Those of you who read my most recent prospectus (BRDGT: get used to writing these over and over and over ...) would not my repeated use of "border" and "periphery". These words are useful in talking about the Rhine regions, not just because they are geographically descriptive, but because they set up a expectation about the Rhine that I can use to my advantage. These words suggest displacement, poverty, powerlessness, indeterminacy, and confrontation. With respect to the Rhine, displacement, poverty and powerlessness do not quite apply. Or rather, the people struggle to overcome them and succeed. By using the words, I can use my favorite narrative mode (screw you, Hayden White) to set up expectations and knock them down.

This weekend I worked on organizing my description of urban politics in the Old Regime. For the most part, the Rhenish cities fell into the "hometown" mode described by Mack Walker. I also describe a number of cities--Cologne, Aachen, Dusseldorf, Mainz, Colmar, Strasbourg, and Mulhouse--so that the reader gets a sense of the variety of these cities as well as their dedication to commerce.

However, I came upon a problem: what to about Metz and Lorraine (more specifically, the French Moselle)? The notion of Alsace-Lorraine is deeply ingrained into the brains of most historians: it partially explains the tension between France and Germany. However, Alsace- Lorraine was a modern German invention, not a natural unity between the two, and never included all of Lorraine. If I start out my dissertation in 1815, it is difficult to argue that the city of Metz and its hinterland were part of Alsace. At the time Metz was a military town in decline. It competed with neighboring Nancy for resources, and Nancy was winning out. It supported a weak population of German speakers who were traded with neighboring Saar and who were increasingly isolated (many Americans who claim German descent actually come from the French Moselle, not Germany). According to Braudel, Metz relationship with Alsace has been functional: it is a double border, a place to garrison against Germany if Alsace betrayed France. It produced few men of stature: Raymond and Henri Poincare come to mind, a general and a mathematician, but no writers. It produced a few second-tier bureaucrats. It housed nobles on vacation. It traded little with Alsace, and with Germany only within a small area that was quite poor. It shared little of what made life in the Rhine so vibrant: its patricians were weak, displaced by a transplanted aristocracy, and they cared little for commerce or for industry. And they seemed content with having no role in national political life. After annexation, the Reich invested heavily in the city, but many French citizens left, and those who took up their place were German military men. Furthermore, it competed with Strasbourg, putting it under that city. After 1870, it makes sense to call Metz part of the Rhine because of the connection of Alsace-Lorraine. In modern times, Metz is caught between Strasbourg and Nancy, struggling to keep its resources (and doing well, at least against Nancy).

But how can Metz be handled in the long term? One possibility is to consider Metz as something unusual, the periphery of a border (or the border of a periphery), something hellishly displaced. It is the entry to a poor, displaced part of Germany or the portal to a renegade part of France. It is a smaller model of what Strasbourg is: a French city in relationship with a part of Germany, only without the wealth). Still, it is one of France's largest cities (though it has few).