It's quite funny you suppose I have intentions which you deny having as far as you are personnally concerned.
I hardly see what I can add since you seem (my perception may be wrong but it's what I perceive) to justify the very specific german ideology that implied that the language made the nation.
The difference is: In the German federation (and also the late HRE), it was the rulers who prevented the unification and the bourgeois and common people who wanted it, not vice-versa.
Besides, your argument goes both ways: The Alsacians and Lorrains don't become French just because their ruler told them to.
You even go as far as saying that the common people wanted german unification, which was never proven. Your underlying idea seems in fact to be that those who did not even care about the matter actually wanted unconciously were in favour of german unification. This is a nice peace of classic national/nationalist propaganda but this is not historical truth.
Some politicians and somme elite people (scholars, ...etc) and some common people wanted unification. They conceived all the intellectual, cultural, historical and philosophical background to promote their view and they finally were able to have their wish prevail.
Quite comparable things occured in Italy. It has already been established long ago that, contrary to the victorian cartoon, most people in central and southern Italy were not in favour of the political unification of Italy. Most did not care or did not want. And most faced ruin because of the economic disruption that unification caused in favor of the north.
I speak both French and German well enough to know where there is a linguistic boundary and where there is none
Yes, but unchaining syllogisms does not make a truth.
You are comparing 2 very situations separated by 200 years. In the late 17th century, most people in the german space spoke germanic dialects, not standard german. Standard german only began spreading one century later and started being dominant in the 19th century. And you are doing as if late 17th Germany was late 19th century Germany to back the anachronic arguments used by late 19th century german nationalists to justify their ambitions.
Since you speak german well enough, you maybe also know today's Germany well enough to be aware that there are different pronounciations of standard german depending on regions of Germany. And those different pronounciations are sometimes important enough to have some germans have light trouble understand parts of what some other germans say.
You also know that there can be very quite similar pronounciations in german spoken in Holstein and in danish.
And - by the impartial application of your logic - no more than France had any rightful claim to Alsace in 1918. Somehow, the French failed to comply with that logic.
If you read my previous posts, you have already noticed that I said that the notion of rightful claims for setting political frontiers was a nonsense. There is no rightfulness because what is "legal" is what one is able to have prevail by force. The stronger forces the weaker to accept his claim and has him sign a treaty that makes this claim legal.
France was not rightful when it annexed alsacian cities and counties. No more than Prussia and the new german empire when they took Alsace and parts of Lorraine away from France.
Any kind of justification is biased and bad faith.
Now, if you go to facts. The alsacians, being in a quite centralized country, were progressively frenchified, this process being furthered by the french revolution that created a civic nation.
Civic nations and civic countries are the dominant model. So when Germany and Prussia took Alsace and a part of Lorraine a way from France, they acted in accordance with the laws of war.
But they made a fault on several points of view :
- they did not take into account the fact that that it was no longer the age of feudality and localism but the age of nations and nationalisms. And they snatched away lands and people that had become parts of the french nation.
- they did not take into account the fact that this amputation of a part of France would prevent reconciliation and make France a permanent enemy and threat.
The way german of acting on point 1 was anachronic. In the age of nations and nationalisms, one should no longer take people away because they are part of a self-concious enough nation so that it will create trouble and be cause for conflicts and wars.
The consequence of this anachronic view was drawn after WWII : you can take territories away from defeated enemies, but you don't force their population to change national allegiance. You force populations to move.
So you are telling me that it is pure coincidence when
- a Russian speaks Russian/a Russian native speaker is in fact a Russian,
- an Italian speaks Italian/an Italian native speaker is in fact an Italian,
- a Japanese speaks Japanese/a Japanese native speaker is in fact a Japanese???
Or are you saying those examples are rare exceptions?
Even at the cost of repeating myself - I am NOT saying the Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was right. I am just annoyed by the supposed implicitness of the assertion that it wasn't.
You seem to like over-simplifying and to use manichean descriptions to reach Salomon judgments' like conclusions.
The reality is shaded and contradictory.
There are people in Russia who speak russian but whose mother tongue is not russian. And some of them are very happy to be part of the russian federation that is in fact an empire, while others would like to be independant from Russia.
Force can create legal realities.
Force can also create national realities in the long run. The fact that today's italians feel italian and part of the same nation doest not imply that it was the case 155 years ago when the country was united by military conquest by the kingdom of Piedmont.
Same for France.
Nations and countries are not eternal. They have a beginning and sometimes they have an end. Local or regional separatist movements appear in some countries.
If Germany had been able to retain Alsace for a longer time, it may well have ended in the definitive severance of links between Alsace and alsacians and the french nation.
But nothing else than the laws of war could could make rightful the annexation of a part of the french nation and territory by the new german empire. Alsacians were not germans snatched away from the german nation.
Formally, the french were not rightful in taking back Alsace-Lorraine. They had it only because they won WWI. But they had a moral ground for wanting to take it back in the age of nations and nationalisms.
For the same reason, the british and the americans did not back the french demand to have Rhineland snatched away from germany.
On which I think they were morally right given than rhinelanders were germans and felt so.
And on which I also think they made a tragic mistake on the strategic side of the settlement of the war : Germany was far too powerful and germany in fact came out of WWI in relative better shape than the allies because most destructions occured on the allies territories.
After WWII, they did not repeat the same mistake.
