History, Geography and the French National Space: The Question of Alsace‐Lorraine, 1914‐18

Abstract

The restoration of French authority in Alsace and Lorraine, the regions ceded to the new German Empire following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, was a major preoccupation of France's political leadership before 1914 and was the principal French war aim during World War I. This paper examines how French politicians and intellectuals sought to reinforce this territorial claim between 1914 and 1918. In the early years of the war, the propaganda campaign was dominated by conservative politicians, business élites and senior figures in the army whose preoccupations were mainly economic and strategic and whose proposals were often unrealistic. Later in the war, moderate and less obviously self-interested geopolitical arguments were developed by leading French academics, particularly the historians and the geographers, with the active support of their government. This campaign emphasised cultural, historical and political questions, drew on the ideas of earlier French theorists of the nation-state, notably Ernest Renan, and had a significant impact on the subsequent development of France's renowned interwar tradition of geo-historical research.