Left Bank of the Rhine

The Left Bank of the Rhine (German: Linkes Rheinufer, French: Rive gauche du Rhin) was the region north of Lauterbourg to the west of present Germany that was conquered during the War of the First Coalition and annexed by France. Because the attempt to create a Cisrhenian Republic foundered, the territories west of the Rhine were reorganized into several départements among the French first republic . After the allied victory over Napoleon in 1814 these territories were provisionally administered by the Central Administrative Departement (Zentralverwaltungsdepartement). The Sarre province and the district of Landau in der Pfalz previously French before the Napoleonic wars were under the definitive act of the congress of Vienna ceded to the members of the coalition. The recent annexations done under the first republic were restituted. From these territories the Bavarian Circle of the Rhine (Rheinkreis) and the Hessian province of Rhenish Hesse (Rheinhessen) were formed in 1816. The regions to the north went to Prussia and were initially part of the two provinces of Jülich-Cleves-Berg and the Grand Duchy of the Lower Rhine, from which the Rhine Province emerged in 1822. The southern left Rhine territories, which had for centuries been under imperial rule in the Holy Roman Empire had been seized by France mostly in the 17th century, were annexed to the new German empire in 1871, following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The region was consolidated as the Imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine for a period of 48 years (1871-1919), before being restituted to France in the wake of the First World War.

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