Natural borders of France

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The Natural Frontiers of France (Frontières naturelles de la France) are a political and geographical concept developed in France , especially during the French Revolution . The borders then run along the seas, the Pyrenees , the Rhine border and the Alps .

French Republic 1800

theory

However, while in older, nationalist, both German and French literature of the 19th century, it was still customary to establish an overarching, continuous concept of foreign policy in pre-revolutionary France to reach the Rhine borders, modern history has moved away from it and sees only a time-bound one here , French politics shaped by particular power conflicts, especially with the Habsburgs. With regard to Richelieu and the Rhine border, this was initiated in Germany by Wilhelm Mommsen and in France by Gaston Zeller . Zeller in particular denied such a state-political idea in pre-revolutionary France and sees the idea more as being brought into France by the German side. In the 1920s, Lucien Febvre also turned against geographical ideas as a driving force in history.

The first mention of France's natural borders seems to be in Cardinal Richelieu's apocryphal testament of 1642. After that, the concept did not reappear until 1786 in the writing Vœux d'un gallophile ( wish of a French friend , Amsterdam) by Anacharsis Cloots , who worked in Prussia , in which he identified the left bank of the Rhine as the natural border of France ( Ce fleuve est la borne naturelles des Gaules ).

The idea found supporters among the French revolutionaries in the 1790s, particularly the Jacobins . After the victory at Valmy on September 20, 1792, the National Convention asked the soldiers to chase the Prussian army across the Rhine. The commander of the Rhine Army Adam-Philippe de Custine said: "If the Rhine is not the border of the republic, it will sink." On December 17, 1792, the National Convention adopted the regulation on the government of the occupied territories, the prelude to the annexation of Belgium through France. This is requested by Georges Danton on January 31, 1793, with the words “The borders of France are given by nature, we reach them at four corners of the horizon, on the banks of the Rhine, on the banks of the ocean, in the Pyrenees and Alps . The borders of our republic must be completed there. "

application

At the Alps

The French Alpine Army conquered Savoy , as part of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, an ally of the Austrians, with almost no resistance on September 21 and 22, 1792. On October 26, leading citizens of Savoy gathered in Chambéry , declared Viktor Amadeus III. for deposed and spoke out on October 29 for a connection to the French republic. On December 17, 1792, the convention in Paris decided to join it as the Département Mont-Blanc . On January 31, 1793, the convention annexed the county of Nice and the Principality of Monaco and formed the Alpes-Maritimes department .

On the Rhine

Danton's speech was taken up by Lazare Carnot and disseminated in the occupied territories by the delegates of the Convention and local supporters of the revolution in order to prepare and justify the annexation by the French Republic. For example, the idea of ​​the natural Rhine borders of the French Republic was taken up by Georg Forster on November 15, 1792 in his speech in the Mainz Jacobin Club on the relationship between the Mainzers and the Franks . In Belgium, the French were defeated on March 18, 1793 in the Battle of Neer winds and had to leave Belgium. Only the French victory in the Battle of Fleurus (1794) and the establishment of the Batavian Republic in January 1795 completed the occupation of Belgium. In the Treaty of Basel on April 5, 1795, Prussia renounced its territories on the left bank of the Rhine in favor of France.

The victories of Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy forced Austria on October 27, 1797 to the peace of Campo Formio , in which Austria renounced all territories west of the Rhine. The directorate then organized all the areas on the left bank of the Rhine into four new departments: Mont-Tonnerre , Rhin-et-Moselle , Roer and Sarre .

Belgium

After Fleurus' victory, there were long debates in the Convention about the fate of the Austrian Netherlands. Driven by Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai , the Convention feared that a separate republic like the Batavian Republic would be too weak as an independent state against England and Austria and would become a buffer state against France. On October 1, 1795, the Convention voted for the annexation of Belgium in several new departments (Dyle, Deux-Nèthes, l'Escaut, Forêts, Jemmapes, Lys, Ourte, Meuse-Inférieure, Sambre-et-Meuse). This was confirmed in the Treaty of Campo Formio with Austria and again in the Peace of Lunéville in 1801.

The formation of the hexagon

In the course of his conquests in the consulate and the 1st Empire, Napoleon went far beyond the "natural borders " of France. In 1812 France had 134 departments and had expanded its territory beyond the Rhine. The Netherlands were annexed and northern Germany as far as Lübeck (1811). On the Pyrenees border, part of Catalonia was annexed in 1812 and part of Italy on the other side of the Alps between 1801 and 1805.

In the First Peace of Paris (1814) after Napoleon's abdication, France lost all territories it had conquered since 1792 and retained only part of Savoy. After the defeat at Waterloo and Napoleon's second abdication, France was reduced to the borders of 1790 in the Second Peace of Paris (1815) and lost Savoy. Only in the Treaty of Turin in 1860 did Savoy and Nice become part of France.

The debate about France's natural borders continued into the 19th century. Jules Michelet saw this theory in his History of France as a determining force in French history. It reappeared in 1830 on the occasion of Belgium's independence, in 1840 in the Rhine crisis and between 1871 and 1918 on the occasion of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the German Empire.

literature

  • Josef Smets Le Rhin, frontière naturelle de la France , Annales historiques de la Révolution française, No. 314, 1998, pp. 675-698, online
  • Josef Smets The Rhine, Germany's river, but France's border. On the mythology of the Rhine in France and Germany from the Middle Ages to the 20th century , Yearbook for West German State History, Volume 24, 1998, pp. 7–51
  • Claudia Ulbrich Rhine borders, revolts and the French Revolution , in Volker Rödel (editor) The French Revolution and the Upper Rhine Lands (1789-1798) , Sigmaringen: Thorbecke 1991, p. 223
  • Sébastien Dubois: La conquête de la Belgique et la théorie des frontières naturelles de la France (XVIIe - XIXe siècle) , in: Laurence Van Ypersele (editor) Imaginaires de guerre. L'histoire entre mythe et réalité, actes du colloque tenu à Louvain-la-Neuve du 3 au 5 may 2001 , Presses universitaires de Louvain et Academia Bruylant, Transversalités No. 3, Louvain-la-Neuve, 2003, p. 171– 200, ISBN 2-87416-004-0 et 2-87209-697-3
  • Denis Richet Frontières naturelles , in François Furet , Mona Ozouf (editor) Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française , Paris, 1988, 1992, 2007
  • Charles Rousseau Les frontières de la France , Ed. A. Pedons 1954
  • Steffen Kaudelka Reception in the Age of Confrontation. French historical studies and history in Germany 1920-1940 , Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 2003 (section Gaston Zeller and the dispute over the historical policy on the Rhine in France , p. 78ff)
  • Peter Sahlins Natural frontiers revisited: France's boundaries since the 17th century , American Historical Review, 95, 1990, 1423-1451
  • Peter Sahlins Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees , University of California Press 1991
  • Daniel Nordman Frontières de France: de l´espace au territoire, XIV-XIX siècles , Paris 1999
  • Daniel Nordman Des limites d´etat aux frontières naturelles , in P. Nora (Ed.) Lieux de mémoire , 3 volumes, Paris 1997, Volume 1, pp. 1125-1146
    • German translation: From state borders to national borders , in: Etienne François / Jörg Seifarth / Bernhard Struck (eds.), The border as space, experience and construction. Germany, France and Poland from the 17th to the 20th century , Frankfurt / New York 2007, pp. 107–134.
  • Daniel Nordman Le Rhin est-il une frontière? , L'Histoire, 201, 1996, 30-1
  • Gaston Zeller La monarchie d'ancien régime et les frontières naturelles , Paris: F. Alcan, 1933

Individual evidence

  1. ^ For example Daniel-Erasmus Khan The German State Borders , Mohr-Siebeck 2004, p. 526
  2. ^ Mommsen Richelieu, Alsace and Lorraine , 1922
  3. ^ Zeller La réunion de Metz à la France (1552-1648) , 2 volumes, Paris 1926
  4. ↑ on Richelieu and the Rhine border: Hermann Weber Richelieu et le Rhin , Revue historique, 239, 1968, 265-280, France, Kurtrier, the Rhine and the Reich. 1623-1635 . (Paris Historical Studies; 9). Röhrscheid, Bonn 1969 ( digitized version )
  5. ↑ Lucien Febvre La terre et l'evolution humaine , Paris 1922, Le Rhin. Histoire, mythes et realités , 1935, German The Rhine and its history , Campus Verlag 1994, Frontières - Word and Meaning , in Febvre The Conscience of the Historian , Wagenbach 1990
  6. ↑ Si le Rhin n'est pas la limite de la République, elle périra , after Smets 1998, p. 677
  7. ↑ Les limites de la France sont marquées par la nature, nous les atteindrons des quatre coins de l'horizon, du côté du Rhin, du côté de l'Océan, du côté des Pyrénées, du côté des Alpes. Là doivent finir les bornes de notre République. Quoted from Joseph Smets 1998, p. 678