French–German hereditary enmity[1] (German: Deutsch–französische Erbfeindschaft ; French: Rivalité franco-allemande) is the idea of unavoidably hostile relations and mutual revanchism between Germany and France that became popular with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. It was an important factor in the unification of Germany and World War I, and was finally overcome after World War II, when under the influence of the Cold War cordial French-German relations became the key to European integration.
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France and Germany both trace their history back to Charlemagne. The death of his son Louis the Pious marked the end of the Frankish Empire, which in 843 was divided into three parts by the Treaty of Verdun. Middle Francia, the weak central part and nominally an empire, was soon split again. Its northern parts became a bone of contention between the western and eastern kingdoms that developed into the modern nations of France and Germany. The resulting frictions took various forms throughout the following centuries.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the rise of mutually hostile modern nationalism, writers, historians and politicians in both countries tended to project their enmity backwards, regarded all past history as a single, coherent and unbroken narrative of ongoing conflict, and re-interpreted the earlier history to fit into the concept of a "hereditary enmity".
The later Emperor Charles V, a member of the Austrian House of Habsburg, inherited the Low Countries and the Franche-Comté in 1506. When he also inherited Spain in 1516, France was surrounded by Habsburg territories and felt under pressure. The resulting tension between the two powers caused a number of conflicts, such as the War of the Spanish Succession, until the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 made them allies against Prussia.
The Thirty Years War (1618–1648), devastating large parts of Germany, fell into this period. Although the war was mostly a conflict between Protestants and Catholics, Catholic France sided with the Protestants against the Austrian-led Catholic Imperial forces. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia gave France limited control over Alsace and Lorraine. The 1679 Treaties of Nijmegen consolidated this result by bringing the towns under French control. In 1681, France occupied Strasbourg.
Meanwhile, the expanding Muslim Ottoman Empire became a serious threat to Austria. The Vatican initiated a so-called Holy League against the "hereditary enemy" of Christian Europe ("Erbfeind christlichen Namens"). Far from joining or supporting the common effort of Austria, Germany and Poland, France under Louis XIV of France invaded the Spanish Netherlands in September 1683, a few days before the Battle of Vienna. While Austria was occupied with the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), France initiated the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–1697). The attempt to conquer large parts of southern Germany ultimately failed, when German troops were withdrawn from the Ottoman border and moved to the region. However, following a scorched earth policy that caused a large public outcry at the time, French troops devastated large parts of the Palatinate, Baden and Wuerttemberg burning down and levelling numerous cities and towns in southern Germany.
In the 18th century, the rise of Prussia as a new German power caused the Diplomatic Revolution and an alliance between France, the Habsburg Empire and Russia, manifested in 1756 in the Treaty of Versailles and the Seven Years’ War against Prussia and Great Britain. Although a German national state was on the horizon, the loyalties of the German population were primarily with smaller states. The French war against Prussia was justified through its role as guarantor of the Peace of Westphalia, and it was fighting on the side of the majority of German states.
The civil population still regarded war as a conflict between their authorities and distinguished between troops less according to the side on which they fought than according to how they treated the local population. The personal contacts and mutual respect between French and Prussian officers did not stop entirely while they were fighting each other, and the war resulted in a great deal of cultural exchange between French occupiers and German population.
The perception of war began to change after the French Revolution. The French mass conscription for the Revolutionary Wars and the beginning formation of nation states in Europe made war increasingly a conflict between peoples rather than a conflict between authorities carried out on the backs of their subjects.
Napoleon put an end to the millennium-old Holy Roman Empire in 1806. In that year, at the Battle of Jena, French forces crushed the Prussian armies. Whereas Hitler took six weeks to conquer over half of France in 1940, within two weeks of Jena Napoleon had conquered almost all of Prussia except the area around Königsberg. The Prussian army, previously thought invincible, had been fought to almost the point of total liquidation. Napoleon formed his own Confederation of the Rhine, and reshaped the political map of the German states, which were still divided. Napoleon directly incorporated German-speaking areas such as the Rhineland and Hamburg into his First French Empire and treated the monarchs of the remaining German states as vassals.
After his victory at the Battle of Friedland he also amalgamated a series of smaller north German feudal states into a new "model state", the Kingdom of Westphalia, with his brother Jerome Bonaparte as king. The Napoleonic Wars, often fought in Germany and with Germans on both sides, as in the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, also marked the beginning of what was explicitly called French–German hereditary enmity. Modern German nationalism was born in opposition to French domination under Napoleon. In the recasting of the map of Europe after Napoleon's defeat, the German-speaking territories in the Rhineland adjoining France were put under the rule of Prussia.
During the first half of the 19th century, many Germans looked forward to a unification of the German states, though most German leaders and the foreign powers were opposed to it. The German nationalist movement believed that a united Germany would replace France as the dominant land power in Western Europe. This argument was aided by demographic changes: since the Middle Ages, France had had the largest population in Western Europe, but in the 19th century its population stagnated (a trend which continued until the second half of the 20th century), and the population of the German states overtook it and continued to rapidly increase.
The eventual unification of Germany was triggered by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and subsequent French defeat. Finally, in the Treaty of Frankfurt, reached after a lengthy siege of Paris, France was forced to cede the German speaking Alsace-Lorraine territory (consisting of most of Alsace and a quarter of Lorraine), and pay an indemnity of five billion francs to the newly declared German Empire. Thereafter, the German Empire was widely viewed as having replaced France as the leading land power in Europe.
The desire for revenge (esprit de revanche) against Germany, and in particular for the recovery of the “lost provinces” of Alsace and Lorraine (whose importance was summed up by the French politician Gambetta in the phrase: “Never speak of them; never forget them!”) remained strong in France over the next 50 years and was the key French war aim in World War I. The Allied victory saw France regain Alsace-Lorraine and briefly resume its old position as the leading land power on the European continent. France was the leading proponent of harsh peace terms against Germany at the Paris Peace Conference. Since the war had been fought on French soil, it had destroyed much of French infrastructure and industry, and France had suffered the highest number of casualties proportionate to population. Much French opinion wanted the Rhineland, the section of Germany adjoining France and the old focus of French ambition, to be detached from Germany as an independent country; in the end they settled for a promise that the Rhineland would be demilitarized, and heavy German reparation payments. On the remote Eastern end of the German Empire, the Memel territory was separated from the rest of East Prussia and occupied by France before being annexed by Lithuania. To alleged German failure to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles in 1923 (Germany being accused of not having delivered telephone poles on time), France responded with the occupation of the Rhineland and the industrial Ruhr area of Germany, the center of German coal and steel production, until 1925. Also, the French-dominated International Olympic Committee banned Germany from the Olympic Games of 1920 and 1924, which illustrates French desire to isolate Germany.
However, the UK and the US didn't favor these policies, which were seen as too pro-French. Germany soon recovered its old strength (most of the war reparations were cancelled under the pressure of the UK and the US), and then from 1933, under Adolf Hitler, began to pursue an aggressive policy in Europe. Meanwhile France in the 1930s was tired, politically divided, and above all dreaded another war, which the French feared would again be fought on their soil for the third time, and again destroy a large percentage of their young men. France's stagnant population meant that it would find it difficult to withhold the sheer force of numbers of a German invasion; it was estimated Germany could put two men of fighting age in the field for every French soldier. Thus in the 1930s the French, with their British allies, pursued a policy of appeasement of Germany, failing to respond to the remilitarization of the Rhineland, although this put the German army on a larger stretch of the French border.
Finally, however, Hitler pushed France and Britain too far, and they jointly declared war when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. But France remained exhausted and in no mood for a rerun of 1914–18. There was little enthusiasm and much dread in France at the prospect of actual warfare after the “phony war”. When the Germans launched their blitzkrieg invasion of France in 1940, the French Army crumbled within weeks, and with Britain retreating, an atmosphere of humiliation and defeat swept France.
A new government under Marshal Philippe Pétain surrendered, and German forces occupied most of the country. A minority of the French forces escaped abroad and continued the fight under General Charles de Gaulle (the “Free French” or “Fighting French”). On the other hand, the French Resistance conducted sabotage operations inside German-occupied France. To support the invasion of Normandy of 1944, various groups increased their sabotage and guerrilla attacks; organizations such as the Maquis derailed trains, blew up ammunition depots, and ambushed Germans, for instance at Tulle. The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich came under constant attack and sabotage on their way across the country to Normandy, suspected the village of Oradour-sur-Glane of harboring terrorists, arms and explosives, and wiped out the population in retaliation.
There was also a free French army fighting with the Allies, numbering almost five hundred thousand men by June 1944, one million by December and 1.3 million by the end of the war. By the war's end, the French army occupied south-west Germany and a part of Austria.
When Allied forces liberated Normandy and Provence in August 1944, a victorious rebellion emerged in occupied Paris and national rejoicing broke out, as did a maelstrom of hatred directed at French people who had collaborated with the Germans (most infamously, the shaving of the heads of French girls who had gone out with German soldiers). Some Germans taken as prisoners were killed by the resistance.
There was debate among the other Allies as to whether France should share in the occupation of the defeated Germany because of fears that the long Franco–German rivalry might interfere with the rebuilding of Germany. However, it was decided to give the French a share in the occupation (also to give a mainland guarantee against the USSR), and from 1945 to 1955 French troops were stationed in the Rhineland, Baden-Württemberg, and Berlin, and the areas were put under a French military governor. The Saar (protectorate) was allowed to rejoin Germany only in 1957.
In the 1950s, the French and the Germans finally discontinued the 300-year sequence of committing cruelties against one another, transforming their old enmity and the cycle of revenge into a new period of Franco–German cooperation that led to the formation of the European Union. Since then, France and Germany (West Germany between 1949 and 1990) have generally cooperated in the running of the European Union and also, often, in foreign-policy matters. For example, they jointly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, leading U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to lump them together as “Old Europe”.