Treaty of Frankfurt
The Treaty of Frankfurt ended the Franco-Prussian War in May 1871 and set up the next one. France ceded Alsace and most of Lorraine, including Metz and Strasbourg, and agreed to pay an indemnity of five billion gold francs with a German army of occupation remaining until it was paid. The annexation was Moltke's demand rather than Bismarck's preference. The military case was strategic depth and the fortress of Metz; Bismarck saw that taking territory from a defeated great power would make a permanent enemy of it, and was overruled by the general staff and by German public opinion. The population of the annexed provinces was mostly German-speaking, which was the public justification, and mostly did not want to be German, which was demonstrated when the deputies from Alsace-Lorraine protested in the Bordeaux assembly and again when some 130,000 people exercised their right to opt for French nationality and leave. The indemnity was designed to cripple France for a decade and was paid off in under three years by public subscription, which surprised everyone and got the occupation troops out early. The provinces were administered directly from Berlin as an imperial territory rather than made a federal state, which kept them second-class. Revanche — the recovery of the lost provinces — became the fixed point of French policy, expressed in the black-draped statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde. France got them back in 1919, lost them again in 1940 and recovered them in 1945. Bismarck spent the following twenty years building alliances designed to keep France without friends, on the assumption that it would never accept the loss. He was right about the assumption, and his successors could not sustain the alliances.
- Year: 1871 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
