Comité d'études

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The Comité d'études (German: "Study Commission") was a semi-governmental French research group that specialized in the study of the Saar and the Rhineland . The commission existed between 1917 and 1918.

history

The Comité d'études was founded by the French Prime Minister Aristide Briand in early 1917. He was advised by Charles Benoît , Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Nancy University . The commission should legitimize and underpin the French claim to territory and the security guarantees vis-à-vis the German Reich . Historian Ernest Lavisse took the chair . In order to achieve this goal, the leading scientists in France put together an extensive catalog of arguments, which should above all be geographically and historically founded. The main arguments were that the Saarland had historically belonged to France several times over a long period of time and that there would be no natural dividing line between Saarland and the Moselle department .

In 1917 a memorandum was published by Paul Vidal de la Blache listing historical French rights to the Saar area. Another protagonist of the Comité d'études was the French numismatist Ernest Babelon , who wrote a two-volume work on the struggle between Rome and the Teutons and who, in his opinion, proposed a French military protectorate as a solution to this, in his opinion, millennia-old conflict . He also used Blache's research, but falsified a quotation to prove that the Saarland population was willing to return to France.

André Tardieu was employed as a negotiator for France in the peace negotiations that ultimately resulted in the Treaty of Versailles . He convened the Comité d'études as a working group of the government and tried using the research results of the group to register a claim to power over the Saar area. However, this was ultimately rejected. France was only granted the right to own the Saar coal and the Saar area was placed under international law until 1935 .

Known members

literature

  • Wolfgang Freund: People, Empire and Western Frontier. German studies and politics in the Palatinate, Saarland and annexed Lorraine 1925–1945 (=  publications of the Commission for Saarland State History and Folk Research . No. 39 ). Commission for Saarland State History and Folk Research, Saarbrücken 2006, ISBN 3-939150-00-2 , p. 48-52 .