Talk:Metz

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[edit] Sectionalization

I put some sections in there but it still needs logical division into proper paragraphs.Dave 18:31, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] POV

Is there any source regarding "Following the armistice with Germany ending the First World War, the French army entered Metz in November 1918 to great cheering from the population?" If there is no concrete source to verify this claim it should be removed. Without factual evidence one could just as easily add that the inhabitents of Metz cheered as the German army entered the city in 1871 "as they had always felt themselves connected to Germany." Things like this need to be cleaned up... Hvatum 08:24, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

from http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/w/i/d/Robert-S-Wideen/FILE/0057page.html (from reading the precedent paragraphs I think that this text is NPOV):

"Celebrating the Return to the Mère Patrie

French troops met with an enthusiastic welcome as they marched through Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Colmar, and Metz in late November 1918. Hundreds of young women in Alsatian headdress and costumes, sporting tricolor cockades, holding flowers, and waving French flags or white handkerchiefs turned out to greet the poilus. The streets were decked in tricolor flags, bands played the Marseillaise, bars gave out free beer to soldiers, and huge crowds of people lined the streets, peered from windows, and climbed on roofs to give French soldiers a welcome that exceeded all expectations (especially in Strasbourg). But the animated welcome had more to do with the understandable relief that the war (fought in part on Alsatian soil for the control of the Vosges ridges) had ended, that famine and widespread shortages would be averted, that Alsatian and Lorrainer soldiers would be returning home, and that Alsace-Lorraine would not pay the heavy price of defeat but on the contrary share, however ambiguously, in the fruits of victory. For the bourgeoisie, the arrival of French troops meant social peace, and the end of the threatening revolutionary movement of soldiers and workers that emerged in urban areas in the midst of the German military collapse. French soldiers were soon followed by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, and on 8 December by President Raymond Poincaré, who headed three specially chartered trains carrying hundreds of senators, deputies, elected Paris officials, members of alsacien and lorrain associations in exile, and journalists who came to reclaim Strasbourg as France’s own.

The spontaneous outbursts of enthusiasm for French troops often took a carnivalesque and religious coloration and revealed how much underlying sympathies for France had developed during four years of German wartime military dictatorship. But spontaneity was only part of the story. Local authorities played a crucial role by forming “reception committees” that printed posters calling upon “truly Alsatian young women” (those of mixed ancestry were presumably unwelcome) to greet their liberators in Alsatian costumes, and gave them precise instructions on how to do so. The Alsatian costume, a rarity at the time, was worn only in rural villages on festive occasions, and its use in 1918 was the object of debate both among urban elites and rural inhabitants; some opposed this masquerade and could not understand why Strasbourg’s demoiselles wanted to be “disguised as peasants.” But the costume, shunned by French revolutionaries, had, thanks to widespread popular engravings, become for the Third Republic a dual symbol of Alsace’s quaint “attachment” to France and its sense of local identity. Out of “charming daintiness” (the words of the Michelin guide), Alsace presented itself to its liberators in the traditional “uniform” that the French had expected women to wear. Alsatian writer René Schickele had a more dyspeptic view: he questioned whether all young women who wore the costume on 18 November were of longstanding Alsatian ancestry; a few years later he noted that the costumed women at a Paris exposition could not speak a word of Alsatian dialect or German."

So in conclusion, there was much cheering, but not necessarily because the population always remained attached to France. I will change the sentence accordingly. --danh 21:39, 10 December 2006 (UTC)