Identity in a Divided Province: The Folklorists of , 1860–1960

David Hopkin

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet97 of 210 The original Lorraine came into existence at the Treaty of in 843, which divided the . Its boundaries have been frequently redrawn since then, as the original Middle Kingdom of the Franks was fought over, occupied, and divided by its neighbors, but Lorraine survived, in the reduced form of an independent , al- most until the Revolution.1 However, from the Constituent Assembly’s partition of into departments in 1790 until after the Second World War, the term Lorraine was only a geographical expression: the four departments of the , , , and the had no significant institutions in common.2 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some of its inhabitants felt that Lorraine deserved more unity and control over its own actions. Mostly associated with the political right, they ranged from moderate decentralizers to outright autonomists. But they were all agreed that Lorraine was a real entity, and its political claims were merely the recognition of this ‘‘fact.’’ But of what did this Lorraine consist? Even its boundaries were uncertain; historically, the area covered by the four departments was more one of divisions than of unity. The dukes were, from the fifteenth

David Hopkin is lecturer in social history at the University of Glasgow. A short version of this article was delivered to the conference of the Association for French Historical Studies in Ottawa, 1998. The author is grateful for the comments from participants at the conference (particularly those of Tony Nuspl and the commentator Robert Schneider), as well as those of the German Historical Studies Group in Cambridge (particularly Chris Clark, Ulinka Rublack, and Brendan Simms) and the anonymous readers for French Historical Studies. The author would also like to thank Carolyn Scott, fellow student of Lorraine, for sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm for this region. 1 For a brief history of the ‘‘réunion’’ of Lorraine with France see André Gain, Géographie lorraine, La Société lorraine des études locales (, 1938), 1–40. 2 Lorraine, as an administrative region, reappeared in 1955, although only after Mitter- rand’s decentralization in 1982 did it take on a political life of its own (Pierre Barral, L’Esprit lorrain: Cet Accent singulier du patriotism français [Nancy, 1989], 143–53). French Historical Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (fall 2000) Copyright © 2000 by the Society for French Historical Studies Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 640 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

century, sovereigns over two distinct , Lorraine and Bar. Until 1542 the bulk of this territory formed part of the Holy Roman Em- pire, but the portion west of the Meuse fell under the jurisdiction of the of Paris. And although the duchy was the largest con- tender for the ‘‘espace lorrain,’’ it was not alone: its most important rival was the city-state of .3 Throughout the medieval and early mod- ern periods the dukes were in dispute with Metz, a conflict that was intensified when France first occupied (1552) and then incorporated (1648) the Three Bishoprics of Metz,, and Verdun. From the 1620s onward the dukes, usually supported by one or other branch of the Hapsburgs, were at war with the French monarchy, only to be finally

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet98 of 210 driven out in 1737. The duchy retained nominal independence under Duke Stanislas, ex-king of Poland and Louis XV’s father-in-law, until finally incorporated into France in 1766.4 Even then it remained legally and administratively apart from the kingdom.The antagonisms created by these historic divisions have sometimes proved more enduring than the states that created them, particularly those between Metz and the former ducal capital, Nancy.5 These internal conflicts posed problems for regionalists who grounded their arguments for political recognition on history. Cer- tainly the duchy had a long history of combative independence on which to draw, and, like other regions tardily ‘‘reunited’’ with France, regionalists could point to treaties promising the recognition of local rights. But a modern region called Lorraine was unlikely to be concomi- tant with the duchy, which would have been an unworkable patchwork of crisscrossing jurisdictions. Nor could Lorrainers have recourse to ethnicity or language as a basis for regional identity, as was the case in .6 The majority population of Lorraine and the Three Bishoprics spoke langue d’oïl dialects, but both provinces contained a significant minority of germanophones.

3 The historico-geographical complexity of the ‘‘espace lorrain’’ is depicted in two excel- lent atlases: Geographical Section of Naval Intelligence Division, Naval Staff, Admiralty, AManual of Alsace-Lorraine (London, 1920); and Georg Wolfram and Werner Gley, Elsass-lothringischer Atlas: Landeskunde, Geschichte, Kultur und Wirtschaft Elsass-Lothringens (Frankfurt am Main, 1931). 4 For the history of the conflict and final settlement between France and Lorraine see, in particular, Stéphane Gaber, LaLorrainemeutrie:LesMalheursdelaguerredetrenteans(Nancy, 1979); and Guy Cabourdin, Quand Stanislas régnait en Lorraine (Paris, 1980). 5 The present-day antagonism between the cities is very evident over such important issues as the placing of the TGV line between Paris and Strasbourg, but also in football and even such apparently minor matters as whether Metz University should offer degrees in sport studies. In the past their conflicts were much more bloody; for instance, in 1790 when the National Guard of Metz (and Toul) willingly helped crush the Nancy rebellion. 6 Solange Gras, ‘‘Regionalism and Autonomy in Alsace since 1918,’’ in ThePoliticsofTerritorial Identity, ed. Stein Rokkan and Derek Urwin (London, 1982), 309–54. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 641

To justify their position, therefore, regionalists of Lorraine turned to popular traditions as evidence of their cultural identity.7 The nine- teenth-century study of folklore, as part of the romantic ‘‘discovery of the people,’’ had proved a vital element in nascent nationalisms from Finland to Serbia.8 Few Lorrainers would go so far as to argue that folkloric unity gave claim to a national identity, but it was proof that Lorraine continued to exist, despite its lack of common institutions. Folklore also provided an argument for self-government, because this traditional local culture was under threat from the centralizing and ho- mogenizing policies emanating from both of the states that, between 1870 and 1945, battled for dominance in the region.

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet99 of 210 Although France had taken control over Lorraine in the eigh- teenth century, its position was disputed during the nineteenth and twentieth by the ’s successors, Prussia and then . Prussia had already gained several pieces of Lorraine at the second Treaty of Paris in 1815. After the war of 1870–71, Prussia, citing both Lorraine’s history and her ethnic mix, occupied the eastern cor- ner of the region. Until 1918 Lothringen, together with Alsace, formed a German Reichsland. As France never gave up its claims to the lost prov- inces, both sides of the border in Lorraine became sites for symbolic displays of national unity. France regained Alsace-Lorraine in 1918, but German governments, before and after the Nazi takeover, continued to interest themselves in the region, and for five traumatic years between 1940 and 1945the Moselle once more formed part of the Reich. The hostility between nations was matched by a desire to ensure unity within each nation. Both France and Germany tried hard to in- culcate a sense of national identity in their subjects, particularly in this contested border region. In this climate of heightened nationalism it was impossible to ignore the competing claims over Lorraine. What- ever their nostalgia for the time of the dukes, most regionalists agreed with Maurice Barrès that ‘‘nous ne pouvons être aujourd’hui que Fran- çais ou Allemands’’ (and, indeed, most had a marked preference for one or the other).9 Their search for a regional identity was, therefore,

7 Of course, even within France they were not alone in this; regionalists everywhere based their claims on a mixture of history, language, and popular culture. For details of how folklore was used by exponents of regionalism in Alsace see James Wilkinson, ‘‘The Uses of Popular Culture by Rival Elites: The Case of Alsace, 1890–1914,’’ History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 605–18. 8 This history is well known, but for examples see William A. Wilson, ‘‘The Kalevala and Finnish Politics,’’ Journal of the Folklore Institute 12 (1975): 131–55; and Duncan Wilson, TheLifeand Times of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (Oxford, 1970), 1–10. 9 René Taveneaux, ‘‘Barrès et la Lorraine,’’ in Maurice Barrès: Actes du colloque organisé par la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Nancy (Nancy, 22–25 octobre 1962) (Nancy, 1963), 143. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 642 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

complicated by their desire for a strong nation to defend them from their well-armed neighbors.The consequent dialectic between national and regional identity is one of the issues considered in this article, as folklorists reacted to the fluctuating policies and military fortunes of France and Germany. Regionalist demands (and folkloric activity) were at their most restrained when the process of nation building was at its mildest, in the 1860s; they became more strident as the national or racial ‘‘community’’ took political center stage in the 1920s and 1930s. It is hardly surprising that nationalist and regionalist arguments devel- oped in tandem: the more the state attempted to enforce uniformity the more regionalists rushed to defend local identities. As nationalist poli-

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet100 of 210 cies were usually linked to a wider political agenda, whether Bonapart- ist, Republican, or even Fascist, there were always opponents of these regimes for whom regionalism might prove a handy political weapon. Yet most of the folklorists considered below thought of themselves as good patriots: regionalism, in their eyes, was not necessarily in competi- tion with nationalism. They were the twin descendants of the same anti- cosmopolitan reaction to the Enlightenment that posited a connection between a defined geographical entity, a specific culture, and political institutions. But whereas romanticism endowed nations with history, re- gions got folklore. The difficulty for regionalists was that, although it was relatively simple to uncover the traditions of Lorraine, it was harder to prove that they were specific to Lorraine, or that they were associated with a par- ticular Lorrainer identity. Should Lorraine, therefore, be considered as an ‘‘imagined community,’’ whose existence was largely confined to the minds of folklorists and regionalists? Was the folklore, which they de- ployed both as evidence of—and justification for—their province, just another example of ‘‘invented tradition’’?10 Neither phrase is entirely adequate: both arguments have a tendency to reduce the perception of community to an expression of political expedience. Yet the sense of Lorraine identity was often deeply held: local folklorists, whatever their political and national affiliations, sometimes felt more in com- mon with each other than with either French or Germans ‘‘of the in- terior.’’ If we want to uncover the foundations of this sense of identity, we should, perhaps, take seriously the arguments for a regional culture. The folklorists’ version of Lorraine may be partial, but it was rooted in

10 The terms imagined community and invented tradition respectively derive from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983), 5–7; and Eric Hobsbawm, ‘‘Inventing Traditions,’’ in Inventing Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), 1–14. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 643

the lived experiences of local inhabitants. As Carolyn Hamilton has re- cently demonstrated, albeit in a very different context, there are limits to historical invention.11 On one level this article may seem parochial; however, the issues raised have significance beyond Lorraine. It is certainly not the only region where a belief in cultural identity has given rise to political de- mands. Its peculiarity lies in the vagueness of its borders, as demon- strated by the work of Emmanuel Cosquin.

What’s in a Name? Emmanuel Cosquin versus Arnold van Gennep

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet101 of 210 In 1876 the journal Romania published a series of ‘‘Contes populaires lorrains, recueillis dans un village du Barrois, à Montiers-sur-Saulx (Meuse).’’ They had been collected in 1866–67 by the folklorist Em- manuel Cosquin. Cosquin rejected the practice of his French predeces- sors, the salon conteuses, of taking servants’ narratives and turning them into elaborate fairy tales with grafted-on morals.12 His collection was not literature but rather a contribution to the new science of folklore (the term had only been coined in 1846) of which the brothers Grimm were among the earliest exponents. The Grimms were Cosquin’s inspiration. In 1862, then a law stu- dent, he wrote to Jacob Grimm enclosing a tale he had heard from an old servant that was almost identical to a text in the Grimms’ collec- tion.13 Although the Grimms were well known in France (a French trans- lation of the tales had appeared more than thirty years before), this was the only direct contact between the brothers and a French folktale col- lector. Few French folklorists had yet emulated the Grimms and com- menced fieldwork in their own country, and little of their work had ap- peared in print before 1876.14 So although Cosquin’s was not quite the first French folktale collection, it was quickly seized on as the national counterpart to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, a comparison that its size,

11 Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical In- vention (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 12 Emmanuel Cosquin, ‘‘Contes populaires lorrains, recueillis dans un village du Barrois, à Montiers-sur-Saulx (Meuse),’’ Romania 5(1876): 82. The entire collection was published as Contes populaires de Lorraine: Comparés avec les contes des autres provinces de France et des pays étrangers, et précédés d’un essai sur l’origine et la propagation des contes populaires européens, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886). 13 Nicole Odette Stein-Moreau, ‘‘Les Frères Grimm, conteurs, et la France au dix-neuvième siècle,’’ in Bruder Grimm Gedenken (Marburg, Germany, 1963), 553–54. 14 The notable exceptions were Jean-François Bladé in and François Marie Luzel in , who had largely published in langue d’oc and Breton, and so were little known outside their regions. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 644 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

range, and quality amply justified.15 In the Catalogue raisonné of French folktales Cosquin’s is the only French collection to stand beside the Grimms’ among the Recueils fondamentaux.16 Folktale collections, usually with some claim to represent a na- tional tradition, had already appeared for many European countries.17 Yet sixty years had passed between the publication of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and Cosquin’s ‘‘Contes populaires lorrains.’’ The reason for this lag becomes apparent in the Grimms’ reception in France. Even for enthusiasts such as Alexandre Dumas, part of the tales’ attraction was their air of the ‘‘Outre-Rhin.’’ They were expressions of a back- ward German mentality, simple and credulous, which French readers

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet102 of 210 might enjoy for its quaintness but which no longer formed any part of French experience. French national culture was enlightened, rational, and urbane; it had no room for the ramblings of illiterate peasants.18 Ac- cording to another Lorraine folklorist, le comte de Puymaigre, ‘‘Nous étions si fortement sous l’influence de certains préjugés, que la muse populaire ne nous a plu qu’à la condition d’être étrangère.’’19 French sophistication had been reinforced by the centralizing ef- fects of the Revolution and its successor regimes and by the consequent domination of Paris in all cultural arenas. Both Napoléon I and Napo- léon III made occasional attempts to encourage folklore studies, aware that ‘‘tradition’’ could give cultural weight to nationalist policies.20 How- ever, these efforts were couched in terms of recording for posterity the remnants of feudal benightedness, rapidly being eradicated (thanks

15 For example, in Alice Sperber, Charakteristik der Lothringer Märchensammlung von E. Cosquin (Vienna, 1908), in which she concluded on the basis of the comparison of Cosquin’s collection with that of the Grimms that the French tales were less moral and more materialistic. 16 Paul Delarue and (from vol. 2) Marie-Louise Tenèze, Le Conte populaire français: Catalogue raisonné des versions de France et des pays de langue française d’outre-mer, 4 vols. (Paris, 1957–85), 1:57– 58. Twenty-nine of the 320 items in Delarue’s bibliography of French folktales predate the appear- ance of the ‘‘Contes populaires lorrains,’’ but almost all of these, as Delarue indicates, were either literary in style or of doubtful origin. 17 For example, Hungary (1822), Norway (1842), Serbia (1853), Denmark (1855), Russia (1855), Spain (1859), Scotland (1860), and Ireland (1866). 18 Indeed, as James Lehning has demonstrated, the idea of what was ‘‘French’’ was all but defined as the antithesis of what was ‘‘peasant’’ (Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge, 1995], 11–34). 19 Théodore de Puymaigre, Chants populaires recueillis dans le pays messin (Metz, 1865), 3. Puy- maigre knew from experience the likely reaction of the reading public: the Cardinal de l’Est, re- viewing his collection in a local journal, asked ‘‘mais où allez-vous chercher tant de niaiseries?’’ According to the cardinal, who may be considered as a representative of the educated classes of France, Puymaigre’s folk songs consisted of ‘‘des vers qui n’ont ni rimes, ni cesures, ni sens com- mun, qui souvent sont grossières, où l’on trouve des mots qui n’ont été accueillis par aucun dic- tionnaire; rien que des chansons de nourrices, des rondes d’enfants, des couplets insipides qui heureusement, disparaissent de la mémoire des paysans’’ (Revuedel’Est[ Jan.–Feb. 1868]: 2). 20 See Harry Senn, ‘‘Folklore Beginnings in France, the Académie Celtique, 1804–1813,’’ Journal of the Folklore Institute 18 (1981): 23–29; and Charles Rearick, Beyond the Enlightenment: Histo- rians and Folklore in Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomington, Ind., 1974), 162–63. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 645

to a beneficent government) by the spread of education, national cul- ture, and the rule of law. Cosquin tried to combat this dismissive atti- tude even before he published his tales with articles on folklore in re- spected journals.21 Despite his efforts, folktales appeared irredeemably old-fashioned, even ancien régime.The hostility of French national cul- ture to folklore may explain why Cosquin placed his collection within a regional setting. His tales could not be considered characteristic of the nation, for France was modern and enlightened, but only of one ancient (indeed extinct) province—Lorraine. Cosquin was not alone in preferring the names of the former prov- inces of France to its current administrative divisions. Out of the three

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet103 of 210 hundred and more titles listed in Delarue’s bibliography of French folk- tales, only twelve make even a passing reference to the department in which they were collected. Arnold Van Gennep, the doyen of French folklorists, noted this peculiarity: ‘‘Les folkloristes locaux ont, d’une manière normale et persistante, employé dans leur titres le nom de la province, ou l’ont ajouté quand ils décrivaient un petit pays, un canton et même un département.’’22 However, Cosquin’s choice of title was par- ticularly confusing, as it referred to three incompatible geographical entities: these were ‘‘folktales of Lorraine’’ collected in a village of the Barrois (which, by definition, was not Lorraine), in the Meuse (which, as a department, was the antithesis of the provinces).23 Perhaps this was why Gennep singled out Cosquin for criticism: according to his magis- terial Manuel de folklore français contemporain, the whole collection was misappropriated. The tales belonged not to Lorraine but to the neigh- boring province of : ‘‘Le malheur est que ce titre a fait at- tribuer à la Lorraine...unerichesselittéraire qu’elle est très loin de posséder.’’24 This apparently minor dispute goes to the very heart of folklore studies because it calls into question the link between folklore and territory. But why argue about whether the tales belonged to either Lorraine or Champagne, when both were long vanished?

21 Cosquin’s first article on folklore opened with the question ‘‘Y a-t-il donc, dans les contes populaires, quelque chose d’intéressant pour un esprit sérieux?’’ (Les Contes populaires européens et leur origine, extract from Le Correspondant, 25June 1873 [Paris, 1873], 1). 22 Arnold Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 4 vols. (Paris, 1937–43), 3:96. Gennep followed the same practice himself; his work on Dauphiné concerned only the depart- ment of Isère, that on was based entirely in Côte-d’Or. 23 Cosquin did not explain why he called his collection ‘‘lorraine,’’ but the most obvious justification was historical. Montiers-sur-Saulx now lies on the western edge of the department of the Meuse, but until 1766 it marked the border between the territories of the dukes of Lorraine and the French province of Champagne. Montiers was never part of the itself but rather belonged to the Barrois mouvant, yet since 1484 the Barrois had shared in the fortunes and misfortunes of Lorraine, and in particular the century of conflict between the dukes and the French from 1631, which developed a lively sense of Lorrainer identity. 24 Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 4:690. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 646 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

The explanation is that neither Cosquin nor Gennep used the terms Lorraine or Champagne to refer to administrative regions but rather to cultural entities. Cosquin’s implication was that the tales did not belong to him as their editor, or to the persons who narrated them (who are not even named), but to the people of Lorraine as a whole, a people with unifying characteristics and their own cultural inheritance, in this case an oral tradition of folktales. Some of his contemporaries were more explicit about the provincial and collective nature of folk- lore. Léon Pineau was following a well-worn path when he described his Poitevine tales as the literature into which ‘‘le vrai peuple, qui aime et qui souffre, a mis toute son âme: ténèbres et rayons.’’25 So marked was

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet104 of 210 this trend that when a leading folklorist of the period issued a collec- tion of Contes français he felt it necessary to apologize for the title. ‘‘Ces recueils formés de contes rassemblés dans une province déterminée, la Normandie, la Picardie, le Béarn, l’, etc., ont fait croire à beau- coup de personnes qu’il existait pour chacun de ces pays une littérature orale toute différente...maisqu’onpensedifférencier les contes de Haute Bretagne de ceux de la Bretagne bretonnante, de la Normandie ou du Berry et de la , nous ne l’admettons pas....Iln’yadonc pas de Folk-Lore provincial.’’26 Although Gennep dismissed the numerous works ‘‘plus ou moins fantaisistes sur les diverses âmes provinciales,’’ he accepted the existence of separate communities whose identity could be established through folklore.27 One of his principal aims in compiling the Manuel was to distinguish various folkloric regions and relate them to the ethnic, linguistic, and historical diversity of France.28 These regions might not coincide with either current or former administrative boundaries; the royal provinces were just as arbitrary as the revolutionary depart- ments.29 In practice, however, he was obliged to follow his predecessors in using provincial names to describe his regions: ‘‘Le grand public y est habitué.’’30 His argument with Cosquin was that, whatever history said about the position of Montiers, culturally it was located in Cham- pagne.31 Unfortunately, Gennep’s own attempts to fix boundaries to his

25 Léon Pineau, Les Contes populaires du (Paris, 1891), iv. 26 E. Henry Carnoy, Contes français (Paris, 1885), vi–vii. 27 Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 3:150. 28 Ibid., 3:149. The Manuel is littered with maps showing the precise geographical limits of particular folkloric practices and patois terms in fulfillment of this goal. 29 Ibid., 1:3. 30 Ibid., 3:96. 31 Arnold Van Gennep, ‘‘Contribution à la méthodologie du folklore,’’ Lares 5(1934): 20. Gennep based his argument on the dialect used in some of Cosquin’s tales. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 647

cultural Lorraine proved just as difficult, although these did not lead him to doubt its existence.32 The belief that oral literature belonged to a community rather than to individuals indicates the roots of folklore in German romanticism and in particular the inspiration of Johann Herder. In reaction to the universalist claims of the Enlightenment, Herder’s philosophy stressed the individuality of each nation. A national community was an organic whole, its personality expressed through its customs and above all its poetry.33 Folk songs and tales were national poetry, the artless expres- sion of the national ‘‘soul.’’ Individual singers were merely the vehicle for the voice of the nation as a whole. This idea was developed by the

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet105 of 210 Grimms, for whom a folktale ‘‘knows neither name nor place, nor a defi- nite home, and it is something that belongs to the entire fatherland.’’34 Cosquin was certainly influenced by the Grimms’ ideas, although he later became an exponent of an alternative school of folklore, and the clear implication of his title is that Lorraine formed such a his- toric community. It is unlikely, however, that his ambitions, unlike the Grimms’, ever included generating a sense of national consciousness in Lorraine.35 Cosquin was a French patriot; he cut his formerly close ties with German folklorists in memory of Alsace and Lorraine, ‘‘arrachées, par la plus odieuse conquête, à leur patrie d’affection, à leur veritable patrie.’’36 If his work implied that Lorraine was a cultural whole, per- haps with a right to political expression, this was because his concept of France was one in which the province and the nation were not incom- patible. When Cosquin was not researching folklore he was a dedicated Catholic and Legitimist journalist. His articles on religious, archaeo-

32 Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 3:61. Gennep defined Lorraine as the four departments of the Meuse (minus the area around Montiers), Moselle, Meurthe-et-Moselle, and the Vosges, together with a bit of the Ardennes, thus including the germanophone popula- tion of the Moselle. True, the latter had formerly been the subjects of the dukes of Lorraine, but in terms of language and culture they were closer to the Franconians of the Palatinate. 33 William A. Wilson, ‘‘Herder, Folklore, and Romantic Nationalism,’’ Journal of Popular Cul- ture 6 (1972–73): 819–35. For the continued influence of romantic notions on folklore see Roger D. Abrahams, ‘‘Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics,’’ Journal of American Folklore 106 (1993): 3–37. 34 Christa Kamenetsky, TheBrothersGrimmandTheirCritics:FolktalesandtheQuestforMeaning (Athens, Ohio, 1992), 65. 35 The proposition is not quite as far-fetched as it sounds: other ‘‘French’’ folklorists of the first generation, particularly the Bretons, had been accused of separatism. The first ‘‘French’’ folk- lorist (in the sense of a follower of Herder), Théodore-Claude-Henri Hersart de La Villemarqué, was also the author of a Breton patriotic song sung at the Breton banquet of 1837: ‘‘Ils [nos pères] étaient libres, nous aux chaînes, / Mais nos fers, nous les briserons, / Leur sang coule encore dans nos veines, / Nous sommes encore bretons’’ (Xavier de Planhol, An Historical Geography of France [Cambridge, 1994], 323). 36 Cosquin, Les Contes populaires européens,1. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 648 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

logical, and ethnographic matters appeared regularly in Le Quotidien, Le Français, and Le Moniteur.37 Cosquin helped organize the Fribourg meetings that paved the way for the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum and was a cofounder of the Congrès internationaux des catholiques sociaux.38 He was a leading collaborator of the Cercles catholiques ou- vriers founded in 1871 by Albert de Mun and René de La Tour du Pin- Chambly. The Cercles were born out of their direct experience of class conflict during the suppression of the Paris Commune; their main aim was to unite the working classes with the ‘‘classe dirigeante.’’ Opposed to the unregulated labor market, but equally horrified by the socialist alternative, they proposed a more organic society made up of medieval-

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet106 of 210 style corporations, in which ‘‘natural’’ elites performed their paternalist duty by the workers and were rewarded with the latter’s filial obedience. The political stance of the Cercles was summed up in 1878 by de Mun as ‘‘nous sommes la Contre-révolution irréconciliable.’’39 As part of their counterrevolutionary campaign, the Cercles wished to reverse the post- 1789 concentration of power in Paris through decentralization within a framework of provinces.The revolutionary departments had no basis in history; to create an organic society one had to return to the provincial map of France, each province with its own, unique heritage.40 Folklore was one expression of this heritage. By the time Cosquin published, he had rejected the Grimms’ theories and had become an exponent of diffusionism. Like his mentor, Theodor Benfey, Cosquin argued that folktales originated in India, from whence they had spread with traders, missionaries, and conquerors.41 However, he never fol- lowed the logic of the diffusionist argument to its conclusion, which would have denied the connection between folklore and locality. In- stead, he emphasized that folktales kept communities in touch with

37 Most of these took the form of book reviews or commentaries arising from his frequent travels in central and eastern Europe. His polemics on freemasonry, which appeared in Le Moni- teur, caused quite a stir. 38 Raymonde Robert, ‘‘Emmanuel Cosquin et les contes lorrains,’’ in Lorraine vivante: Homage àJeanLanher, ed. Roger Marchal and Bernard Guidot (Nancy, 1993), 204. 39 Charles Molette, Albert de Mun, 1872–1890: Exigence doctrinale et préoccupations sociales chez un Laic catholique, Séries recherches d’histoire religieuse 1 (Paris, 1970), 57. There is a large litera- ture on social Catholicism in France and its links to Legitimism; see Steven D. Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852–1883 (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), 179–209. 40 Unlike other Legitimist organizations, decentralization was not a key policy for the Cercles, whose main concern was industrial relations. But that they were favorable to such a policy is made clear in a pamphlet published by the Cercles, which argued that ‘‘la division de la France en quarante provinces correspond, qu’on vient de la voir, à une décentralisation réelle et vraiment salutaire’’ (Le Marquis D’Auray, Du pouvoir de l’organisation administrative en France avant et après 1789, extract from the Association catholique, journal of L’Œuvre des cercles catholiques d’ouvriers [Bar-le-Duc, 1888], 8). 41 Every tale in his collection is followed by a chain of comparisons back to Indian religious texts. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 649

their past: in tales a king still sat on the throne of France, where he doled out rewards in livres and not in francs. In more than one tale insti- tutions and even named individuals from the ancien régime have their place.42 Hierarchy is apparent in the very form of the collection: the tales were told by Cosquin’s servants and their friends, but it was their master’s name that appeared on the cover. However, through their en- thusiasm for folklore, both classes were united, unlike the antagonism that Cosquin considered the consequence of the modernizing, secular- izing Republic.43 Although there is little overt royalism or religiosity in Cosquin’s folklore publications, his interest in the discipline was asso- ciated with his vision of France as rural, pious, and hierarchical. His

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet107 of 210 sense of his country’s geography was part and parcel of this vision, as it recalled the lost provinces of what Cosquin considered a more natural, organic society.44 Folklorists, regionalists, and the political right were often found in each others’ company in the nineteenth century. It was not a necessary connection: Franche-Comté’s two leading folklorists were Max Buchon (a democratic-socialist, exiled after the June Days) and Charles Beau- quier (a radical-socialist deputy during the Third Republic). However, there is a logic to the alliance. A roll call of folklorists from Lorraine would include some half dozen aristocrats and a similar number of clerics, traditional social elites sidelined by successive revolutionary regimes.45 They found themselves lumped together with popular tra- ditions as the useless baggage of the past. The threat of the secularist and centralist direction from Paris forced these social groups to look for new allies and new weapons. The study of folklore provided one de- fense against the interference of the state and the incursion of indus- trial capitalism into the rural world from which both landowners and clergy drew their strength. It enabled them to portray themselves as the

42 For example, the tale of PouetPouceends with a visit to ‘‘Père Quentin,’’ the last operator of the four banal before its closure during the Revolution (Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine,1: no. 18). 43 Of course, the hierarchies of folktales are constantly being turned upside down—desert- ers murder their captains, cobblers rape princesses, seigneurs are tricked by peasants. Cosquin does not comment on these developments. 44 Cosquin was a prolific journalist, but I have not been able to discover an article in which he tackles decentralization or regionalism directly. However, in the notes to his published cor- respondence with Jacob Grimm he wrote, ‘‘Ma petite ville de Vitry-le François (département de la Marne) faisait partie, en effet, autrefois de la province de Champagne, une de ces régions historiques qui ont été morcelées à la Révolution, et que maintenant beaucoup de bons esprits voudraient voir rétablies’’ ( Johannes Bolte, ‘‘Kleine Mitteilungen—Jacob Grimm an Emmanuel Cosquin,’’ Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde 21 [1911]: 251n). 45 Louis Jouve, a friend and supporter of the republican Jules Ferry, is the one obvious exception among the folklorists of Lorraine. Interestingly, his Chansons en patois vosgien (Epinal, 1876), is one of the few folk song collections to explicitly refer to a department, rather than a province, both in the title and in the text. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 650 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

guardians of ‘‘True France,’’ whose destruction no election result could justify.46 Hence there is a tendency to paint folklorists as romantic re- actionaries, whose commemorations of a golden age of pious peasants and paternalist seigneurs, united through love of their pays, was little more than a work of political imagination. There is an element of truth to this image, although it does not do justice to the serious scholarship of someone like Cosquin. It does recognize, however, that folklore, for him and for others, formed part of a wider interest in society. Cosquin, like other folklorists, was intent on recording a traditional way of life he considered to be in danger, but he was also active in attempts to preserve (or perhaps even re-create) links to the past. 6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet108 of 210 Le Comte de Puymaigre: Folklore and Decentralization Such was also the case with Théodore-Joseph Boudet, comte de Puy- maigre. Before the Revolution his family had been the seigneurs of the château of Inglange (Moselle). Puymaigre’s father was an émigré, and after the Restoration became the ‘‘Ultra’’ prefect who suppressed the Belfort rebellion of 1821. Théodore inherited his father’s political be- liefs and in 1846 stood as the (losing) Legitimist candidate in the elec- tions at . In 1848 he was made mayor of Inglange, a post he was forced to resign after the coup d’état of Napoléon III. Thereafter he took little active part in politics, but unofficially he was the leader of the Legitimist faction in the Moselle, and in frequent contact with the Bourbon pretender to the throne, the comte de Chambord.47 When his political career foundered on the rock of his obstinate loyalty to the Bourbon cause, Puymaigre turned to folklore to keep himself busy. His most important contribution was published in 1865 under the title Chants populaires recueillis dans le pays messin. The choice of wording is significant, for what Puymaigre meant by the pays messin was not the territory that had formerly belonged to the city-state of Metz. Instead, he included all the pieces of the Three Bishoprics, the duchies of Lorraine and Bar, and the Spanish , which had been put together in 1790 to form the department of the Moselle. His activities as a folklorist were, therefore, limited by the boundaries of the department, but he could not bring himself to use its name in the title: ‘‘Ce nom de département a quelque chose de moderne, d’administratif,

46 Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 1–11. 47 J. Eich, ‘‘Un Littérateur et érudit lorrain: Théodore de Puymaigre,’’ Annuaire de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de la Lorraine 53(1953):110–26. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 651

de préfectoral, de bureaucratique qui s’accorde très-peu avec la poésie populaire.’’48 He preferred his invented ‘‘province.’’ Puymaigre’s folkloric and political activities went hand in hand. His contacts with folksingers were made through his network of aristo- cratic and political acquaintances. Perhaps it was his work in preserv- ing local folk culture that prompted Chambord to suggest to Puymai- gre that he turn his attention to decentralization, a Legitimist objective since at least 1832. The centralized state, which consisted only of the government and the mass of individuals that it governed, was anathema to their organic concept of society made up of natural (and implicitly hierarchical) groupings—the family, the village, the trade corporation.

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet109 of 210 To revive the body politic one needed to revive the natural hierarchies of society. Without hierarchies the state descended into disorder. What was natural was also traditional, so decentralization would, in the words of the Legitimist Arthur de Gobineau, ‘‘reconnect the chain of time.’’49 Other parties, therefore, suspected plans for decen- tralization as the forerunner of a return to the ancien régime.50 How- ever, under Napoléon III, when all opposition groups were smarting from their exclusion from power, the possibility arose for consensus. In November 1862 Chambord published an open letter that argued that the only way to reconcile representative government with public order was through decentralization: ‘‘Elle seule aussi peut créer les mœurs politiques sans lesquelles les meilleurs institutions se dégradent et tom- bent en ruines.’’51 At Chambord’s direct behest Puymaigre and a group of Lorraine Legitimists (including Puymaigre’s successor as editor of the local Legitimist paper, Victor Vaillant, who also made several con- tributions to folklore) came together to develop his ideas.The resulting pamphlet—Décentralisation et régime représentatif—was published anony- mously in 1863.52 The authors’ underlying concern was to ensure liberty without anarchy. At present, they argued, the populace had become unruly because they were denied any control over their own affairs.The

48 Puymaigre, Chants populaires recueillis dans le pays messin, 5. The department of the Moselle where Puymaigre did his collecting is not identical with the modern department of the same name, which consists of those parts of the old departments of the Moselle and the Meurthe occupied by Germany between 1871 and 1918. 49 Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society,96. 50 Montalembert complained in 1865, after thirty years of campaigning for decentraliza- tion, ‘‘On n’y pouvait songer sans être atteint et convaincu de vouloir ramener la féodalité!’’ (Le Correspondant 29 [1865]: 1009). 51 Louis Philip Robert d’Orléans-Bourbon, La Monarchie française: Lettres et documents poli- tiques, 1844–1907 (Paris, 1907), 70–75. 52 According to Nérée Quépat (a pseudonym of René Paquet, himself a folklorist), Puymai- gre wrote the pamphlet ‘‘en collaboration avec Vaillant, sur des notes du comte A. de Circourt, à la demande du comte de Chambord’’ (Dictionnaire biographique de l’ancien département de la Moselle [Paris, 1887], 419). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 652 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

way to prevent further disturbances was to re-create the links between the people and their rulers. Puymaigre wanted to put the community, in the shape of genuine local government, back in between the state and its subjects.The model he had in mind was the English county coun- cils. Decentralization, even on this modest scale, would teach both the electors and the elected to take their responsibilities seriously.53 Puymaigre did not use this pamphlet to make overt party-political points; he hoped that his suggestions would appeal to notables across the .Yet it is not difficult to detect his political prefer- ences. The danger of centralization was that it deprived government of ‘‘son élément essential, la représentation vraie des groupes naturels de

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet110 of 210 citoyens et d’intérêts dont la réunion constitue le pays.’’ Without decen- tralization ‘‘un citoyen pût s’arroger le droit de changer un gouverne- ment sans tenir compte de la tradition et des faits établis.’’54 Thisisthe voice of the Legitimist landowner, deprived of the influence that he thought his right and his duty.55 For Puymaigre, the established habits and traditional customs of local communities included the deference due to the natural hierarchies of an organic society. According to Jacques Droz, seventy-seven major works on decen- tralization appeared between 1861 and 1870, mostly written by royalists of various shades.56 Although Décentralisation et régime représentatif caused a ripple of interest when it was published, it would only be a footnote of history if it had not been taken up two years later by the Nancy Com- mittee as the blueprint for their Projet de décentralisation.57 The members of the committee were drawn from all the opposition groups under the Second Empire, although the majority, including the organizer Alex- andre de Metz-Noblat, were aristocrats with Orleanist or liberal Catho- lic connections. Their Projet appeared at precisely the moment when the government was considering some modest measures of decentral- ization, and it was designed to unite the opposition behind more radi- cal demands. Through judicious use of press and political contacts in

53 His suggestions were to have elected mayors under the supervision of cantonal councils, which would replace the subprefects. The cantons would be responsible for electing representa- tives to the departmental council, which would take over most of the functions of the prefect, except for national issues such as the army, the police, and the execution of justice. 54 Théodore de Puymaigre, Décentralisation et régime représentatif (Metz, 1863), 43, 58. 55 When, in 1981, the Mitterrand government put forward a program of decentralization, the then prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, said it had become possible because ‘‘the men in the châ- teaus are gone now,’’ a phrase that could fairly be applied to Puymaigre (Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 120). 56 Jacques Droz, ‘‘Le Problème de la décentralisation sous le Second Empire,’’ in Spiegel der Geschichte: Festgabe für Max Braubach zum 10 April 1964, ed. Konrad Repgen and Stephan Skalweit (Münster, Germany, 1964), 783. 57 The history of the Nancy Committee and its Projet de décentralisation is explored by Odette Voillard, Nancy au XIXe siècle, 1815–1871: Une Bourgeoisie urbaine (Paris, 1978), 298–314. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 653

Paris the committee managed to line up some heavyweight support- ers among Legitimists, Orleanists, and even Republicans (including the Lorrainer Jules Ferry). With the liberal government of Emile Ollivier in 1870, decentralization was firmly established on the political agenda; elements of the Nancy Projet might have made it into law had the events of the latter half of that year not intervened.58 The Nancy Projet followed most of Puymaigre’s and Vaillant’s sug- gestions for decentralization: cantonal councils, the abolition of the ar- rondissement, more powerful conseils généraux. Indeed, large chunks of the Projet were copied word for word, as Vaillant pointedly remarked in 1870.59 The claims to precedence threatened to develop into the tra- 60

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet111 of 210 ditional verbal spat between the two rival cities. However, the messin contribution went unacknowledged for the same reason that Puymai- gre’s own pamphlet was anonymous. His links to Chambord would have discredited the Projet with other parties.61 How did Puymaigre define the community that he felt should have such an important administrative role, from whence came the shared sense of identity that would make individuals more politically respon- sible? If the community was one of shared habits and customs, then it could be defined through folklore. He wrote, ‘‘Dis-moi ce que tu chantes, je te dirai qui tu es!’’ playing on a French proverb in a way that explicitly linked folk song and identity.62 Vaillant gave a more vivid de- scription of the role of song in uniting a community. In 1861, as part of the celebrations for the Exposition universelle held in Metz, musical societies from neighboring departments and countries were invited to take part in a massive choral festival held in the main square:

Tous les chanteurs, venus de cinquante lieues à la ronde, défilèrent enbonordre,fiers...del’illustration collective dont chacun jouis-

58 Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet, La Commission de décentralisation de 1870: Contribution à l’étude de la décentralisation en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1973), 27–29. 59 Victor Vaillant, Congrès décentralisateur de Lyon: Nos Réserves (Paris, 1870), 70. 60 In 1887 Quépat accused ‘‘ces politiciens de Nancy, plus habiles et surtout peu scrupu- leux’’ of outright plagiarism (Dictionnaire biographique de l’ancien département de la Moselle, 504). The charge is unfair, as both Alexandre de Metz-Noblat and Maurice de Foblant, the founders of the Nancy Committee, had also taken part in the discussions at Puymaigre’s home that led to the messin pamphlets. The Metz and Nancy decentralization initiatives can be seen as two prongs of the same campaign. 61 Vaillant showed the potential danger of the Legitimist connection in 1869 by quoting at length from Chambord’s 1862 letter at the Lyons Congress of decentralist newspaper editors even though Chambord’s name was not likely to inspire the liberal Bonapartists and moderate republicans who did so well in the elections that year (Congrès décentralisateur de Lyon, 62–69). 62 Théodore de Puymaigre, Poésie populaire: Chants allemandes recueillis dans le departement de la Moselle, extract from the Revuedel’Est(Metz, 1864), 4. (The proverb is ‘‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes, je te dirai qui tu es.’’) Puymaigre’s ideas about folklore developed subsequently in a diffusionist direction, but he never totally renounced the connection between place, community, and folklore. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 654 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

sait....Etquands toutes ces cohortes pacifiques, rangées en cercle, réalisant l’unité dans la diversité du coup-d’œil, entonnèrent d’un même cœur et d’une même voix les chants de l’arrivée et du salut, un frisson électrique parcourut la foule non habituée à un tel spectacle. ...L’association du chant à trouvé grâce devant les prohibitions et les défiances. L’association a groupé des hommes, leur a donné le même stimulant, les a fait vivre de la même vie. Ces hommes sont deschanteurs....Qu’importe?...Ceconcours pacifique était plus qu’un vain spectacle pour les yeux, il avait un sens profond. Il célé- brait les bienfaits de l’agrégation, de l’entente libre, de l’association sympathique....Letempsviendra, nous le verrons peut-être, où il ne sera plus vrai de dire qu’il n’y a en France que l’Etat et l’individu, l’Etat maître, l’individu isolé. Alors nous aurons tous les jours un

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet112 of 210 spectacle semblable, le spectacle de l’ordre dans le mouvement, de l’harmonie dans la diversité, de la solidarité dans l’organisation!63 For both Puymaigre and Vaillant, the community of voices that needed the freedom of decentralization was more provincial than departmen- tal. Although Puymaigre denied that his intention was to revive the royal provinces, he did suggest that it might be necessary to have supra- departmental bodies for such matters as the positioning of railways.64 The authors of the Nancy Projet were equally keen to distance them- selves from the ancien régime but similarly saw the necessity for co- operation: ‘‘On ne peut revenir aux anciennes provinces (le mot lui- même suscite des ombrages), mais les changements qui sont intervenus . . . suggèrent d’envisager des circonscriptions aggrandies ou des en- tentes entre départements voisins.’’65 Although the Nancy committee was too shy to mention the word, its chairman had, a few years before, proposed the grouping of departments to form new provinces corre- sponding with France’s ‘‘sous-nationalités’’ defined by his mentor, the Lorraine patriot and antiquarian Baron Auguste Guerrier de Dumast. So, despite the shadows, it might be fair to see the decentralization pro- posed by Puymaigre and Metz-Noblat as a step toward the resurrection of something shaped like the former provinces. Their successors, who took up the battle after the Franco-Prussian war, were not so hesitant.

63 Victor Vaillant, La Décentralisation à l’œuvre: Par l’un des auteurs de ‘‘Décentralisation et Régime représentatif’’ (Metz, 1863), 65–66. Vaillant does not specify this event, but his description tallies exactly with the choral program of the 1861 Exposition universelle at Metz. 64 Puymaigre wrote, ‘‘Que l’on ne’en revienne pas aux anciennes provinces, mais que l’on n’isole pas les départements afin de les réduire à ne pouvoir rien faire que d’insignifiant; et n’en est-il pas beaucoup qui ont entre eux des rapports d’intérêts positifs’’ (Décentralisation et régime représentatif, 69). Vaillant went further and suggested a division of the country into twenty-two economic regions, following the plan laid down by his fellow Legitimist Ferdinand Béchard (La Décentralisation à l’œuvre,50). 65 Voillard, Nancy au XIXe siècle, 300. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 655

Charles Sadoul: Folklore and Regionalism After the Franco-Prussian war a new parliamentary commission on de- centralization was formed. However, the impetus for wide-ranging re- form had been lost, particularly in Lorraine, which had experienced the first shock of defeat. A quarter of the province had been forcibly re- moved by the Treaty of Frankfurt, and the remainder found itself on the frontline of national defense against a confident and aggressive neigh- bor. Lorrainers were understandably more concerned to strengthen the nation rather than the region. Although decentralizers believed that the collapse of 1870 was the consequence of too much centraliza- tion, their opponents took the opposite view and argued that the state 6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet113 of 210 needed to take more active control over every aspect of life. For the next thirty years the regionalist movement was nursed in Provence by Mistral’s Félibrige. Only the University of Nancy remained a haven for decentralist theory.66 The regionalist revival in Lorraine was stimulated by the growing disenchantment of the province’s most famous son, Maurice Barrès, with the Republic. Parliamentary politics were, he believed, tainted by particular interests and individual ambitions; the sense of the general good had been lost. Barrès the nationalist was more concerned with the collective than the particular, and above all with the unity of the nation. However, he recognized that the sense of belonging was neces- sarily formed at a more local level, in the landscapes that people knew, in the familial and community relationships that formed them. It was at the provincial level that Barrès’s doctrine of ‘‘la terre et les morts’’— the influence of the environment and the heritage of one’s ancestors —worked to shape collective identity. His patriotism was, therefore, rooted in his attachment to his native Lorraine, in his grandfather’s war stories, in his mother’s grave, in the pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Sion.67 Barrès was not directly involved in the foundation of the Union régionaliste lorraine, but the new group was anxious to procure his blessing. The initial impetus had come from the visit to Nancy in 1902 of Jean Charles-Brun, the leading advocate of regionalism in the first

66 As exemplified in N. Pierson, L’Université de Nancy et la décentralisation (Nancy, 1890). The university, it should be explained, was one of the glories of the ducal regime, but it had been al- lowed to decay under French control. Its renewed vigor from the 1860s onward owed much to the tireless campaigning of Guerrier de Dumast. It was, therefore, both the product of—and a justification for—decentralization. 67 Ann-Marie Thiesse, Ecrire la France: Le Mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Epoque et la Libération (Paris, 1991), 69–75; Robert Gildea, ThePastinFrenchHistory(New Haven, Conn., 1994), 179–80. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 656 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

half of the twentieth century. His concept of regional France had ini- tially developed in the Félibrige, but like many other second-generation Félibres, he became disenchanted with Mistral’s unwillingness to con- sider a political solution to the dominance of the north. In 1900 he had founded the Fédération régionaliste française to campaign for regional self-government.68 Charles-Brun’s regionalist agenda found a ready audience among the academics of Nancy. Shortly after his visit a group of about thirty university teachers and students met to found the Union décentraliste lorraine. Within a year the group changed its name to the Union ré- gionaliste lorraine (URL), an indication of the development of ideas

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet114 of 210 since 1865. It issued a manifesto, broadly in line with the objectives of Charles-Brun’s Fédération, and a program of initiatives. Most of these came to nothing, with the exception of its journal: Le Pays lorrain is still going strong today, an achievement that owes much to the man to whom the URL entrusted its publication, Charles Sadoul.69 Like Cosquin, Sadoul trained as a lawyer. At the law faculty of Nancy he was taught by regionalist academics, including Gaston Gavet (the first president of the URL). Like the Grimms, it was his law studies that kindled Sadoul’s enthusiasm for folklore. While researching in Lorraine’s rich archives of witchcraft trials he became interested in magic. From this starting point he developed a broad knowledge of every aspect of the traditional life of Lorraine, from furniture and cookery to customs and legends, which he put to good use as the cura- tor of the Musée Lorrain from 1910 to 1930.70 In addition, he was prob- ably the most active collector of folk songs and tales that francophone Lorraine ever had.71 According to scholars who had access to it be- fore the Second World War, his collection was unique in quantity and quality.72 The few songs and tales that were printed hint at a very rich source, but the vast bulk remained in manuscript at his death. Sadly, they were accidentally burnt by American troops in 1945.73 If Sadoul’s reputation as a folklorist relied only on his published

68 On Jean Charles-Brun and the Fédération régionaliste française see Thiesse, Ecrire la France, 57–102. 69 Paul Sadoul, ‘‘Union régionaliste lorraine (1903–1912),’’ Le Pays lorrain 78 (1987): 139–41. 70 Charles Bruneau, ‘‘Charles Sadoul et le folklore lorrain,’’ Le Pays lorrain 23 (1931): 22. 71 Sadoul claimed, in a speech originally given in 1912, to have transcribed more than four hundred songs in just six months (Les Chansons lorraines, extract from Le Pays lorrain [Nancy, 1933], 6). 72 Bruneau, ‘‘Charles Sadoul et le folklore lorrain,’’ 23. Four tales were printed in the Revue des traditions populaires and one in Le Pays lorrain, all in 1904. A notebook containing six manu- script tale-texts is supposed to exist, although I have not been able to see it. Individual songs are scattered throughout both journals. 73 Information supplied by Paul Sadoul. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 657

work he would be a minor figure, but despite difficulties in bringing his own projects to fruition, his enthusiasm proved infectious and inspired a host of other Lorrainers. In Le Pays lorrain appeared articles on folk- lore by Louis Lavigne, Jean-Julien Barbé, René Schamber, and the abbé Thiriot, all of whom went on to make substantial contributions to the subject. Sadoul was also responsible for Barrès’s own flirtation with folk- lore. Whereas Barrès had once declared, ‘‘Tout ce félibrige m’ennuie,’’ his later novels, such as Colette Baudoche, bear the marks of his long con- versations with Sadoul on the popular culture of Lorraine.74 Sadoul was a proselytizer, both for regionalism and for folklore, and his preaching went well beyond the pages of Le Pays lorrain. Through the museum,

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet115 of 210 regular public meetings, and by making his collection of songs available to local singing clubs, he introduced large numbers of nancéiens to the region’s traditions. Although the URL faded after the First World War, Le Pays lorrain remained a platform for regionalist ideas until Sadoul’s death in 1930. Sadoul himself provided a regular column on ‘‘Régionalisme.’’ This was in addition to feature articles on all aspects of regionalism, from the historical origins of the province in the pre-Roman, Roman, and Mero- vingian periods and its glory days under the dukes to its geographical homogeneity, its economic needs, its cultural tradition, and its political future. Sadoul obviously remained wedded to the regionalist cause, but, because of the wide-ranging content of Le Pays lorrain, it is not so clear what he or the other members of the URL meant by regionalism, nor what region precisely was to be emancipated. It was always easier to state what regionalism was against ( Jacobin conformity, Napoleonic centralization, and Parisian domination) than what it was for. Charles- Brun himself avoided defining the term regionalism,inordernottoput off potential supporters.75 But regionalism certainly implied adminis- trative decentralization. The URL saw themselves as the successors to the Nancy Committee. The first volume of Le Pays lorrain contained a history of their Projet, and when the URL hosted a joint conference with the Fédération régionaliste française in 1909, the program focused on the objectives of 1865.76 However, the URL felt that their predecessors

74 Bruneau, ‘‘Charles Sadoul et le folklore lorrain,’’ 26. See also Abbé Joseph Barbier, ‘‘La Colline inspirée, roman historique ou poème symphonique,’’ in Maurice Barrès, 189. 75 Philippe Vigier, ‘‘Régions et régionalisme en France au XIXe siècle,’’ in Régions et régional- isme en France du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, ed. Christian Gras and Georges Livet (Strasbourg, 1977), 163. 76 Maurice Payard, ‘‘Un projet de décentralisation Nancy, 1865,’’ Le Pays lorrain 1 (1904): 297–303, 320–25, 335–41. The program for the 1909 conference was announced in Le Pays lorrain 5(1908): 348. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 658 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

had been too timid: although they had bemoaned the work of 1790 in making arbitrary and ahistorical divisions in the country, they had not publicly called for undoing the department and re-creating the prov- inces. Their successors were more decided: they wanted France recast into twenty or so regions. This more radical stance may be considered surprising, given that the international threat to Lorraine had hardly existed in the 1860s, but it may have been a response to rapid industri- alization since 1871. The economic pull brought large numbers of im- migrants to the region, which in the minds of Sadoul and others posed a definite threat to Lorraine’s traditional culture.77 The decline of a genu- ine monarchist alternative to the Republic also eliminated concerns

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet116 of 210 about a return to feudalism. Regionalism was about more than administrative reform; region- alists were equally concerned with the economic, demographic, intel- lectual, and cultural life of their petite patrie, and in developing a re- gional sense of identity through learning about a shared past. Robert Parisot, the leading historian of the duchy and one-time president of the URL, also founded the Société lorraine des études locales dans l’enseignement public with the aim of making future generations aware that the history of Lorraine was not necessarily the same as the .78 Most importantly, at least in Sadoul’s eyes, was the preser- vation of the cultural traditions of the region. Lorraine possessed ‘‘un caractère propre. Ses mœurs et son langage ont leur saveur.’’ Regional- ists had to defend that character, to ensure that ‘‘les tempéraments et les mœurs restent divers’’ and were not surrendered to the dull mediocrity of national standardization.79 Partlybecauseofthevarietyoftaskstheregionwassupposedto perform, its boundaries were often left fuzzy.80 For those politician- regionalists like Charles Beauquier (radical deputy and Comtois folk- lorist) and (nationalist republican deputy for Nancy and ethnographist) who were primarily concerned with depopulation and economic development, there was no need for the regions to be tied to any historical arrangement. Marin in particular was keen to sepa-

77 Lorraine seems not to have responded to the ’s attempts to include workers’ culture within the discipline of folklore (Lebovics, True France, 135–88). 78 Robert Parisot, ‘‘La Décentralisation de l’enseignement de l’histoire et de la géographie,’’ Le Pays lorrain 1 (1904): 201–5. The Société lorraine des études locales dans l’enseignement public continues its work to this day, bringing local history into the classroom. 79 Charles Sadoul, ‘‘Le Roman rustique lorrain et Julien Pérette,’’ Le Pays lorrain 14 (1922): 555. 80 Parisot recognized this when he asked himself in a paper delivered to the URL, ‘‘Existe- t-il une région lorraine?’’ His reached the conclusion ‘‘yes,’’ but only after skating over some tricky problems of definition (‘‘La Lorraine, région française, telle qu’elle est constituée par les condi- tions géographiques, historiques et économiques,’’ Le Pays lorrain 5[1908]: 465). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 659

rate ‘‘le régionalisme proprement dit qui est la conscience prise par les Provinces de leur activité et du rôle qu’elles doivent jouer dans la vie nationale, d’avec le traditionalisme, tourné plus spécialement sur le passé qu’il s’efforce de faire revivre par un culte fervent, mais passif.’’81 How- ever, when (in his capacity as president of the Fédération régionaliste française) he presented his plan for a totally novel division of the coun- try to the 1909 conference, the other Lorrainers present rose in protest. Parisot and Sadoul opposed a plan that would sacrifice ‘‘l’essentiel du régionalisme, les souvenirs et les traditions du passé, de supprimer, par un morcellement plus arbitraire encore que celui de la Constituante, ce qui depuis un siècle a subsisté d’esprit local.’’ Echoing the protests of

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet117 of 210 Lorrainers against the 1790 division, they proclaimed, ‘‘On ne fait pas d’expériences d’anatomie sur des corps vivants.’’82 Traditionalists may have been convinced that Lorraine was a living body, but even they did not find it easy to position its borders pre- cisely. Barrès’s conception of ‘‘la vieille Lotharingie’’ sometimes ranged as far as Cologne and beyond; others, like Pierre Braun and Charles Berlet (secretary of the URL), imagined a return to the territorial divi- sions that existed under the monarchy.83 Considering the complexity of the pre-1789 map of Lorraine, most regionalists recognized that this was impractical, and it had unpopular connotations. They had chosen the term région precisely to avoid the counterrevolutionary overtones of the word province. Sadoul, whose family was politically connected to Jules Ferry, was explicit about his rejection of the ancien régime: ‘‘La région lorraine que nous réclamons n’est pas l’ancien duché: elle com- prendrait celui-ci, le Barrois, les Trois-Evêchés, la principauté de , les enclaves françaises, etc., soit les quatre départements de Meurthe, Meuse, Moselle et Vosges.’’84 Sadoul’s solution had the advantage of simplicity (and the Lorraine region formed in 1981 consists precisely of these four departments), but it would not have satisfied all his colleagues. The inclusion of Moselle in Sadoul’s Lorraine (whose capital would undoubtedly be Nancy) wor- ried some people in Metz. When, in 1909, Le Pays lorrain changed its title page to include le pays messin, Sadoul was rebuked by the editors of the journal Austrasie (based in Metz), who claimed to be the true voice

81 In a speech given to the URL, Marin cited Le Pays lorrain itself as an example of the passive traditionalism that acted as a brake on regionalism (‘‘Chronique,’’ Le Pays lorrain 4 [1907]: 299). 82 Pierre Braun, ‘‘Le Congrès régionaliste, Nancy, 1909,’’ Le Pays lorrain 6 (1909): 501. 83 Ibid., 499. 84 Charles Sadoul, ‘‘Régionalisme,’’ Le Pays lorrain 13 (1921): 589. Sadoul used the pre-1870 departmental titles, but the territories covered by the four departments today is essentially the same. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 660 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

of that region.85 At the time Metz was part of Germany, and there was little immediate chance of it forming part of any French region. After 1918 the problem became acute because it seemed possible that, in a new regional division of the country, Moselle might remain joined to Alsace. Sadoul argued vociferously for a return to the pre-1870 depart- mental boundaries as the nullification of the period of German occu- pation: ‘‘ ‘Alsace-Lorraine’ est une expression géographique qui ne sig- nifie rien....LesAlsaciens-Lorrains ne constituent pas un peuple,’’ the implication being that Lorrainers collectively did.86 Most franco- phone Mosellans were equally anxious to break the dominance of Stras- bourg, but this did not mean they were keen to see it replaced by the

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet118 of 210 ‘‘ueberallisme nancéien.’’ For the germanophone population the op- tions were also not so straightforward. In the plans of regionalists, how- ever, the existence of the language division was largely ignored: Le Pays lorrain paid little attention to the German-speaking minority. The in- habitants of Thionville, , and Fénétrange were consid- ered—by their history, economic interests, and some aspects of cul- tural tradition (such as their Catholic faith)—to share in the unity of Lorraine, even if they called these towns Diedenhofen, Saargemünd, and Finstingen. Despite their difficulty in defining the region Lorraine, regionalists had little doubt that it was French. Although Barrès and others occa- sionally referred to Lorraine as a nation forcibly rather than willingly incorporated into France, there can be no doubt where their sympa- thies lay.87 Even those members of the URL like Parisot, whose revalua- tion of the ‘‘good’’ dukes was certainly read as a comparison with the poor record of the French, nonetheless recognized that an independent Lorraine, squeezed between two confronting continental powers, was impractical. German troop maneuvers could be watched from the hills above Nancy, a powerful reminder of the need for a strong French pres- ence. The involvement of such ultranationalists as Barrès and Marin with the URL indicates that it had no separatist or even autonomist leanings. Instead, they argued, in the words of Barrès, that France was a garden made beautiful by its variety.88 This metaphor had already been used by the author of Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, the ‘‘little red book of the Republic,’’ which also celebrated the diversity of France

85 ‘‘Lettre de ‘l’Austrasie,’ ’’ Le Pays lorrain 6 (1909): 717–18. The name L’Austrasie refers to a Merovingian kingdom considerably larger than either the pays messin or Lorraine. 86 Sadoul, ‘‘Régionalisme,’’ 588. Sadoul was quoting the journalist Trygée. For various prac- tical reasons, the policy was never adopted, and the present departmental map preserves the 1871–1918 border. 87 Taveneaux, ‘‘Barrès et la Lorraine,’’ 143. 88 Maurice Payard, ‘‘Le Projet Beauquier,’’ Le Pays lorrain 4 (1907): 589. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 661

as a source of its strength.89 Regionalists differed from republicans in that they perceived that the only way to ensure that this diversity was retained was through political decentralization. Even so, no member of the URL argued that the region should have control over such pri- mary matters as defense, the police, or even education. If Le Pays lor- rain seemed obsessed with La Mothe (Lorraine’s Masada), it was equally interested in . Indeed, as was the case with Barrès, region- alism could be the cover for French nationalist objectives. After the First World War Le Pays lorrain expanded its interests into new regions. Sadoul ran features and regular columns on Belgian Lorraine, Luxem- bourg, and the , suggesting that these, too, might form part of

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet119 of 210 a new region of France, either because of their historical attachment to the duchy or for economic and strategic reasons. The essential French- ness of Lorraine, however defined, was never seriously questioned. And it was the rallying cry for another group of folklorists, over the border in the pays messin.

Raphaël de Westphalen: Folklore and Irredentism In 1887 the Académie de Metz sought studies on ‘‘les anciens usages particuliers au pays mosellan’’ for its essay competition. The chairman of the adjudicating committee, Charles Abel, tried to encourage a good response through a short article on messin folk songs in the Académie’s journal. Songs invoked memories of better days: ‘‘Les soirs d’été d’avant la guerre de 1870, j’écoutais avec les oreilles attendries d’un archéo- logue nos jeunes filles se livrer sur l’Esplanade de Metz à de joyeux ébats en chantant: ‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois / Les lauriers sont coupés.’ ’’ Sadly, he wrote, one hears them no more. Instead, one was obliged to listen to ‘‘des sons plus ou moins mélodieux du Wacht am Rhein.... C’est le cas de dire en Lorraine, des chants français comme de bien d’autres souvenirs, ‘requiescant in pace!’ ’’90 The competition drew only one, anonymous entry, headed by the device ‘‘Pro Patriâ.’’91

89 David Denby, ‘‘ ‘Le Tour de France par deux enfants’ (1877): Mapping of Territory and Construction of a National Memory’’ (paper presented at the France, History and Story Con- ference, University of Birmingham, July 1999). Sadoul and his contemporaries would have been brought up on this book, whose heroes were their fellow countrymen. That the educational poli- cies of the Third Republic may not have been as ‘‘Jacobin’’ and homogenizing as they are some- times presented is also argued by Anne-Marie Thiesse (Ils apprenaient la France: L’Exaltation des ré- gionsdanslediscourspatriotique[Paris, 1997], 7–14). However, the diversity so valued in the rhetoric of the Republic was usually geographical (and therefore unchanging), whereas for regionalists it was human (and therefore changeable and in need of protection). 90 Charles Abel, ‘‘Revue rétrospective des vieilles chansons populaires du pays mosellan à propos d’un concours ouvert en 1888,’’ Mémoires de l’Académie de Metz, 3d ser., 17 (1887–88): 11–12. Abel’s own interest in folklore dated back to the July Monarchy. 91 Charles Abel, ‘‘Rapport sur le concours d’histoire de l’année 1887–1888,’’ Mémoires de l’Académie de Metz, 3d ser. 17 (1887–88): 47–53. The author was Celestin Loiseau of Barchain. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 662 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Despite the disappointing response to this competition, French- speaking Moselle is probably the most studied region of France in terms of folklore (only rivaled by parts of Lower Brittany). Of course, between 1871 and 1918 this region was not part of France—it had been incorpo- rated into the Reichsland of the new German Empire—and it can hardly be a coincidence that this period also witnessed the greatest activity by francophone folklorists. In the absence of any political or military developments, folklore provided a link to the lost Fatherland. Few of these folklorists made explicit reference to the political situation of the Moselle, but their loyalties are evident in the content of the collections. In Quépat’s Chants populaires messins, for example, ‘‘La

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet120 of 210 belle Nanon’’ follows her lover to serve the Bourbons; the female sol- dier ‘‘La Douceur’’ tells us, ‘‘Dans la troupe de France, / J’y ai servi long- temps; / J’ai fait voir ma vaillance/AtouslesAllemands’’; and ‘‘La belle se voulant marier’’ only wants a Frenchman.92 The cities of Paris, Rouen, Orléans, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle are mentioned, orientating the minds of listeners (and readers) toward the west.The past achievements of the armies of France from the siege of Maastricht in 1675to Sebasto- pol are noted, and Mosellans share in the reflected glory. Yet few of these songs were overtly nationalistic in content.They had little to offer the patriotic French folklorist except the fact of their existence in the pays messin, because the same songs were being sung in Poitou, , and the Nivernais, not to mention just over the border in the depart- ment of Meurthe-et-Moselle.93 As long as Mosellans shared a song cul- ture with the rest of Lorraine, and France in general, the attempts of their new masters to ‘‘Germanize’’ the region were doomed to failure. Folklorists believed that Lorrainers would remain French, even during half a century of German occupation, because the memory of France was alive in their songs.94 The irredentist potential of folklore is best exhibited in the work of Raphaël de Westphalen. Born in Metz in 1873, from 1900 on he worked as a country doctor with responsibility for the Hospice des vieil- lards in Novéant. His privileged access to elderly, francophone peasants

92 Nérée Quépat, Chants populaires messins, recueillis dans le val de Metz en 1877 (Paris, 1878), nos. 6, 8, 20. 93 The boundaries of this song community are drawn up in Eugène Rolland, Chansons popu- laires de la France (Paris, 1883), in which those he collected in his native pays messin are included alongside those from all other parts of France. 94 It is not surprising, then, that Puymaigre dropped his plans for a volume of songs he had collected from the germanophone population of the Moselle. Despite their far more blatant French patriotism (compared with the songs of their francophone neighbors), it would inevitably have emphasized the ethnic divisions of the region. The manuscript of this collection now rests in Metz, Archives départementales de la Moselle, 12/J/102, Fonds Puymaigre. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 663

enabled him to build up a collection of more than four hundred folk songs, as well as information on popular traditions, particularly folk medicine. He moved back to Metz during the First World War to work at the hospital (part of a successful attempt to avoid being drafted into the German army).95 The bulk of his folklore collection was made in the period 1900–1917.96 According to Westphalen the people of the Moselle always hoped to be reunited with France: ‘‘Il [le peuple] sent fleurir les ronces de son cœur, il réunit ces fleurs en un modeste bouquet, le tend vers le soleil couchant en murmurant tout bas: Vive la France!’’97 In the mean- time Westphalen made it his task to preserve the romance heritage of

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet121 of 210 his homeland. In a speech given to the Gesellschaft für lothringische Geschichte und Altertumskunde (SHAL) in April 1914, he reproached his colleagues for their previous neglect of ‘‘les vestiges lorrains d’un riche passé.’’98 One senses that Westphalen was worried that the edu- cated elite of Metz had become too involved with the administrative and economic life of Germany and were in danger of forgetting their roots. For Westphalen, as for Herder, folk song was a means to remain true to one’s identity. The study of folklore necessarily turned one’s mind toward ‘‘l’ethnie lorraine’’ and revealed the ‘‘caractère’’ of the pays messin. Folk song in particular ‘‘nous permet de faire certaines déduc- tions sur le niveau d’une culture,’’ a culture shared not only by the popu- lation of the pays messin but by other Lorrainers.99 Westphalen’s ambitions were the same as those he ascribed to his fellow doctor and folklorist Frédéric Estre, ‘‘endiguer les vagues en- vahissantes du germanisme.’’ After the invasion the teaching of Ger- man in schools became mandatory, a rule that Estre and Westphalen believed was having a detrimental effect on local romance dialects: ‘‘Les campagnards s’entretenaient entre eux en patois, mais l’évitaient lorsqu’ils s’adressaient à leurs enfants.’’100 Estre combated this trend

95 H. Tribout de Morembert, ‘‘Raphaël de Westphalen (1873–1949),’’ Nos Traditions: Cahiers de la société du folklore et d’ethnographie de la Moselle, n.s. 2 (1949): 25–33. 96 Westphalen’s Petit Dictionnaire des traditions populaires messines (a misleading title at 490 pages) was not published until 1934; the collection of Chansons populaires de Lorraine was only pub- lished in 1977, long after his death. 97 Raphaël de Westphalen, ‘‘Frédéric Estre: Médecin, artiste peintre, lou felibre de la Mou- sello, folkloriste de la Nied française,’’ Nos traditions 1 (1938): 17. 98 The Gesellschaft für lothringische Geschichte und Altertumskunde had been set up in 1888, under the patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had a summer residence near Metz. Its pub- lications were bilingual, and it was clearly intended to rival the overtly francophile Académie de Metz, but in practice both institutions shared many members. Perhaps because of the German influence the SHAL was more interested in folk culture than the Académie, which, despite Abel’s example, remained wedded to the ‘‘French’’ idea of culture as something urbane and polished. 99 Raphaël de Westphalen, Chansons populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Metz, 1977), 1:vii–ix. 100 Westphalen, ‘‘Frédéric Estre,’’ 21. Not coincidentally, the period 1870–1918 saw the pub- Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 664 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

with a series of patois almanacs; Westphalen joined the battle with a patriotic song, ‘‘Lo Péys messîn,’’ originally written for the children taught by his friend the abbé Thiriot at Servigny-lès-Sainte-Barbe. Thi- riot was a folklorist in his own right and, like several clergymen of the Moselle, an expert on dialects.101 The Church was concerned that the Christian message should be taught in the mother tongue the better to penetrate the hearts of their flock, and this led to its involvement in the defense of education in French. For pious Catholics such as West- phalen and Thiriot, Germanization contained overtones of the Kultur- kampf.102 Thiriot published ‘‘Lo Péys messîn’’ in 1913 in a collection of chansons lorraines so that the other Mosellan children might also know 103

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet122 of 210 that ‘‘Mon pays, c’est la Lorraine. / C’est là qu’au monde je suis venu!’’ In 1920 the song was sung as the final number in a concert of chan- sons populaires de Lorraine for the Exposition nationale de Metz, part of the triumphant affirmation of the city’s return to France. By then Westphalen had added another verse: ‘‘Maintenant enfin, nous avons retrouvénotreMère./Aquinouspensionstoujoursaumilieu de nos chagrins. / Regardez nos cœurs, ils vous dirent sans crainte / Que nous sommes Français / Nous avons appris à bien aimer la France, / Dans notre pays, dans notre pays!’’ Thiriot noted that ‘‘cette pièce...avait l’heur de donner sur les nerfs à un de nos maîtres de jadis, le ‘‘Kreis- direcktor’’ von Loeper; il l’appelait une Marseillaise déguisée. Il n’avait peut-être pas tort.’’104 However, if Westphalen thought that ‘‘Lo Péys messîn’’ was part of Lorraine in 1913, there is evidence to suggest that he changed his views after the war. Although he described his songs as ‘‘lorraines’’ in 1914, the traditional cures he cataloged and published in 1934 were titled ‘‘messines,’’ despite being collected in the same geographical area. A similar change of tack is noticeable among other Mosellans. During the

lication of two mammoth surveys of the dialects of francophone Moselle, by Léon Zéliqzon and Robert Brod. 101 Abbé Hubert Vion of nearby Bazoncourt, for example, had published studies on (and written poetry in) the patois of the pays messin, and Abbé Ritz had a regular patois column in the newspaper Le Lorrain. For the clergy’s attitude to dialect in general see Gérard Cholvy, ‘‘Régio- nalisme et clergé catholique au XIXe siècle,’’ in Gras and Livet, Régions et régionalisme en France, 187–201. 102 Stephen L. Harp’s study of primary schooling in Alsace-Lorraine has shown that the German authorities were not as dogmatically Prussian and Protestant as generations of historians have believed; they worked closely with locals and permitted both Catholic and French instruc- tion. It is Harp’s contention that this subtler approach may have been more successful at turning Alsace-Lorrainers into Germans than the more authoritarian myth, which may have been pre- cisely what Westphalen and Thiriot objected to (Learning to Be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940 [Dekalb, Ill., 1998], esp. 106–24). 103 Abbé J. Thiriot, Chansons lorraines (Metz, 1913). This pamphlet was published by SHAL. 104 Morembert, ‘‘Raphaël de Westphalen,’’ 27. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 665

period of the German occupation they had wanted to demonstrate that their homeland was divided: it formed a whole with the other Lorraine over the border. Hence the political group supported by most franco- phones was called the ‘‘Bloc lorrain,’’ whose leaders made regular pil- grimages to the at the summit of Mont Sion, Bar- rès’s Colline inspirée. In their campaign to Germanize the Moselle the new authorities had hoped to capitalize on the history of the duchy as part of the Holy Roman Empire (portrayed in the history curricu- lum as the forerunner of the new German Reich), but the plan failed as long as the bulk of Lorraine remained in France.105 After the war, however, and particularly after the electoral victory of the Cartel des

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet123 of 210 Gauches in 1924, which threatened the religious settlement in former Alsace-Lorraine, Mosellans were increasingly willing to stress their par- ticular identity and experience.106 Even before Edouard Herriot an- nounced his plans to implement the laic laws in the recovered prov- inces, the Académie nationale de Metz had debated the proposition ‘‘Metz n’est pas en Lorraine. Metz doit se séparer de Nancy.’’ Arguing from history and military strategy, the military governor, general de Lardemelle (whose very title recalled the days when Metz had been a bastion of France surrounded by a hostile duchy), demanded that Metz become the capital of its own region, which would stretch along the German/Luxembourger/Belgian border to Sedan.107 Westphalen’s views on this project are unknown, although he was a member of the Académie at the time. His creation, in 1937, of the Cercle folklorique de Metz does appear to have been an attempt to assert the independence of messin folklorists from the Nancy-based Le Pays lorrain. Mosellans who had previously published in Le Pays lorrain, such as René Schamber, transferred their loyalty to the Cercle’s journal Nos Traditions. Yet the Cercle was entirely concerned with the franco- phone population of the Moselle, and Nos Traditions affirmed that the pays messin remained French to its core. There remained a threat from the east, and Westphalen’s intention in setting up the Cercle was not only to guard against the pretensions of Nancy but to counteract the influence of a new folkloric organization in the germanophone half of the department—the Société du folklore lorrain de langue allemande

105 In the Second World War, when the Moselle was once more incorporated into Germany, the Nazis tried to avoid this difficulty by renaming the region ‘‘Westmark’’ and joining it to the Saarland. 106 Because Alsace-Lorraine were under German occupation at the time of the separation of church and state in France, the Concordat and the Falloux law were still in place. Abbé Ritz, who before the war wrote articles in patois for Le Lorrain, became the paper’s political editor after 1921 and the leading defender of religious schooling. 107 Charles Sadoul, ‘‘Metz et Nancy,’’ Le Pays lorrain 15(1923): 581. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 666 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

founded in 1936 by the abbé Louis Pinck. Some of its members had a very different concept of the identity of Lorraine.108

Louis Pinck: Folklore and Autonomism The folklorists of the pays messin, like the contributors to Le Pays lorrain, had little to say about the German-speaking inhabitants of the Moselle. Considering the powerful competing claims over the area, even to ac- knowledge their existence could have national, or even international repercussions. Perhaps more surprising, considering the keenness of the post-1870 authorities to assert the Germanic identity of Lorraine, was that German folklorists did not fill the gap. Only in the early sum- 6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet124 of 210 mer of 1914, when the SHAL was persuaded to contribute to the for- mation of the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (DVA), was any concerted at- tempt made. A regional commission was set up to collect folk songs and had made a good start before war intervened once more.109 One member of that commission, the abbé Louis Pinck, went on to have a successful, if contentious, career as a folklorist.110 Louis Pinck was born in Lemberg in 1873, the same year as Sadoul and Westphalen, but his national orientation was very different. The Pinck family illustrates the dilemmas over identity facing a population that changed nationality four times between 1870 and 1945. Although German was his mother tongue, Louis Pinck’s grandfather opted for France in 1872. His father stayed on but was a known French patriot and in 1919 formed part of the Commission de naturalisation, which over- saw the return to France. Louis Pinck’s eldest brother was even impris-

108 I have no definitive proof that the Cercle folklorique de Metz was set up to rival the Société du folklore lorrain de langue allemande, but I do not believe it was a coincidence that in the years running up to the Second World War the department of the Moselle could boast two folklore organizations while none of the other departments of Lorraine could manage even one. According to Henri Hiegel, the Cercle refused to have a joint publication with the germanophones (‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck [1873–1940],’’ Les Cahiers lorrains n.s., 33 [1981]: 249), and although Pinck and Westphalen knew each other, there was a fair amount of tension between the two organizations, to judge by Jean de Pange’s account of the launch of the germanophone society ( Journal, 1934–1936 [Paris, 1970], 436). 109 This collection is also to be found in Metz, Archives départementales de la Moselle, 21/J/12, Fonds de la Société de l’histoire et de l’archéologie de la Lorraine. 110 Because of the contentious nature of the Pinck family’s involvement in the political, cul- tural, and religious life of germanophone Lorraine, they and their work have been the subject of numerous studies. For Louis Pinck I have drawn on Henri Hiegel and Charles Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck (1873–1940),’’ Les Cahiers lorrains, n.s., 33 (1981): 199–218, 249–66; and Laurent Mayer, ‘‘La Chanson populaire en Lorraine germanophone d’après le recueil ‘‘Verk- lingende Weisen’’ de Louis Pinck,’’ 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Metz, 1983). For his folklorist sister, Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, see Henri Hiegel, ‘‘Deux Folkloristes lorrains: Henri Lerond et Angelika Merkelbach,’’ Les Cahiers lorrains, n.s., 27 (1975): 108–14; and Karl-Heinz Langstroff, Lothringer Volksart; Untersuchung zur deutsch-lothringischen Volkserzählung an Hand der Sammlung von Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck (Marburg, Germany, 1953). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 667

oned during the First World War as a suspected French sympathizer. However, another brother, Emile, used his position as a banker in Stras- bourg to channel German money to friendly organizations in Alsace in the interwar years. He was a founder of the Alsatian autonomist pub- lication Die Zukunft and at the trial of autonomist leaders in 1926 was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years’ imprisonment for plotting against the security of France.111 The conflict-ridden history of Lorraine caused many divisions in the Pinck family. Like Emile, Louis Pinck enjoyed a tempestuous political career. Imbued with his family’s religious faith (two of his siblings would also take holy orders), Pinck was destined for the Church. It was his talent

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet125 of 210 for polemic, however, that drew him to the attention of the bishop of Metz. Soon after his ordination in 1901 he was appointed editor of the German-language Catholic daily the Lothringer Volksstimme, where he gave free rein to his vehement religious and political opinions. He was a tireless critic of the German authorities, mostly Protestant Prussians, whom he accused of treating Lorraine as a captive colony. He was not afraid to launch himself against the kaiser himself, and was finally dis- missed and exiled to the rural parish of Hambach in 1908 after a par- ticularly vitriolic attack on ‘‘le roi de Prusse’’ for using local taxpayers’ money to rebuild an imperial residence in Alsace.112 Pinck’s antagonism toward Lorraine’s new rulers should not be mistaken for French irredentism. He disliked them as agents of the Kulturkampf, but his other main targets in the pages of the Lothringer Volksstimme were the Bloc lorrain and the pro-French newspaper Le Lor- rain. Pinck had never known his homeland as part of France, and those who hankered after the lost Fatherland appeared to him as nostalgic buffoons. He saw in France not the eldest daughter of the Church but the secular Republic, teeming with Voltairean freethinkers and Jacobin centralizers. A return to France posed more of a threat to the culture of eastern Lorraine (envisaged as fervently Catholic) than even Prot- estant Prussia. Pinck was therefore a militant for the Zentrum Elsass- Lothringen, linked to the German Catholic party, the Zentrum. The main policies of the Center Party in Alsace-Lorraine were the reten-

111 Emile Pinck’s roles as the link between Robert Ernst (organizer of German propaganda in Alsace and the future governor of the province under the Nazis) and the Alsatian autonomists, and his later role as a leading informer on the autonomist movement for the French security ser- vices, are narrated in Pierri Zind, Elsass-Lothringen/Alsace-Lorraine: Une nation interdite, 1870–1940 (Paris, 1979), 589; and Philip Charles Farwell Bankwitz, Alsatian Autonomist Leaders, 1919–1947 (Lawrence, Kans., 1978), 15–27. 112 According to Pinck, his exile from Metz was the result of the direct appeal of the kaiser to the Vatican over the Hohkönigsburg affair, a story that is certainly widely believed in Lorraine today, although Hiegel is doubtful (‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 211). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 668 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

tion of religious education and the achievement of federal status for the Reichsland within the Empire. Pinck’s support was wholehearted.113 Catholic, germanophone Lorraine would be safe, he believed, only when united with the strong Christian-democrat forces within Ger- many. Given this background, the Allied victory of 1918 came as a terrible shock. His pro-German sympathies made him an object of suspicion for the returning French authorities, who prevented him from travel- ing outside his parish. This harassment, and the gibes of local French patriots (whom Pinck always referred to as ‘‘chauvinistes’’), goaded him back into political action. By 1921 he had become the vice president of

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet126 of 210 L’Union de la presse catholique d’Alsace-Lorraine, which was designed to preserve the religious settlement in Alsace-Lorraine, where the Con- cordat and the Falloux law still applied. He was also an indefatigable defender of mother-tongue education, particularly for the catechism.114 This was a traditional position for the clergy in germanophone Lorraine from before 1870, but in the highly charged atmosphere of the interwar years it inevitably led to involvement in autonomist politics.115 Support for the autonomist movement within Alsace-Lorraine only became widespread after the new left-wing prime minister Herriot de- clared in 1924 the intention of implementing the laic laws. This re- pudiation of promises made in 1918 reopened ‘‘la question d’Alsace- Lorraine,’’ and as the dispute became more bitter, the defenders of the religious settlement were pushed to take more radical positions.116 For Pinck autonomy and the religious issue were inevitably bound together. When in 1926 he was asked, during one of his frequent court appear- ances, whether he was an autonomist, Pinck answered (in German to annoy the judge), ‘‘Ja.’’ When asked why he replied, ‘‘afin que nos chré- tiens ne deviennent pas des paîens.’’117 Although Pinck was seldom so directly involved as his brother Emile in political action (he was under direct orders from his bishop to stay out of trouble), the local anti- clerical press described him as ‘‘l’âme de mouvement autonomiste lor- rain.’’118 He was probably the author of a report on behalf of ‘‘les ré-

113 He even ran an article in the Volksstimme in 1907 in which his brother Emile, a Center Party candidate, ridiculed their own father for supporting the Bloc lorrain (it was published under a pseudonym) (Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 210). 114 [Louis Pinck], Religion und Muttersprache in der Schule: Vortrag gehalten beim Kantonal- Katholikentag zu Wolmünster am Ostermontag (Metz, 1921), 1–23. 115 The local clergy had been the main opposition to Maggiolo’s plans to impose French as the first language of education when he was inspector of schools at Nancy in the 1860s. 116 For the history of this period see Samuel Houston Goodfellow, Between the Swastika and theCrossofLorraine:FascismsinInterwarAlsace(De Kalb, Ill., 1999), 13–27. 117 Mayer, Chanson populaire, 1:19. 118 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 216–18. He is widely believed to Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 669

gionalistes lorrains’’ to the Vatican that accused the bishop of Metz of apathy on the religious issue and of being too cozy with industrialists like the Wendels (whose rapacity was pushing the workers into the arms of the communists).119 Pinck’s self-appointed mission as priest, journalist, and politician was to defend what he considered to be an oppressed minority—ger- manophone Lorrainers. Folklore fitted with his concerns. His enthusi- asm had been kindled by the songs sung by his grandmother around the family hearth. After his exile to Hambach he began to collect in earn- est. In 1914 Pinck joined the commission collecting for the DVA. Al- though it was disbanded with the outbreak of hostilities, Pinck worked

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet127 of 210 on throughout the war. In 1917 he offered his songs for use in propa- ganda by the Gesellschaft für elsässische Literatur. Depressed by defeat in 1918 and temporarily deprived of his contacts with German folk- lorists, Pinck ceased collecting until the revival of the autonomist move- ment in 1924 gave him a new lease on life. In 1926 he published one hundred songs as Verklingende Weisen: Lothringer Volkslieder [Fading melo- dies: Lorrainer folk songs].The title clearly indicated Pinck’s belief that his was a culture under threat. Three more volumes appeared between 1929 and 1939. Together they form one of the finest folk song collec- tions of any period, although they represent just the tip of the iceberg of Pinck’s collecting.120 He also inspired his sister, Angelika Merkelbach- Pinck, to collect the narrative tradition of the same region. The three thousand or more tales she noted between 1933 and the 1950s form an equally impressive corpus. Each song in Verklingende Weisen was accompanied with copious notes on its variants, sources, and singers, a great contrast with Puymai- gre and Westphalen. This was the policy of his mentors at the DVA who were setting new standards in folklore, but Pinck was also aware that his political history would bring his probity into question. Even with all the details of persons, dates, and places supplied, the anticlerical

have been the éminence grise behind Victor Antoni’s germanophile Parti chrétien social popu- laire. 119 Pinck was an inveterate enemy of the Wendels, who had been leading figures in the Bloc lorrain before the war. At the time of his dismissal from the Lothringer Volksstimme he was being sued for defamation by Charles de Wendel. 120 In total he recorded more than two thousand songs, and he also sought out Liederheften— the handwritten songbooks of his informants, Fliegenblätter or peddler’s song sheets, and popular hymnbooks. Some of this material was destroyed by looting troops in the first months of 1940, but much has been preserved in the DVA in Freiburg or in the departmental archives in Metz. A guide to his collection in Freiburg is given in Otto Holzapfel, ‘‘Nachlasse Pinck in Deutschen Volkslied- archiv: Ammerkungen zum deutschen Volkslied in Lothringen,’’ Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 22 (1977): 119–31. The material in the Archives départementales de la Moselle can be found under codes 42/J/22–25, Fonds Pinck. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 670 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

newspaper Le Messin still claimed in 1926 that the songs had not been found in Lorraine at all, but in the ‘‘bouges’’ of the Palatinate.121 Only by demonstrating that he was merely recording tradition, rather than inventing it, could he justify the existence of the collection. This scientific meticulousness does not mean that no personal ele- ment crept into the Verklingende Weisen. The choice and arrangement of the songs reveal Pinck’s personality and his vision of Lorraine. Al- though he used the ducal arms as his frontispiece, Pinck’s Lorraine was a much smaller place than for any regionalist discussed thus far, con- sisting of just the eastern half of the department of the Moselle. Nearby Metz could never be for Pinck the bastion of Catholic France envis-

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet128 of 210 aged by Barrès in Colette Baudoche; rather, it was the haunt of social- ists, freemasons, and .122 The defining characteristic of this rump Lorraine was its piety, and so each volume opens with religious songs, Pinck’s favorites.123 They make up 18 percent of the total, whereas in a comparable collection from the neighboring Saarland they account for only 1 percent.124 These are followed by rural craft songs: the industrial trades of mining and glassblowing, so important to the area, are not represented. Although Pinck was a leading advocate of social Catholi- cism, and vocally supported strikes in these industries, his Lorraine remained pastoral. This was one facet of his traditionalism. He also worked hard to ensure that every song had been known in Lorraine before 1870. This choice of a cutoff date was partly to avoid any accu- sation of anti-French sentiment, which would certainly have fallen on him if he had included the German patriotic songs learnt in schools and barracks, but was also to please his own tastes.125 Considering Pinck’s leanings, it is paradoxical that the result of this policy was to make the germanophone Lorrainers appear as loyal Frenchmen and the Germans as the enemy. As one conscript song has it: ‘‘Es gibt nichts Schöneres auf der Welt / Als wie die Franzosen wohl in dem Feld, / Wenn sie in Batallje sind.’’126 Yet while the singer boasts of his French identity, the song itself belongs, Pinck demonstrated, to the deutsches Volkstum—cultural Germany. The song had originally

121 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 255. 122 His consequent hope to separate germanophone Lorraine from the pays messin was ex- pressed in the slogan ‘‘Los von Metz: Hin zum Elsass’’ [Away from Metz: Toward Alsace]. 123 He had planned a fifth volume of purely religious numbers, but he died before the project reached fruition, and his manuscripts were destroyed during the war. His sister, together with the folklorist J. Müller-Blattau, managed to piece enough together to produce a fifth volume in 1962. 124 Mayer, Chanson populaire, 1:118. The following section draws heavily on Mayer’s analysis. 125 The post-1870 collection of Liederheften, which is preserved in the DVA, seems to consist almost entirely of songs learnt by conscripts during their time in the army. 126 Louis Pinck, Verklingende Weisen: Lothringer Volkslieder, 4 vols. (Metz, 1926–39), 1:144. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 671

appeared in that great monument of German romantic nationalism, Ludwig Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn of 1808, where it was Hussars who delighted in the field. The song had been adapted to the peculiar historical circumstances of Lorraine, but it was also proof that the cultural affinities of eastern Moselle lay over the Rhine.127 It was, in Pinck’s words, a pearl washed up on the shore of the Germanic ocean.128 Like Herder, Pinck argued that folk song was the true mirror of thefolksoul.129 In the case of Lorraine, that soul was German—dis- tinctive but definitely part of the wider deutsches Volkstum. Indeed, Pinck asserted that in a border zone people were more passionate about pre-

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet129 of 210 serving that culture than elsewhere; his best singers came from com- munities right on the language divide. This border was all but impene- trable, Pinck argued: in terms of folklore there was no contact between the cultures. To judge from their Liederheften, some of his informants also knew songs in French, but these he ignored. According to Pinck, songs only traveled ‘‘avec ceux qui les chantent et se conservent dans leur langue maternelle, même dans un entourage parlant une langue différente.’’ His work as a folklorist was therefore a part of his agitation for mother-tongue schooling. In a speech to the Congrès International de folklore held in Paris in 1937, he made the connection himself: ‘‘Il n’y a plus de doute, les chansons...seconserve[nt] grâce à la langue maternelle. Mais là où la langue maternelle se perd les chansons popu- laires se perdent également.’’ He praised the British for their broad- minded toleration of French culture in Canada, so unlike the French themselves in Lorraine!130 Pinck’s folklore had a very political edge, with the result that his work has been contested both at the time and ever since. Even for mod- ern French historians, who have largely shed revanchisme,theVerklin- gende Weisen appear as a continuation of the prewar policy of German- ization.131 This is partly because Pinck was not satisfied with recording folk culture; he wanted to make it live again.132 He saw himself, like Herder, giving back a voice to the people, and with it their sense of themselves as an organic whole. He supported choirs, gave lectures, made films, and broadcast on radio (from Germany). He willingly let

127 Ibid., 1:299. 128 Ibid., 2:i. 129 Ibid., 1:274: ‘‘Dass das Volkslied mit der Volkseele eng verwachsen ist.’’ He also quoted Puymaigre’s dictum, ‘‘Dis-moi ce que tu chantes, je te dirai qui tu es!’’ 130 Louis Pinck, ‘‘La Circulation des chants vue de la Lorraine,’’ Folk-Liv 2–3 (1939): 208–13. 131 François Roth, La Lorraine annexée: Etude sur la présidence de Lorraine dans l’empire allemand (1870–1918) (Nancy, 1976), 258, 493. 132 Pinck, Verklingende Weisen, 2:i. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 672 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

his songs be used for cultural propaganda by the Alsatian separatist organization the Jungmannschaft, a paramilitary group with overt Nazi orientations. Its leaders, Hermann Bickler and Friedrich Spieser, were among Pinck’s friends, and Spieser even lived with Pinck for several months in 1930 while researching his doctorate on the folk songs of Lorraine.133 Both men were active German agents before the war and were to become leading collaborators during the occupation.134 These contacts, and his known links with German academics, allowed French nationalists to label Pinck as the mouthpiece of German propaganda. Anticlerical journalists accused him of accepting money from the Ger- man agencies to fund his folklore publications. These suspicions were

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet130 of 210 confirmed in 1939 when Hambach, like all villages in front of the Magi- not line, was evacuated into the interior. Officers billeted in the paro- chial house discovered a secret cupboard containing correspondence with Robert Ernst and the Töpfer brothers, generous patrons of all kinds of autonomist propaganda, some of which were signed ‘‘Heil Hitler.’’ It was only the fact that Pinck was fatally ill that saved him from prison. Instead, he returned to die in his native Lorraine in Decem- ber 1940.The occupying Nazi authorities wanted to give him a national hero’s funeral, but his family refused. However, they were unable to prevent his work being mined by Nazi propagandists.135 Pinck’s relationship with Germany is still debated in Lorraine.136 That he was a German nationalist seems clear, though always a Lor- rainer first. Foolishly, he did not distance himself from his contacts after 1933, unlike other clerical autonomists. However, because he died so soon after the invasion, Pinck escaped the taint of collaboration. His sister was not so fortunate. She publicly welcomed the return of Lorraine to Germany and contributed articles to Nazi propaganda pub- lications.137 Although her Catholic faith prevented her from getting too

133 Friedrich Spieser, Das Leben des Volksliedes im Rahmen eines Lothringer Dorf (Bühl-Baden, 1934). Despite Spieser’s political bias (he accused the French authorities of trying to destroy the culture of Lorraine), this volume contains some useful insights on the interaction between com- munity and folk culture. 134 On the autonomist activities of both men see Bankwitz, Alsatian Autonomist Leaders,50– 63, 90–95, 112–22; and Goodfellow, Between the Swastika and the Cross of Lorraine, 103–18, 149–61. 135 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 259–61; Karl-Heinz Rothenberger, Die elsass-lothringische Heimat- und Autonomiebewegung zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen, Europäische Hochschulschriften 42 (Bern, Switzerland, 1975), 142, 150. 136 While I was working on the Verklingende Weisen in the Nancy Public Library, people would approach me and offer their opinions about whether Pinck was or was not a Nazi. The discussion was not made easier by the fact that the actual volumes in the library had been ‘‘liberated’’ from the private collection of Hermann Göring. 137 Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, ‘‘Der Lothringer,’’ in Elsass-und Lothringen, Deutsches Land, ed. Otto Meissner (Berlin, 1941) 183–91. Her collection of folktales, which had been originally published under the title Volksmärchen aus Lothringen in 1940, was republished in 1943 (with all the French loanwords removed) as Deutsche Volksmärchen. See Langstroff, Lothringer Volksart, 10. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 673

close to the authorities, her name remains under a shadow.138 Whatever the Pincks’ allegiances and motivations, however, the quality of their work as folklorists was high. They were not blinded by their prejudices, and the songs, tales, and legends themselves are, as far as it is possible to ascertain, accurate transcriptions from the oral tradition. Since the war, a younger generation of Mosellan folklorists has worked to save the reputation of the collections, if not the collectors.

Henri Hiegel: Folklore and Not surprisingly, Pinck’s Société du folklore lorrain de langue alle- mande was not revived after the Liberation, but Westphalen’s Cercle 6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet131 of 210 folklorique de Metz did make a brief reappearance. In 1948 one of its members, René Schamber, returned to the issue of the language bar- rier that had so exercised Pinck. In an article on the migration of songs he noticed ‘‘des similitudes assez nombreuses entre des chansons fran- çaises et allemandes.’’ The famous French song ‘‘Malbrouk s’en va-t’en guerre’’ had an exact counterpart in Pinck’s collection; many tunes, phrases, and motifs were found among both communities. Lorraine was not, therefore, divided into two cultural areas by the impassable obstacle of language, but rather united by a common folk heritage.139 This argument was taken up by Pinck’s friend, Henri Hiegel. Hiegel had helped Pinck with his fieldwork in the years before the war and in 1961 still referred to him as ‘‘mon maître.’’140 His concept of folklore was, however, quite different. Whereas Pinck seemed to believe that Lorraine was an enclosed community, cut off from the rest of Europe, Hiegel considered it as a zone of transition. Not only was French influ- ence readily apparent in the Verklingende Weisen, but songs from Italy, , Switzerland, and Scandinavia all met there.141 The same was true of the tales and legends collected by Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck; they had some local characteristics, but the basic themes were common to both language communities in Lorraine and could also be found in the Ardennes, , the Saarland, and Alsace: ‘‘La compari-

138 Her entry in the bibliography of French folktales contains a little warning note suggest- ing readers should consult Langstroff as to her probity. The collection of folktales she amassed, surely the one of the largest made in France this century, still awaits translation into French (De- larue, Conte populaire français, 1:83). 139 René Schamber, ‘‘Migration de la chanson populaire,’’ Nos Traditions, n.s., 1 (1948): 80– 82. 140 Henri Hiegel, ‘‘Bibliographie du Folklore mosellan,’’ Les Cahiers lorrains, n.s., 16 (1964): 113. 141 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 256–57. For an authoritative over- view of the relationship between French and German folk songs see Heinke Binder, ‘‘Deutsch- französische Liederverbindungen,’’ in Handbuch des Volkslieder, ed. R. W. Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and W. Suppan (Munich, 1975), 2:285–337. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 674 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

son de ces légendes, recueillies entre le Rhin et la Meuse, permet d’établir la communauté indiscutablement européenne des légendes allemandes et françaises.’’ The people of the Rhine-Meuse-Moselle basin may have spoken different languages, but their stories, and the desires expressed in them, were the same. Theirs was a history of con- flict, and the tales they told were of the horrors of war and the con- solation of religion. In particular the legends of Saint Oranne, the former patroness of germanophone Lorraine but also honored in the Saarland, ‘‘montrer la profonde aspiration des habitants des pays sar- rois à l’établissement d’une paix durable et de la communauté euro- péenne.’’142

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet132 of 210 Hiegel’s was only one of a number of postwar attempts by the folk- lorists to encourage a rapprochement between both language groups, and both states, represented in Lorraine. In 1950 some Verklingende Wei- sen were translated into French by the local poet Adrien Printz.143 In 1961 Marie-Louise Tenèze, whose career as a folklorist started in the Moselle, published a collection of folktales from France and Germany, translated into each other’s language: it was called Rencontre des peuples dans le conte.144 Even Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck altered her view of ger- manophone Lorraine as an introverted community. In the postwar edi- tion of her collection, for each tale she gave comparative references drawn from both Cosquin and the Grimms, demonstrating the links to both French and German folk cultures.145 The moral of all these initiatives seems clear: whether French or German, Lorrainers were first and foremost good Europeans. It is surely no coincidence that the Moselle was also the constituency of Robert Schuman, architect of Franco-German reconciliation and the founding father of the Euro- pean Community.

Conclusion: Does Lorraine Exist? Since Jack Zipes attacked Robert Darnton for the lack of ‘‘depth’’ of his scholarship, historians have been wary of folklore, particularly when any issue of identity has been concerned.146 Darnton’s argument, that

142 Henri Hiegel, ‘‘La Compréhension européenne dans la collection des légendes et contes de M. Loymeyer sur les Pays Sarrois,’’ in Festschrift für Karl Loymeyer, ed. Karl Schwingel (Saar- brucken, 1953), 274–79. 143 In a letter dated 1940 from Pinck, reproduced by Printz, the former had given his bless- ing to the project (Anthologie de la poésie populaire de langue allemande, d’après ‘‘Verklingende Weisen’’ de Louis Pinck [Metz, 1950], 68–69). 144 Marie-Louise Tenèze and Georg Hüllen, eds., RencontredespeuplesdansleconteI:France/ Allemagne (Münster, 1961). 145 Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, Lothringer Märchen (Cologne, 1961), 319–22. 146 Jack Zipes, ‘‘The Grimms and the German Obsession with Fairy Tales,’’ in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia, 1986), 273. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 675

folktales contain evidence of ‘‘the existence of distinct cultural styles, which set off the French...fromotherpeoples,’’ has been much criti- cized.147 According to James Fernandez, ‘‘In our generalizations about the folklore of nations...weoversimplify the complexities of folk- lore dynamics....Therisingnationalisms of the nineteenth century made much use of folklore to typify and thus create new national iden- tities around new national boundaries, but there is no reason for the folklorists to be the acquiescent agents of such nationalisms.’’148 Zipes and Fernandez were particularly concerned about the use of folklore to make assertions about ethnicity, which they associated with the Nazi abuse of Volkskunde.149 But ethnicity is only one element in the forma-

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet133 of 210 tion of national identity. If the inhabitants of a particular nation (what- ever their ethnic origin) share common experiences (for example, through interaction with the state), it is not unreasonable to expect that these might be incorporated into their narratives. This is demon- strable in germanophone Lorraine, where many of the tales collected by Merkelbach-Pinck were originally learnt while on service in the French army. The characters, language, and concerns of these tales are very similar to those told by veterans from every region of France and reflect their experience of this national institution.150 But this argument is difficult to apply to the region of Lorraine, which has seldom shared any institutions. Regionalists and folklorists argued that it should because of its cultural homogeneity, but as they often had other axes to grind, it is possible that the unity they sought existed only in the Lorraine of their imaginations. Folklorists may have approached their subject loaded with ideological baggage that influ- enced the way they arranged the material they collected, but this does not mean they ‘‘invented tradition’’; rather, they manipulated it. The

147 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Lon- don, 1984), 70. There is a potential flaw in Darnton’s comparisons of tales, because his examples were drawn from collections already edited with the intention of demonstrating ‘‘national charac- ter,’’ but his conclusions are in keeping with the work of some of the leading postwar scholars in folklore including Paul Delarue, Elisabeth Koechlin, Marianne Rumpf, and Lutz Röhrich, not to mention Karl-Heinz Langstroff’s study of the Merkelbach-Pinck collection. 148 James W. Fernandez, ‘‘Folklorists as Agents of Nationalism: Asturian Legends and the Problem of Identity,’’ in Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales and Society, 235. Several other items in this collec- tion take up the polemic with Darnton. For a more general critique of historians’ use and misuse of folklore see Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘‘Fairy Tales, Folk Narrative Research, and History,’’ Social History 14 (1989): 343–57. 149 James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, introduction to German Volkskunde: ADecade of Theo- retical Confrontation, Debate, and Reorientation (1967–1977) (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 7–14. See also Dow and Lixfeld, The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (Bloomington, Ind., 1994). 150 Merkelbach-Pinck, Lothringer Märchen, no. 35, Le Vieux La Ramée; and no. 38, Pipet, ein alter Franzos. See David Hopkin, ‘‘La Ramée, the Archetypal Soldier, as an Indicator of Popular Attitudes to the French Army,’’ French History 14 (2000): 115–50. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 676 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

songs really were sung, the tales really were told in Lorraine, and if they have features in common then one might, following Gennep, argue for a folkloric community. It is therefore time to take issue with Carnoy’s assertion: ‘‘Il n’y a donc pas de Folk-Lore provincial.’’ At first glance folk songs and tales are poor vehicles for assertions of local identity. Similar tales have been collected from Vietnam to Morocco and all places-in between.151 There is a potential contradiction manifest in the work of Cosquin and Puymaigre—that although they defined their collections as belonging to a particular province, they both went to great lengths to demonstrate that similar items could be found in many other regions and countries. As Puymaigre’s folkloric

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet134 of 210 studies matured, he was astonished to discover that ‘‘on rencontrait une ballade entendue en Champagne, sur les bords de la Moselle, sur les rives de la Loire, sur le versant des Alpes italiennes, dans les vallées des Pyrénées...onretrouvaitlesmêmesdonnées en Castille, en [sic] Por- tugal, en Catalogne, parfois en Allemagne et en Hollande, en Angle- terre et en Grèce, partout pour ainsi dire.’’152 No location could claim to be the birthplace of a song; they were the common inheritance of all. Both men used these international comparisons to justify their folk- loric activities: in this context they could not simply be dismissed as ‘‘niaiseries’’; rather, they were participating in the scholarly apparatus of an international art form. Subsequent generations of folklorists were concerned with the continent-wide uniformity of tales (which would seem to obviate the need to look for national or local characteristics), arguing that they had traveled with the Aryan populations on their migrations from Asia to Europe and beyond, or that they were survivals from a pre-Christian religion practiced over a wide area.153 Yet within a single tale-type no two narratives are exactly the same, and even the same person telling the same tale on two different occasions may give different renditions. Since 1945folklorists have been more interested in the variable ele- ments of folktales, showing how individual narrators altered stories to fit their own personalities and the expectations of their audience.154 Try-

151 Stith Thompson, ‘‘The Folktale from Ireland to India,’’ in The Folktale (New York, 1946), 13–293. 152 Théodore de Puymaigre, Folk-Lore (Paris, 1885), 7–8. 153 The Grimms believed that tales contained the remnants of the beliefs of their Teutonic forebears. For other examples of scholarly belief in ‘‘survivals’’ in folklore see Max Müller, Com- parative Mythology, An Essay (London, 1909); Paul Saintyves, Les Contes de Perrault et les récits parallèles: Leurs origines (coutumes primitives et liturgies populaires) (Paris, 1923); Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore (Manchester, 1984), 100–123. 154 A model study in this vein (and particularly useful for historians) is provided by Bengt Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective, Folklore Fellows Com- munications 239 (Helsinki, 1987). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 677

ing to reconcile both uniform and variable elements in folktales has proved complicated, but a possible solution is offered by the concept of ecotypes. The term was coined by the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow to help understand why there are such marked differences in national canons of tales. He explained these in terms of tradition regions with definite boundaries; only one variant of a tale would be at home in any tradition region.155 The concept was eagerly taken up by the American folklorist Alan Dundes: ‘‘In folklore, the term refers to local forms of a folktale, folksong or any other folkloristic genre...definedwithref- erence to either geographic or cultural factors. Oicotypes could be on 156

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet135 of 210 the village, state, regional, or national level.’’ In other words, folklore adapts to particular cultural milieus, and we can expect that a com- parison of oral traditions will highlight cultural differences. Any new oral narrative would either be rejected by a community satisfied with its existing ecotype or, by altering its motifs, style, or meaning, be changed to fit its new cultural context. The process of ecotypification, described by Roger Abrahams for the urban ghettos of North America, is a valu- able way to connect the tradition with its specific social base, for simi- larities across tale-types (and even across genres) can be related to the particular environment.157 Ecotypes help explain the distinct regional patterns in the almost universal distribution of folktale motifs.158 If Darnton’s conclusions are reliable, then he has identified na- tional ecotypes for France, Germany, Italy, and England. In terms of national ecotypes Lorraine appears to be a zone of transition, as Hiegel suggested.159 However, the existence of national ecotypes does not prove the existence of distinctive regional cultures. What we need to know is whether Lorraine possessed its own ecotypes. There are some tales that reflect the violent history of the province. In one of Merkelbach-Pinck’s tales, for example, a shepherd boy defeats an army of invading Swedes because during the battle he gets caught

155 Carl W. von Sydow, ‘‘Geography and Folktale Oicotypes,’’ in Selected Papers on Folklore (Copenhagen, 1948), 44–59. Von Sydow borrowed the idea from botany where the term is used to describe native variants. One may also see oikotype, but ecotype is the commonly accepted spelling and already familiar as a concept to historians of the family. 156 Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: APortrait of German Culture through Folklore (New York, 1984), 2. 157 Roger Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadel- phia (Chicago, 1970), 173–74. 158 Lauri Honko, ‘‘Methods in Folk Narrative Research,’’ in Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies,ed. Reimund Kvideland, Henning Sehmsdorf, and Elizabeth Simpson (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 38. 159 Montiers-sur-Saulx was the furthest extension into France of several tale-types whose principal home lay across the Rhine; for instance, AT530 ThePrincessontheGlassMountainor AT533 The Speaking Horsehead (Delarue and Tenèze, Conte populaire français, 2:309–15, 338, 514–29). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 678 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

on a wayside cross that thereafter he carries on his back. The Swedes think Christ himself has joined the battle and flee.This is a local version of what is usually a humorous motif in which an unlikely hero routs an army by accident. In this case, however, it is not a joke, for the memory of the Swedes’ rampage across Lorraine in 1635, and in particular their sacrilegious destruction of shrines, was still alive in the oral tradition three hundred years later. This tale exhibits two features that might be considered typical of germanophone Lorraine, deep religiosity and a legendary quality, that is to say a tale ‘‘contaminated’’ with history and therefore passed from the status of fiction to that of believed legend.160 A clearer example of an ecotype, because it occurs more than once,

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet136 of 210 may tell us something about the distinctive character of francophone Lorraine. A popular tale (forty-seven versions have been collected from France) concerns The Maiden without Hands. It can be found in Cosquin’s collection and is also one of Sadoul’s surviving tales.161 In the typical French version the daughter of a king is mutilated and expelled from her father’s house by the machinations of her stepmother, is restored to health by miraculous intervention, marries a prince to whom she bears children, is again expelled from the marital home by the machi- nations of her mother-in-law, and is finally reunited with her husband. Both Cosquin’s and Sadoul’s versions follow this basic outline but with the addition of one significant motif: each heroine escapes from misery by dressing as a soldier and serving in her husband’s army. This motif is borrowed from another tale-type, The Innocent Slandered Maiden. This mixing of tale-types occurs in Lorraine and nowhere else. Songs about military maids were also extremely frequent in Lorraine, and it would seem that the motif of the cross-dressing she-soldier had particular resonance there.162 This is just one example of the kind of regional ecotypes that folklorists have uncovered for both language groups (and occasionally across the linguistic divide) in Lorraine; others can be demonstrated

160 Merkelbach-Pinck, Lothringer Märchen,no.7Der wilde Mann und der Königssohn (AT502 The Wild Man, develops as AT314 with elements of AT1640). 161 Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine,2:no.78LaFilledumarchanddeLyon; and Charles Sadoul, ‘‘Contes de Lorraine,’’ Revue des traditions populaires 19 (1904): no. 4 La Fille aux mains cou- pées ou l’hôtesse du Dragon Vert. Finding ecotypes that straddle the language divide is more difficult, which suggests that Pinck’s view of the linguistic frontier was closer to the mark than Hiegel’s. 162 Explaining the significance of this ecotype in Lorraine would require a separate article. Although Lorraine has produced more than its fair share of militarily active women, from Joan of Arc through Madame de Saint-Baslemont to Louise Michel, the motif of the cross-dressing she-soldier in folklore may have more to do with the distribution of authority within the domes- tic sphere than with public displays of power. It might, for example, be significant that it was in Lorraine that the anthropologist Susan Carol Rogers conducted the fieldwork for her semi- nal article ‘‘Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/Male Interaction in Peasant Society,’’ American Ethnologist 2 (1975): 727–56. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 679

for songs, rituals, and even house-building styles.The existence of these ecotypes can sometimes be linked to the existence of an independent duchy, but they often spread beyond the boundaries of ducal Lorraine to include the entire ‘‘espace lorrain.’’163 Yet although ecotypes give indications of distinct regional cultures, they should not necessarily be considered as proof of identity that demands an awareness on the part of participants in that distinctive culture. Did Lorrainers recognize each other as belonging to a single cultural community because they sang the same songs or told the same tales? Historically, the study of folklore has been bound up with national- ism. However, the actual material under scrutiny—songs, dances, tales,

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet137 of 210 traditions—displays what some readers may find a refreshing apathy concerning identity politics. In Lorrainer folklore collections, for ex- ample, there are very few references to the existence of a place called Lorraine, and hardly any to the dukes. The people and places most frequently named were either national (the king of France, Jean de Calais) or international (Amsterdam, England, Australia). Despite the national references in the tales, they give little indication that France was a locus for loyalty; rather, it provided an exotic ‘‘other’’ to the purely local knowledge and concerns of the narrators. It would have been interesting if the folklorists had questioned their informants as to their thoughts on the origins and value of their repertoires, but as most nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century collectors were working within the paradigm of communal creation, the views of the actual narrators and singers were not considered significant. When the informants offer a description of their material, it is usually as ‘‘old tales’’ or ‘‘old songs,’’ rather than something specific to Lorraine. What for folklorists was an expression of a particular identity was, for their informants, part of a way of life that, inasmuch as they were aware of its limits, was time spe- cific and local rather than regional. The folklorists’ awareness of the regional distinctiveness of this cul- ture necessarily involved taking a wider view than did their informants, and having an alternative to judge it against. Folklorists almost invari- ably came from a wealthier, more educated background than those who supplied their material. It was because folklorists participated in national politics and international debate that they felt able to distin- guish folk culture from elite culture. They could only establish the exis- tence of ecotypes through comparative study, an opportunity not avail- able to most of their neighbors. Folklorists were, therefore, faced with a

163 The example of the distinctive rural settlement pattern in Lorraine, propagated by the dukes, is discussed by de Planhol (Historical Geography of France, 194–96). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 680 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

paradox: while presenting their material as evidence of a regional iden- tity, they nonetheless had to accept that that regional identity was not clearly articulated in the texts themselves. Most folklorists recognized this and avoided placing too much ideological weight on their material; their identity politics were implied through the titles and organization of their collections, rather than openly flaunted. Although there clearly was a connection between the folkloric and political activities of Cos- quin and Puymaigre, they usually avoided the temptation of explicitly linking one to the other. Their belief in ‘‘fidelity to the oral tradition’’ as the cornerstone of their discipline prevented them from dressing up their material for political ends. Even Pinck did not blanch at including

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet138 of 210 anticlerical or French patriot songs. The one exception to this rule was Louis Marin. Louis Marin was the first professional anthropologist to write about his native Lorraine, and one might expect that he would bring a vigor to his studies that was lacking among the amateur folklorists consid- ered here. Indeed, his Contes traditionnels en Lorraine, written immedi- ately after the Second World War, is the one work of Lorraine folk- lore that has become widely known among historians because both Eugen Weber and Edward Shorter have quoted from it.164 Unfortu- nately, Marin presents an object lesson in the dangers of professional- ization. Both when doing his fieldwork (before the First World War) and when he came to write up his notes, he viewed all information through ‘‘bleu-blanc-rouge’’ glasses. His nationalist intentions are evi- dent throughout. His main thesis, that veillées in Lorraine were not pri- marily occasions for amusement or courting but for patriotic educa- tion, is contradicted by every single one of the score or more folklorists and anthropologists who have studied this social institution locally.165 The text is littered with inconsistencies, and where Marin’s assertions canbechecked,theyareoftenwrong.166 Marin, of course, was also an

164 Louis Marin, Les Contes traditionnels en Lorraine: Institutions de transfert des valeurs morales et spirituelles (Paris, 1964). Published posthumously, this work is based on two articles that originally appeared in 1946. 165 For a summary of work that contradicts Marin see Colette Mechin, ‘‘Les Veillées,’’ Le Pays lorrain 58 (1977): 199–205. 166 For example, Marin asserts at one moment that oral memory only went back as far as the eighteenth century but a page later that the hostility of Lorrainers to the division of Charlemagne’s Empire (‘‘notre Empire’’) had been passed on from generation to generation since the Dark Ages (Contes traditionnels, 19–20). Later Marin states that the schoolmaster of his home village (Faulx) had, with the help of locals, included in a report for the minister of education on the occasion of the International Exposition of 1900 ‘‘une moisson prodigieuse’’ of tales, legends, proverbs, and other forms of oral literature (Contes traditionnels, 95). In fact, the schoolmaster wrote precisely the opposite, that no locals knew any interesting local stories, and that to fill in the space he included a couple he had found in the margins of the parish records from previous centuries (‘‘Monographes des communes de Meurthe et Moselle rédigées en 1889 par les instituteurs pour l’exposition de 1900,’’ Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy, MS. 354 [1662]). Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED PROVINCE 681

active politician, the leader of the conservative Fédération républicaine in the interwar years, and infamous for his obsessive nationalism.167 As Herman Lebovics has shown, ‘‘Marin saw his methods of anthropologi- calinquiry...astoolstorenderarchitects’ drawings of conservative moral orders.’’168 He bent his folklore research to his political purposes, and in so doing transgressed ‘‘the limits of historical invention.’’ It may be the unwillingness of the other Lorrainer folklorists to in- vent that limited their appeal. Had they manufactured a national epic of independence like the Kalevala, it might have helped them achieve their wider political objectives by convincing their fellow inhabitants that Lorrainer folk culture constituted a distinctive identity. But the

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet139 of 210 effort to popularize their subject could have resulted in compromis- ing their scholarly standards, which most proved reluctant to do. Cos- quin and Puymaigre published their folklore in academic (sometimes foreign-language) journals, which were unlikely to have a large reader- ship in Lorraine. Even those folklorists, like Sadoul and Pinck, who did try and reach a broader public, imposed strict discipline on their use of the material. Pinck, for example, avoided the well-stocked genre of ‘‘Heimatlieder’’ when compiling his collection. These songs answered his political intentions very well, but they did not fit his other criteria. Thus his collection cannot help but highlight the historic and cultural divisions within the region, rather than reconcile them. Unlike Alsace, therefore, where large-scale opposition to both German and French governments was organized around a sense of local identity, regional culture never became a major political issue for Lorraine as a whole.169 Although they had some influence with a succession of mainly right- wing or nationalist politicians from Lorraine, the folklorists never suffi- ciently roused the majority of Lorrainers to line up behind a regionalist political agenda. Even in germanophone Lorraine the interwar autono- mist movement received little support, compared with Alsace. Region- alists argued that Lorraine existed because it possessed ‘‘une âme com- mune faite à la fois des souvenirs collectifs d’un long passé de joies ou de douleurs, et d’une communauté toujours actuelle d’idées, d’habitudes, d’intérêts,’’ but they proved unable to communicate this awareness to the broader public, or at least without at the same time focusing atten- tion on the issues that divided them, such as language, religion, poli- tics, history.170 The warnings of Sadoul and others that the assimilation

167 For details of Marin’s political career see William D. Irvine, French in Crisis: The Republican Federation of France in the 1930s (Baton Rouge, La., 1979), 7–11. 168 Lebovics, True France,27. 169 Wilkinson, ‘‘Uses of Popular Culture in Alsace,’’ 605–19. 170 L. Bardedette, ‘‘Lorraine ou Comté?’’ Le Pays lorrain 17 (1925): 123. Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103 682 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

of regional culture would lead to a dull, national mediocrity were not heeded. When the region was finally reborn, in 1982, it owed its ori- gin not to concerns about traditional culture but rather to a left-wing government influenced by the experience of decolonization. It is prob- able that the folklorists considered in this article would have felt this wastoolatetopreservetheâme commune that was their justification for regionalist politics. 6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet140 of 210 Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103