What Germany wants Author:Edmund von Mach Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II ALSACE - LORRAINE Contrary to the general belief Bismarck is said to have regretted more than anyone the necessity of taking Alsace-Lorraine fro... more »m France in 1871. It is true that these provinces had belonged to Germany from the time of the division of Charlemagne's empire in 843 to 1648, when Germany, exhausted by the Thirty Years' War and torn by internal dissensions, was forced to cede the greater part of them to France; Strassburg and the surrounding territory was seized by Louis XIV in time of peace in 1681. The people of Alsace are almost entirely of German stock, belonging to the Alemannian tribe, from the name of which the French name for Germany, Allemagne, is derived. That their native speech is German will appear even to the uninitiated from such names as Miilhausen, Breisach, Strassburg, Weissenburg, Saarburg, etc. Similarly, the population of Lorraine is for the most part closely related to that of the adjoining part of Prussia.1 1 H. C. G. von Jagemann, The Outlook, September 16, 1914. In spite of this Bismarck foresaw that France would not rest while she could hope some day to regain these provinces. The very peace, therefore, which concluded the Franco-Prussian war laid the foundation of another war in the future. This was a heavy price to pay, but without Alsace and Lorraine the South German States felt unable to join the federation of the German Empire. Bismarck therefore yielded and gave his reasons in a speech delivered May 2, 1871. He pointed out that there had not been " a generation of our fathers for three hundred years which had not been forced to draw the sword against France ", and that after the successful war of 1870 it had become our duty to take steps against similar attacks. The first step was the federation of the German States in...« less