Concept

Moselle (department)

Summary
Moselle (mɔzɛl) is the most populous department in Lorraine, in the northeast of France, and is named after the river Moselle, a tributary of the Rhine, which flows through the western part of the department. It had a population of 1,046,543 in 2019. Inhabitants of the department are known as Mosellans. On 4 March 1790 Moselle became one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution. In 1793, France annexed the enclaves of Manderen, Momerstroff, and the County of Kriechingen – all possessions of princes of the Duchy of Luxemburg – a state of the Holy Roman Empire, and incorporated them into the Moselle department. In 1795, the seigneurie de Lixing was also integrated into the Moselle department. One of its first prefects was the comte de Vaublanc, from 1805 to 1814. By the Treaty of Paris of 1814 following the first defeat and abdication of Napoleon, France had to surrender almost all the territory it had conquered since 1792. In northeastern France, the Treaty did not restore the 1792 borders, however, but defined a new frontier to put an end to the convoluted nature of the border, with all its enclaves and exclaves. As a result, France ceded the exclave of Tholey (now in Saarland, Germany) as well as a few communes near Sierck-les-Bains (both territories until then part of the Moselle department) to Austria. On the other hand, the Treaty confirmed the French annexations of 1793, and furthermore, the south of the Napoleonic department of Sarre was ceded to France, including the town of Lebach, the city of Saarbrücken, and the rich coal basin nearby. France thus became a net beneficiary of the Treaty of Paris: all the new territories ceded to her being far larger and more strategically useful than the few territories ceded to Austria. All these new territories were incorporated into the Moselle department, and giving Moselle a larger area than it had had since 1790. However, with the return of Napoleon (March 1815) and his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (June 1815), the Treaty of Paris in November 1815 imposed much harsher conditions on France.
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