THE ARMISTICE THAT ENDED the First World War in November 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles that followed it mandated the occupation by Allied troops of all German territories west of the river Rhine. The British Army of the Rhine occupied a zone around Cologne, and the Belgian forces occupied a zone around Aachen. The French Army of the Rhine took control of a large zone stretching all along the west bank of the Rhine, roughly from Bonn in the north up to and including the region of the Pfalz (the so-called Bavarian Palatinate) in the south. Administrative responsibility for the whole of the Rhineland occupied by the Allies (of which the Pfalz was only a part) was vested in the Interallied Rhineland High Commission (IRKO) that drew up a Rhineland Agreement as a supplementary document to the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies agreed to a passive occupation of the Rhineland for a maximum period of fifteen years. (As it happened, however, French occupation of the Rhineland only lasted until the end of 1930.)

By April 1919, the French occupying troops in the Rhineland numbered 367,000. During the early months of 1919, German concern about the situation on the Rhine increased. Throughout the sittings of the Armistice Commission, and during the drafting of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, France was hard at work to anchor in the treaty the separation of the Rhineland from Germany in order to create a buffer state that would protect France from future wars. Since the outbreak of the First World War, the Rhine border had been at the center of French war aims. After the war, French military authorities employed all means at their disposal to manufacture evidence that those living on the left bank of the Rhine were not real Germans but “celtes, commes nous” (Celts like us), as one French proclamation phrased it, in the hope that the inhabitants of the French occupied Rhineland (of which the Pfalz was a part) would voluntarily turn toward France. According to a report by Paul Jacquot, a major in the French Eighth Army, the aim of General Gérard, Commander of the French Occupation Force in the Pfalz, was to promote sympathy for France and to encourage separatist freedom movements among the population.