Meurthe department
The Meurthe department is a former French department of which Nancy was the capital .
The department was created in 1790 from parts of the province of Lorraine and the area of the Principality of Toul (one of the Trois-Évêchés ) and in 1800 divided into five arrondissements . The sub-prefectures (French Sous- prefectures ) were Château-Salins , Lunéville , Sarrebourg and Toul . In 1866 the department had 714 communes and 428,387 inhabitants.
Through the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1871 , Germany received large parts of Alsace and Lorraine , including the northeast of the Meurthe department with the sub-prefectures of Château-Salins and Saarburg . The rest of the Meurthe department together with a small remainder of the original Moselle department formed the new Meurthe-et-Moselle department , while the part of Meurthes that came to Germany was combined with the German annexed part of the former Moselle department to form the Lorraine district .
With the Treaty of Versailles , Alsace and Lorraine became French again in 1919, but the former borders of the departments were not restored. The municipality of Raon-lès-Leau is still claiming back a 1000 hectare wooded area, which was added to Germany in 1871 at the instigation of Bismarck in order to control the strategically important Donon . Since then, the forest area has belonged to the Alsatian municipality of Grandfontaine .