Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-9prln Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-10T18:51:26.778Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The ‘Minority Problem’ and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2008

TARA ZAHRA
TARA ZAHRA*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 85, Chicago, IL 60637, United States; tzahra@uchicago.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called ‘minority problem’ loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in France and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. It suggests that even as east/west binaries structured the unequal application of new international minority rights protections, France, rather than Czechoslovakia, implemented a more radical and racist policy of forcible national classification.

Le ‘problème des minorités’ et la classification nationale dans les zones frontalières françaises et tchécoslovaques

A la suite de la première guerre mondiale, le ‘problème des minorités’ était très important dans la politique européenne. De plus, ce problème était entendu comme particulier à l'Europe centrale et orientale. En fait, la diversité linguistique n'était pas une caractéristique unique de l'Est, mais aussi un continuel défi dans des états qui revendiquaient depuis longtemps une culture nationale unifiée. Cet article compare les politiques de classification nationale et le droit des minorités en France et en Tchécoslovaquie après la première guerre mondiale. Il argumente que la classification de l'appartenance nationale était, en France, plus radicale et plus raciste qu'en Tchécoslovaquie, même si on pouvait encore reconnaître la divergence traditionnelle dans l'octroi des droits des minorités.

Minderheiten und die staaliche politik nationaler klassifizierung in den französischen und tschechoslowakischen grenzgebieten

Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg bestimmte ein so genanntes ‘Minderheitenproblem’ die europäische Politik und wurde besonders auf Zentral- und Osteuropa bezogen. Tatsächlich jedoch trat linguistische Vielfalt nicht nur im Osten Europas auf, sondern bildete auch eine kontinuierliche Herausforderung in Staaten, welche scheinbar eine vereinheitlichte nationale Kultur aufwiesen. Dieser Artikel vergleicht die Art und Weise, wie in der Politik Frankreichs und der Tschechoslowakei nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg Minderheiten nach nationalen Kriterien klassifiziert und Minderheitsrechte durchgesetzt wurden. Er argumentiert, dass die Klassifikationen von nationaler Zugehörigkeit in Frankreich radikaler und rassistischer war als in der Tschechoslowakei, auch wenn man den traditionellen Gegensatz in der Gewährung von Minderheitenrechten noch erkennen kann.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 137 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Cited in Macartney, C. A., National States and National Minorities (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 482Google Scholar.

2 Oscar, Janowsky, Nationalities and National Minorities (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 2Google Scholar. More recently, this region has been depicted as a ‘war-breeding zone’ by Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, whose borderlands project took as its starting point a view of central and eastern Europe as the ‘site of the most sustained and intense ethnic violence in the modern era’. See http://www.watsoninstitute.org/borderlands/region.cfm (last visited 3 August 2007).

3 Henry, C. Wolfe, Human Dynamite: The Story of Europe's Minorities (New York: Foreign Policy Asssociation, 1939)Google Scholar.

4 For French statistics see Boswell, Laird, ‘From Liberation to Purge Trials in the “Mythic Provinces”: Recasting French Identities in Alsace and Lorraine, 1918–1920’, French Historical Studies 23, 1 (2000), 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodfellow, Samuel, ‘From Germany to France? Inter-war Alsatian National Identity’, French History 7, 4 (1993), 455CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Czechoslovak statistics see Rothschild, Joseph, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 89Google Scholar. These statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt. The Czechoslovak statistics are based on the census, which, as we shall see, was not a transparent reflection of national loyalties or language use.

5 For numbers see Christopher J. Fischer, ‘Alsace to the Alsatians? Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1890–1930’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2003, 238.

6 Boswell, ‘From Liberation to Purge Trials’, 129–62. On Alsace see also Fischer, Christopher J., ‘Alsace to the Alsatians? Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1890–1930’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 36 (2005), 55–62Google Scholar; Harvey, David Allen, Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace, 1830–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Cabanes, Bruno, La victoire endeuillé. La sortie de guerre des soldats français 1918–1920 (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 97–180Google Scholar; Harp, Steven L., Learning to be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation-Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

7 Gerald, Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985), 171Google Scholar. All translations of quotations from untranslated sources are by the author.

8 For more on national classification under the Habsburg monarchy, and on the shift from individual choice to objective characteristics, see Zahra, Tara, ‘Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian lands, 1900–1945’, Central European History 37, 4 (2004), 501–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The phrase ‘objective characteristics’ comes from the decisions of the Czechoslovak Supreme Administrative Court, which regulated the application of the Lex Perek. Z. 6962/22, carton 857, Nejvyšší správní soud (NSS), Národní archiv, Prague (NA).

10 NSS, Decision from 10 February 1923, č. 10967/22, Oddělení spisovny 8, čislo 113, podčislo 4, carton 1238, Ministerstvo Vnitra – Stará Registratura (MV-SR), NA.

11 See Vládní nařizení, č. 256/1920, 8 April 1920, and č. 592/1920, 20 Ocbober 1920, in Sbírka zákonů a nařizení státu československu (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1920), 1503–6. The following cartons in the National Archive in Prague contain several thousand files of individuals whose nationalities were changed from German to Czech in 1921 and 1930, and who protested to the Ministry of Interior: NA, MV-SR, Cartons 251–8, 1238, 1239, 2995, 2996–8.

12 On efforts to re-establish order following the First World War and the revolutions of 1917–19 see Sheila, Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Mark, Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999), 41–138Google Scholar; Rogers, Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79–179Google Scholar; Eagle, Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Maureen, Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Eliza, Ablovatski, ‘Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1918–1919’, in Maria, Bucur and Nancy, Wingfield, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Istvan, Deak, ‘The Habsburg Empire’, in Mark, von Hagen and Karen, Barkey, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 129–42Google Scholar; Jeremy, King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 153–68Google Scholar.

13 For the details of the case see Hudson, Manley O., ed., World Court Reports. A Collection of the Judgments, Orders and Opinions of the Permanent Court of International Justice, Vol. 2, 1927–1932 (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1935), 268–320Google Scholar, 690–91.

14 Hudson, World Court Reports, 292.

15 See Hans-Ulrich, Wehler, Nationalitätenpolitik in Jugoslawien: die deutsche Minderheit, 1918–1978 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980), 23Google Scholar.

16 For the classic examples see Taylor, A. J. P., The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Carl, Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981)Google Scholar; Macartney, C. A.The Habsburg Empire 1790–1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1969)Google Scholar. For more recent examples see Schöpflin, George, ‘Nationalism and Ethnicity in Europe, East and West’, in Kupchan, Charles A., ed., Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 37–65Google Scholar; Solomon, Wank, ‘Some Reflections of the Habsburg Empire and its Legacy in the Nationalities Question’, Austrian History Yearbook, 28 (1997), 140–41Google Scholar; Steven, Beller, A Concise History of Austria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Ivan, Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Andrew, Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

17 For theoretical literature drawing distinctions between eastern and western nationalism see Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins (New York: Macmillan, 1944)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 101–30Google Scholar; Rogers, Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Liah, Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–26Google Scholar; Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

18 There is a vast and growing literature on tensions between universalism and regional, religious, ethnic and linguistic difference in the French metropole and empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the classic text on regional and linguistic diversity in nineteenth-century France see Eugen, Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. On regionalism in France see Stéphane, Gerson, A Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Caroline, Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. On the tensions between universalism and difference posed by immigration see especially Mary, Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Clifford, Rosenberg, Policing Paris: the Origins of Modern Immigration Control Between the Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Gerard, Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Patrick, Weil, Qu'est-ce qu'un Français? Histoire de la nationalité français depuis la Révolution (Paris: Grasset, 2002)Google Scholar. On the French Empire and race see Tyler, Stovall and Sue, Peabody, eds., The Color of Liberty. Histories of Race in France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Herrick, Chapman and Laura, Frader, eds., Race in France (New York: Berghahn, 2004)Google Scholar; Fred, Cooper and Ann, Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Alice, Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Gary, Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Conklin, Alice L. and Julia, Clancy-Smith, ‘Introduction: Writing French Colonial Histories’, French Historical Studies 27, 3 (2004), 497–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daughton, J. P., An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 For a fuller analysis of the nature and extent of national ambivalence, indifference, and flexibility in eastern Europe see Cohen, Gary M., The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Judson, Pieter M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; Glassheim, Noble Nationalists; Chad, Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Luft, Robert, ‘Nationale Utraquisten in Böhmen: Zur Problematik nationaler Zwischenstellungen am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Godé, Maurice et al. , eds., Allemands, Juifs et Tchèques à Prague, 1890–1924 (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry-Montpellier III, 1994), 37–54Google Scholar; Timothy, Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Kate, Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Tara, Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

20 For examples of this revisionist approach to east central Europe see Cohen, Gary B., ‘Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914’, Central European History 40, 2 (2007), 241–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Gary B., ‘Neither Absolutism Nor Anarchy: New Narratives of Society and Government in Late Imperial Austria’, Austrian History Yearbook, 29, 1 (1998), 37–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Judson, Pieter M., Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Judson, Guardians of the Nation; King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; Alison, Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Glassheim, Noble Nationalists; Daniel, Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Rogers, Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google ScholarPubMed.

21 For recent challenges to the east–west division see Maria, Todorova, ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism’, Slavic Review, 64 (2005), 140–65Google Scholar; Boswell, ‘From Liberation to Purge Trials’; Geoff, Eley and Ronald, Grigor Suny, ‘Introduction’, in Eley, and Suny, , eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3–38Google Scholar.

22 This approach borrows from the insights of Peter Sahlins and Pieter Judson, who have both explored the ways in which nationalists constructed their self-image in so-called borderlands. See Peter, Sahlins, Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Judson, Pieter M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

23 Hannah, Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 152Google Scholar. On perceived links between democracy and the nation-state in 1918 see also Mazower, Dark Continent, 41–138; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 79–179; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls. On the influence of Germany in shaping French nationalism see Alan, Mitchell, A Stranger in Paris: Germany's Role in Republican Paris, 1870–1940 (New York: Berghahn, 2006)Google Scholar; Michael, Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstversändnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792–1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992)Google Scholar.

24 Lothar, Kettenacker, Nationalsozialistische Volkspolitik in Elsass (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1973), 31Google Scholar.

25 After 1867 the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy was governed much more like a nation-state along the French model than were the Austrian crown lands. The government of Hungary sought to assimilate its linguistic minorities through policies of Magyarisation.

26 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 67–94.

27 On the role of the Austrian state in facilitating nationalist movements see especially King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; Judson, Guardians of the Nation; Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten; Tara, Zahra, ‘Each Nation Only Cares for its Own: Empire, Nation, and Child Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1918’, American Historical Review, 111, 5 (2006), 1378–402Google Scholar.

28 For more on the loyalty (and perceptions of disloyalty) of Czech-speakers to the Austrian state during the First World War see Alon, Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (New York: Berg, 2002)Google Scholar; Křen, Jan, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft. Tschechen und Deutschen 1780–1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 303–400Google Scholar; King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, 147–52; Zahra, ‘Each Nation Only Cares for its Own’; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, ch. 3. On popular protest, anti-Austrian sentiment, and the revolutions of 1918 in Austria see Healy, Vienna; Nancy Wingfield, ‘Conflicting Constructions of Memory: Attacks on Statues of Joseph II in the Bohemian Lands after the Great War’, Austrian History Yearbook (1997), 147–71; Heumos, Peter, ‘Kartoffeln her oder es gibt eine Revolution: Hungerkrawalle, Streiks, und Massenproteste in den böhmischen Ländern, 1914–1918’, in Mommsen, Hans et al. , eds., Der erste Weltkrieg und die Beziehungen zwischen Tschechen, Slowaken, und Deutschen (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 255–87Google Scholar; Boyer, John W., ‘Silent War and Bitter Peace: The Revolution of 1918 in Austria’, Austrian History Yearbook, 35 (2003)Google Scholar.

29 See Stéphane, Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette, Becker, Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002), 135–58Google Scholar. On French images of the German enemy see also Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde. On fears of racial ‘contamination’ in the French empire see Ann Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia’, in Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 286–324.

30 On the role of Orientalism in constructing the idea of the civilised West see Edward, Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978)Google Scholar; On images of eastern Europe as a violent, backward, and fragmented borderland region see Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Maria, Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

31 Otto, Junghann, National Minorities in Europe (New York: Covici, Friede, 1932), 116, 119Google Scholar.

32 Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 23, 90.

33 Oscar, Jaszi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 31Google Scholar. See also Junghann, National Minorities in Europe (New York, 1932), 18.

34 Gilbert, Murray, ‘Introduction’, in Mair, L. P., The Protection of Minorities: The Working and Scope of the Minorities Treaties under the League of Nations (London: Christophers, 1928), v–viGoogle Scholar.

35 Carole, Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 360Google Scholar. On the political considerations which shaped the minority treaties see also Patrick, Finney, ‘An Evil for All Concerned: Great Britain and Minority Protection after 1919’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30, 3 (1995), 533–51Google Scholar. On inter-war minority protection see also Mark, Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Inter-war Europe’, Daedelus, 126 (1997), 47–61Google Scholar and ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 379–89. For an excellent overview of work on the League of Nations see Pederson, Susan, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review, 112 (October 2007), 1091–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Murray, ‘Introduction’, The Protection of Minorities, vii.

37 Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 278, 287, 298, 310–11. See also Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations’, 47–61.

38 French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, on 24 January 1919. Cited in Harvey, Constructing Class and Nationality, 544.

39 On the Habsburg state's anti-Czech politics during the First World War see Jan Havránek, ‘Politische Repression und Versorgungsengpässe in den böhmischen Ländern 1914 bis 1918’, in Mommsen et al., Der erste Weltkrieg, 47–67; Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft, 312; Healy, Vienna, 122–159; Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War.

40 On war pedagogy and propaganda in France see Stéphane, Audoin-Rouzeau, La guerre des enfants. Essai d'histoire culturelle (Paris: A. Colin, 1993)Google Scholar.

41 For a detailed investigation of both the realities and myths of German war atrocities in 1914 see John, Horne and Alan, Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Isabel, Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 207–14Google Scholar.

42 See Noiriel, French Melting Pot, 61.

43 Fischer, ‘Alsace to the Alsatians?’, dissertation, 208–12.

44 Jean, Claude Farcy, Les camps de concentration français de la première guerre mondiale (Paris: Anthropos, 1995), 51–63Google Scholar. Among the 10,000 people classified by the military commission, 5,247 were issued the carte tricolore, 219 were considered suspect, 936 were freed before the commission arrived, 219 were considered hostages and 4,214 were classified as Austro-Germans. See Fischer, ‘Alsace to the Alsatians?’, 212.

45 Commissions interministerielle de classement des Alsaciens Lorrains, Paris 25 Mars 1919, 121 AL 902, Archives départmentales du Bas-Rhin (ADBR).

46 Fischer, ‘Alsace to the Alsatians’, 214–16. On similar tensions between Alsatian evacuees and French hosts in the south-west during the Second World War see Boswell, Laird, ‘Franco-Alsatian Conflict and the Crises of National Sentiment During the Phoney War’, Journal of Modern History, 71 (September 1999), 552–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Wetterlé, L'abbé Émile, Ce qu'était l'Alsace-Lorraine et ce qu'elle sera (Paris: L'Édition française illustrée, 1915), 308Google Scholar.

48 Boswell, ‘From Liberation to Purge Trials’, 131–2. On Alsatian particularities see also Fischer, ‘Alsace to the Alsatians?’, 55–62; François Uberfill, La société strasbourgeoise entre France et Allemagne, 1871–1924 (Strasbourg: Société Savante d'Alsace, 2001).

49 Wetterlé, Ce qu'était l'Alsace-Lorraine, 27.

50 On efforts by states to render populations ‘legible’ see James, Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

51 Wetterlé, Ce qu'était l'Alsace-Lorraine, 305.

52 On fears of racial ‘degeneration’ in France see Robert, Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

53 On the ethnicisation of German–French difference in France see Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde, 349–64.

54 Edgar Bérillon, ‘La psychologie de la race allemande d'après ses carictéristiques objectives et spécifiques’, lecture, 4 February 1917, Association française pour l'avancement des sciences, (Paris, 1917), 77–139, 118, 121, cited in Annette Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre. Humanitaires et culture de guerre, 1914–1918. Populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Noêsis, 1998), 328. For other contemporary examples of the racialisation of French–German difference see Louis Battifol, L'alsace est française par ses origines, sa race, son passé (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1919); E. Sainte-Marie Perrin, Ce que pense l'Alsace (Paris: Cussac, 1918), 29.

55 Harris also discusses the vigorous debate about abortion provoked by racial fears about children of German soldiers. Ruth Harris, ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”: Rape, Race, and Nationalism in France during the First World War’, Past and Present, 141 (1993), 170–206. See also Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, L'enfant de l'ennemi: vol, avortement, infanticide pendant le Grande Guerre (Paris: Aubier, 1995).

56 Alfred Zeil, Rapport sur les questions de nationalité. Comités d'études économiques et administratives relatives a l'Alsace-Lorraine, Adopté en séance du Comité du 23 Fevrier 1918, 4, 30/AJ/96, Archives nationales françaises (AN).

57 Ibid., 27. Zeil also cited the Jews of Romania as a model for the treatment of Germans in Alsace.

58 Ibid., 28.

59 121 AL 907–8, ADBR; 286 D 175, ADBR.

60 Zeil, Rapport sur les questions de nationalité, 46–7.

61 Cathérine Lefevre à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 17 April 1919, 286 D 175, ADBR.

62 For similar debates in both French and German colonial contexts see Lora, Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers’, 286–322.

63 Telegram, Metz 4305 11/10, 23 May 1921, 30/AJ/296, AN.

64 Memo from Hirschauer, 30 June 1921, 30/AJ/296, AN.

65 Hélène Herr à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 27 March 1919, 286 D 175, ADBR.

66 Joseph Kropfinger à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, May 9, 1919, 286 D 175, ADBR.

67 Jacques Guthier à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 28 March 1919, 286 D 175, ADBR.

68 Monsieur Ziegler à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 11 April 1919, 286 D 175, ADBR.

69 Le commissaire de la République à Strasbourg à Monsieur Ziegler, Inspecteur de la Prison Civile, 16 April 1919, 286 D 175, ADBR.

70 Commission de triage et de classement du 2ème degré (Metz) à Commissaire général de la République (Strasbourg), 7 July 1919, 121 AL 902, ADBR.

71 Denunciation of Ludzig Bauni, 21 January 1919, AL 121 906, ADBR.

72 Bergen, Doris L., ‘The Nazi Conception of “Volksdeutsche” and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939–45’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29, 4 (1994), 569–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Otto Lergenmueller à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 9 March 1919; Le Commissaire de la République à Monsieur Lergenmueller, Otto, 18 March 1919. For other uses of anti-German sentiment as ‘proof’ of Frenchness see Charles Thomas à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 29 April 1919; Emile Ruos à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 16 April 1919; Charles Kraft à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 19 March 1919; Chrétien Knösel à Monsieur le Haut-Commissaire de la République, 14 March 1919. All in 286 D 175, ADBR.

74 Heinrich, Rauchberg, Der nationale Besitzstand in Böhmen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1905), 435Google Scholar. Other districts in Bohemia with a high percentage of bilingual children included Most/Brüx (22.4 per cent), Budějovice/Budweis (16.2 per cent), Liberec/Reichenberg (16.1 per cent) Duchcov/Dux (17.1 per cent) and Litoměřice/Leitmeritz (13.4 per cent). Statistics are not available for Moravia, but one nationalist pedagogue referred to bilingual education in the home as a ‘Moravian specialty’ in 1883. See Jan, Kapras, Řeč mateřská orgánem školy obecné a znakem národnosti (Prague: Urbánek, 1883), 9–10Google Scholar.

75 Indra, Richard, ‘Návod, jak reklamovati české dítky z něměckých škol’, Zákon perkův, právní priručky pro učitelstvo (Zábřeh: Družstvo knihtiskárny, 1913), 43Google Scholar.

76 Z. 6962/22, Carton 857, NSS, NA. For more on the Lex Perek and reclamations see Zahra, ‘Reclaiming Children for the Nation’. More than 300 cases reached the Czechoslovak Supreme Administrative Court, in which the court was charged with determining whether individual children were Czech or German.

77 See King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, 164–5, for a discussion of the 1921 census.

78 No author, Unsere deutsche Schulen und das Vernichtungsgesetz (Eger: Böhmerland Verlag, 1920), 7.

79 This strategy was successful. For statistics see Friedmann, František, Mravnost či oportunita? Několik poznámek k anketě acad. spolku ‘Kapper’ a českožidovství a sionismu (Prague: Sionistický výbor pracovní pro Čechy a Moravu, 1927), 24–6, 36Google Scholar.

80 See Vládní nařizení č. 256/1920, 8 April 1920 and č. 592/1920, 20 Ocbober 1920 in Sbirka zákonů a nařizení státu československu (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1920), 1503–6.

81 Oddělení spisovny 11, č. 57, podčislo 15, Carton 251, MV-SR, NA.

82 Oddělení spisovny 11, č. 58, podčislo 4, Carton 251, MV-SR, NA.

83 Ibid., podčislo 7, carton 251, MV-SR, NA.

84 Ibid., podčislo 38, carton 251, MV-SR, NA.

85 Ibid., podčislo 44, carton 251, MV-SR, NA.

86 Ibid., podčislo 19, podčislo 17, podčislo 28, podčislo 38, all in carton 251, MV-SR, NA.

87 Sčitání lidu 1930, Memo from the NRČ to the State Statistical Office and the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, 16 May 1930, carton 183, NRČ, NA.

88 Vládní nařizení ze dne 26 června 1930 o sčitání lidu v roce 1930, Sbírka zákonů a nařízení státu československého (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1930), 480.

89 Memo to Josef Mičkov in Frýdek, Odděleni spisovny 8, č. 247, podčislo 19, carton 2995, MV-SR, NA.

90 Odděleni spisovny 8, č. 249, podčislo 16, carton 2996, MV-SR, NA.

91 Germany's 2000 citizenship law automatically grants citizenship to children of non-citizens born on German soil, if at least one parent has the status of permanent resident and has been residing in Germany for at least eight years. Such children are required to apply to retain citizenship status at the age of 23, and may not have dual citizenship. Germany's naturalisation law requires prospective citizens to live in Germany for eight years and take 650 hours of German language instruction.

92 Michael, Johns, ‘Do as I Say, not as I Do: the European Union, Eastern Europe, and Minority Rights’, East European Politics and Societies, 17, 4 (2003), 682–99Google Scholar. For Minority at Risk data see http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/ (last visited 3 August 2007).

93 Tony, Judt, Post-war: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Knopf, 2005), 8–9Google Scholar.

94 For further discussion on the creation of minorities in Europe after 1918 see Bahm, Karl F., ‘The Inconveniences of Nationality: German Bohemians, the Disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Attempt to Create a “Sudeten German” Identity’, Nationalities Papers, 27, 3 (1999), 375–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John, Swanson, ‘Nation, Volk, Minderheit, Volksgruppe: Die deutsche Minderheit in Ungarn in den Begriffskämpfen der Zwischenkriegsära’, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 55, 4 (2006), 526–47Google Scholar; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 55–78; Theodora Dragostinova, ‘Between two Motherlands: Struggles for Nationhood among the Greeks in Bulgaria, 1906–49’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 2006; Chu, Winson, ‘“Volksgemeinschaften unter sich”: German Minorities and Regionalism in Poland, 1918–39’, in Gregor, Neil, Roemer, Nils and Roseman, Mark, eds., German History from the Margins. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 104–26Google Scholar; Brown, Biography of No Place, 18–51.