“Repairing an injustice”. Two Lorraine town halls want to recover the 2,000 hectares of forests allocated by Germany in 1871 to an Alsatian commune. A loss of income for these villages which are struggling with budgetary difficulties.
On the edge of a Vosges forest path, two discreet markers, eroded by time. One is engraved with a “D”, for “Deutschland”. Vestiges of a bygone time, they marked the border between the empire of William I and the France of Napoleon III, defeated in 1871 by its eastern neighbor who then annexed Alsace and part of Lorraine.
The old Franco-German border
With a gesture, Denis Henry points to the vast forest behind the German boundary marker. “These are the woods that belonged to us a century and a half ago,” breathes the mayor of Raon-sur-Plaine, a town of 150 inhabitants in the Vosges.
With Etienne Meire, his counterpart from Raon-lès-Leau, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, an even more modest neighboring village (around forty inhabitants), the 69-year-old councilor has been trying for years to recover what he calls “our lost forests”. Because in this corner of the Vosges massif, on the borders of Lorraine and Alsace, part of the local history remained frozen in 1871, in an never-modified article of the Treaty of Frankfurt.
After six months of conflict, the text attributes Alsace and part of Lorraine to the young Reich, into which the two Raons were then reluctantly integrated: through acts of defiance, a few months later they wrested their return to the French fold.
“Memory” and financial issue
But their forests (around 1,200 hectares for Raon-lès-Leau, a little over 700 for Raon-sur-Plaine), strategic for the Germans because on the ridges, remain German and are attached to Grandfontaine. The town of this Bas-Rhin commune is located on the other side of the Col du Donon, in Alsace then annexed. It will become French again after 1918, following the German defeat in the First World War.
The Treaty of Versailles should have recorded, a year later, the retrocession of the forests, believes Etienne Meire. But “there has never been restitution,” laments the ebullient elected official, who has been working on this issue for more than 20 years and holds the French State “entirely” responsible for this situation.
For the city councilors, recovering these forests certainly has a “memorial” aspect, not forgetting the resistance of the inhabitants 150 years ago. But the issue is also budgetary: these state-owned forests belong to the State and are sources of tax revenue, such as the tax on undeveloped land.
A “gruesome” situation
A tax precisely collected by Grandfontaine, 400 inhabitants, which, each year, receives “around 70,000 euros” for a total of “3,500 hectares”, explains Philippe Remy, mayor since 2008. It is not a question of depriving Grandfontaine of a fiscal resource, tempers Etienne Meire, but “our budgets are extremely limited” and subsidies “increasingly difficult” to obtain.
And this situation slows down, according to him, the development of rural communities like the two Raons for which the return of forests and the related tax benefits – which the mayors do not precisely evaluate – would bring a breath of fresh air. After years of pulling political levers in vain, the two elected officials this week requested a public inquiry from the prefectures of Vosges, Meurthe-et-Moselle and Bas-Rhin. Asked by AFP, they did not respond.
“We need a peaceful debate,” explains the lawyer for the Lorraine villages, Me Antoine Loctin. They were “spoliated”, believes the council, judging the situation of these “forest communities without forests” to be “ubiquitous”.
“Prescription”
If they do not succeed at the end of the investigation, the two elected officials plan to demand from the State the payment each year of compensation equal to what their municipalities should receive. An approach that Philippe Remy observes with skepticism: “I put myself in their place but 150 years later, I find that there is a prescription”.
“We did not choose to be German (in 1871), it was imposed on us! », Again reminds the mayor of Grandfontaine. According to him, other municipalities located along the route of the old border, from the Moselle to the Territoire de Belfort, are in the same situation and could therefore demand similar restitutions. Proving both Raons right would then amount to opening Pandora’s box, fears the chosen one. And “set a precedent”?