The story of the very short-lived Rhineland Republic is a confusing and often contradictory one. The proponents of a separate German republic on the Rhine often clashed with German right-wing nationalists and Rhinelanders who wanted the Rhineland to be one of the new federal Länder. This volatile confusion was in no small measure due to the intersection of international and German domestic politics in this region.

The main partisans of a secession were the French occupation authorities and a group of Rhennish activists centered the lawyer Hans Adam Dorten. In the case of the French, General Mangin argued that a separate Rhineland would act as a buffer zone against German revanchism and its weakness would mean it would soon emerge as a French ally. This was in keeping with French policies of supporting the smaller successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland, the so-called Little Entente. Furthermore, the advent of the Soviet Union and the Russian Civil War had eliminated one of France's principle allies on the continent, therefore French policymakers sought to seek a new source to bring balance for French interests against Germany. In a 1919 memorandum, the French government argued that a French-allied Rhineland would make the Little Entente viable as it would prevent Germany from destroying the new states of the East while France was caught up trying to pass the Rhine River.

The rationale of Dorten and his supporters for a Rhenish republic was a bit more nebulous. One animating factor was that fearing a Carthaginian peace and imminent French military occupation, an independent republic would spare the Rhineland this fate. Confessional politics also played a role, as the predominantly Catholic Rhineland had long memories of the Prussian-led Kulturkampf against political Catholicism and a breakaway republic would undo what some Catholic Germans saw was an unholy union between Protestant and Catholic Germany that began after the Congress of Vienna and culminated in Bismarck's 1871 Reich. And Rhenish particularism was also at play; the Rhineland's political elites had never been particularly close to Prussia and this Rhenish political culture often chafed at being part of the Prussian state. The disordered situation of 1919-1923 allowed all of these sentiments to come to the fore.

The problem for both the French and Dorten's party was that the majority of Rhinelanders did not favor secession, but were divided on the future state of the region. Adenauer in this regard was very typical. As mayor of Cologne, he had to deal with both the French and Dorten, but he never openly pushed for a separate republic. Instead, he played a circumspect game in which he held out the tantalizing prospect of his support for a Rhineland Republic, but never gave it. This was likely to further his own aim of creating an enlarged Westphalian Land that would be an integral component of the newly formed Weimar Republic. This may have been Dorten's endgame as well, declaring an independent republic and then appealing for the republic to join with the German state with concessions to Rhenish autonomy.

France's allies did not look upon the creation of a separate French state very fondly either. Both Wilson and Lloyd George saw the French initiative as overstepping the peace settlement being hashed out at Versailles and something that would inflame German opinion. The French response to this was to simultaneously push Dorten to declare independence, but also to push compromise measures on their Anglo-American allies, such as a fifteen-year occupation and demilitarization of the region. This fatally compromised the position of Dorten as it appeared to many Germans he was serving French interests, but it also meant that the French were not willing to back him to the hilt. French politicking for an independent Rhineland also ensured that many Europeans would perceive any declaration of independence not as a grassroots movement, but rather a ploy by the French to meet French security means by methods other than those established by the Versailles settlement and the League of Nations.

The immediate legacy of the Rhineland Republic on Germany was almost imperceptible. Dorten declared a republic for a second time in 1923, but such an entity had little support beyond a narrow circle. What this irridentism did accomplish is that it compromised any attempts to have a radical restructuring of the Weimar Republic's federal Länder and the Rhineland would remain part of the Prussian Land. The issue of territorial integrity became one of the lodestones in early Weimar Republic politics and precluded any radical restructuring of Germany's internal boundaries because doing so would appear to be caving in to foreign interests. With the exception of a few minor principalities which became Thuringia and ceded territories, the boundaries of the Republican Länder were much the same as they had been under the Kaiserreich and the Rhineland continued to be administratively part of Prussia. The charge of French collaboration tarred Adenauer's career in the interwar period. But in the final estimation, Adenauer's position did triumph. The Rhineland emerged as an enlarged Land in the FRG along much the lines Adenauer proposed in the early 1920s. The period also saw the articulation of his political view that German territorial integrity and sovereignty were sacrosanct, but that the influence of Prussia and its militarism had prevented Germany from properly assuming a leading role in Western Europe. These ideas would become the cornerstones of Adenauer's vision for Germany postwar and one of the bedrocks of political culture in the early Federal Republic.

Sources

Collar, Peter. The Propaganda War in the Rhineland: Weimar Germany, Race and Occupation After World War I. London: I. B. Taurus, 2013.

Irving, R. E. M. Adenauer. London: Longman, 2002.

Wandycz, Piotr Stefan. France and Her Eastern Allies, 1919-1925; French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from the Paris Peace Conference to Locarno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.