From war to reconciliation
To question borders and identities
Author : Francois Ernenwein
This could evoke the green ray or the blue hour filmed by Eric Rohmer or the Maloja serpent by Olivier Assayas in Sils Maria: nothing proves that these phenomena really exist. But everyone believes they have seen them. And finds good reasons to dream there…
The famous blue line of the Vosges looks a bit like all that. Who hasn't heard of it? But no one has described it precisely? Who knows exactly what it's made of? Except by contemplating the Vosges mountains at dawn when the fir trees on the crests light up and release, some explain, "aerosols", isoprene or sabinene.
To tell the truth, science is not very useful here. Even before the expression took hold, everything would lead to anchoring it in the imagination of millions of French people. It would thus mark the destiny of millions of men and women for several generations.
In the "lost provinces"
On August 4, 1870, the founding events took place in Alsace. Smiling hills were the scene of a bitter French defeat. From Geisberg, a mountain overlooking Wissembourg, the French infantry was crushed by Bavarian troops.
First rout which opens – against a backdrop of disorganization of the French army, born of the negligence of the management, of quartermaster problems – the road to Sedan… Despite the heroic and vain charge of the cuirassiers at Reischoffen, Bismarck triumphs. Alsace and Moselle will finally be torn from the national community.
From 1871 onwards, the “lost provinces” constituted an immense French nostalgia, a permanent lesson in patriotism, widely taught in schools and supported by those who had fled the Germans. Around 125 people left Alsace and Moselle, taking advantage of the option provided for by the Treaty of Frankfurt. At the end of the legal emigration period, many young people fled to France to escape military service in the German army.
A horizon line
However, when Jules Ferry's will was made public on March 7, 1893, the expression took time to take hold. “I wish to rest in the same tomb as my father and my sister, facing this blue line of the Vosges, from where the touching complaint of the vanquished rises to my faithful heart.”, had written at the end of his last will this immense figure of the Third Republic (Ferry, 1993, t. VIII, p.437).
He had already used a similar formula four years earlier during an award ceremony at the Saint-Dié college. The aesthetic dimension (blue) rubs shoulders with the political notation (the complaint of defeated France). But Jules Ferry himself never called for an aggressive policy towards Germany. And he always preferred a major colonial policy for France to revenge.
The press seized on his remarks and therefore offered a contrasting reading. For some, Jules Ferry's blue was "national", that of the Guard of the same name, heir to the Revolution. But conversely, in La Croix of March 25, the commentary on the will was above all an opportunity for Catholics to settle a few scores (there are some!) with the man who had ardently fought them: “No, it is not in Saint-Dié that he must rest. The blue line of the Vosges is too graceful a setting, too religious for his hateful figure. Saint Odile is too close; too many priests pass by, too many bells ring there, too many children pray there.”
A starting point
The formula will therefore not immediately have a great posterity. Never used in the press, yet lyrical, when the Tour de France stormed the Ballon d'Alsace in July 1905, nor after the assassination of Jaurès in July 1914.
But it still haunts military or patriotic speeches that reproach the Republic for not being vengeful enough. The image will gradually support a patriotism with contrasting forms.
In 1914, in any case, we went to the front to settle the dispute with Germany once and for all. The blue line had ceased to be just a horizon, it had become the starting point for a reconquest… “An enormous force assembles without a sound, a danger that arises without a fear, that is what France is today. Neither boasting nor aggression: this time it is the lot of others. And that is how we deserve to be able to hope, and that is how an immortal “still” more eloquent than any other, seems to come to us from the blue line of the Vosges”.
The forehead mark
In fact, the French soldiers, in blue Alpine hunter uniforms, went up to attack the famous line. It still runs from Luxembourg to Switzerland, marked by blocks of stone. 1,10 m high and buried in the mountain to a depth of 50 cm, these 4 granite markers, separated by about 056 meters from each other, have an F to indicate France and a D (Deutschland) for Germany, engraved in the stone.
After the defeat of 1871, they were paid half by the victors (from marker 1 to 2008 in the Donon massif), the following half by the vanquished.
At the beginning of the war of 1914, near the place called Rudlin next to a magnificent waterfall, a small train runs towards the French lines and the blue line, merged at Gazon du Faing. An inclined plane is the metaphor of this reconquest. It will take another three years to happen.
The sign of annexation
The departure station is located at the place called the hermitage at an altitude of 717 meters and the arrival station at more than 120 meters. The slope is 25%. Technical feat when you think of the scale of the deforestation carried out by 400 people between August and September 1915.
This is an important contribution to the offensive that will result in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides. All along the blue line and at its feet, the many necropolises bear witness to the violence of the fighting. Some are very spectacular, others more discreet and sometimes more moving.
In 1940, the blue line reappeared, well guarded when Alsace-Moselle was annexed by the Third Reich. It once again marked the border. The Gauleiters imposed Nazi order around Strasbourg and Metz. It would only disappear between 1944 and 1945 after very tough battles on its flanks (the Colmar pocket).
The emblem of reconciliation
But it remains a sign. This time of reconciliation. It was right next to the markers that materialized the blue line, in Dabo (Moselle) that, on July 19, 1983, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl prepared new progress in Franco-German relations. This meeting is now forgotten, largely eclipsed by the emotion born of the outstretched hands at Verdun, a year later.
On the foothills of the Moselle Vosges, near the White Zorn, they walk in a clearing from the century-old forester's house of Jaegerhof where the first interviews took place. They discuss missiles, the compensation by Germany of the "malgré-nous", these Alsatians and Mosellans forcibly incorporated into the German army during the Second World War. They also talk about the division of the Mundat forest, a border conflict near Wissembourg. Where it all began in 1870.
