French–German enmity

Germany lay farther from the Roman domain and was well-protected by the strong natural barriers of the Alps, the Rhine and Danube rivers, and the dense forests.

Its northern Lotharingia part on both sides of the language border became a bone of contention between the western and eastern kingdoms that developed into the modern nations of France and Germany.

In 1477, the Habsburg archduke Maximilian I of Austria, son of Emperor Frederick III, married Mary the Rich, the only child of the Burgundian duke Charles the Bold.

His ancestors of the French House of Valois-Burgundy over the centuries had acquired a collection of territories on both sides of the border of France with the Holy Roman Empire.

[2][3] Upon the duke's death, King Louis XI of France attempted to seize his heritage as reverted fiefs but was defeated by Maximilian at Battle of Guinegate (1479), who by the 1493 Treaty of Senlis annexed the Burgundian territories, including Flanders as well as French-speaking Artois and asserted the possession of the County of Burgundy (Franche-Comté).

The Thirty Years War (1618–1648), was a complex conflict that took place in and around the Holy Roman empire, with religious, structural, and dynastic causes.

The Vatican initiated a so-called Holy League against the "hereditary enemy" of Christian Europe ("Erbfeind christlichen Namens").

The attempt to conquer large parts of southern Germany ultimately failed, when German troops were withdrawn from the Ottoman border and moved to the region.

However, following a scorched earth policy that caused a large public outcry at the time, French troops, under notorious General Ezéchiel du Mas, Comte de Mélac, devastated large parts of the Palatinate, Baden and Württemberg burning down and levelling numerous cities and towns in southern Germany.

In the course of the Seven Years' War and in view of the rising Kingdom of Prussia, which had concluded the neutrality Treaty of Westminster with Great Britain, France under Louis XV realigned their foreign policy.

The Diplomatic Revolution as an alliance between France, the Habsburg Empire and Russia manifested in 1756 in the Treaty of Versailles and the following Seven Years' War against Prussia and Great Britain.

The French war against Prussia was justified through its role as guarantor of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and France was fighting on the side of the majority of German states, including Habsburg Austria.

It led politicians (such as Stein and Hardenberg) to reform Prussia in order to adapt their country to the new world brought about by the French Revolution.

The Napoleonic Wars, often fought in Germany and with Germans on both sides, as in the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, also marked the beginning of what was explicitly called French–German hereditary enmity.

The German nationalist movement believed that a united Germany (even without Austria) would replace France as the dominant land power in Western Europe.

Finally, the Treaty of Frankfurt, reached after a lengthy siege of Paris forced France to cede the Alsace-Lorraine territory (consisting of most of Alsace and a quarter of Lorraine), of which most of the inhabitants spoke German dialects.

[7] The desire for revenge (esprit de revanche) against Germany, and demands for the recovery of the "lost provinces" of Alsace and Lorraine was often heard in the 1870s.

[13][14] The Allied victory in 1918 saw France seize back Alsace-Lorraine and briefly resume its old position as the leading land power on the European continent.

In the end, the Americans and the British forced them to settle for a promise that the Rhineland would be demilitarized, and that heavy German reparation payments would be levied.

[15] On the remote eastern end of the German Empire, the Memel territory was separated from the rest of East Prussia and occupied by France before being annexed by Lithuania.

[16] In the words of the American historian Daniel Becker, the campaign against the "Black Horror on the Rhine" centered "tales of sexual violence against German, bourgeois, white women that often bordered on the pornographic" and the campaign against the "Black Horror" by various German authors and associated international sympathizers "unleashed a rhetoric of violence, and radical nationalism that, as some scholars have argued, laid the groundwork for widespread support for the various racial projects of the Nazi regime.

Meanwhile, France in the 1930s was tired, politically divided, and above all dreaded another war, which the French feared would again be fought on their soil for the third time, and again destroy a large percentage of their young men.

France's stagnant population meant that it would find it difficult to withhold the sheer force of numbers of a German invasion; it was estimated Germany could put two men of fighting age in the field for every French soldier.

To support the invasion of Normandy of 1944, various groups increased their sabotage and guerrilla attacks; organizations such as the Maquis derailed trains, blew up ammunition depots, and ambushed Germans, for instance at Tulle.

The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich came under constant attack and sabotage on their way across the country to Normandy, suspected the village of Oradour-sur-Glane of harboring terrorists, arms and explosives, and wiped out the population in retaliation.

[17][18][19][20][21] When Allied forces liberated Normandy and Provence in August 1944, a victorious rebellion emerged in occupied Paris and national rejoicing broke out, as did a maelstrom of hatred directed at French people who had collaborated with the Germans.