Their regional capitals were, respectively, Aachen , Koblenz and Essen. The Rhenish Republic is best understood as the aspiration of a poorly focused liberation struggle. The objectives of the many different separatist groups ranged widely, from the foundation of an autonomous republic to some sort of change in the status of the Rhineland within the Weimar Republic. Others advocated full integration of the Rhineland into France. Rhenish separatism in the s should be seen in the context of resentments fostered by economic hardship and the military occupation to which the previously prosperous region was subjected.
After , blame for defeat in the First World War was apportioned to amongst others the military or simply the French. France, like Germany, had been profoundly traumatised by the First World War and the conduct of its occupation of the left bank of the Rhine was perceived as unsympathetic, even among its Western wartime allies. Increasingly, however, blame was directed against the German government itself, in far-off Berlin. By , as the German currency collapsed , the French occupation forces headquartered at Mainz under the command of Generals Mangin and Fayolle were having some success in their encouragement of anti-Berlin separatism in the occupied zones.
After , economic hardship slowly began to ease and a measure of brittle stability returned to Germany under the Weimar State. The appeal of Rhenish separatism, never a mass movement, was damaged by the violence employed by many of its more desperate supporters.
The political temperature cooled after the French occupation of the Ruhr attracted increasingly strident criticism from Britain and the United States. Following the Dawes Plan in September , an agreement to lower Germany's war reparations payments, the French vacated the Ruhr in the summer of The end of the Rhenish Republic can be dated at December , when its leading instigator, Hans Adam Dorten β , was obliged to flee to Nice. By , when French troops also vacated the left bank of the Rhine, the concept of a Rhenish Republic, independent of Berlin, no longer attracted popular support.
The Cisrhenian Republic β and subsequent incorporation of the region into the French Empire lasted for less than a generation, but introduced to the occupied Rhineland many of the features of the modern state.
