House of Commons on war aims

The British chronology of the war records under 14 February 1917 that the British government gave an assurance in the House of Commons that the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France was one of the aims of the war. In the index of the same chronology this assurance appears under 15 February. In the records of Commons debates for February 1917, however, no statement by a minister naming both provinces could be found. On 14 February there were instead questions in the House about war aims, and the government’s answers referred to the joint Allied note, which covered the question of Alsace-Lorraine, though without naming it.

Mr Outhwaite’s questions

On 14 February the Liberal MP Robert Outhwaite, a supporter of a negotiated peace, asked whether the Allied governments intended in the post-war settlement to grant independence to the nations to which they now denied it. The Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour replied briefly that he had nothing to add to the statements already made on the Allies’ aims. Outhwaite pressed him on whether the government would not set a better example by granting independence to Ireland. Immediately afterwards he asked whether, in view of the general ignorance about the Czechoslovaks, for whose independence the Allies were fighting, the government would announce what territory they claimed and what form of government they wanted. Balfour replied that he did not think this necessary.

The day before, the Under-Secretary of State Lord Robert Cecil had announced that the Allied reply to Wilson’s note of 10 January would be printed together with a translation and laid before Parliament. These were the “statements already made”. Among the war aims the note listed the restitution of provinces and territories formerly wrested from the Allies by force or against the will of their inhabitants. The British yearbook The Annual Register noted that this was generally read as an allusion to Alsace-Lorraine, which France had lost to Germany in 1871 under the Treaty of Frankfurt. In December, at the London conference, Balfour had wanted the Allies to say this outright, but in the end a more general formula was adopted.

What London knew

France had plans in this matter going further than the note suggested. According to the French historian Stéphane Tison, at a meeting in the Élysée Palace on 7 October 1916 it was agreed that France would demand the frontiers of 1790, that is Alsace-Lorraine together with the Saar Basin, and that the fate of the left bank of the Rhine would be decided after the war. The ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, acquainted the British with these decisions on 12 January 1917. He discussed them in detail with Balfour only in June.

Meanwhile, on the same 14 February, in Petrograd the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue and the Russian Foreign Minister Nikolai Pokrovsky exchanged letters that confirmed the arrangements made by Gaston Doumergue, who was in Russia for the Allied conference. Russia agreed to support the return of Alsace-Lorraine within the frontiers of 1790, the annexation of the whole Saar coal basin and the creation on the rest of the left bank of the Rhine of neutral states separated from Germany. In return France, in a separate exchange of notes in Paris completed at the beginning of March, agreed to leave Russia free to fix its western frontiers. Britain was not a party to this agreement.

Later

The matter came up in the Commons several more times. On 15 November 1917 the MP Fred Jowett asked when the British government had agreed to support France in regarding the return of Alsace-Lorraine as an essential point of the war aims. Lord Robert Cecil replied that it had been “a well-understood war aim from the moment we entered the war”. The British chronology treats this statement as a further assurance on the matter. It was put most forcefully, however, by Prime Minister David Lloyd George in his speech to the trade unionists on 5 January 1918. He declared that Britain would stand “to the death” by the French democracy in its demand for the righting of “the great wrong of 1871”, when two provinces had been torn from France against the will of their population. After the war, under the Treaty of Versailles, Alsace-Lorraine returned to France.