> Not only had the Prussians humiliated them on the battlefield, but they had marched through the streets of Paris – and if that wasn’t enough, they had taken the French territories of Alsace and Lorraine and added them to their Germanic realms.
Weeellll, Elsaß was German (i.e., part of the Holy Roman Empire) until 1639 & Lothringen was German until 1766. They were both retaken from France in 1871, retaken by France from Germany in 1919, occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940 and restored to France in 1945. Out of the past 1,000 years, Elsaß has been de jure German for 687 and Lothringen has been German for 814.
So describing them as French territories is a bit … Francophilic.
All the way down to Rome, occasionally. But please don't call the thing today's northern Italy was part of "Germany". That empire was an administrative framework for nomadic kings that had little to do with today's concepts of nation or ethnicity. If you can't do without mapping to current states, you have to pick Austria, because Vienna is where the Habsburg emperors had their main residence.
That's like listing how long Texas or California were part of Spain/Mexico. It's true, as history, but it wouldn't make the US any happier if those lands went back to Mexico. Current facts on the ground say that those are part of the US, and have been for over a hundred years.
Nobody is asking France to return Alsace-Lorraine, but in a historical article, one might expect at least a footnote to say that this wasn't just French territory! And I don't think the comparison with Texas is all that fitting: this particular territorial dispute goes back almost to the days of Charlemagne, with sovereignty changing numerous times. This isn't so much a case of "It was yours, now it's mine" as of "It was mine, then it was yours, then mine again, then yours again - now we can't really say whose it ought to be, but I still want it".
My point was that, no matter how many times it went back and forth, it had been France for over a hundred years. That's "just French territory" for most reasonable purposes.
(Except this is Europe, where a hundred years is not a particularly long time...)
Weeellll, Elsaß was German (i.e., part of the Holy Roman Empire) until 1639 & Lothringen was German until 1766. They were both retaken from France in 1871, retaken by France from Germany in 1919, occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940 and restored to France in 1945. Out of the past 1,000 years, Elsaß has been de jure German for 687 and Lothringen has been German for 814.
So describing them as French territories is a bit … Francophilic.