usertron2020
Donor
Personnally, I had always understood that Alsace-Lorraine had been annexed because the Germans thought they needed to annex it for their own defense. That's more or less what Wilhelm I wrote in a letter to Empress Eugenie (Napoleon III's wife) in 1870, letter which was used by Clemenceau at Versailles to justify the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine. So I guess I just put Bismarck on the same boat as his Emperor.
Yet during the Third Republic, a critic of the colonial policy said "I lost two sister and you're offering me twenty servants". The two sister referred to Alsace and Lorraine, the servants to the colonies France was conquering and it was basically a way of saying "Who care about colonies: we need to recover our lost brothers in Alsace and Lorraine".
Very nicely put. The problem was with the racists among the Anti-Drefusards who were more interested in the territory of those two provinces, rather than their people. But then they were a bunch of anti-semitic types some of whom were trying for a royal restoration as a means of doing away with much of the Rights of Man (damn all that tolerance!) and restore the power of the Roman Catholic Church in French law and society (France into Ireland, basically).
The loss of Alsace-Lorraine was seen as a deep mutilation of the territory after 1870 and that is what fueled most of French Revanchism during the 1870-1914 period. Besides, let's not forget that Alsace had been French since the reign of Louis XIV: before 1870, it had been French for two centuries and was thus considered a French territory by most people.
Not just today, but also in the past. What's generally annoying is that people only remember how quickly France was defeated in 1870 and 1940: never mind the fact France was the dominating power in Europe for a long time and still considered one of the major power even after its defeats. Never mind also that there are quite a few episodes of French bravery that were spoken even in the two big defeats or the fact that even then the French managed to score a few victories (didn't change the course of these wars but still...)
I remember. I remember the flower of a whole generation of Frenchmen going to their deaths in the trenches of WWI to save the Third Republic. Revanche was purely secondary by 1914.
BTW? If any American Exceptionalist asshat or Sun Never Sets Briton gives you crap (I'm assuming you are French
For the Brits:
"At Dunkirk we held the line to save YOUR army!"
For the Americans:
At Yorktown the British could not retreat
Bottled up by Washington and the FRENCH FLEET!