However, his relations with the Germans were problematic. Within his own family he spoke French. He stayed faithful to his fellow Alsatians for whom he did not cease to defend energetically their interests against the imperial administration . At this time he earned the nickname "the Sundgau Lion" (als: "D’r sundgauer Leeb"). He even refused the "Roter Adlerorden" from the imperial government. Before war broke out, he tirelessly worked for the preservation of peace and, in 1913 and 1914, went with Abbot Haegy to the interparliamentary peace conferences of Berne and Basel where he met again other active pacifists like Jean Jaurès. During the war, he was charged and transferred to northern France because he strenuously defended his friend "Médard Brogly" who had been accused of being francophile by a German military court. At the end of the war, he saw that the full autonomy granted by the Germans in 1918 had arrived too late and, on the abdication of the Kaiser, formed the "Nationalrat" ("National Council") to try to save Alsatian political gains by means of negotiation with the French. He took the initiative and convened the council on 12 November 1918. Elected president of the "Nationalrat", he proposed to the French authorities that they accept an agreement guaranteeing those Alsatian rights he knew were threatened by French Jacobinism. But the winds had changed and, with it, many coats within the veterans of the "Landtag". He found himself in a minority, and a major part of the "Zentrum" parliamentarians, with the Social Democrats, didn't want to provoke France and opted to rely on the promises of the French generals such as Joffre. The "Nationalrat" became the National Council for Alsace-Lorraine shortly before its abolition. For the rest of his life, Ricklin reproached the other "Nationalrat" members for having acted too late to preserve Alsatian autonomy. With the arrival of the French on November 22, 1918, Ricklin knew he would face challenges. It was certain that they considered him as the man to be most feared in Alsace. So, they tried by all means to eliminate him from the political scene so as to give themselves a free hand in their policy of francization, which had already been prepared in Paris during the war years. They also tried to prevent him playing a role in the reconstruction of the "Zentrumspartei Elsass-Lothringen" for which debates began in February 1919.