World Business: Battle Line–1965

For three-quarters of a century, through three wars and the twilight years of peace, tiny Alsace was a depressed no-man’s land between the guns of France and Germany. The province changed flags four times between 1871 and 1945. As more than 400,000 Alsatians left, the grey turrets of the Maginot Line became the chief landmark. Forgotten was the fact that for most of the 19th century Alsace had been one of the world’s most industrialized areas.

An Alsatian firm, in fact, built the locomotives for France’s first railway.

Now Alsace is booming once again, its strategic location near major German population centers at last an advantage rather than a threat. Sleek high-rise apartments tower over half-timbered villages. Factory smokestacks loom above the countryside, famed for its dry Sylvaner and Riesling wines. Oil refineries have risen near the Gothic spire of Strasbourg’s famed cathedral, and the Rhine port now serves as the Central European distribution center for the big South European pipeline from the Mediterranean. Since Alsatian resurgence began, 220 new plants have been set up, doubling sales of the province’s industries to $1.6 billion in ten years. Last week the Alsatian Regional Development Organization announced that industrial production has reached an alltime high, fully 45% above the base year of 1959.

Center Point for 170 Million. The key to Alsatian prosperity is, of course, the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which set up the Common Market and removed a Maginot Line of trade barriers that sat between France and its neighbors. French firms, actually encouraged by the government to stay away from the danger zone between the wars, began to discover the province and its opportunities: ample land and labor force, the broad highway of the Rhine, convenient location.

Rhone Poulenc has built a new chemical plant near Ottmarsheim, Peugeot a transmission works at He Napoleon, Hispano-Suiza a factory for aircraft components at Molsheim. Franco-Canadian Polymer is making synthetic rubber near the Strasbourg refineries; three other chemical companies have bought sites near by. All this activity has made Strasbourg, 250 miles from salt water, France’s biggest port for exports. “Alsace,” says Albert Auberger, president of the Strasbourg Port Authority, “is the center of a vast market of 170 million consumers—the keystone of the great arch connecting the North Sea and the Mediterranean.”

The True Europeans. Alsace’s strongest push has come not from the French but from foreign companies that want to locate in the heart of the world’s second-biggest market. More than a third of Alsace’s new plants are either wholly or partially owned by Germans; the Swiss have 15 plants, the Americans 8. German-owned Triumph employs 800 people at a corset and girdle factory in Strasbourg; other German companies are busy making shoes, office equipment, and engineering and precision instruments. America’s Timken Roller-Bearing has built the largest foreign-owned plant (1,000 employees) at Colmar; Remington Rand employs 311 persons to produce electric shavers at Huttenheim; Minoc, a subsidiary of Rohm & Haas, makes ion exchangers at Lauterbourg. Wrigley will enter Alsace next year, turn out three brands of chewing gum at a new $4 million plant near Colmar. Near the Swiss border, Swiss-owned companies have put up plants to make drugs, soups, elevators and caffeine-less coffee.

More than any other businessmen in Europe, Alsatian businessmen know that their prosperity is hinged to European unity, give Charles de Gaulle’s attempt to disrupt the Common Market no support. Says Jean Wenger-Valentin, president of the Industrial Credit Bank of Alsace and Lorraine: “We are all true Europeans here.” Amid all the bustle and renewal, one ancient Alsatian industry has survived almost unchanged: sturdy farm hands still hand stuff the gullets of Strasbourg’s shiny geese, which produce Europe’s best pate de foie gras.