Bloody Sunday (Colmar)
The Bloody Sunday of Colmar (French le dimanche sanglant ) is a physical dispute between Alsatian autonomists and pro-French Alsatians on August 22, 1926 in Colmar ( Haut-Rhin ).
prehistory
The largely German-speaking departments of Moselle , Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin were annexed by Germany as the Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 . After the lost World War I , the reannexion was carried out by France. As a result, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were expelled within a few weeks. The French government pursued a policy of assimilation . This policy was initially supported by a large part of the Alsatian and Lorraine politicians.
The chamber elections in 1924 resulted in a victory for the left across France. The government declaration of the new head of government Édouard Herriot of June 17, 1924 was received with indignation in Alsace. Herriot declared that the principle of secularism , which shapes the relationship between church and state in France, also wanted to enforce in Alsace and Lorraine. The Concordat of 1801 should no longer apply and the denominational schools should be abolished. On June 19, Robert Schuman presented a declaration of protest by 21 MPs from Alsace and Lorraine in the Chamber. On September 15, 1924, the General Councils in Upper and Lower Alsace and Lorraine adopted identical declarations. The people followed the calls of the Catholic Church and the bourgeois parties for mass demonstrations. In total, more than 100,000 citizens took part in demonstrations, 50,000 of them on July 20, 1924 in Strasbourg. A school strike was followed across the board. A referendum took place in March 1925. It was asked whether the “integral maintenance of the current school regime, as well as the respect for religious freedoms and institutions” would be supported. This demand is supported by 181,612 in Lower Alsace, 191,703 in Upper Alsace and 198,329 eligible voters in Lorraine.
Herriot was unable to assert his demands. The Council of State decided on January 24, 1925 that the Napoleonic Concordat of the 18th Germinal An X ( French Revolutionary Calendar ) (April 8th 1802 according to our calendar) would remain in force. Due to the economic problems, the Herriot government overthrew on April 10, 1925; the Kulturkampf had been won by the bourgeois forces in Alsace and Lorraine.
In the following years, especially in Alsace, an autonomy movement developed that was opposed by the French central government. On June 7, 1926, Der Elsässer published the Heimatbund Manifesto of the Alsace-Lorraine Homeland League , which was signed by 102 homeland lawyers. By decree of June 11, 1926, the community and state officials who had signed the manifesto were suspended or removed from office.
The bloody Sunday of Colmar
On August 22, 1926, the chairman of the hit Alsace-Lorraine Heimatbund , Eugen Ricklin , at the station of Colmar in order to one of the competent Prefecture allowed meeting with Joseph Rossé , the Secretary-General of the influential regional teachers' union ( Union des groupements professionnels des membres de l'enseignement d'Alsace et de Lorraine ), local supporters of the autonomy movement and sympathetic communists to protest against the measures of June 11, 1926. During the protest march from the train station to the meeting place, there were violent clashes between the event participants and nationalist counter-demonstrators. The police forces present did not intervene in the bloody fighting, in which, among other things, Ricklin was seriously injured.
Post-history
In the wake of "Bloody Sunday", the Poincaré government tried harder to politically eliminate the Alsatian autonomy movement. On November 26, 1927, Joseph Rossé's house was searched and he was arrested on December 1. In the days that followed, over 100 more house searches and over 20 arrests took place. In 1928 those arrested were tried in the Colmar plot process .
literature
- Manfred Kittel / Horst Möller: The Beneš Decrees and the Expulsion of Germans in a European Comparison . Quarterly issues for contemporary history , 54th year 2006, issue 4, pp. 549–550 ( PDF ).
- Karl-Heinz Rothenberger: The Alsace-Lorraine home and autonomy movement between the two world wars , pp. 113-114, including Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1976 (2nd edition). ISBN 3-261-01485-7 .
- Christopher J. Fischer: Alsace to the Alsatians? Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870-1939 . Berghahn, New York-Oxford 2010 (Studies in Contemporary European History, Vol. 5). ISBN 978-1-84545-724-2 .
- Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien , Éd. Yoran Embanner, Fouesnant 2014. ISBN 978-2-36747-001-6 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Fischer: Alsace to the Alsatians? , SS 187-188. Berghahn, New York-Oxford 2010; Wittmann: Jean Keppi 1888-1967 . Éditions Yoran Embanner, Fouesnant 2014, p. 107 describes the counter-demonstrators as nationalist French World War II veterans, royalists from the Camelots du roi and members of the fascist Faisceau des Combattants (from the so-called Ligue d'extrême droite )