Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Alsace (France) – Boundaries »

Abstract This article explores the introduction of family policy in Alsace following the Great War and the efforts of local pronatalist leaders to create a new moral order in the region. While French goals of promoting population growth have been well documented at the national level, relatively little attention has been accorded to the unique way in which the demographic question developed outside Paris. The interwar period in France was marked by shifting boundaries and population movements across borders, both of which shaped French pronatalism. Because such developments factored into understandings of both French identity and concerns about population growth, French demographic policy cannot be fully understood without considering how these questions developed in regions such as Alsace. As this article shows, the introduction of a pronatalist family policy and moral crusade intersected with concurrent efforts to minimize German influences and make the region more ‘French’.

The hydraulic management works, carried out on the Rhine over about 150 years, have suppressed a large part of the Rhine floodplains and thus dramatically modified the environmental conditions of alluvial ecosystems. The Offendorf alluvial forest situated 30 km north of Strasbourg, of which 60 ha are now a nature reserve, is taken as an example of a restoration programme to attain “the most natural possible” ecosystem functioning. The general status of the Offendorf forest hydrographic network is mesotrophic to eutrophic, due to the water supply. Some diffluent arms present a tendency to silt up, because of the lowering of the water table. Thus a first step in the restoration programme was to re-establish the continuity of surface flow, in low as well as in high water, taking into account the water quality. But the accurate context of the restoration is that of a naturally functional unit, i.e. the whole extent of the forest lying between the high water dykes and not the limited sector within the administrative boundaries of the nature reserve. A definition of a restoration programme is proposed: the renaturalizing of the riverside environments should comprise several stages from study of the past or present processes to prediction of new modifications.

This article analyses the Life of St. Deicolus of Lure, a monastery in the Alsace region of east France, written by the cleric Theodoric in the 970s or 980s. It argues that the text contains a notable amount of information on the existence, methodology, and limitations of an ill-understood aspect of monastic integration around the year 1000. Relying on an analysis of the narrative's second prologue as well as scattered comments elsewhere in the text, it reconstructs three phenomena. The first is attempts to (re-)establish a Luxeuil-centered imagined community of institutions with a shared Columbanian legacy through the creation and circulation of hagiographic narratives. A second is the co-creation across institutional boundaries of texts and manuscripts that were designed to facilitate these integration attempts. And the third phenomenon is the limits of this integration effort, which did not tempt those involved to propose the establishment of a distinct ‘neo-Columbanian’ observance. As such, the Life represents an attempt to reconcile the legacy of Columbanus and his real or alleged followers as celebrated at late tenth-century Luxeuil and Lure with a contemporary understanding of reformed Benedictine identity.

Defence date: 10 February 2006
Examining board: Mme Laurence Fontaine, prof. à l'Institut Universitaire Européen de Florence, directeur de thèse ; M. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, prof. à l'Institut Universitaire Européen de Florence ; M. Patrick Weil, directeur de recherche au CNRS, Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne ; M. Christian Windler, prof. à l'Université de Berne, superviseur externe
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

In 1918 Alsace was restored to French rule after almost fifty years of annexation into the German Empire. Its return was greeted with enthusiasm in Alsace and across France, but reintegration proved much more difficult than expected. This concluding chapter traces how the return of Alsace to France was shaped by the border, and suggests that consideration of the border as a driver of change encourages us to avoid a binary view of Alsace as either French or German or falling between two nations. Instead, a focus on the border encourages the consideration of Alsace as a dynamic force and draws our attention to the multiple languages that the population adopted to describe return. It underlines that reintegration proved a multi-cornered struggle and reveals that nations are not formed in isolation, but rather through interactions involving actors at the centre, at the periphery, and beyond the national boundaries.