Territoire de Belfort

The Territoire de Belfort is a department in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region, eastern France. It had a population of 141,318 in 2019. History The administrative district Territoire de Belfort was created under the terms of the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt. The German Empire annexed almost all of Alsace, but the French were able to negotiate retention of the Territoire de Belfort which thereby was separated from the rest of Alsace (where it had been part of the department of Haut-Rhin). There were three principal reasons for this exceptional treatment: The population in and around Belfort was French-speaking. Belfort had demonstrated heroic resistance, under Colonel Pierre Denfert-Rochereau, to the German invasion. Belfort's left-wing Catholic Deputy Émile Keller now conducted a similarly forceful political campaign in the National Assembly. He argued that ceding heroic Belfort to Germany after the war would be unthinkable. Since Belfort is situated in a relatively flat passage between the Vosges and Jura mountain ranges (known as the Belfort Gap), the Germans agreed to leave the city in France, because the Prussian military officers indicated that this strategy would give Germany a more defensible border. After retaining its unique status as a for just over half a century, Belfort was officially recognized as France's 90th department in 1922. France had recovered Alsace three years earlier, but the decision was taken not to reintegrate Belfort into its former department. There was talk of giving it a new departmental name, with suggestions that included "Savoureuse" (after the main river of the new department) or "Mont-Terrible" (the name of a former Napoleonic department embracing parts of Switzerland), but there was no consensus for a name change and the department continues to be known as the Territoire de Belfort.