At the outbreak of the French Revolution neither Alsace nor Lorraine possessed a clearly defined frontier toward the north. In each case the boundary had arisen historically, without any large measures of readjustment or delimitation, in a region of minute subdivisions and overlapping claims; and the result was a tortuous, broken line, with enclaves on either side, which defied geographical and administrative convenience. At certain points the limits of sovereignty were in dispute, and the boundary cannot everywhere be defined with certainty. In Alsace, beyond the present limit of the river Lauter, lay the enclave of Landau, an old Alsatian city which had passed to France in 1648, while the intervening territory obeyed the bishop of Speier, the duke of Zweibrücken, or the Elector Palatine. To the north of Lorraine Louis XIV had established French influence on the Saar and constructed his new town of Saarlouis, as an outpost to insure the military control of the valley. The acquisition in the eighteenth century of the duchy of Lorraine, already traversed and cut up by pieces of French territory, carried the French frontier well to the north and east of Saarlouis, while at the same time it left the German county of Saarbrücken astride the Saar on either side of the town of the same name. A glance at the map will show the impossible character of the resulting frontier, which had not been greatly improved when the armies of the Revolution poured over it and added the whole region to France. That its incorporation was not a simple act of violence appears from various petitions of 1797 asking for the privileges of French citizenship, among them a long list of signers from the canton of Saarbrücken.[38] In 1814 the first treaty of Paris had as its primary task to reëstablish the limits of France. As the basis of its work it took the frontier of January 1, 1792, as anterior to the revolutionary wars of conquest. In this region, this did not differ from the frontier of 1789. It was, however, recognized that the old frontier had become an impossibility in the region of Alsace-Lorraine, and required straightening and adjustment to adapt it to modern conditions. Accordingly enclaves were abandoned on either side. Toward the Rhine the new arrangement took away certain French dependencies in the neighborhood of Wissembourg and Landau, but left France those towns and added a connecting strip of territory extending east to the Rhine. In the region of the Saar France lost the outlying lands to the north and gained the valley of the river above Saarlouis, including Saarbrücken and the region round about. In area the adjustments roughly balanced, but in resources France had received an advantage because of the coal deposits thus retained. As a geographic frontier, the new line of 1814 was a great improvement, but it was never laid out on the spot or put into actual effect.