Grand Duchy of Alsace-Lorraine

The Grand Duchy of Alsace-Lorraine, in German Elsaß-Lothringen, is the westernmost constituent state of the German Empire. It lies between the Rhine and the crest of the Vosges, with the plain of Alsace along the river and the plateau of German Lorraine to the north-west, and its capital is Straßburg. France ceded it to Germany in 1871, and it has been German ever since, except for six years between 1939 and 1945 when fascist France held it and called it French.

The grand duchy is the house that Bismarck built, in the plainest sense. When the Emperor dismissed Otto von Bismarck as Chancellor in 1890, he gave him the provinces Bismarck had taken from France, and the founder of the Empire went to live among the people he had conquered. His descendants have reigned there since. The present Grand Duke, Konstantin, born in 1994, succeeded in January 2027, on the day France renounced its claim to the grand duchy, when his father abdicated with the words that the house’s work was done.

Its people are German citizens who speak three languages and were claimed by a neighbour until 2027. About two-fifths of them speak German at home, a quarter French, and a third still speak Alsatian or the Franconian Platt of Lorraine, the strongest regional speech left anywhere in the Empire. Asked who they are, most answer Alsatian or Lorrainer first, German second, and French almost never. A sizeable minority, most of them in Metz, call themselves French-speaking Germans and mean both words. A grandmother born in the grand duchy in the 1920s grew up under one flag, was made French under another at fourteen, and has lived under the first again since 1945.

The annexation of 1939 to 1945 is the wound under everything. The fascist regime banned German, renamed every town and family, conscripted about 130,000 of the grand duchy’s men into the French army to fight Germany, and built a camp in the Vosges at Schirmeck where about 22,000 people died. Those men, the malgré-nous, are the grand duchy’s hardest memory, because they were German citizens made to wear the uniform of the country that had taken them, and many of them died at the siege of Berlin.

Since 1946 the grand duchy has governed itself in two languages, and since 2027 in two official ones. Its constitution of 1946 was written in German and French equally, to answer a regime that had forbidden German, and when France gave up its claim in the Treaty of Straßburg on 18 January 2027, French became co-official with German. The same treaty made Straßburg the seat of the European Concert’s Parliament, and the most contested city in western Germany has become, almost overnight, the richest place in it.

Name

The state is Elsaß-Lothringen in German, Alsace-Lorraine in English and French, and Elsass-Lothringe in Alsatian, and since 1946 its own instruments give the German and French names together, in that order, with neither one the translation of the other. The English name is the one the Register uses for the article, as the Kingdom of Prussia article does. The German name is the one the Empire’s own documents use and the one written in the table of states.

The capital is Straßburg, and the spelling is a position. France spelled the city’s name its own way before 1871, and Germany has written Straßburg since, and between 1939 and 1945 the annexation regime restored the French spelling by decree, with every street sign in the city replaced in the first month. The grand duchy has written Straßburg in every language since, French included, and a French newspaper that uses the French spelling in a story about the grand duchy can expect a letter from the President of the Council of State’s office within the week. The French spelling is not banned; it is simply understood, in the city, to belong to the six years.

The other towns have two names each, which the constitution of 1946 recognises and the co-official status of 2027 has made equal: Mülhausen and Mulhouse, Kolmar and Colmar, Diedenhofen and Thionville, Hagenau and Haguenau, Schlettstadt and Sélestat. Metz is Metz in both. German usage, and this article, gives the German form; signs since 2027 give both, German above.

“Reichsland”, the imperial territory, is the name of the years from 1871 to 1890, when the provinces were governed from Berlin and had no prince of their own. Nobody in the grand duchy uses it of the present, and it survives chiefly in French schoolbooks, which kept it for a century because it made the provinces sound occupied.

Who they think they are

Three flags in a lifetime

The grand duchy’s first fact is that its people have been made to change nationality more often than anyone else in western Europe. A man born in Kolmar in 1860 was born French, became German at eleven, and died German. His granddaughter, born in 1925, was born German, was declared French at fourteen by a regime that had marched in, was German again at twenty, and may have lived to see her great-grandchildren learn French as an official language of their own German state. Every family in the grand duchy has a story of this shape, and most have several, and the stories are told in more than one language at the same table.

The result is a people who answer the question of identity with a region. Asked in surveys whether they are German, French, Alsatian or Lorrainer, about two-thirds of the grand duchy’s people answer Alsatian or Lorrainer first, and most of the rest answer German. Almost nobody answers French. The figure for French has been in single digits since the 1950s and fell further after the annexation’s records were published in the 1970s, which is the clearest single measure of what the six years did to France’s standing in the provinces it wanted back.

The French-speakers are German, and say so in French. About a quarter of the grand duchy speaks French at home, most of them in Metz and the valleys of western Lorraine, some in the old bourgeois families of Straßburg and Mülhausen. They are the people France claimed most loudly and convinced least. The phrase they use of themselves, Allemands de langue française, French-speaking Germans, was coined in Metz in the 1950s and is now used without irony on both sides of the Vosges, though in France it is still heard as a reproach.

Alsatian and Lorrainer

Alsace and Lorraine were never one country, and the grand duchy has never quite made them one. Alsace is the plain between the Vosges and the Rhine, Alemannic in speech, Catholic and Lutheran, wine-growing, densely settled and old; it looks east across the river to Baden and south to Switzerland. German Lorraine is the north-western plateau around Metz and the Moselle, the part of the old duchy of Lorraine that the Treaty of Frankfurt took, Catholic, French-speaking in Metz and Franconian-speaking in the villages to the east, industrial in its valleys, and it looks west to French Nancy, which it has always regarded as a rival rather than a capital.

Lorraine is the more jealous of its own. Of the grand duchy’s three districts, Lorraine is the only one with a separate identity strong enough to argue with Straßburg’s, and it does so continually: about the budget, about the Concert, about the seat of the courts, about the Grand Duke, who since 2027 has lived outside Metz and is claimed by it, and about the football. Alsatians say Lorrainers are French with German passports. Lorrainers say Alsatians are Swiss who lost their way. Both sayings are older than the grand duchy and both are said with affection about half the time.

The question, and its end

For 156 years the grand duchy lived with a claim on it. France ceded Alsace and eastern Lorraine in 1871, lost two wars trying to recover them, and kept the claim formally alive in its politics after 1945, though no French government pressed it. The claim was the grand duchy’s weather. It explained the watchfulness of Berlin, the French schoolbooks that coloured the provinces violet, the reluctance of French ministers to set foot in Straßburg, and the caution of every Grand Duke, who reigned over a state that a neighbour regarded as stolen.

France gave up the claim on 18 January 2027, in the Treaty of Straßburg, and the grand duchy received the news with a festival. Straßburg held a night of fireworks on the Rhine, the cathedral bells rang for half an hour, and the old men of the malgré-nous associations stood together in the square in front of the cathedral in their berets, which was the photograph the German press printed the next morning. The French press printed the fireworks, and Paris thought them in poor taste. The President of the Council of State said that the grand duchy had not been asked whether it minded being celebrated and had decided not to mind.

The end of the claim has not ended the question, only changed it. Since 2027 the argument in the grand duchy is not whether it is German but what kind of German state it is: how French its official life should be, now that French is co-official; whether a European capital belongs to the grand duchy or to Europe; whether Lorraine is paying for Straßburg’s boom. These are the arguments of a settled place, and the grand duchy has the slightly dazed air, in the account of every visiting correspondent, of a family that has been told the house is finally its own and is not yet sure what to do with the attic.

History

Before 1871

Alsace became French in the seventeenth century, and Lorraine in the eighteenth. Alsace, a patchwork of imperial cities, abbeys and lordships of the Holy Roman Empire, passed to France in pieces from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and Louis XIV took Straßburg, a free imperial city, in 1681. The duchy of Lorraine, a sovereign state between France and the Empire, passed to France on the death of its last duke in 1766. Metz, a free city, had been French since 1552. The provinces kept their German speech under French rule for two centuries, and their French loyalty grew with the Revolution, which made them citizens.

The Marseillaise was written in Straßburg. In April 1792, at a dinner at the house of the city’s mayor, an engineer officer of the garrison, Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, wrote a war song for the Army of the Rhine, and it was first sung in Straßburg before soldiers from Marseille carried it to Paris and gave it their city’s name. The grand duchy keeps the house, with a plaque in both languages, and the fact that France’s anthem was born in a German city is the oldest of the grand duchy’s jokes against Paris, and the one Paris likes least.

1870 and 1871

The war of 1870 took the provinces in a month and kept them for a peace. The German armies crossed the Rhine in August 1870, besieged Straßburg for forty-six days and shelled it, burning the city’s library with its medieval manuscripts and damaging the cathedral, and the city surrendered on 28 September. Metz, the great fortress of Lorraine, surrendered in October with the French Army of the Rhine inside it, the largest capitulation of the war. The German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles on 18 January 1871, and the Treaty of Frankfurt of May 1871 ceded Alsace and the eastern part of Lorraine, Metz with it, to the new Empire, with an indemnity of five billion francs.

The provinces were not given to Prussia. Bismarck, who had drawn the new frontier along the crest of the Vosges and around the fortress of Metz for reasons of strategy, would not let Prussia absorb them, and they were constituted instead as the Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen, an imperial territory belonging to the Empire as a whole and governed from Berlin. It had no prince, no constitution of its own and, at first, no representation in the Bundesrat. It was the Empire’s possession, and it knew it.

The optants left. The treaty allowed the provinces’ people to keep French nationality by declaring it before 1 October 1872, on condition that they left. About 160,000 made the declaration, and about 50,000 actually went, most of them young men avoiding German military service, and many of them from the French-speaking bourgeoisie of Metz, which lost a generation in a year. The departure left Metz’s French more provincial and its loyalty more stubborn, and the descendants of those who stayed have never forgotten that their great-grandparents chose to.

The Reichsland, 1871 to 1890

For nineteen years the provinces were governed as a conquest. An Oberpräsident ruled from Straßburg until 1879, and then a Statthalter, the Emperor’s governor: Field Marshal Edwin von Manteuffel from 1879 to 1885, and then Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, a Bavarian Catholic and a careful man, from 1885. A provincial committee with advisory powers was conceded in 1874. The provinces elected deputies to the Reichstag from that year, and the first fifteen they sent were Protestler, protest deputies, who read a declaration against the annexation into the record and voted against nearly everything for a decade.

The Empire built in Straßburg as if it meant to stay. The Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität was founded in 1872 and given the best-funded faculties in Germany, to make the city a showcase of German learning. A new German quarter was laid out to the north and east of the old city, with a great square, the Kaiserplatz, and on it, between 1883 and 1889, an imperial palace for the Emperor’s visits, the Kaiserpalast, a building so large and so heavy that the city called it the elephant. The railway station, the post office, the library that replaced the one the siege had burned, and the university’s palace on the other side of the river were all built in the same years and the same confident style, and they are still the bones of the city.

1890: Bismarck comes to Straßburg

In March 1890 Friedrich IV dismissed Bismarck, and gave him the provinces. The young Emperor, two years on the throne and determined to govern for himself, parted with the Chancellor who had made the Empire after a quarrel over policy and over who was master, and both men wanted the parting to look like something other than what it was. The solution, proposed by the Emperor’s advisers and accepted by Bismarck after a week of silence at Friedrichsruh, was to make him a sovereign. An imperial law of May 1890 constituted the Reichsland as the Grand Duchy of Elsaß-Lothringen, hereditary in the male line of the house of Bismarck, with four votes in the Bundesrat, a weight given to honour the man rather than the population. Hohenlohe, the last Statthalter, went back to Bavaria. The founder of the Empire went to Straßburg.

Nobody expected him to live there, and he did. Bismarck was seventy-five. Berlin assumed he would govern from his estate near Hamburg and visit his grand duchy when ceremony required. Instead he moved into the Kaiserpalast in the autumn of 1890, with his wife Johanna, who disliked it, and his papers, and stayed. He held audiences, read the provincial committee’s minutes, sat through its debates, and wrote, in the palace’s east wing, the memoirs that Germany has read ever since. The Emperor never stayed in his own palace again.

He learned French. It was the act the grand duchy remembers. Bismarck had always read French and spoken it badly, and at seventy-five he took a tutor from the lycée, a Messin, and learned to speak it well enough to be mocked for his accent in the Metz papers, which he collected. He received French-speaking petitioners in French, protected the French-language schools of Metz against a ministry in Berlin that wanted them closed, and told an imperial commission that came to inspect them that the provinces had been taken by force and would be kept by courtesy or not at all. Le vieux, the old man, the Messins called him, and the name has stayed affectionate for a hundred and thirty years.

He governed fairly, coldly and briefly. He was not a liberal and did not become one. He refused the provinces a constitution, kept the provincial committee advisory, and regarded the Catholic clergy, the grand duchy’s largest institution, with the suspicion of the man who had fought the Church in the 1870s. But he governed the grand duchy as a state and not as a conquest, which nobody in Berlin had done before, and when he died at Straßburg on 30 July 1898 the provinces mourned him with a sincerity that surprised everyone, the provinces included. He is buried at Friedrichsruh, as he had asked, and Straßburg has a statue of him on the Kaiserplatz that people still leave flowers at, in both languages, on his birthday.

Herbert, and the regency

His son Herbert reigned for six years. Herbert von Bismarck, born in 1849, had been his father’s foreign secretary and his father’s shadow, and he reigned as Grand Duke from 1898 until his death in September 1904, quietly, conscientiously and without his father’s French. He had married late, in 1892, Countess Marguerite Hoyos, the granddaughter of an English engineer and herself French-speaking, and their son Otto was eleven when Herbert died.

Grand Duchess Marguerite was Regent from 1904 to 1911. She was thirty-three, born at Fiume, half English and a stranger to the provinces, and she governed them for seven years with an energy the house had not shown since Bismarck. She opened the palace to the provincial committee’s sittings, spoke French in public as a matter of course, and pressed Berlin, through the imperial ministry and through every relation she had, for a constitution for the grand duchy. She got one in the year her son came of age.

The constitution of 1911

The Reichstag gave the grand duchy a constitution in May 1911. It created a Landtag of two chambers, a first chamber of notables partly appointed by the Grand Duke and a second chamber elected by universal male suffrage, and confirmed the four Bundesrat votes. It was a cautious document that left the Grand Duke and the imperial authorities a good deal of power, and it was the first time the provinces had governed themselves in anything since 1871. Otto II came of age that year and swore to it.

The Landtag’s first act of independence was a flag. In 1912 the new Landtag adopted, against the wishes of Berlin, the old Alsatian colours, red over white, with the gold double-barred cross of Lorraine at the hoist, as the grand duchy’s flag. The Emperor never approved it, the imperial authorities never flew it, and every town hall in the provinces flew it anyway. It was banned in 1939, and the constitution of 1946 restored it.

The First Great War

The grand duchy’s men went to war in German uniform in August 1914, and were watched. The First Great War began with the shooting of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha by a French republican, and it set Germany against the country that had once owned the provinces. The imperial army, which did not trust them, sent most of the grand duchy’s regiments east, to the Russian front, where desertion meant crossing to the Tsar rather than to France. Most of the men served loyally and many died. Some thousands, chiefly French-speakers from Lorraine, crossed to the French lines in the first two years, and what they were, traitors to their state or loyal to their language, is a question the grand duchy has argued over for a century and settled for none of them.

In 1916 the French came in sight of Metz. The French offensive of that year went out of the fortress of Verdun into German Lorraine, on the ground lost in 1871, and for eleven days it advanced across the plateau west of the Moselle, through the villages of the frontier, until its forward battalions stood on the hills west of Metz and could see the cathedral. There it stopped. The German counter-stroke then fell on Verdun for four months. The villages the French took and lost in those eleven days were shelled flat, and their memorials, which name the dead of both armies on separate faces of the same stone, are the war memorials of the Lorraine valley. The town of Metz rang its bells when the offensive stopped, which France has never forgiven, and the town has never been sure whether it rang them for relief or for the dead.

1919

The Treaty of Berlin left the grand duchy German, and the grand duchy was relieved. At the peace conference in 1919 the delegation of the United Kingdom of America proposed a plebiscite in Alsace and Lorraine, and Germany and Britain refused it. In the grand duchy the refusal was taken with relief. The war had been won, the provinces were not in question at Berlin, and a vote would have run through every family in the grand duchy, with brothers on different sides and grandparents on a third. The Landtag passed a resolution of thanks to the imperial government, the only resolution of its history passed unanimously, and nobody has ever quite admitted to having proposed it.

The democratic settlement reached Straßburg with the other states. The constitution of 1911 was amended in 1919, as the other states’ constitutions were, to give women the vote, to make the second chamber of the Landtag the sovereign chamber, and to make the government responsible to it. The grand duchy’s politics in the years between the wars were those of a Catholic, bilingual, prosperous border state: the Zentrum governed, the SPD organised the steel valleys and the mills of Mülhausen, and a small autonomist movement argued for more home rule and was watched by Berlin and courted by Paris.

Between the wars

France’s revanche did not end with the war; it hardened. The Republic that lost in 1918 lost Alsace and Lorraine a second time, and the fascist movement that rose out of its veterans’ leagues in the 1930s made the recovery of the provinces the centre of its creed. Its newspapers printed maps of the grand duchy in violet, its rallies at Nancy ended with an oath to Straßburg, and its leader, Henri Delacroix, promised the “recovered provinces” in every speech he made. In the grand duchy the autonomist movement collapsed under the weight of the attention, and by 1938 there was almost nobody left in Straßburg who would say in public that the provinces had anything to gain from France.

1939: the annexation

Fascist France overran the grand duchy in the first weeks of the Second Great War. The French armies came through the Vosges passes and across the Lorraine plateau in the autumn of 1939, faster than the imperial army could reinforce a frontier it had expected to hold, and took Metz in nine days and Straßburg in three weeks, before driving on across the Rhine into Baden, which became the corridor of the invasion of southern Germany. The grand duchy was the first German state the regime took and among the last it gave back.

Grand Duke Otto II went to war and was captured. Otto, forty-six, had served in the imperial army as a young man and held a reserve colonel’s commission, and on the day of the invasion he left Straßburg to join his regiment on the Lorraine front. His ministry and his family went east, across the Rhine and into unoccupied Germany, where the government of the grand duchy sat in exile at Würzburg for the rest of the war. Otto was taken prisoner with the remains of his regiment in the second week of the invasion, near Diedenhofen.

The regime did not send him to a camp. It sent him home. He was brought back to Straßburg under guard and kept in his own palace, the Kaiserpalast, in four rooms of the east wing where his great-grandfather had written his memoirs, and for six years he was made to appear at the regime’s ceremonies: on the cathedral square at the proclamation of the annexation, at the reopening of the university as a French one, on 14 July each year beside the Commissioner-General. The regime’s newsreels showed him standing among its officials in a civilian suit, saying nothing, and France was told he had accepted the return of the provinces. He had not, and everybody in the grand duchy knew it, because he never once took his hat off for the tricolour, and the newsreels, which could cut a great deal, could never cut that.

The provinces were declared French and given a governor. The regime annexed the grand duchy by decree in November 1939 as the Recovered Provinces, abolished its institutions, and placed it under a Commissioner-General at Straßburg, Gaston Ferry, a Party official and former prefect from Épinal, who governed it for six years. His mandate was to make the provinces French, and he understood that to mean that nothing German should be left in them.

The six years

German was banned. From the first month of the annexation German was forbidden in public, in schools, in courts, in churches and on signs. Children were punished for speaking it in the playground. Sermons in German were forbidden, and the Lutheran churches of Alsace, whose liturgy was German, held their services in French or not at all. The Alsatian dialect, which the regime classed as German, was banned with it, which meant that a large part of the population could not lawfully speak to its own grandparents in the street.

Every name was made French. Towns, streets and villages were renamed by decree: Straßburg was given its French spelling back, Mülhausen became Mulhouse, Diedenhofen Thionville, and the hundreds of villages ending in -heim and -weiler were given French names that nobody had ever used. Then the regime turned to the people. Family names were “restored” to French forms or replaced, first names were changed in the registers, and the inscriptions on gravestones in German were ordered chiselled off. The order was carried out in some cemeteries and refused in many, and the half-erased stones are still there.

The grand duchy’s men were conscripted into the French army. In 1940 the regime declared the people of the Recovered Provinces French citizens and therefore liable to French military service, and over the next five years it conscripted about 130,000 of the grand duchy’s men, German citizens, into the army of the state that had annexed them. Those who refused were imprisoned or sent to Schirmeck, and their families were deported to the interior of France. The conscripts were sent as far as possible from home, most of them east, into the deep thrust across the north German plain, and many of them were at the siege of Berlin in the winter of 1941, fighting the army their brothers and cousins were serving in on the other side of the line. About 40,000 of them were killed or are still missing.

They are called the malgré-nous. The word is French, despite ourselves, and the grand duchy uses it in both languages, because the men were conscripted in French. It is the grand duchy’s hardest word. The malgré-nous were victims of the regime and wore its uniform; some deserted to the German lines at the first chance and many could not; some were made to take part in what the regime did in occupied Germany and a few took part willingly. The grand duchy has spent eighty years trying to hold all of that at once, and it has not always managed.

Schirmeck

The regime built its camp in the Vosges. In 1940 it opened a camp on the mountainside above Schirmeck, a small town in the valley of the Breusch south-west of Straßburg, on land taken from a farm, with a view down the valley that every survivor remembered. It was built for the people the regime declared were not French: French Jews from the provinces and from France itself, Roma, resisters, priests who had preached in German, and German-speakers of the grand duchy whom the Commissioner-General’s office classified as irrecoverable. About 52,000 people were held there between 1940 and 1945, and about 22,000 of them died, of hunger, cold, labour in the quarries, medical experiment and execution.

Its dead were French and German, and it is on German soil. The camp was liberated in April 1945 by its own guards’ flight, a few weeks before the provinces were handed back, and the first people to enter it were the villagers of Schirmeck. Since 1946 it has been a memorial of the grand duchy. Most of its dead were citizens of France, killed by the French state, on territory that state had annexed and has since admitted was never its own, and the memorial’s inscriptions are in French, German and Hebrew. It is the camp at which Napoleon VII laid his wreath in 1999.

11 May 1945

The grand duchy was not liberated by a battle. By the spring of 1945 the Allied armies had cleared most of Germany and were in France, and the French garrisons in the Recovered Provinces, cut off from Paris and from each other, held on behind the Vosges with nothing left to defend. When Delacroix was taken in the ruins of Paris on 3 May 1945, the regime ceased to exist, and the garrisons began to surrender. They surrendered to the grand duchy’s own officials, town by town, over the following week: Straßburg on 6 May, Kolmar and Mülhausen in the days after, and the last of them at Metz on 11 May, when the French commandant handed the keys of the city to its German mayor, who had been held in the prison of the citadel since 1939.

Otto II walked out of the palace on 6 May. The guard on his rooms had left the night before. He came down the main staircase of the Kaiserpalast in the suit the newsreels had shown for six years, crossed the Kaiserplatz on foot, went into the first church he came to, and asked the priest to say the mass in German. The priest did.

11 May is the grand duchy’s civic day. It is a public holiday, kept with the bells of every church in the three districts rung at noon, the malgré-nous associations at the memorials, and a wreath laid at Schirmeck by the Grand Duke and the President of the Council of State together. It is not a festival. The grand duchy celebrates on 18 January, with the Empire and, since 2027, with its own reasons, and it remembers on 11 May.

Grand Duchess Marguerite did not see it. She had stayed in Straßburg in 1939, refusing to leave her son, and lived out the annexation in a flat in the old city under watch, and she died there in February 1945, at seventy-three, three months before the city was handed back. She is buried in the cathedral, the first of the house to lie in Straßburg.

1946: the bilingual constitution

The grand duchy rebuilt itself in two languages. The constitution of 1911 had been suspended by the annexation and could not simply be restored, since the regime had made a lie of the German state’s claim to be a home for French-speakers, and the grand duchy’s answer was to write a new constitution in which the two languages were equal. The Constitution of 1946 was drafted in German and French together, by a convention elected that winter, and both texts are authentic; a court that finds them different must reconcile them. It replaced the two chambers with a single Landtag, created a government called the Council of State under a President of the Council of State, a title borrowed from the French side to say that the grand duchy owed nothing to either side, and restored the flag of 1912.

Otto II gave the palace away. He would not live again in the rooms where he had been paraded for the regime, and when the constitution came into force he gave the Kaiserpalast to the new Landtag, which has sat in its great hall since, and moved the house to a plain villa in the Ruprechtsau, on the edge of Straßburg by the Rhine. The palace was renamed the Palace of the Rhine in the same year, and it is the Landtag, the Council of State’s offices, and nothing else.

The regime’s men were tried, and the trials are still argued over. Gaston Ferry was arrested in Paris, extradited, tried before the grand duchy’s own court at Straßburg in 1946, condemned for the annexation, the conscription and Schirmeck, and executed. His senior officials were tried with him. Local collaborators, people of the grand duchy who had served the regime’s administration or denounced their neighbours, were tried by the grand duchy’s courts in the years after. The malgré-nous were never tried as soldiers of the enemy, by the decision of the first postwar government, and the argument over who among them chose what, and what the grand duchy owes to those who could not choose, has never stopped.

The Landespartei was founded the same year. The Elsaß-Lothringische Landespartei, in French the Parti régional, was founded in 1946 by men and women of the exile government and the resistance, for autonomy within the Empire and for the equality of the two languages, and it has sat in every Landtag since and in most of its governments.

The long peace

The postwar settlement left the claim formally open. France under the restored Empire accepted the frontier in practice in 1946, and the crape that had covered the statue of the city of Straßburg in the Place de la Concorde since 1871 came off that year. But the settlement of 1945 left the question of the provinces formally open, and no French government would renounce a claim that French schoolchildren had been taught for seventy-five years. No French government pressed it either. For eighty years the claim was a sentence in French law and an absence in French diplomacy: French ministers did not visit Straßburg, French maps drew the frontier in a dotted line, and the grand duchy got on with being German.

The grand duchy prospered. The steel of Lorraine and the chemicals and textiles of Mülhausen rebuilt quickly in the postwar boom, Straßburg became a city of banks and insurers serving the upper Rhine, and the Alsatian wine villages, which the annexation had emptied, filled again. The Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität was reopened as a German university with a French faculty, then made fully bilingual. A French-speaking University of Metz was founded in 1970, and a technical university at Mülhausen followed.

Otto III and the malgré-nous law

Otto II reigned until his death in 1971, at seventy-seven. He was the longest-reigning of the house, sixty-seven years, and the one who had suffered most for it, and he was succeeded by his son Otto III, born in 1925, who had spent the annexation in exile at Würzburg as the face of the grand duchy that had not surrendered, and who had joined the imperial army himself in 1943, at eighteen, and served on the Rhine.

Otto III’s reign is remembered for one law. In 1975, against the opposition of the old soldiers’ associations, who held that the malgré-nous had worn the enemy’s uniform and fought against the men who were trying to free their homes, Otto III pressed his ministers and the Landtag for a law recognising the malgré-nous as victims of the regime and not as soldiers of the enemy, with pensions for the survivors and the widows and a memorial in every district. He was himself a soldier of the other side, which is why the law could pass. He spoke for it once in public, at Kolmar, and said that he had been lucky enough to be on the right side of the Rhine at fourteen, and that luck was not a merit. The law passed by four votes.

He died in 1989, and was succeeded by his son Herbert II, born in 1958.

Herbert II

Herbert II reigned for thirty-eight years and waited. He married in 1990 Anne Thiriet, a lawyer’s daughter from Metz, French-speaking, not royal, the first Grand Duchess born in the grand duchy, and Paris read the marriage as a message, which it was. He reigned through the long, slow approach of France and Germany to each other, and never once said in public that he wanted France to let the provinces go, because a Grand Duke who said so would have been asking.

He brought the Emperor of the French to Schirmeck. In 1999, on his state visit to Germany, Napoleon VII came to the grand duchy, the first French head of state to do so, at Herbert’s invitation, and at Schirmeck he laid a wreath from the French people and said one sentence, which both countries quote: that the crime had been done in French, by Frenchmen, to people the French state had declared not to be French, and that Germany’s hospitality to the memorial did not transfer any part of it. The two men walked down the camp road together afterwards in the rain, and the photograph is in most Alsatian school textbooks. Since that visit the memorial’s board has had a French member.

France recognised the malgré-nous in 2002. Three years after the visit, the Estates-General passed a law recognising the malgré-nous as victims of the fascist regime, with a French pension for the survivors, some thousands of whom were still alive. It was the first French law to concern the grand duchy since 1871 that did not assert a claim to it, and the associations, who had asked for it for half a century, received it with a statement of two lines.

He brought the Concert’s Parliament to Straßburg. When France and Germany relaunched the negotiation for a European union at Straßburg in 2023, and the French government proposed Straßburg as the seat of its Parliament, the proposal was French in origin and needed German acceptance, and Berlin hesitated, because putting the Parliament in the grand duchy looked to some imperial ministers like inviting France to share it. Herbert II spent the winter of 2023 persuading them, privately and by every means a constitutional Grand Duke has, and Berlin accepted. Building began on the Ill that year.

He abdicated on the day the treaty was signed. On 18 January 2027 the Treaty of Straßburg was signed in the city, and with it France renounced its claim to Alsace and Lorraine. That evening Herbert II signed his abdication in the Palace of the Rhine, before the President of the Council of State and the presidents of the three districts, and said that the house of Bismarck had been put in Straßburg to hold the provinces until France let them go, that France had let them go, and that the house’s work was done and a new reign should begin with the question closed. His son was sworn the next morning. Herbert II lives at the villa in the Ruprechtsau and has not been seen at court since.

Konstantin

Grand Duke Konstantin was thirty-two when he succeeded, and had been a reporter. He was born in 1994 at Metz, the second child and elder son of Herbert II and Grand Duchess Anne, and given a name that no Bismarck had carried, chosen by his mother, who wanted a name that was the same in German and French and belonged to neither. He was educated in Straßburg and at the University of Metz, in French, and for eight years, from 2018 to 2026, he was a reporter on Le Messin, the French-language daily of Metz, covering the steel valleys and the Landtag under his own name. He resigned in the autumn of 2026, when his father told him what he intended, and the paper printed his last story, on a works council election at Hayingen, without comment.

He succeeded on the evening of 18 January 2027, when his father signed, and watched the night’s fireworks on the Rhine from the terrace of the Palace of the Rhine beside the President of the Council of State, a Grand Duke of two hours. He was sworn the next morning in the great hall, in both languages, as every Grand Duke has been since 1946, and he swore first in French, his first language, which no Grand Duke had done. Then he went home to Metz.

He lives at Plappeville, outside Metz, and Straßburg has noticed. In 2027 he took over his mother’s family house, a plain stone house on the hill west of Metz with a view of the cathedral, which the city calls la maison Thiriet and refuses to call anything grander. He is the first Grand Duke since Bismarck not to live in or beside Straßburg, and Metz, which claims him as a Messin by birth, mother and language, has been unbearable about it since.

The year of the regencies

The grand duchy’s part in the year of the regencies was its own. When Heinrich I died suddenly in February, Konstantin walked at his funeral in Berlin among the German princes, the youngest sovereign there. In September a plant of Renault, the carmaker owned by the French state, opened at Mülhausen, the first French factory in the grand duchy, and Napoleon VII came to open it with Princess Charlotte, then chair of the imperial Regency Council; it was his first visit to the grand duchy since 1999, and Paris and Berlin both photographed it from every angle. When Kittyhawk, the flight carrying King Ernest V, was lost east of Newfoundland later that month, Konstantin wrote privately to Queen Christina; nothing about the letter was made public. In October the grand duchy’s four votes in the Bundesrat went with every other state’s for the amendment that abolished the imperial Regency Council, and the Landtag ratified it within the day.

The Grand Dukes

The house of Bismarck

The house is new, and the grand duchy is the only German state whose reigning house was made by the Empire. The Bismarcks were an old family of the Altmark gentry, Junkers of no great wealth, until Otto von Bismarck made the Empire and was made a prince by it in 1871. Every other reigning house in Germany is older than the state it reigns over, and several are older than the idea of Germany. The house of Bismarck was raised to sovereignty in 1890 by an imperial law, for a man rather than for a dynasty, and its legitimacy in the grand duchy has always rested on what it did there rather than on what it was.

The succession is by male-preference primogeniture, as the law of 1890 provided, and the Landtag has never changed it. The SPD tabled a bill for absolute primogeniture in 2027, which would make Konstantin’s elder sister, Princess Sophie, his heir in place of their younger brother, and it was stalled within the year when Princess Sophie said publicly that she did not want to be heir and would not be made one by a vote.

The family now

Grand Duke Konstantin is unmarried, and the press counts the weddings he attends and the guests he speaks to at them. His heir is his younger brother, Prince Gottfried, born in 1999, who served four years in the imperial army and then started late in medicine at Straßburg, where he is in his clinical years and is said by his teachers to be competent and by his fellow students to be bad at cards. His elder sister, Princess Sophie, born in 1993, teaches at a girls’ Gymnasium in Kolmar, and has told the Landtag, through the President of the Council of State, that she likes her job.

Herbert II and Grand Duchess Anne live at the villa in the Ruprechtsau. The former Grand Duke has not appeared at any public occasion since his abdication and has given no interview. His wife appears at Metz, where she was born, on the cathedral’s feast day each year, and nowhere else.

What the Grand Duke does

The Grand Duke acts on the advice of his ministers and reigns in two languages. He appoints the President of the Council of State whom the Landtag elects, signs the grand duchy’s laws in both texts, opens the Landtag after each election, receives the President of the Council of State once a week, and represents the grand duchy among the Empire’s sovereigns. He confirms the Bishop of Straßburg and the Bishop of Metz under the Concordat. He has no personal power that is used in practice. He lays the wreath at Schirmeck on 11 May, and on 18 January he gives the grand duchy’s only public ducal speech of the year, on the terrace of the Palace of the Rhine, which since 2027 has been in French and German alternately, a paragraph at a time.

He is believed to write a column. Since February 2027 Le Messin has carried a weekly unsigned column, Le Promeneur, the walker, of walks through Metz and the Lorraine valleys, written in a French that the paper’s readers recognised in its first week. It has never mentioned the Grand Duke, the house, the Landtag or the Concert. The palace has never denied that he writes it, and the President of the Council of State, asked about it in the Landtag, said that the government did not comment on the literary activities of private citizens, which the Landtag took as confirmation.

He is liked and watched. Konstantin is liked for his French, which is his first language, for his informality, which extends to taking the train from Metz to Straßburg and being photographed in second class, and for the fact that he was a working journalist for eight years and is still treated by the press as a former colleague, which makes it gentler with him than with his father. Straßburg watches him for preferring Metz. The German-speaking villages of Alsace watch him for speaking their dialect badly. Everyone reads Le Promeneur for clues, and has found none.

Geography

The grand duchy covers about 14,500 square kilometres between the Rhine and the Vosges and across the Lorraine plateau. It has three landscapes. The plain of Alsace runs about 190 kilometres along the left bank of the Rhine, from the Palatinate border in the north to the Swiss border at Basel in the south, flat, fertile, densely settled and between twenty and forty kilometres wide; across the river lies Baden. West of the plain rise the Vosges, a range of rounded, wooded mountains rising to over 1,400 metres at the Großer Belchen, whose crest has marked the frontier with France since 1871 along most of its length. On the eastern slopes of the Vosges, between the plain and the forest, runs the band of wine villages that makes Alsace’s name abroad.

North-west of the Vosges lies German Lorraine, a rolling plateau of farmland and forest drained by the Moselle and its tributaries, the Orne and the Fentsch, whose valleys hold the iron and steel towns. Metz stands on the Moselle in the middle of it. The frontier with France runs across the plateau west and south of Metz, on the line drawn in 1871 around the fortress, and it is the only part of the grand duchy’s border with France that is not a mountain crest, which is why the 1916 offensive came that way.

The towns. Straßburg, on the Ill near its junction with the Rhine, has about 320,000 people and has grown by twenty thousand since the Concert arrived. Mülhausen, in the south near the Swiss border, has about 110,000; Metz about 120,000; Kolmar, the seat of Upper Alsace, about 70,000. Diedenhofen on the Moselle, Hagenau in the north, Schlettstadt and Saargemünd are the larger of the rest.

The three districts

The grand duchy is divided into three Bezirke, as it was in 1871, each under a district president appointed by the Council of State, with an elected district assembly that has charge of roads, secondary schools and the districts’ share of the hospitals. Lower Alsace, the northern half of the plain, has its seat at Straßburg; Upper Alsace, the southern half, at Kolmar; Lorraine at Metz. The districts are older than the grand duchy and in Lorraine’s case more loved than it, and the district assembly at Metz has a habit of passing resolutions on matters that belong to the Landtag, which the Landtag has learned to ignore.

Government and politics

The constitution of 1946

The Constitution of 1946 is the grand duchy’s fundamental law, and it exists in two equal texts. It provides for the Grand Duke, the Landtag, the Council of State and the courts, guarantees the equality of the two languages in public life, the rights of the dialects in schools and local government, and the Concordat, and it can be amended only by two-thirds of the Landtag. Its preamble, which every schoolchild in the grand duchy learns in both languages, says that the people of Alsace and Lorraine, having been forbidden their language by one state, give themselves a constitution in two, so that no state may forbid either again.

French has been co-official with German since 2027. Until the Treaty of Straßburg the constitution of 1946 guaranteed French as a protected language in schools, courts and local government but kept German as the language of administration, as the Empire required. When France renounced its claim, the imperial government and the Landtag agreed, as part of the same settlement, to make French a co-official language of the grand duchy, the only German state in which the language of a neighbouring country is co-official across its whole territory. Since 1 July 2027 every law is enacted in both languages, every citizen may deal with every public authority in either, and the signs give both.

What that means in practice is the live argument. A year in, the grand duchy is still settling what co-official French requires: whether every civil servant must pass the state examinations in both languages, or only those who deal with the public; whether a judge in Kolmar may write a judgment in French if one party is German-speaking; whether the dialects, which the constitution protects but does not make official, have lost ground to French in the schools. The Council of State’s bill on the civil service examinations, which would require both languages of every entrant from 2030, has been the grand duchy’s main political quarrel since the spring, and the German-speaking villages of Alsace, who did not ask for French to be made official and do not speak it well, are its loudest opponents.

The Landtag

The Landtag has a hundred members, elected for five years by proportional representation across the grand duchy, and sits in the great hall of the Palace of the Rhine, Bismarck’s palace, under a ceiling painted for the Emperor’s receptions. It elects the President of the Council of State, passes the laws and the budget, and debates in both languages with simultaneous interpretation, which members ignore when they wish to be insulting in the other language without being understood. The last election was in 2025 and the next is due in 2030.

The Zentrum is the grand duchy’s natural party of government. In a land where about two-thirds of the people are Catholic, the Catholic centre has led most governments since 1919, and its strength runs across both languages and all three districts. The SPD holds the steel valleys of Lorraine and the industrial suburbs of Mülhausen and Straßburg. The Landespartei, the regional party of 1946, holds the wine villages, the Alsatian countryside and a good part of the Straßburg middle class, and is the party of the dialects as well as of autonomy. The National Liberals are the party of Straßburg’s banks, the FVP of its professions and of the Concert’s growing German staff, and the DKP has a foothold in the Protestant villages of northern Alsace.

The Council of State

The government is the Council of State, led by its President, a title chosen in 1946 from the French side of the grand duchy’s history to say that its government was its own and not Berlin’s. The President of the Council of State is elected by the Landtag, appointed by the Grand Duke, and leads a council of eight ministers. The grand duchy’s other offices kept German titles, and the President is the only head of government in the Empire whose title is French in origin.

Since 2025 the President of the Council of State has been Jean-Paul Schaeffer, of the Zentrum, who leads a coalition of the Zentrum and the Landespartei with 54 of the 100 seats. He was born in 1967 at Diedenhofen, in the Moselle steel country, the son of a rolling-mill foreman, and his French first name and German surname are the commonest pattern in Lorraine. French is his first language. He trained as an engineer, spent twenty-six years in the Lorraine steel industry, the last nine as manager of the integrated works in the Fentsch valley, and came into the Landtag in 2015 for the Diedenhofen district. He took office in 2025, in the last stage of the Straßburg negotiation, and negotiated the grand duchy’s side of the language settlement with the imperial government, which is why his opponents call the examinations bill Schaeffer’s French and his supporters call it the treaty.

Courts

The grand duchy has its own courts, under imperial law. Its court of appeal sits at Kolmar, as it has since 1879, and its local and regional courts sit in all three districts. Proceedings may be conducted in either language at the choice of the parties, and since 2027 judgments are given in the language of the proceedings, with a translation in the other. The court of appeal at Kolmar is the only court in the Empire that publishes its judgments in French as of right.

The Concordat

The grand duchy is the only German state still governed by a Napoleonic law. The Concordat of 1801 between Napoleon and the Pope, with the organic articles that extended it to the Lutheran and Reformed churches and later to the Jewish communities, was in force in Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, when France ceded them, and the German authorities, who had other things to change, left it alone. France abolished it for itself in 1905, separating church and state. In the grand duchy it was never repealed. The state pays the clergy of the four recognised faiths, Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Jewish; the Grand Duke confirms the Bishops of Straßburg and Metz on the Pope’s nomination; and religious instruction in the four faiths is part of the school timetable. The arrangement has been challenged in the Landtag several times, by the FVP and the SPD, and has never come close to repeal.

The grand duchy in the Empire

The grand duchy casts four votes in the Bundesrat, a weight it was given in 1890 to honour Bismarck and not its population, and one larger than that of Baden, which has nearly twice its people. The anomaly has been raised in every debate on the Bundesrat’s composition since 1919 and has survived every one, because changing it requires a constitutional amendment that every state must ratify, and the grand duchy has never been the only state with something to lose.

Its relations with Berlin are those of a state that was a conquest first. The imperial government governed the provinces directly for nineteen years, watched their soldiers in 1914, and could not defend them in 1939, and the grand duchy has never quite trusted Berlin’s judgment of it. Since 2027 the relationship has changed again, because the grand duchy is now the Empire’s window on the Concert, and imperial ministers come to Straßburg more often than they come to any other state capital but Munich.

Its relations with France are now the closest in the Empire. Since the renunciation, French ministers visit Straßburg as they would any German state capital, the French consulate-general at Straßburg is the largest French mission in Germany after the embassy in Berlin, and the President of the Council of State meets the prefect of French Lorraine at Nancy twice a year. The grand duchy’s border with France, which for a century and a half was the most watched frontier in Europe, is now crossed by about 90,000 commuters a day, most of them French citizens working in Straßburg, Metz and Mülhausen.

Economy

Straßburg and the Concert

Since 2027 the European capital has been the grand duchy’s engine. The Concert’s Parliament, its secretariat and the offices, lobbies, law firms, consultancies, hotels and press bureaux that gather around any parliament have brought about twenty thousand new jobs to Straßburg in under two years, and the grand duchy’s banks and insurers, which had served the upper Rhine for a century, now serve a continent’s institutions as well. The Parliament sits for one week in four, and in sitting weeks the city fills to the last room within forty kilometres; in the other three, the secretariat, the committees and the industries around them keep it busy. The grand duchy’s income per head has risen faster since 2027 than any other German state’s, and it is now one of the richest states in the Empire, at about A£96,000 a head against the Empire’s A£84,000.

The rest of the grand duchy does not feel it. Straßburg’s boom has raised rents in the city by about a third since the Parliament opened, pushed its teachers, nurses and police out to the commuter towns of the plain, and drawn the grand duchy’s graduates away from Metz, Kolmar and Mülhausen. The Landtag’s quarrels about the Concert are quarrels about who it is for. Lorraine, whose valleys are the poorest part of the grand duchy, regards the European capital as Straßburg’s good fortune paid for by everyone else, and the SPD and the Lorraine members of the Zentrum have made the transfer of Concert revenue to the districts a condition of the next budget.

Lorraine steel

The steel of Lorraine is smaller than it was, and alive. The iron-ore field of Lorraine, whose phosphoric ore, the minette, fed the furnaces of the Moselle valleys from the 1870s, was worked out and its mines closed in the 1990s. Across the Vosges, in French Lorraine, the steel went with them. In the grand duchy two integrated steelworks survived, in the Fentsch valley at Hayingen and in the Orne valley, rebuilt in the 1990s to run on imported ore shipped up the Moselle and coke from the Saar, and as German in their ownership and their works councils as any plant in the Ruhr. They employ about nine thousand people between them, a fifth of what the valleys once employed, and the President of the Council of State ran the Fentsch works for nine years before he went into politics.

Mülhausen

Mülhausen makes chemicals, and has begun to make cars. The southern city grew in the nineteenth century on cotton printing, and its mills, the largest in Germany in their day, are museums now. Its chemical industry, which grew out of the dye works of the mills and the potash mines north of the city, survives as the grand duchy’s largest manufacturing employer after steel; the potash mines themselves closed in the 2000s. In September 2028 Renault, the carmaker owned by the French state since 1945, opened an assembly plant at Mülhausen, the first French factory in the grand duchy, building small electric cars for the Concert’s market. Napoleon VII and Princess Charlotte opened it together. The first car came off the line in November.

Wine, food and visitors

Alsatian wine is the grand duchy’s best-known export. The vineyards run for about 170 kilometres along the eastern foot of the Vosges, from Marlenheim to Thann, on slopes facing the plain, and produce dry white wines of Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Pinot gris and Sylvaner, sold in the tall flute bottle that the law reserves to them. The Wine Road, the road through the wine villages, is the grand duchy’s busiest tourist route. Lorraine’s exports are its mirabelle plums, its quiche and its beer.

Visitors come for the cathedral, the wine and Christmas. Straßburg’s Christmas market, held in the square in front of the cathedral since the sixteenth century, draws about two million visitors in December, and the wine villages of the Vosges foothills draw as many again across the year. The memorial at Schirmeck draws about two hundred thousand, most of them French schoolchildren.

Transport

The grand duchy is a crossing. Straßburg’s port on the Rhine is the second largest on the upper river after Mannheim’s, and the barges that carry the steelworks’ ore up the Moselle from the Rhine pass Metz on their way to the Fentsch and the Orne. Five road and rail bridges cross the Rhine between the grand duchy and Baden, the oldest of them, at Kehl, rebuilt in 1946 after the German army blew it in the autumn of 1939 to slow the French crossing. Straßburg lies on the main lines to Karlsruhe, Basel, Metz and the Saar, and its airport, at Entzheim on the plain to the south-west, has more flights to Brussels and Vienna than to Berlin since the Concert’s institutions were spread across the three.

The railway to Paris reopened as an ordinary railway only in 2027. The line across the frontier at Deutsch-Avricourt, which the Treaty of Frankfurt drew across, was closed from 1939 to 1946, reopened with a customs halt and a frontier police inspection that took longer than the journey to Nancy, and was made an ordinary line, without a stop at the frontier, on the day the treaty came into force. The first through train from Paris to Straßburg without a halt at Avricourt ran on 1 July 2027 with the Concert’s first deputies aboard, and the French deputies, the Straßburg papers noted, were the ones who looked out of the window at the frontier.

Output

The grand duchy’s output is about A£288 billion, about A£96,000 a head, well above the Empire’s average. It was a little above the average before 2027, when the Concert came, and the gap has widened every quarter since. Unemployment is lowest in Straßburg and highest in the Lorraine valleys, and the grand duchy is now a net contributor to the Empire’s equalisation between states, for the first time in its history, which Lorraine finds the hardest fact of all to accept.

Society

Population

About 3 million people live in the grand duchy, about 1.95 million in Alsace and 1.05 million in German Lorraine. The population grew slowly through the twentieth century, lost heavily in the annexation, when about 40,000 of its men died in French uniform and tens of thousands of its people were deported, imprisoned or expelled, and recovered in the postwar decades. Since 2027 it has grown faster than in any period since the 1950s, almost all of the growth in and around Straßburg. About one in eight of the grand duchy’s residents was born outside the Empire, most of them in France, Italy, Turkey and North Africa.

Languages

The grand duchy speaks three languages and calls them two. At home about two-fifths of its people speak German, a quarter French, and a third Alsatian, the Alemannic dialect of the plain, or Lorraine Franconian, the Platt of the villages east of Metz, which together are the strongest regional speech left anywhere in the Empire. The constitution makes German and French official and protects the dialects in schools and local government without making them official, which the Landespartei regards as the constitution’s one injustice.

Each language has its territory and none is confined to it. French is strongest in Metz, in the western valleys of Lorraine and among the old families of Straßburg and Mülhausen; German is the language of the cities, of administration until 2027 and of most of the young; the dialects are strongest in the Alsatian countryside and the Lorraine villages and among the old, and they are holding, which is more than any other German dialect is doing. Most of the grand duchy’s people speak two of the three and many speak all three. A conversation that moves through all three in a single sentence is so common that the grand duchy has a word for it, in Alsatian, which does not translate.

The annexation is in the language. The regime banned German and the dialect for six years, and the people who were children then grew up speaking a French they had been punished into and a German they had spoken in secret. They are the grand duchy’s oldest generation now, and the survey that found the dialects holding found them holding most strongly among the grandchildren of people who were beaten at school for speaking them.

Religion

About two-thirds of the grand duchy is Catholic, and about a sixth Protestant, Lutheran in the main and Reformed in a few old communities, concentrated in northern Alsace, in Straßburg and in the villages of the Vosges foothills. The Jewish community, about twelve thousand, is one of the oldest in Europe, older than Alsace’s French centuries; the regime deported most of it to Schirmeck and the east, and it rebuilt after 1945 around the great synagogue of Straßburg, which the regime burned in 1940 and the grand duchy rebuilt in 1958. The four recognised faiths are paid by the state under the Concordat. A growing number, about a sixth, belong to none.

Education

The grand duchy has three universities. The Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität at Straßburg, founded in 1872 to make the city a showcase of German learning, has been bilingual since 1946 and is one of the Empire’s great universities; it is known in French as the University of Straßburg and in the grand duchy simply as the university. The University of Metz, founded in 1970, teaches mostly in French and is Lorraine’s pride. The Technical University of Mülhausen teaches engineering and chemistry in both languages and has the closest links to industry of the three.

Every child learns both official languages from the first year of school, in schools that teach some subjects in German and some in French, and the dialect is taught as a subject wherever parents ask for it, which in most of the Alsatian countryside they do. Children of the four recognised faiths receive religious instruction in their own faith, and children of none take a course in ethics instead.

Newspapers and broadcasting

The grand duchy reads in two languages. The largest daily is the Straßburger Neueste Nachrichten, founded in 1877 and published in German with a French edition; in Metz the French Le Messin, founded in 1919, is read across Lorraine and has carried Le Promeneur since 2027. The grand duchy’s public broadcaster, founded in 1946, broadcasts on two channels, one in each language, and a weekly programme in the dialect that is the most watched thing it makes.

Culture

The cathedral

Straßburg’s cathedral is the grand duchy’s emblem. The cathedral of Notre-Dame, in German the Münster, was built in the red sandstone of the Vosges between the eleventh century and the fifteenth, and its single north spire, completed in 1439, was for two centuries the tallest building in the world. It was damaged in the siege of 1870 and repaired by the German authorities. In 1939 the regime flew the tricolour from its spire; on 6 May 1945 the grand duchy’s red and white replaced it, raised by the cathedral’s sacristan and a schoolboy, and the schoolboy’s photograph of the flag going up is the image the grand duchy uses for 11 May. Its astronomical clock, rebuilt in the 1840s, still draws a crowd every day at half past noon.

Food

The grand duchy eats from both sides of the Vosges. Its dishes are Sauerkraut, which Alsace calls choucroute in French and Surkrut in the dialect, served with pork and sausages; the Flammkuchen, a thin bread baked in a wood oven with cream, onions and bacon; the Kugelhopf, a ring-shaped yeast cake baked in a fluted mould; Munster cheese from the Vosges valleys; goose liver from the plain; and from Lorraine the quiche, the mirabelle tart and the pâté lorrain. A Straßburg restaurant menu is printed in German and French, and has been since 1946, and is ordered from in whichever language the waiter speaks.

The Marseillaise house

The house where France’s anthem was first sung is in Straßburg, on the Broglie square, with a plaque in both languages. The regime made it a shrine in 1940. The grand duchy kept the plaque after 1945, added a second one giving the date of the annexation and the number of the malgré-nous, and the two plaques side by side are the most photographed doorway in the city.

Football

The rivalry is Straßburg against Metz. RC Straßburg, Racing Club, and FC Metz both play in the imperial first division, and their meetings, twice a season, are the Alsace-Lorraine derby, the grand duchy’s identity argument in ninety minutes. Straßburg’s supporters sing in German and Alsatian, Metz’s in French, and since Konstantin moved to Plappeville Metz’s supporters have sung a song about the Grand Duke that the club has asked them not to sing and they have not stopped singing. The Grand Duke has attended the derby once, at Metz, sat in the directors’ box in a neutral scarf, and was booed by both ends.

Bismarck

The grand duchy’s affection for its founder surprises the rest of Germany. Elsewhere in the Empire Bismarck is a figure of granite, the iron Chancellor, the man of blood and iron. In the grand duchy he is le vieux, the old man who came to live among the conquered at seventy-five, learned their language badly, kept Berlin’s hands off their schools, and died among them. His statue on the Kaiserplatz shows him seated, in civilian clothes, with a book, which is how Straßburg chose to remember him when it commissioned the statue in 1905; there are fresh flowers at it on 1 April each year, his birthday, with cards in both languages.

Memory

The three wars

Every war the grand duchy remembers was fought over it. It keeps the siege of 1870 in the restored library and the scarred stones of the cathedral’s south side; the war of 1914 in the villages west of Metz that the French offensive of 1916 took and lost, whose memorials name the dead of both armies on separate faces of the same stone; and the war of 1939 everywhere, in the half-erased gravestones, the plaques on the houses of the deported, the memorial to the malgré-nous at Kolmar, and Schirmeck.

The malgré-nous

The malgré-nous are remembered as victims, by law, since 1975. The memorial at Kolmar, unveiled in 1977 under Otto III’s law, lists the 40,000 dead and missing by name and village, in alphabetical order, with no rank and no unit, because the inscriptions committee decided that the men had not chosen their units and should not be remembered by them. France recognised them as victims of the regime in 2002. Their associations, whose members were once counted in the tens of thousands, are now made up almost entirely of their children and grandchildren, who keep the memorials and the archives and have never stopped asking the question the men themselves could not bear to answer, of who among them chose what.

Schirmeck

The memorial at Schirmeck is the grand duchy’s and France’s together. It has been a state memorial of the grand duchy since 1946, with the camp’s barracks, the gallows, the quarry and the crematorium preserved on the mountainside above the Breusch valley, and a museum opened in 2005. Since Napoleon VII’s visit of 1999 its board has had a French member, and it receives about two hundred thousand visitors a year, most of them French schoolchildren, who are taken round by guides speaking French on German soil about a crime the French state committed. In November 2028 the first car from the Renault plant at Mülhausen went to the memorial’s minibus fleet, at the plant’s suggestion.

Symbols

The flag is red over white, with the gold cross of Lorraine at the hoist. The red and white are the old colours of Alsace, Rot un Wiss, and the double-barred cross is the cross of Lorraine, the badge of the old dukes. The Landtag adopted the flag in 1912 against Berlin’s wishes; the regime banned it in 1939; the constitution of 1946 restored it, and it has flown on the cathedral spire on every 11 May since. The state arms quarter the arms of Upper and Lower Alsace with those of Lorraine, three silver eaglets on a red bend on gold, under the Grand Ducal crown.

The anthem is wordless. The grand duchy has an official anthem, a march composed in 1912, and has never adopted words for it, because no text could be agreed in a single language and the Landtag of 1946 decided that a text in two would be sung by nobody. At public occasions it is played, and the crowd stands, and nobody sings, and the grand duchy regards this as the most accurate thing about it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• German Empire, of which the grand duchy is a constituent state
• European Concert, whose Parliament sits at Straßburg
• The Second Great War, in which fascist France annexed the grand duchy
• The First Great War, and the offensive of 1916 that came in sight of Metz
• France, which ceded the provinces in 1871 and renounced its claim in 2027
• French Third Republic, whose revanche was the recovery of the provinces
• Napoleon VII, who laid a wreath at Schirmeck in 1999
• Grand Duchy of Baden, across the Rhine
• Kingdom of Prussia, which the provinces were never made part of

Categories

Nations of the World · The German Empire · Constituent states · Alsace · Lorraine · Straßburg