civilian superior, Bismarck. No reference to it however has been found in any of the German literature.

Our knowledge of this report, and even of the mere fact that it was made, is based solely on a copy (or possibly the original after a copy had been made) which the Civil Commissioner for Alsace had transmitted on September 11 to the military governor of Lorraine at Nancy, and which the French officials found there after the departure of the Germans and retained in the prefectural archives. The map which Hauchecorne made to accompany his original report was unfortunately not found—it may possibly not have been transmitted to Nancy. May, who first noted the existence of the report in 1909, assumed that someone in authority had assigned Hauchecorne the task of preparing it (op. cit., p. III); Engerand concluded that he did it of his own volition (Les Frontières Lorraine, p. 288).

26 Evidently the Moulaine, a small tributary valley of the Chiers, southeast of Longwy.

27 Hauchecorne's report, loc. cit., p. 292. Similar description of the development of that time is given in “Influence de la cession de l'Alsace-Lorraine …,” loc. cit.

28 Hauchecorne's report, loc. cit., p. 295. The report recognized that the mines were concentrated near the margins on the north and east, using shallow pits or horizontal tunnels cut back from the outcrops in the bluffs, and that few shaft-mines had been dug farther back where the beds were deeper. But it did not mention a theory which is said to have been current at the time, that only those ores found within two kilometers of the outcrop were worth working. Neither did it discuss the problem of using the high-phosphorous ores for steelmaking.

29 From Thiers' report as quoted by Jacob, Karl in Bismarck und die Erwerbung Elsass-Lothringen, 1870–71, Strassburg, 1905, notes on p. 25Google Scholar; cf. also May, op. cit., p. 125.

30 The inclusion of the entire arrondissement of Briey would have added only 8 per cen in area and 4 per cent in population to the total territory claimed by the original decree, a calculated from the data given by Wagner, Hermann in “Das Reichsland Elsass-Lothringei nach den definitiven Bestimmungen des Friedensvertrages von 10 Mai, 1871,” Petermann' Mitteilungen, XVII, (1871), 299–306.Google Scholar

31 Vionville and Ste. Marie aux Chênes, sites of two of the heaviest battles of the war wit nessed personally by the Emperor, who was anxious that the cemeteries of the Germai soldiers and officers who had fallen there should be included in Germany (Abeken, op. cit letters of February 24 and 26, 1871; Busch., op. cit., entries for February 22 and 23, 1871).

32 Jacob, , op. cit., p. 66.Google Scholar

33 Count Bray, according to a later statement paraphrased in Bismarck, “Gespräche,” I, 393.

34 The views of the Crown Prince are mentioned because they were believed to reflect those of a number of others close to the court, rather than because of his position. For in spite of that, and of his mature years, he was frequently excluded from discussions of state matters, both because of fear that information might leak out through his English wife and because of doubts about the stability of his thinking. In a diary entry of February 25, 1871, he noted, “as usual no one thought it necessary to tell me anything.” On the question of Metz, his views show considerable vacillation (though no more so than those of Bismarck). Extracts from his diary of this period were published after his death in Deutschen Rundschau, September 1888, and re-published, as Jus Kaiser Friedrichs Tagebuch, 1870–1871, in New York, 1888; cf. Wolbe, Eugen, Kaiser Friedrich: die Tragödie des Uebergangen, Hellerau bei Dresden, 1931, pp. 199–200.Google Scholar

35 Bismarck did not keep a diary and his later reminiscences of this period, as Haller has shown, cannot be taken as accurate (Bismarck's Friedenschlusse, Munich, 1916, pp. 77f.). Statements made to the French representatives or to his German colleagues must be regarded as arguments in negotiations which did not necessarily represent what the speaker was thinking. Even his own immediate staff were not taken into his confidence, as his aide, Abeken, observes (op. cit., letter of January 24, 1871). Earlier students of this particular question did not have available all the evidence collected in the Gesammelte Werke, published in the 1920's and 1930's.

36 Quoted in this instance from Hahn, Ludwig, Fürst Bismarck; Sein politisches Leben und Wirken, urkundlich in Thatsachen und des Fürsten eignenen Kundgebungen, Berlin, 1878, II, 328.Google Scholar Johannes Haller, who analyzes in detail the factors influencing Bismarck's thinking on the problem of Metz (op. cit., pp. 67–72), finds in this statement a demonstration of Bismarck's characteristic manner “of treating political questions above all geographically.”

37 Haller, , op. cit., pp. 81 f.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. 82.

39 In Poschinger, , op. cit., III, 24.Google Scholar

40 Busch, op. cit., entries of August 22 and 28, and September 4, 6, and 30, 1870.

41 Hahn, , op. cit., p. 134Google Scholar; Bismarck, , “Politische Schriften,” pp. 519 f.Google Scholar The possibility that if Germany voluntarily limited herself to the annexation of areas actually German in culture, France would ultimately accept the settlement as permanent, thus making unnecessary the consideration of military strategy of the next war, was evidently viewed as completely unrealistic by all those associated with the German supreme council, with the possible exception of the Crown Prince. France had bitterly opposed the unification of Germany, had resented the Prussian victories over Austria, and would be expected to seek revenge for the humiliating defeat in the current war; and the public expression of loyalty to France by the German-speaking population of the provinces to be annexed would keep alive in France the conviction that these provinces should be recovered, even if the population concerned was ultimately won over to loyalty to Germany.

42 Bismarck, , “Gespräche,” I, 393.Google Scholar

43 At least this was Thiers' understanding of the conversation, according to Gabriel Hano-taux Contemporary France, tr. by J. C. Tarver, New York, Putnam's, 1903, I, 21; and Jacob, , op. cit., pp. 57Google Scholar, 69 f. and 16*.

44 Bismarck repeatedly expressed his concern that once the military victory had been established the war should be brought promptly to an end and he was ready to make considerable concessions if necessary to reach the definitive treaty of peace. Cf. Haller, , op. cit., p. 76Google Scholar; and Jacob, , op. cit., pp. 57Google Scholar, 69 f., 70, 74 f. and 16*.

45 Lorenz, , op. cit., pp. 516, 520.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., p. 516. He also sought the support of others to persuade the Emperor (title of the King of Prussia after the proclamation of January 18, 1871) to acquiesce in giving up Metz (Jacob, , op. cit., p. 80Google Scholar; Aus Kaiser Freidrichs Tagebuch, entry of February 21, 1871).

47 Haller, op. cit., p. 83.

48 As quoted by Busch, op. cit., entry of February 22, 1871.

49 Jacob, , op. cit., p. 79.Google Scholar

50 Abeken, op. cit., letter of February 26.

51 Aus Kaiser Friedrichs Tagebuch, entry for February 26.

52 Lorenz, , op. cit., p. 523.Google Scholar

53 Abeken, op. cit., letter of February 26, 1871; Bismarck, , “Politische Schriften,” p. 706Google Scholar; cf. Hanotaux, , op. cit., I, 123.Google Scholar In Paris on the evening of the same day, Thiers told the advisory committee of representatives of the National Assembly that “Metz was lost” but that he planned to put up a battle for Belfort (Jacob, , op. cit., p. 85).Google Scholar

54 Lorenz, , op. cit., p. 523.Google Scholar

55 The statements that Busch adds as presumably paraphrases of Bismarck's commentary are significant in their discussion of points previously never mentioned: “One would otherwise have had to give up large parts of Lorraine that one had in mind to secure. These parts had perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, were very fruitful, especially the Moselle Valley, and contained magnificent beds of iron ore.” (Busch, op. cit., entry for February 23, 1871). Whether these were points that the military urged on the Emperor we do not know, but they are not mentioned by any of the others present at headquarters who recorded their impressions of the debate. Judging from the population figure given, the statement quoted refers only to the arrondissement of Metz where the iron ore deposits were of minor importance; the great gain in iron was in the arondissement of Thionville, about which there had been no question.

56 Bismarck, , “Briefe,” Die gesammelten Werke, Band 14, II, 1862–1898, Berlin, 1933, p. 816.Google Scholar

57 Beust, the chancellor of Austria-Hungary, quotes Bismarck as telling him that he “had personally been opposed to the annexation of Metz in view of its French population and had agreed to it only on the determined demand of the military authorities.” (Bismarck, “Gespräche,” II, 16.) But this was after the event, and Bismarck may have had political reasons for wishing the Austrian government to believe that this was his view.

58 Haller states that experience showed the opposite, that the German-speaking population proved the more difficult, but he recognizes that Bismarck could not have been expected to foresee that (op. cit., pp. 82 f.).

59 Laussedat, , op. cit., pp. 31 f.Google Scholar, 47 f.; cf. Kiepert, , op. cit., p. 280Google Scholar, footnote 2.

60 Roesler states that “the boundary set for Lorraine was decided upon by strategists after consultation with the metallurgist Stumm and the mining engineer Hauchecorne” (Roesier, , op. cit., p. 56Google Scholar ), but I have not been able to find a source for this statement. Stumm, who had inherited his family's ironworks in Saarbrücken, would presumably have known Hauchecorne during the latter's service in that mining center. As a member of the Prussian Landtag, and a colonel in the army during the war, he would have been able to recommend Hauchecorne's name either to Bismarck or to the army authorities. But the suggestion might also have come from either the Civil Commissioner or the Military Governor of Alsace, or from government officials in Berlin who were familiar with Hauchecorne's career.

61 Cf. Engerand, , Les Frontières Lorraine …, p. 288.Google Scholar

62 Beyschlag, Friedrich, “Gedächtnisrede,” in Jahrbuch des Königlichen preussischen geologischen Landesanstalt und Bergakademie zu Berlin, XXI (1900), pp. xcvii–cGoogle Scholar; Laussedat, op. cit. Hauchecorne was not, as some French writers assumed, a renegade Frenchman, but a descendant of a French Huguenot family long established in Berlin.

63 The communications between the German members of the Commission and Bismarck have been published by Goldschmidt, Hans in Bismarck und die Friedensunterhändler, 1871: Die deutschfranzösischen Friedensverhandlungen zu Brüssel und Frankfurt, März-Dezember 1871, Berlin, 1929, reference on p. 78.Google Scholar

64 Ibid., p. 49. This clearly disproves Laussedat's suggestion, followed by some later French writers, that Bismarck had intentionally made the radius from Belfort indefinite in the preliminaries of peace so that he might have a basis for bargaining for additional territory in Lorraine. Nothing is clearer from the record than the fact that Bismarck was anxious to have the definitive treaty signed as soon as possible.

65 Goldschmidt, , op. cit., p. 78.Google Scholar

66 quote only the smaller part of Kiepert's sentence: “einige unsichere Parcellen … deren Zurückerwerbung den von Boeckh und mir betreffenden Ortes für die Grenzlinie gemachten Vorschlägen entsprechend durchgesetz wurde,” from “Der Sprachgrenze in El-sass-Lothringen,” p. 308. No doubt the contents of that memorandum was foreshadowed in the press articles which Kiepert notes that he and Boeckh published late in February, 1871.

67 Quoted in full in Hahn, , op. cit., p. 323.Google Scholar

68 Goldschmidt, , op. cit., pp. 78 f.Google Scholar

69 Kiepert had not only pointed out the difficulties this irregular salient would make in the control of smuggling but also noted correctly that it would leave to France a portion of the bluffs overlooking Thionville by nearly 700 feet, at a distance of five miles, a fact that appears to have been overlooked or ignored when Moltke's “green line” was drawn in thefall of 1870.

70 The following discussion is based on the very detailed description by Colonel Laussedat (a member for France of the boundary commission who was at Frankfort as adviser to the French representatives) based on full notes taken at the time and on a copy of the map Bismarck showed the French, on which Laussedat indicated clearly the specific proposals (op. cit., pp. 39–51). Jules Favre's account of the boundary discussions at Frankfort is far from complete and in part inaccurate (Government de la Défense Nationale, Pt. 3, Paris, 1875, pp. 372 f.). The lines on Laussedat's map have been compared with the data on language given by Boeckh and Kiepert and with three maps published successively in Petermann's Mitteilungen, 1870, Tafel 22; 1871, Tafel 8 and Tafel 15.

71 Nor did it quite eliminate French contact with Luxemburg. Whether the German leaders regarded it as significant to cut the connections between France and Luxemburg is not known. Ignoring Kiepert's suggestion of the danger of French desires to annex Luxem burg, the leader of the German members of the boundary commission, General von Stranz, may well have known of complaints made by the military during the war that French sol diers had used Luxemburg as a route of escape from the German forces back into France and that the French in Metz had been supplied, at night, with provisions from Luxemburg. Bismarck himself had sent a formal note of complaint to the Grand Duchy (quoted in Hahn, , op. cit., pp. 179–181Google Scholar ). On the French side certainly, Colonel Laussedat regarded this separation as a serious handicap, presumably from the military point of view. For economic purposes, Bismarck appears intentionally to have left a small bit of common boundary, about half a mile, just where the valley of the Chiers offered a possible route, a route which was in fact later used for the construction of rail and highway connection.

72 Kiepert, H., “Der Gebietsaustausch zwischen Deutchland und Frankreich in Folge des Frankfurter Friedens,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, VI (1871), 274.Google Scholar

73 Ibid., v. 279.

74 From Bismarck's dispatches published in Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette 1871–1914, in “Auftrage des Auswärtigen Amtes,” Berlin, 1922, Bd. I (1871–1877), dispatch of May 9, 1871. The Emperor's annotation on this point in the telegram is significant, not only for his own thinking, but, according to the German editors in 1922, for that of many others in Germany: “u(nd) Mars la Tour? ” Mars la Tour was a commune immediately west of Vionville in the southwestern salient of the arrondissement of Metz, a part of the field of battle of August 16, 1870 (Mars la Tour-Vionville-Rezonville). Like Vionville it had been excluded by the alteration in the boundary made by the “green line” of February 21, 1871, but unlike Vionville had not been regained by the modification of that line made in the Preliminary Treaty. A Prussian cavalry division had lost over half 'its numbers there in an heroic sacrifice. Its addition, however would have notably lengthened the peninsular projection of the boundary at Vionville.

75 Ibid, dispatch of May 8, 1871.

76 This story has repeatedly been told as an example of the success of Norman wit in gaining points in diplomatic bargaining. Bismarck having stated that he would make no further territorial concessions, Pouyer-Quertier, a Norman who had planned his little stratagem overnight, said: “If you were the conquered party, I give you my word that I would not have forced you to become a Frenchman, and here you are making me a German.” “How can that be?” said Bismarck, “Who is talking of taking your Normandy.' I don't understand you at all.” “It's very simple, Prince. I am one of the principal shareholders in the forges of Villerupt, and you see clearly that, in this quarter, you make me a German.” “Well, well,” said Bismarck, “don't weep about it. I leave you Villerupt; but do not ask for anything more, or I shall take it back again.” (From the original account of the story by Laussedat, , op. cit., p. 51.Google Scholar ) If Pouyer-Quertier gained a valuable point on this exchange, Bismarck could feel that he had finally got what he wanted—namely, a definite end to French requests for further concessions; after this exchange, he could properly expect Pouyer-Quertier to end the discussions and sign on the dotted line.

77 Kiepert estimated in 1871 that of the total population involved (7,000) one-fourth were German-speaking (op. cit., p. 280); on the basis of the official count taken subse-quently, he concluded in his second article that only one-ninth were German-speaking, and only two communes, isolated in the extreme northwest, had a German majority (op. cit., p. 309 and map).

78 Haller, , op. cit., p. 92 footnote.Google Scholar

79 Described by Laussedat, , op. cit., pp. 42–47Google Scholar; and particularly by Favre, , op. cit., pp. 404–20Google Scholar, 577–90.

80 Favre, , op. cit., p. 581.Google Scholar

81 Ibid., p. 431.

82 Many French writers since have criticised Thiers not only for his underestimate of the importance of the Lorraine ores, but also because he as a civilian placed greater importance on the enlargement of the area around Belfort than did the military commission. But Hailer's criticism of Bismarck for underestimating the military importance of Belfort, as demonstrated in the first World War, would appear to justify Thiers' judgment. Certainly the difference in the exact location of the boundary on the plateau west of the Moselle escarpment had little effect either on military tactics or on military potential as based on iron resources: during peacetime the two countries used ore from the same mines, and early in World War I the Germans conquered the entire area and utilized all its resources.

83 Laussedat, , op. cit., pp. 85 ff.Google Scholar; compare the maps published immediately after the ratification of the treaty in Petermann's Mitteilungen (1871), Tafel 15, and in Kiepert, , op. cit., Vol. VI.Google Scholar

84 We are dependent entirely on Laussedat's detailed account, written in 1887 (though not published until 1901) on the basis of a diary kept meticulously during the negotiations. Though Hauchecorne was the author of scores of technical papers in geology and engineering and was one of the co-directors of the International Geological Map of Europe, he appears never to have published a word concerning the work in which he left his mark on the political map of Europe and for which he was awarded the Iron Cross. The numerous memorials published at the time of his death refer to this work only in broad generalizations -including the somewhat exaggerated phrase of one writer who called him a Mehrer des Reichs. One wishes that he had written his side of the story, for it is hard to find the man described by Laussedat in any of the memorials written by his colleagues in Germany.

85 Production figures from Parisot, Robert, Histoire de Lorraine, Paris, 1924, p. 68Google Scholar; and from Roesler, , op. cit., p. 56.Google Scholar The Moniteur des intérêts matériels estimated, in April 1871, that the area annexed accounted for three-fourths of the production of the northern field, over half of the total for Lorraine; but this estimate was based on the production figures of 1867, “Influence de la cession de l'Alsace-Lorraine …” p. 243. Apparently the rapid increase in development by 1869 had been concentrated in the Longwy district.

86 Roesler, , op. cit., p. 56.Google Scholar

87 Ibid.

88 Engerand, , Les Frontières Lorraine …, p. 301Google Scholar; “Influence de la cession de l'Alsace-Lorraine …,” p. 242. The data in the latter reference requires correction because the author, writing in April 1871, understood that Villerupt would go to Germany. With this correction his data show that Germany secured blast furnaces which in 1867 produced two-thirds of the entire pig iron production of Lorraine, perhaps a somewhat smaller proportion in 1869.

89 Brooks, Alfred H. and La Croix, Morris F., The Iron and Associated Industries of Lorraine, the Sarre District, Luxemburg, and Belgium, U. S. Geological Survey Bulletin 703, 1920, Plate I.Google Scholar

90 Ibid., pp. 4042.