Alsace and Lorraine a war aim

On 15 November 1917 the question of Alsace and Lorraine came up again in the British House of Commons. The Labour member for Bradford, Fred Jowett, asked whether any conversations about these provinces had been held with France before the war and, if not, when the British government had agreed to support the French in treating their return as an “essential point” of the war aims. Lord Robert Cecil, Minister of Blockade and at the same time Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, answered for the Foreign Office. To the first part of the question he replied in the negative. As to the second, he stated that it had been “a well-understood war aim from the moment we entered the war”. The British chronology of the war records this statement as a further assurance by the government that the return of Alsace and Lorraine was a war aim, and refers to a similar entry from February.

The Tsar’s secret promises

Jowett’s question came immediately after another, more awkward for the government. The Liberal member Hastings Lees-Smith, a critic of the government’s foreign policy, asked whether the Foreign Office was aware that on 31 July 1917 the French foreign minister, Alexandre Ribot, had informed the Chamber of Deputies of a promise made by the Tsar to Aristide Briand while the latter was prime minister. The Tsar was said not only to have supported French claims to Alsace and Lorraine, but also to have left France a free hand should it wish to create an autonomous state out of German territory on the left bank of the Rhine. This concerned the arrangements negotiated in Petrograd in February 1917 by Gaston Doumergue.

Cecil confirmed that Ribot had said so, and added that on the same occasion the French minister had disavowed, on behalf of his government, any policy of conquest. Lees-Smith then pointed out that when he had raised the matter in the foreign policy debate the previous week, the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had called it a fabrication. He asked whether, in view of Cecil’s answer, Balfour stood by his view. Cecil replied that he had not heard his superior’s speech, but had read it the next morning and “adhered to everything” he had said. The short exchange showed where the limit of British commitments lay. London was ready to treat the return of Alsace and Lorraine as an obvious war aim, but wanted nothing to do with France’s further-reaching plans for the Rhineland, which it had taken no part in agreeing.

An answer to “Never!”

The matter had gained weight in the autumn of 1917. On 9 October the German Foreign Secretary, Richard von Kühlmann, declared in the Reichstag that the only real obstacle to peace was the future of Alsace and Lorraine, and to the question whether Germany could make concessions there he answered: “Never!”. Two days later, on 11 October, Prime Minister David Lloyd George replied to him in a speech in London. He said that it was hard to imagine a statement more likely to prolong the war, and that “however long the war may last” England intended to stand by her gallant ally, France, until she had freed her “oppressed children” from the foreign yoke. That same day the former prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith said in Liverpool that Kühlmann’s only concrete contribution to the cause of peace had been his flat denial of France’s rights to the two provinces.

In Paris these words were received with relief. On 19 October Prime Minister Paul Painlevé reminded the Chamber of Deputies that Lloyd George had for the first time formally answered the German challenge by declaring that Britain would stand by France until she recovered Alsace and Lorraine. Painlevé’s government spoke of the “disannexation” of the two provinces from Germany, and its foreign minister, Louis Barthou, insisted that their return was an absolute condition for France. This cabinet fell two days before Cecil’s statement, and its successor was to be Georges Clemenceau, for whom recovering the lost provinces was a lifelong cause.

British assurances had their limits in Britain itself, too. Part of the left and supporters of a negotiated peace asked whether Alsace and Lorraine were worth prolonging the war for, and some proposed that the provinces’ inhabitants should decide their fate. Lloyd George set out the government’s position most forcefully only in January 1918, when he declared that Britain would stand by France “to the death” in her demand for the righting of the wrong of 1871. A few days later President Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, called for that wrong to be righted.