Franco-Prussian War
Prussia and the German states destroyed the French army in six weeks in 1870 and made an empire out of it. Bismarck had beaten Denmark and Austria and needed a war with France to bring the southern German states into a national union, and he manufactured one out of a Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne. France demanded a guarantee that it would never be revived, and Bismarck published an edited account of the conversation in which the demand was made — the Ems telegram — calculated to read as an insult in both countries. France declared war on 19 July. It then discovered that the treaties binding Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden to Prussia existed, that its own mobilisation by individual soldiers reporting to depots was chaos next to the German system of moving whole formations by rail, and that it had no allies. The French chassepot rifle outranged the German needle gun and the mitrailleuse was a novelty; German steel breech-loading artillery decided almost every engagement. Bazaine's army was shut up in Metz in August, and MacMahon's was surrounded at Sedan on 2 September and surrendered with Napoleon III in it. A republic was declared in Paris two days later and refused to make peace, which turned a cabinet war into a national one lasting another five months, with francs-tireurs, reprisals and a siege ended by starvation. The German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles on 18 January 1871, and the peace took Alsace and Lorraine. The war killed perhaps 180,000 people and set the terms of the next two. France spent forty-four years preparing to recover the lost provinces, Germany spent them building alliances to prevent it, and the general staffs of both drafted the plans that were executed in August 1914.
- Year: 1870 CE
- Category: Military
