Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (1871)

With Strasbourg as its capital, the Imperial Territory was the only territory of the German Empire administered directly by the imperial government rather than as a constituent state. Prussia held that the population would first have to be "Germanised", treated the region initially as occupied territory and governed it through a governor appointed by Wilhelm I. An imperial decree of 29 October 1874 created a thirty-member Territorial Committee appointed by the district assemblies; it gained legislative functions in 1877 and the right to initiate laws in 1879, when the office of imperial governor (Reichsstatthalter) was introduced, and the constitution of 1911 brought a bicameral Landtag and limited autonomy. Under the Treaty of Frankfurt the inhabitants could opt for French citizenship until 1 October 1872: 160,878 (10.4 per cent) did so, 20.3 per cent in Upper Alsace. Optants were originally expected to leave, but only about 50,000 (3.2 per cent) left for France, and the roughly 110,000 who stayed were not expelled but kept German citizenship; some estimates put the optants at 280,000 and those who left at 130,000. About 90 per cent of the population spoke German dialects, but Catholics were sceptical of unification under Protestant Prussia while the Protestant minority welcomed it. When the Kulturkampf reached the territory in 1872–73 the Catholic Church became a vehicle of resistance, and when a pastoral letter from the Bishop of Nancy calling for prayers for reunification with France was read in August 1873 the authorities answered with arrests and a ban on the Catholic press.

After the territory received 15 Reichstag seats in 1874, between six and ten of its deputies at every election until 1887 were "protest deputies" opposed to the annexation. Their French-language motion that "the population of Alsace-Lorraine, which has been incorporated into the German Empire by the Treaty of Frankfurt without having been consulted, be called upon to express its opinion on this annexation" was rejected by a large majority, and they did not attend the sessions after their election; nor was the population consulted when it returned to France in 1918. After Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 the parties of the Empire gained ground, and by the early twentieth century no major social group advocated a return to France, until the Zabern affair of 1913 revived tensions. The motives and responsibility for the annexation are disputed. The army demanded the Vosges and the Thionville-Metz route, public opinion wanted France humiliated, and Bismarck's biographers hold that he "reluctantly gave in" while counting the annexation his main mistake, the one that turned France into a permanent enemy; others note that revanchism faded in the 1880s and that the return of Alsace-Lorraine became a French war aim only after the First World War had begun. In September 1870 Marx and Engels wrote to the Brunswick committee that annexation would turn the peace into an armistice, and the committee's manifesto, the General Council's second address and Bebel's and Liebknecht's motion of 26 November all demanded a peace without annexation.