Moselle (department)

History

On 4 March 1790 Moselle became one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution.

In 1793, France annexed the enclaves of Manderen, Momerstroff, and the County of Kriechingen – all possessions of princes of the Duchy of Luxemburg – a state of the Holy Roman Empire, and incorporated them into the Moselle department. In 1795, the seigneurie de Lixing was also integrated into the Moselle department. One of its first prefects was the comte de Vaublanc, from 1805 to 1814.

By the Treaty of Paris of 1814 following the first defeat and abdication of Napoleon, France had to surrender almost all the territory it had conquered since 1792. In northeastern France, the Treaty did not restore the 1792 borders, however, but defined a new frontier to put an end to the convoluted nature of the border, with all its enclaves and exclaves. As a result, France ceded the exclave of Tholey (now in Saarland, Germany) as well as a few communes near Sierck-les-Bains (both territories until then part of the Moselle department) to Austria. On the other hand, the Treaty confirmed the French annexations of 1793, and furthermore, the south of the Napoleonic department of Sarre was ceded to France, including the town of Lebach, the city of Saarbrücken, and the rich coal basin nearby. France thus became a net beneficiary of the Treaty of Paris: all the new territories ceded to her being far larger and more strategically useful than the few territories ceded to Austria. All these new territories were incorporated into the Moselle department, and giving Moselle a larger area than it had had since 1790.

However, with the return of Napoleon (March 1815) and his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (June 1815), the Treaty of Paris in November 1815 imposed much harsher conditions on France. Tholey and the communes around Sierck-les-Bains were still to be ceded as agreed in 1814, but the south of the Sarre department with Saarbrücken was withdrawn from France. In addition, France had to cede to Austria the area of Rehlingen (now in Saarland) as well as the strategic fort-town of Saarlouis and the territory around it, all territories and towns which France had controlled since the 17th century, and which had formed part of the Moselle department since 1790. At the end of 1815, Austria transferred all these territories to Prussia, making for the first time a shared border for those two states.

Thus, by the end of 1815, the Moselle department finally had the limits that it would keep until 1871. It was slightly smaller than at its creation in 1790, the incorporation of the Austrian enclaves not compensating for the loss of Saarlouis, Rehlingen, Tholey, and the communes around Sierck-les-Bains. Between 1815 and 1871, the department had an area of 5,387 km² (2,080 sq mi). Its prefecture (capital) was Metz. It had four arrondissements: Metz, Briey, Sarreguemines, and Thionville.

After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, almost all of the Moselle department, along with Alsace and portions of the Meurthe and Vosges departments, went to the German Empire by the Treaty of Frankfurt on the grounds that most of the population in those areas spoke German dialects. Bismarck omitted only one-fifth of Moselle (the arrondissement of Briey in the extreme west of the department) from annexation (Bismarck later regretted his decision when it was discovered that the region of Briey and Longwy had rich iron-ore deposits). The Moselle department ceased to exist on 18 May 1871, and the eastern four-fifths of Moselle was annexed to Germany merged with the also German-annexed eastern third of the Meurthe Department into the German Department of Lorraine, based in Metz, within the newly established Imperial State of Alsace-Lorraine. France merged the remaining area of Briey with the truncated Meurthe department to create the new Meurthe-et-Moselle department (a new name chosen on purpose to remind people of the lost Moselle department) with its préfecture at Nancy.

In 1919, following the French victory in the First World War, Germany returned Alsace-Lorraine to France under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. However, it was decided not to recreate the old separate departments of Meurthe and Moselle by reverting to the old department borders of before 1871. Instead, Meurthe-et-Moselle was left untouched, and the annexed part of Lorraine (Bezirk Lothringen) was reconstituted as the new department of Moselle. Thus, the Moselle department was reborn, but with quite different borders from those before 1871. Having lost the area of Briey, it had now gained the areas of Château-Salins and Sarrebourg which before 1871 had formed one-third of the Meurthe department and which had been part of the Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine since 1871.

The new Moselle department now reached its current area of 6,216 km² (2,400 sq mi), larger than the old Moselle because the areas of Château-Salins and Sarrebourg were far larger than the area of Briey and Longwy.

When the Second World War was declared on 3 September 1939, around 30% of Moselle's territory lay between the Maginot Line and the German frontier. 302,732 people, around 45% of the department's population, were evacuated to departments in central and western France during September 1939. Of those evacuated, around 200,000 returned after the war.

In spite of the 22 June 1940 armistice, Moselle was again annexed by Germany in July of that year by becoming part of the Gau Westmark. Adolf Hitler considered Moselle and Alsace parts of Germany, and as a result the inhabitants were drafted into the German Wehrmacht.

Several organized groups were formed in resistance to the German occupation, notably the Groupe Mario, led by Jean Burger, and the Groupe Derhan. During these years more than 10,000 Mosellans were deported to camps, many to the Sudetenland, for publicly opposing the annexation.

The United States Army liberated Moselle from Nazi Germany in the Battle of Metz in September 1944, although combat continued in the northeastern part of the department until March 1945. Moselle was returned to French governance in 1945 with the same frontiers as in 1919.

The department was hit particularly hard during the war: the American bombardments in the spring of 1944 caused widespread collateral damage; 23% of the communes in Moselle were 50% destroyed, and 8% of the communes were more than 75% destroyed.

As a result of German aggression during the war, the French Government actively discouraged the German heritage of the region, and the local German Lorraine Franconian dialects ceased to be used in the public realm. In recent years there has been a revival of the old dialects and distinct Franco-German culture of the region with the onset of open borders between France and Germany as members of the European Union's Schengen Treaty.