How did France convince the people of Alsace–Lorraine that they're French despite them being German speakers?

>German speakers
They speak german so much that the Germans themselves had to force them to learn it when they occupied the region. They didn't like it.

There are laws written during the annexation that are still in force today and the German texts have legal precedent over their French translations which technically violates France's principle of French being the legal language of the Republic (which incidentally also is France's oldest law that is still in force).

My Alsatian ancestors were bilingual.

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they didn't speak standard german btw. No one really did in 1870. They spoke alsatian which is an upper german dialect

>be from Alsace-Lorraine
>live under French rule
>all is well, you're treated like any other French citizen
>live under German rule
>you're now a second class citizen who's region has more or less the same rank as a colony and who's sole purpose is shielding south Germany from a potential French invasion
>most germans don't even consider you to be proper germans and look down at you
>can't speak French in public when you were free to speak German before
>also your textile industry gets fucked because you have the audacity to outperform the entirety of Germany in that domain
I really wonder how we did it

>be anglo mutt
>have no culture
>think that language defines your culture
lmeo

They spoke Alsatian, a far Western "dialect" (but no less legitimate than today's English or High German). The Nazis were bad for that area too, which pushed the people closer to Paris patriotically speaking. Also, the state of France has been linguistically pushing for all-French for many decades, for everyone in the Métropole
Note, they were one of the Holy Roman Empire's principalities for nearly 800 years (842 to 1639) but that matters less than the events of the last 200 years

culture is not cakes and old buildings
t. country without government (based)

simmer down half-cast, britain literally created belgium

Kek this. And then in WW2 Germans conscripted 300000 Alsatians to die on the Eastern Front.

from my experience, people in Lorraine consider themselves French, but Alsaciens consider themselves German

Different religion and culture, with 5 decades of abuse by the German Kaiser. They even have their own version of "nigger" that the german state banned because it upset the locals too much

Alsatians are getting economically annexed by Germany.

You won't believe the amount of Alsatian bitches I ran into in Paris that complained about not being able to shop at DM anymore.

"Ever" is a pretty long time...

make a good offer and we'll hand them to you

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I hate Wilhelm 2 so god damn much it's unreal, anybody simping for imperial Germany is retarded

Of the last 2 times we held the territory, the first we pretty much treated them like a colony instead of a real part of the empire (they didn't have their own kingdom like Saxony or Bavaria, instead they were a "Reichsland", the personal property of the emperor), and completely fucked their economy by killing their textile industry, and the second time was the Nazis, which they also wanted to distance themselves from after the war. Also the french government provides zero services like most importantly schools in alsatian or German, only french, and throughout the last 200 years I would be surprised if there had not been any explicit attempts by Paris to make the people there french, like they did with all the other minorities