Remembering the Napoleonic Period in the French-Occupied Rhineland, 1918-30
Tom Williams
France’s victory in the Great War had a profound effect on the ways in which the French related to their national past. At last, the humiliation of defeat in 1870 could be erased and, with the return of Alsace-Lorraine and the start of a period of French military occupation in the German Rhineland, France could return to a position of dominance on the Rhine which it had not exercised since the revolutionary-Napoleonic period. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the French occupation of the Rhineland after 1918 was the great effort made by the French military and civilian authorities – the Armée du Rhin and the French High Commission in the Rhineland Territories – to establish a sense of continuity with the period when France had controlled the entire left bank of the Rhine (1792- 1814). This was more than a nostalgic celebration of past grandeur and national victory. Convinced that French rule in the Rhineland during the revolutionary- Napoleonic era had left enduring pro-French sentiments among the local population, the new French occupiers took every opportunity to present themselves as the direct descendents of those men of the First Republic and Empire who, they claimed, had brought liberty, prosperity and glory to the Rhineland.
Despite French claims that a full annexation of the left bank of the Rhine was both vital for French security and justified by French history, the Treaty of Versailles only provided for a limited period of French military occupation in the Rhineland. As a result, France opted for a policy of pénétration pacifique, an extensive programme of cultural and historical propaganda, through which it was hoped France could gain a lasting influence in the region and, ultimately, encourage the separation of the Rhineland from the rest of Germany. A neutral Rhineland Republic was seen as the next-best alternative to the annexation of the region, as a French propaganda memo made clear: ‘since we did not achieve a pure and simple annexation of this region, the creation of a neutral buffer state between us and Germany is certainly an ideal towards which we should lean’.1 In these political circumstances, the heritage of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period in the Rhineland was presented to the public not in terms of its legacy in constructing French national identity, as was the case in neighbouring Alsace- Lorraine, but rather in terms of how it contributed to a distinct, territorially limited, regional identity in the Rhineland, albeit an identity which tied that region to France. This essay examines the ways in which the French authorities attempted to reconnect with the memories of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period and, in doing so, revive and reinforce the notion of an inherent division between a civilised, democratic Rhineland and an authoritarian and counter-revolutionary Prussia.2
1 Archives Nationales: AJ/9/6176. Report entitled ‘Propagande Allemande/Propagande Française’, signed Lt. Col. Cochet, dated 17 June 1920, p. 4: Puisque nous n’avons pas annexé purement et simplement ce pays, la création d’un Etat tampon neutre entre l’Allemagne et nous est certainement un idéal vers lequel nous devons tendre’.
2 This division was, of course, reinforced in a very real way by the use of French checkpoints on the Rhine to limit the movement of people, goods and information between the Rhineland and the rest of Germany. Similar methods, both practical measures and historical-cultural arguments, were used to reinforce the ‘imagined frontier’ between the Saar and the rest of the occupied zone, as discussed in Nicolas Beaupré, ‘(Wieder-)Herstellen, löschen, verschieben:
Grenzen in den Köpfen: Das Saarland zwischen Krieg und Volksabstimmung in den ersten Jahren der “Besatzungszeit”’, in Etienne François, Jörg Seifarth and Bernhard Struck (eds.),
The legacy of the revolutionary period on the left bank of the Rhine was an important issue in a wider national debate on the future status of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland during the final years of the war.3 In February 1917, a comité d’études was established under the presidency of the historian Ernest Lavisse, bringing together some of the most prominent geographers, historians and economists of the day, to examine the question of France’s north-eastern border and to compile evidence to support French territorial claims to these regions.4 The connection between historical experiences, particularly the social and political changes of the revolutionary period, and the formation of national identity in these border regions was addressed in a number of studies by the members of the committee.5 Under the title of ‘La Révolution et l’esprit de la frontière’, the geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache, who served as vice-president of the committee, argued that it was the experience of 1789 in Alsace which had transformed France’s eastern border from a simple line of demarcation into a
‘spiritual barrier’ between east and west.6 This formative experience, he argued, was the basis of French national identity in Alsace which, in turn, justified the inclusion of Alsace within the boundaries of the French state. In such an intellectual context, it is significant that, when the war came to end, it was above all the heritage of 1789 which the French central government looked to in order to emphasise the divisions between Alsace-Lorraine and Germany and to reinforce the new eastern boundary of France. Perhaps the most visual example
Die Grenze als Raum, Erfahrung und Konstruktion: Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main, 2007), pp. 163-182.
3 For a survey of this debate within the broader context of the historical development of France’s eastern border and its relation to the French national idea see Daniel Nordmann, ‘Des limites d’État aux frontières nationales’ in Pierre Nora (ed.), Lieux de mémoire, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1997), pp. 1125-46.
4 The results were published in two volumes under the title L’Alsace-Lorraine et la Frontière du Nord-Est (Paris, 1918).
5 See, for example, the contributions to the aforementioned collection by Alphonse Aulard and Paul Vidal de la Blache on ‘La Persistance du sentiment français à Saarlouis’ and ‘La Persistence du sentiment français à Landau’ respectively.
6 Paul Vidal de la Blache, La France de l’Est (Paris, 1917), pp. 79-80.
of this was the placing of signs at the Rhine crossings at Kehl and Breisach bearing the inscription ‘1789-1918: Ici commence le pays de la liberté’ (‘Here begins the land of liberty’).7
The Rhineland, however, proved a more problematic case, since it had stood outside the boundaries of the French state in 1789, and did so again in 1918. And while the Rhineland experienced the great social and political changes of the revolution, it did so in the context of invasion by the French revolutionary armies and various stages of military occupation from 1792 and 1794. So, while the memory of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period played a significant part in French policy in both Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland after 1918, there were a number of significant differences in the historical experiences and the contemporary political status of the two regions, which defined the ways in which the legacies of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period could be used as an argument for national/regional identity and conditioned the different ways this commemorative activity was received by local populations.
Perhaps the most significant difference in this respect was that, unlike in the Rhineland, there was a long tradition in Alsace of reconciling a German cultural and linguistic identity with a political-historic identity that looked to France. French national claims to Alsace rested on this notion of a prioritisation of loyalties, which had been neatly encapsulated by the Alsatian poet Ehrenfried Stöber in 1814: ‘my lyre is German, it resounds with German songs; but my sword is French and loves the Gallic cockerel’. While it would be a vast oversimplification to suggest, as Lucien Gallois – another member of Lavisse’s committee – did in 1918, that this summed up the mind-set of all Alsatians, there was certainly evidence that even German-speaking Alsatians felt a particular connection to France due to shared historical experiences.8 This phenomenon had
7 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 183 and 195.
8 ‘Meine Leier ist deutsch, sie klinget von deutschen Gesängen ⎜Liebend den gallischen Hahn, treu ist französisch mein Schwert.’ Cited by Lucien Gallois, ‘Alsace-Lorraine and Europe’, Geographical Review, vol. 6, no. 2, (1918), p. 102.
been observed during the period of German rule in Alsace by Max Weber, with specific reference to the preservation of the memories of the revolutionary period:
Many German-speaking Alsatians feel a sense of community with the French… because of common political experiences. This can be understood by any visitor who walks through the museum in Colmar, which is rich in relics such as tricolors, pompier and military helmets, edicts by Louis Philippe and especially memorabilia from the French Revolution; these may appear trivial to the outsider, but they have sentimental value for the Alsatians.
This sense of community came into being by virtue of common political and, indirectly, social experiences which are highly valued by the masses as symbols of the destruction of feudalism, and the story of these events takes the place of the heroic legends of primitive peoples.9
French national claims to the region in 1918 were strengthened by a wealth of similar evidence for a continued tradition of Francophile remembrance during the forty-eight years of German rule. In 1909, for example, the French patriotic organisation Souvenir Français had successfully campaigned to erect a monument at Wissembourg in Alsace to honour the soldiers who had been killed there in the service of France in 1705, 1744, 1793 and 1870. Symbols of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period, such as the statues of Generals Kléber and Kellermann in Strasbourg and of General Rapp in Colmar, had provided focal points for French patriotic displays on Bastille Day during the years of German rule.10
No such tradition of reconciling a French political identity with a German cultural identity existed in the Rhineland, not least because the experience of French rule in the region had been far shorter.11 But even if no claims were being made within the Rhineland for a historically based French national identity, the heritage of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period had nonetheless contributed to a
9 Max Weber, Economy and Society, (tr. Roth and Wittich, NY, 1968), p. 396.
10 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, 1994), pp. 124-25.
11 The Rhineland had only been fully officially integrated into the French national territory in 1801 as the departments of Mont-Tonnerre, Roër, Sarre and Rhin-et-Moselle, and had been under Prussian rule (Bavarian, in the case of the Palatinate) since 1814.
sense of regional specificity during the nineteenth century. In the decades after 1814, the defence of political and legal reforms from the revolutionary and Napoleonic era had frequently united parliamentarians from the Rhineland and the Palatinate against the Prussian and Bavarian central governments respectively. The legacy of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period, in the form of the Napoleonic Civil Code, survived in the Rheinprovinz until 1900, setting the region apart from the rest of Prussia.
There was also some evidence in the Rhineland of a continued popular attachment to the symbols of French rule from the revolutionary-Napoleonic period. This was especially true in the Palatinate, where the personal cult of Napoleon remained strong throughout the nineteenth century, originating in organizations of the veterans of Napoleonic campaigns and maintained, albeit with gradually fading enthusiasm, by their descendants. The veneration of Napoleon in folk legends and popular songs also attested to a lingering affection for this age of past glory.12 Unlike in Alsace, however, these remembrances of French rule in the Rhineland were largely confined to what Jan Assmann has termed ‘communicative memory’, transmitted within families of veterans with diminishing frequency over the course of generations rather than institutionalised as ‘cultural memory’ in the public domain, such as in museums, state-sponsored commemoration and (as in Alsace before 1870) in primary school history teaching.13
These examples of pro-French remembrance in the Rhineland were, moreover, exceptions in a broader climate of increasing German nationalist feeling in the region, particularly after national unification in 1871. As Alon Confino has shown, the divisive memories of the revolutionary-Napoleonic
12 This attachment to Napoleon in the Bavarian Palatinate was documented by Walter Klein in his work Das Napoleonkult in der Pfalz (Munich, 1934). See also Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), p. 26.
13 This distinction is developed by Jan Assmann in Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (5th edition, Munich, 2005), pp. 48- 56.
period, such as the participation of Rhinelanders in Napoleon’s campaigns against Prussia, were left unmentioned in the unifying narratives of German national memory produced from 1871-1918: ‘a case of repressed historical memory that was better left in silence’.14 This repression of nationally divisive memory was so successful that even the Rhineland, which had fought alongside Napoleon in the Battle of the Nations in 1813, could join the rest of Germany in the 1913 centenary celebration of that ‘national’ victory over France, the eternal enemy (Erbfeind) of all German peoples.15 This notion of hereditary and perpetual conflict between the Latin and Germanic worlds had become the dominant narrative of Franco-German relations on both sides of the Rhine since the Franco-Prussian War.16 The German version of this myth emphasised the negative legacy of the French Revolution, especially after the outbreak of war in 1914 when German nationalist propaganda began to describe the war as a clash of two fundamentally opposed ideas of civilisation, positing the German ‘ideas of 1914’ in direct opposition to the French ‘ideas of 1789’.17
In this context, it would appear that the French belief that gestures towards the legacy of 1789 would secure the support of the Rhineland population was a gross underestimation of German national feeling in the Rhineland. But, as Celia Applegate has argued in the case of the Palatinate, regional and national identities on the Western fringes of Germany were by no means set in stone during the
14 Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997), p. 65-66.
15 Wolfram Siemann, ‘Krieg und Frieden in historischen Gedenkfeiern des Jahres 1913’ in Dieter Düding, Peter Friedemann and Paul Münch (eds.), Öffentliche Festkultur: Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Reibek bei Hamburg, 1988), pp. 298-320.
16 See, among others, Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792-1918 (Stuttgart, 1992) and Michael Nolan, The Inverted Mirror: Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany from 1898 to 1914 (New York, 2005).
17 See, for instance, Reinhard Rürup, ‘“Der Geist von 1914” in Deutschland.
Kreigsbegeisterung und Ideologisierung des Krieges im Ersten Weltkrieg’ in B. Hüppauf, Ansichten vom Krieg: Vergleichende Studien zum Ersten Weltkrieg in Literatur und Gesellschaft (Königstein, 1984) and Wolfgang von Hippel (ed.), Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit:Die Französische Revolution im deutschen Urteil (Munich, 1989), pp. 305-14.
period of great political instability in the months after the German surrender in 1918. ‘Whatever the merits of the French appeal to history’, Applegate argues, ‘it at least recognized on a propagandistic level the potentially volatile state of national and regional loyalties in the Pfalz at the end of 1918.’18
When it came to the myth of hereditary conflict it is significant that French claims to the historical and cultural identity of the Rhineland did not seek to overturn this myth entirely, but simply to shift the frontiers of this conflict to the east by transforming a national conflict between France and Germany into an eternal struggle between a democratic, civilised and Latin ‘West’ and an authoritarian, uncivilised and counter-revolutionary Prussia.19 This understanding of the boundaries of Latin-German conflict reworked long-standing notions of two Germanies and was shared by the Rhenish separatists such as Hans Adam Dorten, who argued that ‘in order to understand the cultural aspect of the Rhineland problem, it is necessary to distinguish between the Prussian spirit (Preussentum) and the spirit of the Rhineland (Rheinländertum)’.20 Based on arguments of the survival of Latin civilisation in Rhenish Carolingian culture, Dorten claimed that ‘the spirit of the Rhineland is of Latin origin’ and that, consequently, ‘the Rhinelander has never seen the Frenchman as an enemy nor even as a foreigner. It was the Prussian who was the enemy.’21
This particular understanding of the ‘true’ identity of the Rhineland within the conflict between the Latin and Germanic worlds is strongly present in the
18 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), p.
121.
19 The inclusion of the Rhineland in Roman Gaul was thus an important argument to support French claims relating to the ‘true’ identity of the Rhineland. These arguments were put to Lavisse’s committee by Camille Jullian, ‘Les Populations rhénanes dans l’Antiquité (Rapport présenté à la séance du 19 mars 1917)’ in L’Alsace-Lorraine et la frontière du nord-est, vol. 1, (Paris, 1918), pp. 343-54.
20J.A. Dorten, La Tragédie Rhénane (Paris, 1936), pp. 17-18: ‘Pour bien comprendre l’aspect culturel du problème rhénan, il faut distinguer entre le Preussentum (l’esprit Prusse)… et le Rheinländertum (l’esprit rhénan)’.
21 Ibid, p. 16: ‘l’ésprit rhénan est donc de souche latine’. Ibid, p. 24: ‘Non, le Rhénan n’a jamais vu dans le Français un ennemi ni même un étranger; l’ennemi, c’était le Prussien.’
main contemporary historical work on French rule on the Rhine during the revolutionary-Napoleonic period, Philippe Sagnac’s Le Rhin français pendant la révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 1917). Sagnac’s account, produced very much in the intellectual climate of Lavisse’s committee, begins by emphasising the Gallo- Roman origins of the region. He then portrays Germanic rule after the barbarian invasions as foreign and sustained only through force: ‘invaded by the Barbarians at the beginning of the fifth century, these lands were germanised by force, yet still retained the imprint left there by the ancient Gauls and the high culture of Rome.’22 A nearly identical situation emerges in Sagnac’s account when, over a millennium later, the Rhineland passed from French to Prussian rule after the defeat of Napoleon. Again, only brute force brings the regions back under unpopular ‘foreign’ rule: ‘Having become Prussian through conquest, they hated their new masters’.23 Like Roman civilisation before it, French rule in the revolutionary-Napoleonic period left a lasting impression on the region, and the period was fondly remembered during the years of Prussian tyranny which followed: ‘long after the fall of the French regime, the Rhineland held on to the cult of memory… Even today, the memory of France has not completely disappeared in Mainz, in Worms, in Koblenz and in Trier.’24
It was within this intellectual context that French policy in the occupied Rhineland was formulated, and these ideas seem to have greatly influenced the way the French military and civilian administration conceived its role the Rhineland. One propaganda memo, for example, reminded French policy-makers they were dealing with a population which had experienced ‘foreign’ Prussian rule for the past century: ‘we must not forget that we find ourselves in a
22 Philippe Sagnac, Le Rhin Français pendant la Révolution et l'Empire (Paris, 1917), p. 1:
‘Envahis par les Barbares au début du Ve siècle, ces pays furent germanisés par la force; mais ils conservèrent l’empreinte qu’y avaient laissée les anciens Gaulois et la haute culture de Rome.’
23 Ibid, p. 354: ‘Devenus Prussiens par la conquête, ils détestaient leurs maîtres.’
24 Ibid, pp. 355-6: ‘Ainsi, longtemps après la chute du régime français, le pays rhénan gardait le culte du souvenir … Aujourd’hui même, la mémoire des Français n’a pas complètement disparu à Mayence, à Worms, à Coblence et à Trèves.’
“Prussian colony”… This situation dominates the whole question’.25 Meanwhile, a guide to the Rhineland region produced by the high command of the Armée du Rhin informed French troops that ‘a large proportion of the native population remains faithful to the tradition and glorious memories of the French period of its history... It is up to us to reawaken the sympathies of this past age’.26
Symbolic gestures to emphasise continuity with the previous period of French rule on the Rhine were a highly visible characteristic of the French occupation from the moment French troops arrived on the banks of the Rhine in November 1918. The British journalist Ferdinand Tuohy recalled one such patriotic display, which highlights the strong connection between French presence on the Rhine, the heritage of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period and French national glory:
What a gesture was that when Mangin’s Hussars, upon reaching the Rhine one November day, dipped their colours in the brown swirling waters of that river! Salute to Hoche! Salute to Marceau!
Salute to Augereau, Kléber! Salute to Custine, Lefèvre, Bernadotte, Davout, Jourdan, Ney! Salute to France! Salute to GLOIRE! … The feelings that were fired in this new Armée du Rhin, successor of that of the Sambre et Meuse after twelve decades!27
While the soldiers of France saw their predecessors in the revolutionary Armée du Sambre et Meuse, the administrators of the French High Commission sought to establish themselves within a tradition of benevolent and efficient French administration in the Rhineland during the revolutionary-Napoleonic era.
25 Archives Nationales, AJ/9/6176: Note sur la Propagande, no. 4.687, Trier, 17 Juin 1920: ‘Il ne faut pas oublier que nous sommes ici dans une “Colonie Prussienne”… Cette situation domine toute la question.’
26 Archives Nationales, AJ/9/5317: La Région Rhénane (1922), p. 6-8: ‘une bonne partie de la population de vieille souche reste fidèle à la tradition et aux souvenirs glorieux de la période française de son histoire… À nous de réveiller les sympathies d’autrefois’. Cited in Franziska Wein, Deutschlands Strom - Frankreichs Grenze: Geschichte und Propaganda am Rhein, 1919-1930 (Essen, 1992), p. 44.
27 Ferdinand Tuohy, Occupied 1918-1930: A Post-script to the Western Front (London, 1931), p. 84.
Paul Tirard, who served as French High Commissioner in the Rhineland and head of the Interallied Rhineland Commission throughout the 1918-30 occupation, was reputed to have decorated his office in Koblenz with images of Jean-Bon St- André and Lezay Marnésia, Napoleonic prefects of Mont-Tonnerre and Bas-Rhin respectively.28 Tirard felt that his own administration should seek to emulate the way these two men dealt with the Rhineland population and showed sensitivity to local issues, and he devoted an extensive section of his account of the 1918-30 occupation to these ‘lessons’ of French rule from 1792-1814.29
In order to make the revolutionary-Napoleonic heritage in the Rhineland more visible to the local population, and to reinforce the sense of a return to past glories, the physical reminders of the previous French regime – monuments, memorials and gravestones – were restored, repaired and integrated into a wide programme of commemorative activity. On Bastille Day and other anniversaries these lieux de mémoire, which included the tombs of the revolutionary General Marceau in Koblenz and the grave of the Napoleonic prefect Jean-Bon St-André in Mainz, were decorated with wreaths and tricolour flags.30 The completion of a monument at Weißenthurm in honour of General Hoche, who had led the revolutionary Armée du Sambre-et-Meuse, provides an excellent example of the French desire to emphasise the continuities from the revolutionary period. The construction of the Weißenthurm monument had begun shortly after Hoche’s death in 1797, but the obelisk remained incomplete when the defeat of Napoleon left the monument in the territory of the newly expanded kingdom of Prussia. In July 1919, in the presence of his spiritual successors – Paul Tirard, Marshall Foch and General Mangin of the Armée du Rhin – Hoche’s mortal remains were transferred to the Weißenthurm site, and on Bastille Day 1928 the monument was
28 Erich Hans Kaden and Max Springer, Der politische Charakter der Französischen Kulturpropaganda am Rhein (Berlin, 1924), p. 8.
29 Paul Tirard, ‘Les leçons du passé’ in his La France sur le Rhin: douze années d'occupation Rhénane (Paris 1930), pp. 8-56.
30 Paul Tirard, L’art française en Rhénanie pendant l’occupation (Paris, 1930), pp. 17 and 164.
completed by the addition of four vast bas-reliefs depicting Hoche’s victories.
The restoration and completion of these monuments stood as a symbol of the restoration of French power on the Rhine and of the continuity of the French civilising mission in the Rhineland. These monuments also seemed an appropriate metaphor for the idea that, even if the memories of France had been neglected in the Rhineland during the past century, they had by no means disappeared from the Rhineland landscape.
These specific sites of memory all had associations with specific historical figures, and one of the principle ways in which the French administration in the Rhineland attempted to reconnect with the revolutionary-Napoleonic past was to centre public commemorative events on the memory of individual historical figures who were seen to embody the ideas with which the new regime wished to be associated. This, of course, was not unique to French policy in the Rhineland, but is an example of the widespread practice of the ‘localisation of memory’, identified by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, by which abstract ideas, in order to establish themselves in the memory of a group, are represented in the more concrete form of an event, a person or a place.31 This was especially true when it came to associating the new French regime with the abstract revolutionary ideal of liberty. To symbolise this cause of liberty, Paul Tirard evoked the memory of Hoche and Marceau in a speech at the inauguration of the Wiesbaden art exhibition on 11 June 1921, making specific reference to the local sites of memory associated with them: their tombs at Weißenthurm and Koblenz:
For centuries, the sons of France have spilled their blood on the battlefields of Europe and the new world in the cause of liberty. It is not at all in our nature to bring slavery to our frontiers. On these very banks of the Rhine, the tombs of Hoche and Marceau, young generals of the Republic who fell for the ideal of liberty, are there to guide us as permanent record of our history. 32
31 Maurice Halbwachs, La Topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte (Paris, 1941), p. 157.
32 Paul Tirard, L'Art Français en Rhénanie pendant l'Occupation 1918-1930 (Paris, 1930), p.
131: ‘Depuis des siècles les fils de France ont versé leur sang sur tous les champs de bataille de
This use the tombs of Hoche and Marceau to locate the memory of liberty ‘on these very banks of the Rhine’ is a clear attempt to convince the public of France’s historical mission to bring liberty to the Rhineland and to portray his own administration as a continuation of that tradition.
In its own rhetoric at least, the new French regime presented itself not as an occupation but as the liberation of the Rhineland from Prussian rule. This discourse rested heavily on the theories regarding the Latin identity of the Rhineland and the foreignness of Prussian rule which characterised contemporary French intellectual engagement with the Rhineland question. On arrival in the Pfalz, for example, the head of the French Eighth Army, General Gérard, informed the local population that ‘You Pfälzers have the greatest happiness in store. After one hundred years of German tyranny, you return to the arms of generous mother France who brings you Liberty and Justice’.33 There is, however, no evidence that this grand rhetoric of liberation, which seemed to bear no relation to the realities of the French occupation, struck a chord with the local population. The aforementioned comments of Tirard at the Wiesbaden exhibition seem defensive, an answer to the critics of the French regime who accused France of enslaving the Rhineland. Nothing demonstrates the failure of this rhetoric of liberation more than extent and the popularity of the ‘liberation’
celebrations with which the Rhinelanders marked the French withdrawal from the Rhineland in 1930.
It is worth noting at this stage that this rhetoric of liberty/liberation gained far more currency in Alsace, largely due to the different ways in which French and German rule had been experienced. The Alsatians who chose to remain in l’Europe et du Nouveau Monde pour la liberté des peuples. Il n’est point dans nos vues de porter l’esclavage à nos frontières. Sur ces mêmes rives du Rhin, les tombes de HOCHE et de MARCEAU, jeunes généraux de la République tombés pour l’idéal de la liberté, sont là pour fixer les traces de notre histoire.’
33 Cited by Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), p. 121.
Alsace after annexation to the new German Reich in 1871generally accommodated themselves to German rule, but along with an enduring sentimentality for the glories of French history came an uneasy relationship with the Berlin government. The persecution of the Catholic Church in Alsace during the Kulturkampf of 1871-8, and the fact that, as an Imperial Territory (Reichsland), Alsace-Lorraine was not granted full status within the German confederation or the right to return delegates to the Bundesrat until 1911, increased feelings of discrimination and inferior status. The war with France, fought on Alsatian soil, only exacerbated these tensions with Berlin as the loyalty of Alsatians to Germany was called into question. As recent research has shown, despite the lack of a national frontier between Alsace-Lorraine and the rest of Germany from 1871-1918, the division of the pre-1871 national frontier remained clear in the minds of those who lived in these regions.34 In 1918, the arrival of French troops was greeted by the hanging out of tricolour flags, and the connections between the revolutionary ideal of liberty and the recent national
‘liberation’ were underlined when parades of French troops filed past the local sites of revolutionary memory which tied Alsace to France – the statues of Kléber, Rapp and Lezay Marnésia and the house in Strasbourg which had seen the first performance of the Marseillaise by Rouget de l’Isle in 1792.35 These
34 Stephanie Schlesier, ‘Vereinendes und Trennendes: Grenzen und ihre Wahrnehmung in Lothringen und preußischer Rheinprovinz 1815-1914’, in Etienne François, Jörg Seifarth and Bernhard Struck (eds.), Die Grenze als Raum, Erfahrung und Konstruktion: Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main, 2007), pp. 135-61 and Nicolas Beaupré, ‘(Wieder-)Herstellen, löschen, verschieben: Grenzen in den Köpfen: Das Saarland zwischen Krieg und Volksabstimmung in den ersten Jahren der “Besatzungszeit” in ibid, pp. 163-182.
35 This notion of France as the bearer of liberty was not confined to the Revolutionary period.
Much to the outrage of the German nationalist press, the 1933 tercentenary of the arrival of French troops in various Alsatian towns during the Thirty Years’ War was celebrated as the
‘first liberation’ of Alsace from German rule. See, for instance, ‘Eine französische
“Befreiungsfest” im Elsaß’, article in the Saarbrücker Abendblatt, 11 October 1933.
connections with the revolutionary period were further reinforced by the planting of liberty trees.36
While it was the 1789 revolution which dominated post-1918 commemoration in Alsace, by far the largest commemorative project undertaken by the French in the Rhineland were the celebrations of May 1921, organised to mark the centenary of Napoleon’s death on 4 May 1821. This certainly made sense, since the main evidence of enduring pro-French memory in the Rhineland was the personal cult of Napoleonic memory. The French recognized, however, that this admiration for Napoleon, while tying the region to France and dividing it from Prussia, had rarely been expressed as a demand for a return of French imperial rule. As a result, the French authorities were guarded against accusations that the Napoleonic commemoration was evidence of French imperial designs on the Rhineland. Disassociating Napoleon from French imperialism in the mind of the Rhinelanders, however, was a nearly impossible task as one propaganda report from Bonn commented:
The general impression of the population is that these celebrations aimed not to reveal the Napoleonic memories of the First Empire but to exalt our victory in the eyes of the whole world, and of Germany in particular, through a grandiose demonstration of militarist and imperial tendencies.37
Despite these criticisms, events such as the opening to the public of the rooms in the Grand-Ducal palace in Mainz where Napoleon had stayed, which attracted 20,000 visitors, were judged as a tremendous success in so far as they proved, in French eyes, the continued veneration of the Emperor in the Rhineland.38 Perhaps for want of any evidence that this Napoleonic cult had been maintained in the public sphere during the nineteenth century, the French
36 H. Iselin, Au Coeur de l’Alsace (Paris, 1946), p. 133.
37 Archives Nationales, AJ/9/6341, report entitled ‘Fêtes du Centenaire de Napoléon Ier’, signed Gelin, 31 May 1921: ‘L’impression générale dans la population est que les fêtes avaient pour but, en Rhénanie, moins de réveiller des souvenirs napoléoniens du Ier Empire que d’exalter notre victoire aux yeux du monde et d’Allemagne en particulier par une grandiose manifestation à tendances militaristes et impérialistes.’
38 Paul Tirard, L’Art français en Rhénanie pendant l’Occupation (Paris 1930), p. 18.
authorities recognised the importance of private family commemoration by the descendants of veterans in the transmission of Napoleonic memory and tailored their commemorations accordingly. Ceremonies were held and wreaths laid at the monuments in Koblenz, Mainz and Kreuznach to those who died serving in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The French administration also went great lengths to trace the descendents of these veterans, to invite them, and to present them with pictures of the Emperor.39 The French High Commission also arranged for the production and distribution of 175 commemorative medals to the descendants of veterans at these ceremonies.40
The French understanding of the historical-cultural identity of the Rhineland shaped both the way they presented the Napoleonic past and the way the reception of the commemorations were assessed. In the concerts, exhibitions and historical lectures organized throughout the French occupied regions, a special emphasis was laid on the admiration for Napoleon by Heine, Goethe and Beethoven, local representatives of what was described as a specifically western cultural tradition in the Rhineland. The popularity of Napoleon in the region was presented as evidence of an ‘instinctive’ affinity towards Latin culture. On the anniversary of Napoleon’s death, the historian Albert Malaurie told a German audience in Mainz that ‘by instinct they [the people of Mainz] recognised the rule of reason, and rediscovered the Latin ruler, the successor of Caesar and the divine Augustus, the restorer of the Ordo Romanus.’41 Meanwhile, any failure to involve the local population in the commemorative events, and any disruption of the events themselves, was attributed to ‘foreign’ Prussian interference. This included a disastrous concert in Trier during the Napoleonic centenary
39 Erich Hans Kaden and Max Springer, Der politische Charakter der Französischen Kulturpropaganda am Rhein (Berlin, 1924), p. 45.
40 Archives Nationales, AJ/9/6320: Letter from Tirard to Colonel Gelin, 12 May 1921.
41 Archives Nationales AJ/9/6320: Albert Malaurie, ‘Napoleon und die Rheinländer’, Speech of 4 May 1921, p. 2: ‘Instinktgemäss haben sie die herrschende Vernunft anerkannt, den lateinischen Führer, den von Caesar und dem göttlichen Augustus bestimmten Nachfolger, den Wiederherrsteller der römischen Einrichtungen (orde romanus) wiedergefunden.’
celebrations where, on the express instructions of the town’s mayor, the orchestra refused to play. The French propaganda report from Trier argues that ‘vicious propaganda… by Prussian civil-servants completely annihilated the good intentions of the population’. It concludes that ‘without the Prussian civil servants on their backs’ the local population would have and abandoned any protests and expressed its support for France.42
Whether due to Prussian interference or not, the majority of events of the Napoleonic centenary failed to involve the local population in any significant way, and throughout the French occupation there is little evidence that pro- French historical commemoration was ever initiated by the local population, rather than by the French themselves. However, it is significant that on one of the few occasions when the local population wished to express its solidarity with France, they did it through references to the revolutionary-Napoleonic past. On 14 July 1923, a group of Germans civil servants in Koblenz, in order to manifest their support for France and their opposition to the Berlin government, paraded through the streets with tricolour flags and gathered at the tomb of General Marceau. It is certainly significant that an act of opposition to Berlin should appropriate the symbols of the revolutionary period, which had become so closely associated with French attempts to reinforce a historical identity in the Rhineland that divided it from the rest of Germany. Yet this episode also demonstrates the way in which the appropriation of the symbols of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period could be used in singularly un-historic ways.
Despite the appeals to the revolutionary past, the crowd was demonstrating to show its support for France’s demands for reparations payments, and carried a banner which made a direct appeal to the Berlin government: ‘Sie sollen
42 Archives Nationales, AJ/9/6320: Compte rendu sur la célébration dans le district de Trèves du centenaire de la mort de Napoleon Ier, 7 May 1921: ‘La propagande acharnée menée contre nous par les fonctionnaires Prussiens et les gros bonnets Francophobes a complètement annihilé ces bonnes volontés.’ ‘Cette cérémonie a montré… combien ces habitants se tournent volontiers vers nous lorsque n’ayant pas de fonctionnaires prussiens sur le dos, ils abandonnent à leur mouvement propre.’
bezahlen: Vive la France’ (‘You should pay! Long live France!’).43 In this case, it appears that the specific symbols of the revolutionary period were simply being used as vague approximations for ‘France’, and had lost any specific meanings attached to them by the French. The demands of the protesters – that reparations payments be resumed in order to put an end to the French occupation of the Ruhr – certainly fell far short of the French hopes that, by rediscovering their revolutionary heritage, the Rhinelanders would question the legitimacy of German rule in the Rhineland and turn to France as the historic agent of liberation in the Rhine region.
As the occupation wore on, and their appeals to the past consistently failed to produce the desired effects, the efforts to which the French went to demonstrate the revolutionary-Napoleonic heritage of the region diminished. By the time France left the Rhineland in 1930, Franziska Wein has argued, French commemoration of past glories in the Rhineland had been reduced to means of escaping a less-than-glorious present and of consoling the French occupiers for the failure of pénétration pacifique to effect any significant changes in the political or cultural orientation of the Rhineland.44 In the climate of a restrictive occupation, the French rhetoric of liberty had gained little currency, and if anything, French appeals to history to separate the Rhineland from the rest of Germany only strengthened local resolve to maintain strong links with their fellow Germans across the Rhine. This was demonstrated by the enthusiasm displayed for the main example of German historical counter-propaganda: the Rhineland ‘millennium’ celebrations of 1925, which underlined the historic ties between the two banks of the Rhine in an attempt to overcome the very real division in Germany between the occupied and unoccupied zones.45 Yet despite
43 A photograph of this demonstration is held in the Archives Nationales, AJ/9/3150, along with an account of the march prepared for distribution to the press.
44 Franziska Wein, Deutschlands Strom - Frankreichs Grenze: Geschichte und Propaganda am Rhein, 1919-1930 (Essen, 1992), p. 59.
45 Ibid., pp. 126-133.
French failings, and particularly in the context of the relative success of similar commemorative projects in Alsace-Lorraine, this commemorative activity in the French-occupied Rhineland remains an important example of the practical application of contemporary French theories regarding the relationship between the legacy of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period and the question of regional and national identities in France’s contested eastern borderlands.
