The forgotten war that made Germany militant and France French
Anthony Paletta
History is famously full of conflicts celebrated by the victors and forgotten by the losers. But some are ignored on all sides. The Franco-Prussian War is one of the latter, but it is now excavated by Rachel Chrastil’s Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe.
This was a mechanized conflict involving modern weaponry, featuring the first proto-machine gun, comprehensive mobilization, and multiple other aspects that anticipated World War I, four decades away, more than it recalled the Crimean War, which had ended a mere 14 years before. Those with any thumbnail sense of the conflict know France was crushed very quickly, as Chrastil puts it, in “one of the most dramatic and one-sided defeats of any modern European army.”
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Napoleon III’s reputation as fundamentally foolish is one that’s undergone no revision over time, nor does it here. Having alienated nearly every state in Europe through one means or another, he maneuvered to prevent a Hohenzollern candidate from ascending to the crown of Spain and succeeded. He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by insisting that the Hohenzollern line forswear any claim to the Spanish throne forever. Bismarck was more than happy to have a convenient excuse for war. Late-stage German revelations that Napoleon III had been seeking to annex Belgium and Luxembourg during the Austro-Prussian War sank any dim hopes of a single ally in Britain.
Theoretically, France was not in a hopeless position. It had an army of roughly comparable size, a dramatically larger navy, and superior rifles. It just had entirely inept plans for using any of these things. French units squandered time crisscrossing the country to regimental depots. Rail movement and supply were also in a shambles. Auxiliary services were subpar. The Germans had one doctor for every 270 men, the French one for every 740. The Germans immediately turned all rail lines to military use. In an 1867 war game, they had transported their army to the front in 32 days. In the event, they achieved it in 19.
The German general staff was rapidly becoming the model for military organization around the world, thanks to the effort of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, its chief. The French didn’t really have one. Other caprices didn’t help. French plans involved the formation of three armies. Napoleon III decided on the spot to form one, then shortly after, to split it into two.
France succeeded in moving only about 300,000 soldiers to its border by the start of the war to face 425,000 Germans. There is an air of inevitability about some accounts of the conflict, but Chrastil makes clear that France squandered early prospects. The French might have prevailed over the Germans at Rezonville and Gravelotte simply by concentrating their nearby forces but didn’t. One general, Francois Bazaine, failed to secure or destroy bridges and was soon besieged in Metz. He well could have broken out early on, but he didn’t even try.
The remainder of the French army made an elliptical move toward the Belgian border, a move that was ill suited for relieving Metz but perfectly suited for being surrounded. Moltke observed, “Now, we have them in a mousetrap.” French Gen. Auguste-Alexandre Ducrot had a more Rabelaisian estimation, “We are inside a chamber pot, and we shall be shat on.” The battle was decided nearly entirely by German artillery.
The Germans won a larger prize than anticipated. They didn’t initially realize that Napoleon III was with the French army. He surrendered personally but did not surrender France — nor did he abdicate. The legitimacy of the resulting government was far from clear. The United States recognized it, but many did not. Bazaine, besieged in Metz, was a Bonapartist who didn’t recognize the new regime. In any case, Paris was soon surrounded by the Germans.
Bazaine contemplated a scheme to surrender and then put down the Republican government but eventually simply surrendered. With this, the pre-war French army was essentially done, save for two regiments recalled from defending the Papal States. Future Prime Minister Leon Gambetta, a relatively moderate Republican, was appointed minister of the interior and left Paris in a balloon to rally France elsewhere. He was a competent and energetic leader, a deviation from recent French practice, but energy won’t get you far when you lack trained soldiers.
Chrastil has clearly not written one of those increasingly common recent histories of war that seem to have no battles in them. She presents a skillful account of military mechanics. Still, where Chrastil shines is in providing a broader societal portrait of the conflict, particularly in France. The war began on July 21. The last truly consequential battle, at Sedan, which saw the French army destroyed and Napoleon III captured, occurred on Sept. 1. Yet the war continued for more than four more months. The monarch was gone, captured but not abdicated. From there, Chrastil describes a France simply seeking to figure out how to muddle on.
Paris contained a number of top-shelf talents, many recently won over to the cause. Gustave Courbet was appointed head of a commission to safeguard art within the city. He commented of Bismarck, “Until Sedan, you even did us a favor … but now that you have settled the score with Bonaparte, what business do you have with the Republic?” Victor Hugo, recently returned from exile for criticizing Napoleon III, was preaching resistance. Censorship and taxes on new periodicals were eliminated. The press flourished. Manet was painting; Gautier was also trapped inside.
Stranger expedients followed: “Fearful that the Prussians would cut off Paris’ aqueducts, Garnier drilled open the concrete layer on which the foundations of the Opera House had been built, revealing a vast well of water that pooled down from Montmartre. This bizarre amalgam of chthonic flood and opera house later inspired Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera.”
Paris was cut off. The Germans destroyed a cable lain in the Seine for communication with the rest of France. They had two means of communication. The first were hot air balloons, which they could not steer. The coordination of one attack was wrecked when the balloon containing orders blew off course to Norway. Second were carrier pigeons. The Germans brought in trained hawks from Saxony to seek to slay them. Supplies gradually dwindled. One cartoon observed, “The danger of eating a mouse is that your cat may run in after it.” Horses became food. (Zoo animals were reserved for the wealthy. One elephant gourmet found “the flesh appetizing, pink, firm, with a fine grain and little flecks of the purest white.”)
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The Germans had been mulling bombarding Paris. Bismarck was eager, Moltke hesitant. Future Kaiser Frederick III had his doubts. “We are no longer looked upon as the innocent sufferers of wrong, but rather as the arrogant victors, no longer content with the conquest of the foe, but fain to bring about his utter ruin.”
Paris eventually ran out of food, and a new government headed by Adolphe Thiers approved the Treaty of Frankfurt, ending the strange post-military-victory limbo and concluding the war. “In the end,” Chrastil concludes, “Germany’s victory in 1870-1871 was disastrous both for Germany and for the rest of the world.” The army’s role was paramount in German society, and there’s no shortage of books explaining just where that led.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.