5 - The Battle over Sovereignty in Kleeburg

Summary

By now it is clear how France developed and effected sovereignty throughout Alsace by co-opting seigneurial lords and administrations, thereby turning their legitimacy to royal benefit. Sovereignty in eighteenth-century Europe could mean many things, especially in the large if vague space between claim and reality. Nowhere were these ambiguities more obvious than in the contested borderlands of northern Alsace after 1648. If the County of Rappoltstein provided the classic example of virtually uncontested French control, and Bischwiller the most exceptional case, French sovereignty was not in doubt in either by the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714. In these and the other Alsatian territories already discussed, the king of France and the duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken respected each other's sovereignty and territorial superiority by mutual necessity. That was not everywhere the case.

Unlike the situation in the territories where king and duke had worked out a modus operandi, the Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken continued with some success to contest French claims of sovereignty in the Vogtei or Amt Kleeburg, which encompassed a collection of a dozen or so settlements centered on a larger village of the same name (Cleebourg). This chapter analyzes the legal skirmishes from 1732 through 1766 between France and the Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken for sovereignty over Kleeburg. It examines the experience of a territory the dukes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken had refused to submit to French sovereignty. It describes France's slow, troubled, yet eventually successful campaign to acquire Kleeburg as well as the costs of realizing its claims. At the same time, it demonstrates the essential role seigneurial legitimacy continued to play both in resisting and in buttressing French sovereignty.

France had included Kleeburg in the réunions but returned it and other palatine territories to their rulers and the empire following the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. However, it resumed its claims to sovereignty in Kleeburg soon thereafter, grounding them on historic feudal jurisdictions and arguments about just where Alsace's true borders lay. Long after the monarchy had abandoned warfare as the primary means of expansion in the region, this small territory remained outside its sphere of sovereignty. It formed a stumbling block, an irritating enclave within French territory.