history robert gerwarth
Auf Wiedersehen, Napoleon
Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe
By Rachel Chrastil (Allen Lane 485pp £30)
In 1867, shortly after Prussia’s deci- sive militar y victories over Denmark (in 1864) and Austria (in 1866), a dinner guest asked the Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, about the prospect of a further armed conflict, this time against France. Would i t be expedient to some- how provoke a French attack on Prus- sia in order to unify the German states against a common enemy? Bismarck rejected the idea: ‘Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.’
III and a triumph for Bismarck, who had engineered it. His victor y over France dramatically changed the European map and ended France’s de facto hegemony on the Continent.
Despite its significance, the FrancoPrussian War has received relatively little attention in the Anglophone world. One of Britain’s leading historians of war,
a professor at Xavier University in Ohio, portrays the war from the perspective of ordinary soldiers and junior to mid-ranking officers, such as Dietrich von Lassberg, a 22-year-old from Munich, who confided in his diary how euphoric he and his brother Rudolf were when they were told that their native Bavaria would be joining Prussia in its fight against France.
Like von Lassberg, Bismarck and his generals viewed the prospect of war optimistically. The Prussian chief-of-staff, Helmuth von Moltke, felt so confident of victory that shortly after the French declaration of war he was lying on his sofa reading Walter Scott. A friend asked why he was seemingly so relaxed, to which Moltke replied: ‘Why not? Everything is
Three years later, however, that war had become a reality, and it would radically alter the balance of power on the Continent. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was Europe’s bloodiest conflict between the Congress of Vienna (1814– 15) and the outbreak of the First World Wa r i n 1 9 1 4 . S o m e t w o m i l l i o n s o l d i e r s saw action and more than 180,000 died. Prussia was joined by the southern German states of Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg, paving the way for German unification through war.
The formal cause of the conflict was a quarrel over the succession to the Spanish throne. Bismarck had encouraged Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a relative of the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, to stake his claim to the throne. For France and its ruler, Napoleon III, the thought of dynastic encirclement by the Hohenzollern family was unacceptable. Leopold eventually withdrew his candidacy, but Wilhelm refused to renounce his family ’s claim to the throne for the future.
To be sure, the French emperor had additional reasons for going to war with Prussia. The conflict seemed like a good opportunity to deflect attention from domestic tensions and simultaneously stop Prussia’s ascent as a major European power to rival France. In the end, however, the war was a disaster for Napoleon
Fight or flight: citizens escaping Paris by balloon during the siege the late Sir Michael Howard, wrote an excellent and still ver y readable account of the conflict, but that was more than sixty years ago. Since then, the field of war studies, broadly defined, has changed significantly and it is now characterised by a more pronounced interest in the human and social experiences of war.
Rachel Chrastil’s latest book, Bismarck’s War, is therefore a welcome new addition to the literature. It is precisely that human dimension of the war, the suffering of civilians and soldiers alike, that takes centre stage in Chrastil’s account. Instead of adopting the perspective of senior politicians and generals, Chrastil,
ready. We’ve only got to press the button.’
Moving large numbers of troops by railway, Moltke managed to swiftly deploy three armies c lose to the French border. Already by 12 August, trains had moved some 640,000 troops, 1,700 horses and 1,600 artiller y pieces to the front line. Yet achieving victor y was not quite as easy as the Prussians had anticipated. The French initially inflicted heavy casualties on their advancing opponents, notably through the mitrailleuses , first-generation machine guns. Eventually, however, the more advanced Prussian steel cannons produced by Krupp proved decisive. By late August, some
Literary Review | july 2023 12
