The French enter Metz

On 19 November 1918 French troops made a ceremonial entry into Metz, the capital of the part of Lorraine that France had lost after the war with Prussia in 1871. For almost half a century Metz had been a German garrison town and one of the strongest fortresses of the Reich, surrounded by a ring of modern forts. Throughout the war the front never reached its forts. As late as September, after the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, there was argument over whether the Americans ought to have gone straight for Metz. For mid-November General Philippe Pétain was preparing a great Franco-American offensive in Lorraine, but the armistice of 11 November forestalled it. The fortress, never taken by assault, fell to the French under the Armistice of Compiègne.

The last days of German Metz

The revolution reached Metz earlier than the other towns of Alsace and Lorraine. On 8 November mutinous sailors arrived by train. They freed soldiers from the military prisons and hung a red flag from the balcony of the town hall. A soldiers’ council was formed in the city. The armistice, however, required the Germans to leave Alsace and Lorraine within 15 days, so the garrison quickly began to withdraw, and the councils dissolved as soon as the troops left. The French government did not wait for the troops to arrive. On 15 November it appointed commissioners of the Republic for Metz, Strasbourg and Colmar, who were to take over the administration of the recovered territories.

The parade

The honour of entering Metz fell to the Tenth Army of General Charles Mangin, the same army that in July had struck the Germans near Soissons. Accounts differ as to whether Mangin himself rode at the head of the troops. Some sources say that after a fall from his horse he could not command that day. In the early afternoon columns of infantry entered the city from the direction of Montigny, through the old Porte Serpenoise, and marched to the Esplanade, to the monument of Napoleon’s marshal Michel Ney. At their head marched the 146th and 156th Infantry Regiments of the 39th Division, preceded by Pétain, General Marie Émile Fayolle and other commanders escorted by hussars and chasseurs d’Afrique. The city was decorated with tricolour flags, and crowds, among them many women and girls in Lorraine costume, greeted the soldiers with flowers.

On the Esplanade Pétain, on a white horse, accompanied by his chief of staff General Edmond Buat and some twenty officers of general headquarters, took the salute. According to Buat’s diary, at noon the commander-in-chief learned by telephone that the government had decided to confer on him the dignity of Marshal of France. Marshal Ferdinand Foch himself had pressed for this with Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau two days earlier. Witnesses remembered that Pétain took the salute calmly and without visible emotion, although the entry into Metz was one of the most symbolic moments of the French victory.

What came next

The decree appointing Pétain a marshal was signed on 21 November. He was presented with his marshal’s baton in Metz on 8 December by President Raymond Poincaré, in the presence of Clemenceau and of Foch, who in his youth had studied at the Jesuit college there. Poincaré noted at the time that thousands of girls in Lorraine costume almost buried him and Clemenceau in flowers. Formally Metz and the whole of Lorraine returned to France only under the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which recognised that this had taken effect from the day of the armistice. Many Germans who had settled there after 1871 still lived in the city, however. Many of them were expelled to Germany in the following months.