France–Germany border

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,627 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Frontière entre l'Allemagne et la France]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Frontière entre l'Allemagne et la France}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,064 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Grenze zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Grenze zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

France–Germany border
View of Offenburg looking west, with the Vosges (Mont Donon) in the background
Characteristics
Entities	France  Germany
Length	450 km (280 mi)

The border between the modern states of France and Germany has a length of 450 km (280 mi). The southern portion of the border, between Saint-Louis at the border with Switzerland and Lauterbourg, follows the River Rhine (Upper Rhine) in a south-to-north direction through the Upper Rhine Plain. The border then turns westward until it reaches the tripoint between France, Germany and Luxembourg.

The Franco-German border can be traced back to the 17th century, and the various treaties following the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), starting with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the Treaty of Nijmegen (1678–1679), marking the Rhine as the frontier between the Kingdom of France, and the different German states. The actual border was determined in the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The border then changed after the French defeat during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), where the French Third Republic was forced to yield Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire in 1871. The territory was then returned to France 48 years later after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The border changed again in 1941 when Nazi Germany de facto annexed the region (without international legal recognition, or treaty). The current border was re-established after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

In 2019, German authorities instituted extended border checks. These checks resulted in 178 people who had been banned from entering Germany being denied entry. 1,177 people on the wanted list were arrested, there were 1,235 breaches of residency laws, 406 breaches against narcotics laws, 205 breaches of weapons laws, 47 cases of falsified documents, and 19 people with extremist backgrounds were hindered from entering Germany. Most of these were along the borders to France and Austria.^[1]

The border follows the Upper Rhine from the tripoint (Dreiländereck) with the French-Swiss and the German-Swiss borders at Basel (47°35′24″N 7°35′20″E / 47.590°N 7.589°E / 47.590; 7.589), passing between Strasbourg and Offenburg. The Rhine forms the eastern border of Alsace on the French side and the western border of Baden-Württemberg on the German side.

Upstream of Karlsruhe (48°58′01″N 8°14′02″E / 48.967°N 8.234°E / 48.967; 8.234), the border leaves the Rhine, cutting westward to forming the northern border of Alsace and Lorraine on the French side, and the southern border of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland on the German side. It passes Saarbrücken, Petite-Rosselle, Freyming-Merlebach, Creutzwald (where it follows the Bist for a short stretch), Überherrn, and meets the E29 before it terminates at the French-Luxembourgian-German tripoint on the Moselle, near the village of Schengen, Luxembourg (49°27′36″N 6°22′08″E / 49.460°N 6.369°E / 49.460; 6.369; chosen as the symbolic site for the signing of the Schengen Agreement between France, Germany, and the Benelux countries in 1985).

• Territorial evolution of Germany
• Territorial evolution of France
• France–Germany relations
• Rhine crisis
• Die Wacht am Rhein