THE RHINE PROBLEM

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 186, 4 May 1929, Page 27

THE RHINE PROBLEM

The evacuation of the Rhineland would be received in Germany with greater satisfaction, sentimentally at least, than the removal of the muchdiscussed transfer clause of the Dawes plan. Nothing irritates the Germans more than the spectacle of the French Tricolour floating over “the German Rhine,” and the presence of 60,000 allied soldiers in the Rhineland. When the French, British, and Belgian troops are withdrawn, the German State will regain complete authority over a region which possesses a longer and richer history than any other part of Germany—a land of legend, carnival, and wine which has been the object of Prussian and French rivalry for centuries.

In this prolonged contest the pendulum of fortune has swung from one extreme to the other. It was the habit of French kings to keep a watchful and protecting eye upon the Rhine States, neither annexing them nor allowing a German power to do so. A wave of revolutionary enthusiasm having carried the armies of the First Republic to the Rhine, Napoleon boldly appropriated the entire left bank and even a part of Westphalia. But French dominion vanished with Bonaparte, and after Waterloo it was Prussia’s turn to seize the Rhineland, Alsace also being added to the German Empire in 1871. For the next forty-seven years the Rhine was in reality a German river, French territory not touching it at any point. In 1918 the French came back, hoisting their flag over Alsace once more and marching into Mayence for the first time since Napoleon’s troops were driven out by the Duke of Coburg.

The left bank of the Rhine for nearly one hundred miles again belongs to France, and a French army has returned after more than a century to keep the “watch on the Rhine.” Few if any present-day French historians would defend the annexation of the Rhineland by the Directorate and Napoleon; and no Frenchman now contends that the Rhineland (excepting

Alsace) should form a part of France. It is conceded to be a German country and France does not covet it. But, as the French point out, it is not, and never has been, a Prussian country; it is, they contend, essentially different in tradition and spirit from the Baltic plains and should never have peen allowed to come under the dominion of Prussia. The French have never got over resenting Prussia’s intrusion in the Rhineland, and one of the grudges that some Frenchmen hold against the Government of the eighteen Fructidor and Napoleon is that under them France preceded Prussia as intruder on the Rhine, destroying the traditional independence of the Rhenish States and thus preparing the way for Prussia to swallow them up at the first opportunity. The French have not forgotten that Roman legions planted their standards upon the Rhine and that the left bank of the river, unlike the rest of Germany, was brought within the favoured sphere of Latin civilisation. One of the consequences is that the Roman Catholic Church predominates to-day in the Rhineland, while in non-Rhenish Prussia there are three times as many Protestants as Catholics.. The valley of’the Rhine, always closely attached to the Church, was nicknamed “Pfaffengasse” (Street of the Priests) by the Emperor Maximilian. The row of Gothic cathedrals extending from Strasbourg to Cologne, the wine harvest festivals, the gay, easy-going life of the people, have led certain Frenchmen to consider the Rhineland as being more akin to France than to the stern, Protestant, beer-drinking inhabitants of the plains of the north. Contrasting the ancient legends of the Rhineland with those of the northern Germans, Barries found in them an exemplification of profound differences of race and character. . In the near future the Rhineland will be evacuated by the Allies. Thus the Rhineland question will be settled for all time, the river being partly French, partly German. But the Rhineland remains as important as ever strategically, and one cannot yet say that the historic rivalry of which it has been the object has come to an end.