Alsace-Lorraine, which were part of Germany for 48 years, in accordance with the Preliminaries of Peace signed at Versailles on 26 February 1871, and the Treaty of Frankfurt of 10 May 1871, returned under French sovereignty without a plebiscite as a precondition to armistice (i.e. and therefore not as a clause of the Treaty of Versailles) with effect from the date of the armistice (11 November 1918), ( 14522 sqkm , 1,815,000 inhabitants (1905)).