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Updated: June 21, 2025
VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.
When he conceived the idea, the only kind of limited object he had in his mind was, to use his own words, "some conquests on the frontiers of the enemy's country," such as Silesia and Saxony for Frederick the Great, Belgium in his own war plan, and Alsace-Lorraine in that of Moltke. Now it is obvious that such objects are not truly limited, for two reasons.
The French Government is entitled to expropriate without compensation the personal property of private German citizens and German companies resident or situated within Alsace-Lorraine, the proceeds being credited in part satisfaction of various French claims.
If our plan in 1917, namely, Germany to cede Alsace-Lorraine to France in exchange for the annexation of all Poland, together with Galicia, and all states to disarm; if that plan had been accepted in Berlin and sanctioned by the Entente unless the non possumus in Berlin and opposition in Rome to a change in the Pact of London had hindered any action it seems to me the advantage would not only have been on the side of the Central Powers.
In drawing the new frontier they included for purely strategic reasons a small portion of western Lorraine, round the fortress of Metz, which was admittedly as French as Champagne or Picardy. From 1871 till 1911, Alsace-Lorraine was governed as a direct appanage of the Imperial Crown; in the latter year it received a constitution, but nothing even remotely resembling self-government.
As we entered the world war to fight for the downtrodden people of the world, determined that people must have their rights and that the peril of military autocracy must be crushed forever, the problem of Alsace-Lorraine became a great problem to America. Every citizen of the United States should know something of this little country that has been called "The Nightmare of Europe."
This idea, which I have heard voiced all over Germany, was aptly set forth before the war by a speaker on "The Decadence of the British Empire," when he sought to prove such decadence by citing the fact that there was only one British soldier to every 4,000 of the people of India. "Why," he concluded, "Germany has more soldiers in Alsace-Lorraine alone than Great Britain has in all India."
Max Bendiner, of Strasburg: "Music may achieve the highest of all missions: she may be a bond between nations, races, and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; she may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile.... No country is more suited for her friendly aid than Alsace-Lorraine, that old meeting-place of people, where from time immemorial the North and South have exchanged their material and their spiritual wealth; and no place is readier to welcome her than Strasburg, an old town built by the Romans, which has remained to this day a centre of spiritual life.
"Twenty thousand German dead and wounded, nearly half the attacking force, lay upon the field, while the British losses did not exceed 2,000." At the end of October the French right wing in Alsace-Lorraine was reported to be making distinct progress. It was said to be advancing through the passes of the Vosges in the midst of heavy snowstorms.
The most difficult problem that the Conference had to solve was the establishment of a new Franco-German frontier. There was no question about Alsace-Lorraine. That had been disposed of by the Fourteen Points, and Germany had acquiesced in its return to France in the pre-Armistice agreement.
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