And they then continued it anyway inside of nine months.
I'm hardly a Bolshevik apologist, but it would be hard to imagine how
anyone wouldn't, under those circumstances. Brest-Litovsk was a peace so immensely cruel to an already immensely devastated country (Germans at the height of the Great Depression were still far richer and safer than 1917 Russians) that
any government which gave a damn about its people would have instantly revoked it as soon as it had the opportunity.
I do not consider the pro-French political establishment of Alsace-Lorraine as telling in regards to the loyalty of the voting population - we do concentrate too much on them being pro-French that we forget the rest of their fairly popular political platform and that voting pro-French was also an outlet to protest against being a "Reichsland".
However, you lack the the biggest and most definitive piece of evidence for the entirety of Alsace-Lorraine preferring French rule - a plebiscite.
True. But the lack of a plebiscite doesn't mean the other evidence is unconvincing, since it
is convincing.
The people of Alsace-Lorraine were presented with autonomist candidates and could have voted them out in favour of German nationalist candidates; and yet they
didn't. The number of them who voted for German nationalist candidates is tiny. National issues often trump political ones; for instance, the Chinese nationalists didn't cooperate with the Japanese nationalists against the Chinese communists. I find it extremely hard to believe, given the evidence we have available, that they actually wanted to be part of Germany, they just kept voting for people who didn't want to be part of Germany.
The German authorities in Alsace-Lorraine, themselves, were worried about how utterly hostile the population was to them. And if you compare Alsace-Lorraine's voting record as a part of France to its record as a part of Germany, you notice that there distinctly
wasn't anything in France analogous to the protest deputies denouncing the annexation that occurred when it was a part of Germany.
I agree that if Germany had actually treated the Alsatians like Germans (as the French treated them like Frenchmen), making Alsace-Lorraine a state instead of a
Reichsland and
de facto militarily occupied province, then the Alsatians would have been happier to
be Germans. But that would have gone against the reason why the Prussian establishment chose to annex Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in the first place, which had little to do with pan-German nationalist solidarity (men like Bismarck had fervently
opposed pan-German nationalism when it was a threat to the establishment two decades before) and everything to do with strategic military usefulness and the internal political imperative not to station Prussian troops in the South German states. For Alsace-Lorraine to have been treated more kindly it needed to have been annexed for different reasons and by a Germany governed by liberal pan-Germanists who actually regarded the Alsatians as fellow Germans rather than reactionary Prussian aristocrats who regarded them as a useful military, strategic and political tool, which means a PoD well before the unification of Germany—indeed, before Otto von Bismarck helped the King to beat down the
Landtag.