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Alsace-Lorraine
The Rhine borderland Germany ruled as an imperial territory from 1871 to 1918
Alsace-Lorraine was a territory created by a peace treaty: the strip of eastern France that the new German Empire took after the Franco-Prussian War and governed from 1871 to 1918 as the Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen. It joined Alsace to the German-speaking northeastern part of Lorraine, and its loss became a lasting French grievance, symbolized by the statue of Strasbourg on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, draped in black for decades. The land changed hands four times in 75 years, a history that left it a legal system of its own that still applies. Strasbourg, its old capital, now hosts the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, a deliberate emblem of Franco-German reconciliation.
The Reichsland covered 14,496 square kilometers, from the crest of the Vosges Mountains east to the Rhine and north to the borders of the Palatinate and Luxembourg. Alsace is the fertile Upper Rhine plain, with vineyards along the Vosges foothills and the cities of Strasbourg, Mulhouse, and Colmar. The Lorraine part, around Metz, is the plateau country of the Moselle valley, once rich in iron ore and coal. Belfort, at the southern tip of Alsace, stayed French in 1871 and became the separate Territoire de Belfort. Today all of the former Reichsland is in France. Alsace forms the European Collectivity of Alsace, created in 2021, and the Lorraine portion is the Moselle department, both within the Grand Est region since 2016.
Most of Alsace passed from the Holy Roman Empire to France in the 17th century, and the Duchy of Lorraine joined France in 1766. After its defeat in 1871, France ceded the territory by the Treaty of Frankfurt. Germany ran it as an imperial territory under the emperor rather than as a full member state, granting a constitution and an elected parliament only in 1911. French troops entered in November 1918, and the Treaty of Versailles confirmed its return in 1919. Nazi Germany annexed it in practice from 1940 to 1944, conscripting more than 100,000 local men into its forces. Because the region was German in 1905, when France separated church and state, Moselle and the two Alsace departments still keep a local law that includes state-paid clergy.