TY - JOUR
AU - Smith, Andrew W M
AB - Every year, on Christmas Eve, children across France set their shoes by the fire in anticipation of a visit from Père Noël. Yet, it was not until after 1945 that he made it all the way to the Western banks of the Rhine, displacing his Germanic counterpart, Christkindel. In Alsace, differences in custom highlighted the region’s sometimes odd fit within the universalist French Republic and, in this deeply researched and incisive work, Alison Carrol considers how ‘on one hand Alsace represented France’s limits, and on the other that Alsace was the heart of a cross-border, transnational community’ (p. 199). Carrol proposes an understanding of the border which makes it more than a line of division. The politics, socio-economic activity, and everyday interactions of life in the borderland variously reflected, re-enacted and resisted the grander political struggles of the state. In Carrol’s excellent book, we come to see borderlands neither as fixed lines, nor blurred boundaries, but like braids that are daily unpicked and reworked afresh by the communities that live within them. Carrol skilfully recounts the return of Alsace to the French nation-state in 1918 following German annexation since 1870. In this powerful and nuanced analysis of attempts to harmonise legal, economic, political and religious structures, the borderland becomes a proving ground for many of the assumptions around nations, states and identity. Carrol’s book serves as an excellent complement to work on Alsace, such as Stephen Harp’s Learning to be Loyal (1998), Christopher Fischer’s Alsace to the Alsatians (2010) and Philip Bankwitz’s Alsatian Autonomist Leaders (1986), in demonstrating the tensions of nation-building in Alsace, while also offering new insights into the pressures of the petites patries (or little homelands of France’s regions) as described by Shanny Peer in France on Display (1998). This approach follows in the path of Peter Sahlins in describing the formalisation of France’s Southern frontier, and Caroline Ford’s Breton study of Creating the Nation in Provincial France (1993). Yet, while complementing a well-developed French historiography, Carrol mirrors her transrhenane subject in also addressing the complexities and ambiguities of national identification and shifting borders in central Europe as identified by James Bjork and Tara Zahra. Carrol first examines how Alsace has represented a territory of connection, even while ‘new state borders formed part of the constitutive myth of the nation state’ (p. 1). Alsace, the perennial bridge across the Rhine, provides a privileged field for observing the realities of modern nation states in formation. The second chapter explores the return of Alsace to France in greater detail, looking at ways in which the French state sought to impose its identity upon the region after November 1918. The expulsion of Germans was a notable moment of upheaval, and the introduction of identity cards reclassifying the population according to their parents’ place of birth reinforced the importance of national identity in the minds of the population. Yet the movement of people did not serve to make Alsace French, and the harmonisation of laws and structures thereafter created further points of tension. Secular French laws chafed against the relative religious freedom Alsatians had heretofore enjoyed, and this continued to intensify during the inter-war period. This was a moment for reimagining the place of the region within the French nation while simultaneously renegotiating relationships with the Germans. The position of Alsace as a bridge across the Rhine contributed to the diversity and prosperity of its economy and culture, yet it also made it vulnerable to political interference by the powerful states it abutted. While German names became terms of political mockery, the German press hunted for anti-French sentiment and French administrators fretted about German interference. Chapters Three and Four look at how the tensions of France’s return were played out in the ever-complex reality of borderland politics and economics, with the flow of people, ideas and money all helping ‘to make the border as much as to transcend it’ (p. 81). As France sought to integrate Alsace economically, Carrol shows well how ‘economics were inseparable from political change’ (p. 114) and discrete economic structures became emblematic of a distinct identity. Efforts to remove the legacy of German influence often meant resistance to French integration, even where it was voiced as autonomism, was treated ‘in national terms’ (p. 102). Chapter Five shows further that identity in the borderland was not a binary choice between being German or French, but instead ‘a spectrum that allowed for the expression of multiple loyalties and attachments’ (p. 144). Arguing for the labelling of cultural specificities as Alsatian rather than German formed one of the key battlegrounds for Alsatian identity after the return to France and this was a form of ambiguity in Alsatian ‘double culture’ which meshed awkwardly with national narratives. This was bilingualism in word and deed, marrying the enthusiastic celebration of Bastille Day with the theatrical staging of Goethe in the original German (pp. 165–6). The final chapter looks at the landscape of Alsace and how nation-building in the years after 1918 made its mark. From the commemorative landscape to the region’s vines, popular engagement stressed Alsace both as representative of ‘France’s limits and as the heart of a cross-border community’ (p. 199). Carrol’s fascinating book is a story of the border’s negotiation and formalisation both on the map and in the mind. This nuanced engagement with Alsatian history changes lenses between ‘the locality, the nation, and the international’ (p. 201) to account for the entangled lives of a borderland community. This is not simply a story of a centralised Jacobin republic trying to pacify its hinterlands after military victory in 1918, but rather of adaptation and negotiation by ordinary communities living between the jaws of Europe’s bellicose nation-states. Carrol’s work adds a new dimension to our understanding of France’s petites patries, yet it also contributes to lively debates around nationalism, national ambiguity, and borderlands more broadly. For scholars of the nation-state, as for those Alsatian children meeting Père Noël after 1945, this book will surely be a welcome gift. © Oxford University Press 2020. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Return of Alsace to France, 1918–1939, by Alison Carrol
JF - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/ceaa236
DA - 2020-11-13
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-return-of-alsace-to-france-1918-1939-by-alison-carrol-BW0lqotUpp
SP - 1366
EP - 1367
VL - 135
IS - 576
DP - DeepDyve
ER -