Wawro G. The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871

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303The Peace

to place the words over the main door that had originally been planned:

“Dem deutsche Volk”–“For the German people.” The chamber was his, not

theirs. It is easy to understand his pique; by 1912, anti-monarchical Social

Democrats would be the biggest party in the Reichstag.

Bismarck had anticipated much of this, and to further weaken the power

of parties and parliament, he had given the German Kaiser wide emergency

powers, the exclusive right to initiate legislation, and had placed a conserva-

tive Bundesrat or “federal council,” with a Prussian blocking minority, over

the popularly elected Reichstag. The existence of the Bundesrat underlined

the fact that sovereignty, in Bismarck’s empire, was never held by the German

people, but by the twenty-two princes and three free cities who had convened

in the camp of the Prussian army at Versailles in January 1871. Bismarck had

also made the German chancellor responsible not to parliament – whose reso-

lutions were always nonbinding – but to the emperor, an insuperable conﬂict

of interest. Barely satisfactory in 1871 –“the girl is ugly,” one Prussian politi-

cian commented at the time, “but must be married somehow”–these consti-

tutional arrangements would be generating enormous tension in Germany

by 1914. Looking at all of the concessions and dodges needed to unify

Germany in 1870–71, one of Bismarck’s best biographers rightly concludes

that the Reichskanzler had “melted together ingredients that could not form

an alloy . . . . The creative element [was] actually the destructive one.”

Part of Bismarck’s plan to end the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 required

prompt French elections, to return the expected majority for peace that every-

one in France but Gambetta fervently desired. Under Bismarck’s protection,

elections for a national assembly were held in French and German-occupied

France on 8 February. To no one’s surprise, anti-war conservatives running

on platforms like “peace and liberty” distanced themselves from Gambetta’s

“war to the knife” rhetoric and took 500 of 676 seats in the new assembly. The

delegates convened at Bordeaux on 12 February and chose Adolphe Thiers as

president a week later. Leaving the same ministers who had run France since

4 September in place, Thiers went to Versailles and haggled with Bismarck for

ﬁve bitter days before exhaustedly – he was seventy-four-years-old – sign-

ing the provisional peace treaty on 26 February. For Thiers, who had fought

tyranny his entire life, penning diatribes against Charles X in the 1820s and

suffering arrest and exile after Louis-Napoleon’s coup in 1851, there was noth-

ing quite like the tyranny of Bismarck. The chancellor never let up, and when

Thiers refused to cede Belfort in addition to Strasbourg and Metz, Bismarck

threatened a resumption of the war. After consulting with the king and Moltke,

Bismarck relented on Belfort in exchange for a gloating victory parade through

Paris in March by 30,000 German troops and additional Prussian annexations

15 Scott W. Murray, Liberal Diplomacy and German Uniﬁcation, Westport, 2000, pp. 119–20.

Gall, vol. 1,p.377.Pﬂanze, vol. 1,p.502.

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304 The Franco-Prussian War

in Lorraine: the blood-soaked villages between Mars-la-Tours and St. Privat

with their vast German war cemeteries.

Whenever Thiers dug in his heels at the negotiations in Versailles, Bismarck

simply refused to speak or understand French until the Frenchman came

round to the Prussian’s way of thinking.

When Thiers, who had toured the

European capitals in the fall to build an anti-Prussian coalition, threatened

another appeal to Europe “if Prussia did not moderate its demands,” Bismarck

waved the bloody shirt of Bonapartism for the last time: “If you speak to me

of Europe I shall speak to you of Napoleon . . . . Remember the plebiscite

and the peasantry, the ofﬁcers and the soldiers . . . with just a little cleverness it

could not be difﬁcult for Louis-Napoleon to win over 100,000 soldiers among

the prisoners in Germany.” Uttering a faint “excuse me,” Thiers desisted.

Although Bismarck himself had been willing to forgo Belfort and Nancy (a

late demand by General Roon), and even return Metz to the French –“I don’t

like so many Frenchmen in our house who don’t want to be there”–he had

been blocked by Wilhelm I and Moltke, who judged Metz and its frontier

fortiﬁcations “the keys to the German house.”

There was also the matter of public opinion. Dispatched into Germany

to gauge the mood of Austria and the south German states in the fall of

1870, Jules Favre’s deputy reported that “the whole of Germany had become

drunk with the unheard-of, unhoped-for success of its arms . . . . I spoke with

many individuals between the Rhine and the Danube, but I never met anyone

who would have consented to a peace without territorial gains.”

Heinrich

von Treitschke’s famous September 1870 essay –“What do we demand from

France?”–evinced man-in-the-street sentiment in Germany: Alsace and

Lorraine “are ours by the right of the sword . . . . At all times the subjection of

a German race to France has been an unhealthy thing; today it is an offense

against the reason of History – a vassalship of free men to half-educated bar-

barians.”

With the German emperor, generals, politicians, and public thus

aroused –“we must have guarantees!”–Bismarck probably never stood a

chance of securing the sort of mild peace he had dictated to the Austrians

in 1866: no annexations (the king had wanted Bohemia and Troppau) and an

indemnity just one-sixtieth the size of this one. Cheated in 1866, Roon and

Moltke bore down at Versailles and secured 5 billion francs ($15 billion to-

day), Lorraine up to Metz and Thionville, all of Alsace, and a victory parade

through the streets of Paris. Bismarck, who had led the “anti-Metz faction” at

16 Washington, DC, National Archives (NA), CIS, U.S. Serial Set 1780, Paris, 1 March 1871,

Washburne to Fish. Giesberg, pp. 108–13. Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris, London, 1965,

pp. 309–14.

17 Frederick III, pp. 314–15. Kolb, Der Weg aus dem Krieg, pp. 360–2.

18 Frederic Reitlinger, A Diplomat’s Memoir of 1870, London, 1915, pp. 81–2.

19 Murray, p. 122.

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305The Peace

Versailles, quite uncharacteristically wilted under the pressure: “The soldiers

will not hear of giving up Metz, and perhaps they are right.”

For a France bankrupted by war, the indemnity stung. Adolphe Thiers,

who offered 1.5 billion francs, protested that the French government would

be unable to raise 5 billion. Then Prussia will occupy France, Bismarck inter-

rupted, “and we will see if we can get 5 billion from it.”

Detached observers

were alarmed by this departure from the tradition of reparations for war ex-

penses alone, the Economist observing in March 1871 that “to exact huge sums

of money as the consequence of victory suggests a belief that money may next

time be the object as well as the actual reward of battle. A ﬂavor of huckster-

ing is introduced into the relations between States.” Nevertheless, Bismarck

insisted: “France being the richest country in Europe, nothing could keep her

quiet but effectually to empty her pockets.”

Overall, the German chancel-

lor felt that he had been mild: “So moderate a victor as the Christian German

does not exist in the world anymore.” He had agreed to reduce the indemnity

from six to ﬁve billion francs, and had not taken Belfort or Nancy.

Out of

cards to play, the Bordeaux assembly ratiﬁed the Prussian terms overwhelm-

ingly – 546 to 107, with twenty-three abstentions – and commenced its move

back to Paris in early March. L

eon Gambetta, who had campaigned against

ratiﬁcation – warning of the “German barbarian hordes”–resigned his seat

and ofﬁces and left for Spain, where he read about the signature of the formal

peace treaty at Frankfurt-am-Main on 10 May 1871.

Diplomatically, the war sent shock waves through a world long accus-

tomed to a balance of power in Europe. In Britain on 9 February, Benjamin

Disraeli stood in the House of Commons and bitterly regretted that “this war

represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French

Revolution of the last century.” Considering Bismarck’s harsh treatment of

the French negotiators, Disraeli observed that “there is not a diplomatic tradi-

tion which has not been swept away. You have a new world, new inﬂuences at

work . . . . The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.”

From Austria-

Hungary, Foreign Minister Friedrich von Beust complained to Thiers that “I

don’t see Europe anymore.” The familiar landscape of ﬁve balanced great

powers and a dozen biddable “middle states” had been shredded by the

Prussian victories in 1866 and 1870–71. The opposition between Berlin’s

20 Moritz Busch, Bismarck: Some secret pages of his history, 2 vols., New York, 1898, vol. 1,

pp. 417–18. A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck, orig. 1955, New York, 1967,p.133.

21 Giesberg, p. 110.

22 Sheridan, vol. 2,p.409.

23 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron, New York, 1977, pp. 153–4.

24 Kolb, Der Weg aus dem Krieg,p.353.

25 Cited in John Lowe, The Great Powers, Imperialism, and the German Problem 1865–1925,

London, 1994,p.41.

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306 The Franco-Prussian War

anxiety – that France would rise again and a “revenge coalition” would unite

against Germany – and the rest of Europe’s conviction that Germany had be-

come colossal and threatening would generate burning friction in the decades

ahead, and be a principal cause of World War I.

Some took comfort from this instability. Accused by Napoleon III of

“Machiavellian perﬁdy” before the war, Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I

revealed a glint of just that at a crown council after Gravelotte, when he

wondered aloud whether it might not be a good thing for the Prussians to

annex Alsace, Lorraine, and any other part of France they might like: “The

occupation of those places would not exactly be peaceful and serene,” he

chuckled.

Was Prussia losing by winning? For the Austrians, of course, this

was cold comfort at best, for Germany would drag them too into the abyss

in the next war.

Militarily the war’s lessons were clear organizationally and less so tacti-

cally. Armies that had begun to adopt Prussian methods after 1866 acceler-

ated the process after 1870. Universal conscription was introduced to swell

the ranks, enable Moltkean “pocket battles,” and replace casualties that the

Franco-Prussian War had generated in shocking quantities. General staffs

were established or expanded. Professional military education, war games,

and staff rides were introduced from Washington to Tokyo. Railways, tele-

graphs, medical arrangements, and logistics were given a very business-like

emphasis in every war ministry.

Although the cumulative result of these

changes would be mutual slaughter, far worse than that inﬂicted by the rather

devil-may-care French on the rigorous Prussians in 1870–71, that probability

was not allowed to obstruct the march of progress. Gung-ho soldiers just

looked the other way. “There was a measure of infantilism in Europe’s enthu-

siastic espousal of militarizing tendencies,” wrote John Keegan,” but “clever

men and responsible governments found wordy arguments to justify them-

selves.”

Not so clever men too: In 1887, the Prussian war minister – General

Walther Bronsart von Schellendorff – chose not to procure new artillery so

that he could focus resources on morale, leadership and the infantry ﬁght.

Like many of his generation, Bronsart prized “Schneid”–“pluck”–over

technology. “One can also have too much artillery,” Bronsart rather illogi-

cally declared at a time when battleﬁelds were expanding in size, and more

and more batteries were needed to buttress one’s own infantry, and catch the

enemy’s in what soldiers were calling a “ﬁre sack.”

26 Kolb, Der Weg aus dem Krieg, pp. 182–3.

27 Wilhelm Deist, “Preconditions to waging war in Prussia-Germany, 1866–71,” in Stig F

orster

and J

org Nagler, eds. On the Road to Total War, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 316–18.

28 John Keegan, A History of Warfare, New York, 1993,p.357.

29 Eric Dorn Brose, The Kaiser’s Army, Oxford, 2001, pp. 62–3. Antulio J. Echevarria II, After

Clausewitz, Lawrence, 2000, pp. 218–20.

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307The Peace

As Bronsart’s confusion demonstrates, the tactical lessons of 1870–71 were

less clear than the organizational ones. The Prussian recipe in 1866 had been

simple: They had waited for Austrian infantry attacks, cut them down with

rapid ﬁre, and then briskly counter-attacked in company columns led in by

swarms of skirmishers. As the Prussians closed in, their company columns

subdivided into platoons and pushed into the skirmish line to envelop the en-

emy. Whether attacking or defending, the Prussians had made optimal use of

their breech-loading Dreyse riﬂe, which could be loaded and ﬁred ﬁve times

more rapidly than the muzzle-loading Austrian Lorenz. After K

oniggr

atz, the

French had rearmed with their own breech-loader, the Chassepot, and adopted

defensive tactics aimed at shattering infantry attacks far downrange. In the-

ory, the Prussians should have been stymied in 1870–71, but had won through

despite the excellent French riﬂe and tactical discipline. How? With artillery:

Cumbered with a riﬂe that was already obsolete in 1870, the Prussians relied

almost entirely in the war on their breech-loading, steel-tubed Krupp guns,

which hit farther, faster, and more accurately than France’s bronze muzzle-

loaders. Indeed the major battles of 1870–71 were decided by the Prussian

artillery; the Prussian infantry attacks into the lines of Chassepots proved

ineffective or even suicidal. General Julius Verdy du Vernois, a Prussian vet-

eran of 1866 and 1870–71, said as much after Gravelotte: “The improvements

in ﬁrearms and the greater explosive force of the powder of the present day

make it certain that the effect of ﬁrearms will be correspondingly greater [in

our future wars] than it is today, when it is already sufﬁcient . . . to repel any

attack.”

Despite the avoidable carnage in 1870–71 – Moltke’s armies lost 117,000

killed and wounded in the war – most post-war analysis credited the Prussians

with dash and movement. Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq, killed at Mars-la-

Tour, etched this hypothesis in military professional circles in his posthumous

Battle Studies. Based on Ardant’s interviews with French troops and ofﬁcers

in 1868 and his brief experience of the Franco-Prussian War, Battle Studies

praised the psychological beneﬁts of the Prussian tactics. It was wrong to sit

on the defensive and trust in a superiority of armament or material. Better

to attack, or risk being swept away by an enemy’s essentially psychological

“determination to get to close quarters.” In sum, the “moral action” of at-

tacking troops would defeat the “destructive action” of defending ones. This

was nonsense on stilts, but nonsense that was eagerly subscribed by most

European armies despite actual experience during and after 1870–71.Inhis

analysis of Gravelotte, General Ferdinand Foch – a leading apostle of the new

French “offensive spirit” after 1871 – wrote that the Prussians had won because

30 Gen. Julius Verdy du Vernois, With the Royal Headquarters in 1870–71, 2 vols., London,

1897, vol. 1,p.98.

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308 The Franco-Prussian War

of their “pure morale and unswerving doctrine,” because of their “single-

minded devotion to the capital idea: Hit, and hit hard.”

Foch’s certainty –

which he maintained steadfastly until 1915 – makes an interesting contrast

with King Wilhelm I’s doubts, loudly expressed on the ﬁeld at Gravelotte:

“He complained bitterly that the ofﬁcers of the higher grades seemed to have

forgotten all that had been taught them so carefully at maneuvers, and had ap-

parently all lost their heads.”

No matter: To modern thrusters like Foch and

Louis Grandmaison (and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who scaled back fortress plans

in 1903 so as not to stand accused of “creeping into hiding”), the very circum-

stances surrounding Ardant’s death near Mars-la-Tour seemed to conﬁrm the

colonel’s theories.

Outgunned and outnumbered on 16 August 1870, the

Germans had marched boldly into a storm of Chassepot and cannon ﬁre and

broken through. Ardant, condemned to play a waiting game, had been killed

behind the lines by a shellburst. But that German breakthrough – and most

others in the war – had far less to do with “psychological” factors (French

elan, German Schneid) than with Bazaine’s refusal to send any of his ample

reserves (like Ardant du Picq’s 10th Regiment) to the threatened point. With

or without “moral action,” it seemed increasingly hazardous to employ the

tactics of 1866 and 1870 in an age of breech-loaders and repeaters, as a Russian

general, engaged against the Turks in 1878, despondently noted:

“We tried hard to imitate the German Schwarm tactics of 1870, but failed

because the high-quality Turkish riﬂes made it impossible to attack like the

Germans in France. Then, the Germans had crept into range, shielding their

main units behind a long chain of skirmishers. That practice no longer works,

for the Turkish riﬂes can hit out to 2,500 paces, cutting down as many of our

reserve troops as skirmishers....Inevitably, our reserve units begin to panic

and push forward into the skirmish line, not because they feel safer there, but

because they need to do something. The result is chaos and mass casualties.”

Across Bulgaria, Russian attacks foundered on their own dead, piles of

corpses so thick that the Russians could not go forward. “It was madness,”

the general concluded.

Yet were the Prussians not nearly as mad in 1870?

Faced with a stringently defensive enemy determined not to repeat the errors

of the Austrians in 1866, the Prussians had fought like Russians at Spicheren,

Froeschwiller, Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte. They had absorbed tremendous

casualties attacking into ﬁre, more than twice as many at Gravelotte as in the

entire Austro-Prussian War. Only their Krupp guns and superior numbers

had saved them. The cannon had blasted holes in the French lines and the

31 Gen. Ferdinand Foch, De la Conduite de la Guerre, 3rd ed., Paris, 1915, pp. 481–2.

32 Blumenthal, p. 98.

33 Brose, pp. 128–9.

34 Gen. Zeddeler, “Das Gefecht der russischen Infanterie im letzten Krieg,”

Osterreichische

Milit

arische Zeitschrift (

OMZ) 3 (1878), p. 219.

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309The Peace

numerous German reserves had replaced the heavy casualties and facilitated

broad ﬂanking maneuvers. Still, it was a bloody, inelegant way to win; German

losses had been thirteen times higher than in 1866, and had the French generals

only counter-attacked each time the Prussians stumbled, the war may well

have ended differently. The Prussians might have been repulsed, Bismarck

toppled, the French Second Empire “re-founded” for the teenaged prince

imperial’s long reign. No, the post-Sedan tendency to credit the Prussians

with superior tactics was wrong. The Prussians had merely used their artillery

to rescue their own faltering infantry attacks and smash the hesitating enemy

or put him to ﬂight. Had every European army heeded this essential lesson,

millions of lives might have been spared the holocaust of 1914–18, when

hordes of attacking infantry and dismounted cavalry were routinely ripped

to pieces and reduced, as one observer put it, “to the task of offering targets

to the artillery.”

Sleepy French villages had also offered targets to the Prussian artillery in

the war, yet few Germans shed tears over this afterward. “Where the people’s

war breaks out,” Julius von Hartmann explained in 1878, “terrorism becomes

a principle of military necessity.” For all of the study and analysis that the

Germans expended on their wars of uniﬁcation, they spent comparatively

little effort on the problem of civilians, volunteer levies and what Hartmann –

a leading military theorist – called terrorism. This did not bode well for the

future. As the years passed, old German veterans simply forgot that the francs-

tireurs had inﬂicted fewer than 1,000 casualties on German forces, and fought

badly. Lapsing into old age, German analysts – led by Moltke, who passed his

opinions down to his nephew – propounded the view that the Franktireurkrieg

had been a waking nightmare of murder, mutilation and mayhem, and would

have to be pitilessly dealt with in future wars. Most of the German army

commanders in 1914 had served as junior ofﬁcers in 1870–71, and they too

were only too ready to deal harshly with any civilian interference in their

plans. In 1914,asin1870–71, French, Belgian and Russian civilians would

put themselves beyond the protection of international law simply by aiding,

abetting or even living in the vicinity of irregular troops. The Germans killed

hundreds of innocent civilians in Belgium in 1914 – often in mass executions –

and burned the cathedral city of Louvain in ﬁve days of panic and murder.

One can perhaps sympathize with both sides; the innocent civilians caught

in the jaws of war, but also the fearful German conscripts who, as a Prussian

colonel put it in 1899, were “also men, with a right to be treated with humanity.

Exhausted after a long march or battle, soldiers who come to rest in a village

have a right to be sure that the peaceful inhabitants shall not change suddenly

into furious enemies.”

This argument is as old as war itself; unresolved by

35 Holger H. Herwig, The First World War, London, 1997, pp. 59–60.

36 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914, New Haven, 2001, pp. 142–6.

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310 The Franco-Prussian War

the Franco-Prussian War, it was nevertheless brought into the modern age

and focused. Monstrous atrocities meted out by Russian, Turkish, Austro-

Hungarian, and German troops in the First World War would focus it still

more sharply.

Conventional wisdom in 1871 purported that with his harsh indemnity

and annexations, Bismarck had “crippled France for thirty to ﬁfty years.”

The war alone had cost the French 12 billion francs ($36 billion today), to

which had to be added Bismarck’s 5 billion francs indemnity, the spoliation

of fourteen French departments, and the costs of a wartime inﬂation that

had quadrupled the French money supply while drawing down the metal

reserves.

Yet France roared back, impelled in large part by its own modern-

ization. The Third Republic, proclaimed three days after Sedan, spread banks,

schools, roads, and railways into the provinces, reduced illiteracy, improved

public health, spurred industry, inculcated a sense of being “French” (as op-

posed to Gascon or Breton), and reformed an army that, for all its pre-war

grittiness and legends, had been an unhealthy, dim-witted institution. Substi-

tution was abolished in January 1873 and universal conscription and a one

to three-year military service requirement introduced in 1889. The effect was

stimulating, ﬂushing fresh-faced, educated youth into ranks formerly occu-

pied by middle-aged, illiterate sots.

The French reforms also paved the way for the Union sacr

ee of 1914–

18, when French of all classes and outlooks rallied behind national aims.

This was new and, in Eugen Weber’s view, occasioned in part by the Franco-

Prussian War, which mobilized far more men (and women) than had fought

in any French conﬂict since the Revolutionary Wars, making “the connection

between local and national interests” and yanking France from its deep-rooted

provincialism. Even the bloody repression of the Paris Commune had its

beneﬁts; reassured by the conservatism and ruthlessness of Thiers –“King

Adolphe I” to the Communards – wary French peasants ﬁnally accepted

that republican governments could “maintain order,” and began voting for

them, rooting republicanism in France. Like the ﬁgure of Marshal Bazaine,

the Communards also provided a useful “stab-in-the-back” legend: France fell

not because it was weak, but because it had been betrayed by a duplicitous

marshal and by unpatriotic “reds,” who “rebelled at the very moment the

French nation was lying . . . defenseless at the feet of the victorious enemy.”

When Gambetta returned to French politics from his brief Spanish exile, he

proved reassuringly moderate, joining with Thiers to condemn red republican

agitation.

The younger generations were brought up by regiments of “black

37 Vienna, Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv (HHSA), IB 27,(1871), Vienna, 28 June 1871, Agent

to Prince Metternich, “Ansichten

uber die Situation in Frankreich.” Public Record Ofﬁce

(PRO), FO 64, 693, Berlin, 25 Oct. 1870.

38 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, orig. 2001, New York, 2003, pp. 134–8.

Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 5th edition, New York, 1995, pp. 210–14. Mitchell,

pp. 81–2.

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311The Peace

hussars,” the rigorously republican, black-robed schoolteachers sent into the

provinces from Paris. Even the imperious Charles de Gaulle, born in 1890 to

royalist parents, never considered himself anything but a republican. The shift

of loyalties was jarring but complete, best characterized – in clear contrast to

the German experience – by a French journalist in 1914: “This country lets

itself be gently run by men who have no pretensions to provide it with an

arrogant doctrine, a superior government . . . . It does not seek to borrow its

prosperity from its institutions; it simply prospers.”

There was also a new

respect for the army in France. After 1871, French citizens decreasingly viewed

their soldiers as “voleurs” (thieves) and “pillards” (pillagers) and increasingly

accepted them as “our troops.” Indeed village society came to value military

service as a way to “d

egrossir” or civilize their young men.

Was collision inevitable between this reformed, newly conﬁdent French

nation and the nervous German Empire? Were the seeds of World War I

planted with Bismarck’s decision to take Alsace-Lorraine? Had the Germans,

as Tsar Alexander II declared in 1870, “created an inexpugnable hatred be-

tween the peoples?”

It certainly looked that way in 1871, when the Bordeaux

Convention that ratiﬁed Thiers’s controversial armistice rang with pugna-

cious, wounded rhetoric. One deputy called the treaty “a sentence of death,”

another expressed his shock that “universal manhood suffrage should give ap-

proval to the dismemberment of France.” Victor Hugo concluded an impas-

sioned speech with the vow that France would “exact a terrible revenge . . . and

rise up to retake Lorraine, then Alsace, then . . . . Trier, Mainz, Cologne and

Koblenz.”

But tempers had cooled considerably by 1914 when most French

had reconciled themselves to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. “As for me,”

the celebrated French thinker R

emy de Gourmont wrote on the eve of World

War I, “I wouldn’t give the little ﬁnger of my right hand for those forgotten

provinces. My hand needs it to rest on as I write. Nor would I give the little

ﬁnger of my left hand. I need it to ﬂick the ash from my cigarette.”

French

statesmen were hardly more aggressive: Ren

e Viviani, the notoriously provin-

cial French premier in July 1914, was just sophisticated enough to know that

he must not repeat Gramont’s error of July 1870, namely “falling into the

trap laid by Bismarck in the form of the ‘Ems telegram’ . . . declaring war on

Prussia [and] thereby forfeiting international support.”

In fact, it would take

another round of German aggression – the Kaiser’s “blank check” to Austria

and the Younger Moltke’s invasion of Belgium and France – to trigger the

39 Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic 1879–1992, orig. 1990, New York, 1995, pp. 113,

140–1.

40 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, Stanford, 1976, pp. 296–8.

41 Kolb, Der Weg aus dem Krieg, pp. 182–3.

42 Giesberg, pp. 119-20. Schivelbusch, pp. 146–7.

43 Schivelbusch, p. 183.

44 John F. V. Keiger, “France,” in Keith Wilson, ed., Decisions for War 1914, New York, 1995,

p. 124.

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312 The Franco-Prussian War

Great War with its 38 million dead, wounded and missing. We must look then

at Germany to see the real scar left by 1870–71.

Riven internally, the new German Empire was not well-equipped to man-

age what would become sharp rivalries with a defeated France, a leery England,

and an ever more conﬁdent and assertive Russia. Besides the suffocating power

of Bismarck, who stiﬂed new men and opinions, the war of 1870–71 had given

a “fresh baptism of moral legitimacy” to a Prussian court and establishment

that had seemed backward before the war.

By forging a German nation and

realizing the idealistic hopes of 1848 – when German liberals had tried and

failed to create a German nation-state – the Prussian king and Junkers had

grafted themselves tightly on to the German state. The war thus empowered a

whole class of militarists who linked Germany’s health to war and expansion.

Clear-headed Germans recognized this even in 1870 when one commentator

deplored Wilhelm I’s creation of a “warrior state . . . based on the permanent

use of war” to achieve political objectives.

To his credit, Bismarck restrained

the soldiers after the war, famously declaring the Reich a “satiated power” and

constructing a complex alliance system that kept the peace for a time. Never-

theless, the constitution that he had devised for the North German Confed-

eration in 1867 and for the German Empire in 1871 facilitated the triumph of

militarists once Bismarck passed from the scene in 1890. Determined to but-

tress his own power and preserve ancient prerogatives of the Prussian king,

Bismarck created a system that was likely to fail in the twentieth century, and

bound to fail once the German crown passed to twenty-nine-year-old Kaiser

Wilhelm II in 1888.

The most cherished prerogative of the Prussian monarchs was their ability

to command and organize armed forces and wage war without parliamen-

tary oversight. This prerogative was the one most strongly reinforced by the

Franco-Prussian War, which slid the keystone into a national mythology of

struggle and conquest, whose ﬁrst plastic manifestation was the victory col-

umn or Siegess

aule erected after the war in Berlin. Its murals depict the heroic

come-from-behind victory of a German nation enslaved by Napoleon and

freed by Bismarck, Moltke, Roon, and, most importantly, King Wilhelm I.

One of the crowning panels, which depicts the king bravely enduring a French

fusillade, encapsulated the German belief that strong armed forces wielded

by a despotic monarch were a forgivable sin. The German liberals, who had

unanimously deplored the illegal ﬁnancing of the Prussian army by Bismarck,

Roon, and Moltke in the 1860s, quickly forgave the “militarists” after Sedan;

indeed they applauded Wilhelm I’s promotion of Bismarck from Count to

Prince and his gifts to the chancellor from the public purse: 1 million taler

($15 million today) and the vast estate of Friedrichsruh near Hamburg, which

45 Pﬂanze, vol. 1,p.506.

46 Cited in Wehler, p. 30.