In the summer of 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within weeks, it faced invasion by a Prussia-led German coalition that included both the North German Confederation that Prussia dominated and the southern German states of Bavarian, Baden, and Württemberg. The immediate trigger was a dynastic dispute over the throne of Spain, but the real cause stemmed from conservative statesman Otto von Bismarck manipulating the tension over the rise of Prussia seeking to unify the disparate German states and kingdoms into a single country under Prussian King Wilhelm. Emperor Napoleon III of France, who had dismantled the French Second Republic two decades earlier to attain the throne, now faced both external and internal enemies. The war of leaders soon became a war between nations, as both French and Germans became increasingly emotionally engaged in defeating the enemy.
Despite French superiority in rifles and its new machine gun, within six weeks, the German forces defeated Napoleon III’s armies at Sedan and the emperor was overthrown in favor of a republic. The new French government continued to fight off invasion for over four months before finally conceding defeat and the loss of Alsace and parts of Lorraine to the new German Empire. It was a partially mechanized conflict in which armies moved by train, with the advantage of this modern mode of transportation being its steadiness rather than its speed. Readers around the globe could access newspaper accounts of battles published within days, thanks to the telegraph and journalists embedded in armies.
The Franco-Prussian War lasted for six months, but it reverberated for decades to come and shaped the wars of the twentieth century. It was the largest continental war between Waterloo and the Great War. It’s tempting to see a direct line of tension between France and Germany that extended to the Great War and then the Second World War. After all, the choice to declare official founding of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles Palace only served to increase the bitterness of this anguished war.
The line from conflict to conflict, however, was neither straight nor pre-determined. While some French nursed thoughts of revenge for the lost territories and the mourning of Alsace-Lorraine was marked in schoolbooks and maps, this lingering wound was not the sole or leading cause of the guns of August in 1914. German aggression and Russian desire not to look weak—among many other dynamics—rated higher than the French desire for revenge. The stronger legacy of 1870-1871 on the world wars lay in the conduct of war, particularly in its early stages, and the role of civilians.
The Iron Chancellor
After 1870, nations across Europe adopted the Prussian model, vastly escalating the scale of the debacle when it occurred in 1914. Armies furthermore learned from the Prussian example that a well-planned mobilization and concentration, as deliberate steps in moving armies to the field, would increase the speed of engagement, boost morale among soldiers, and allow for strategic flanking of long-range weaponry, that could prove decisive. Prussian planning, including its ability to move and call up men and to engage medical services and materiel, minimized the inevitable fog of war. The German armies were ready to fight within eighteen days. This focus on speed shaped the German strategy of a rapid mobilization in the two-front war of 1914 with the aim to quickly defeat France before facing Russia. The fundamental military problems of 1870-1871, however, were unresolved by 1914. Armies had not fully come to grips with the use of high-powered artillery, the early machine gun, and long-range rifles. Instead, the lesson learned from 1870 was that military courage and a well-trained, national conscripted army could overcome the challenges caused by a strong defence.
The Franco-Prussian War furthermore shaped the role of civilians during conflict. Given the relative peace on the continent for several generations, many Europeans had come to believe that war took place far afield and that the fate of armies ought to be separate from their civilian populations. Instead, the Franco-Prussian War demanded new sacrifices of women and children, as small villages became the scenes of invasion and requisition, and large cities the targets of bombardment intended to break their morale.
Civilians in France found themselves facing an invasion with little guidance on how to react when the Germans came to their towns: fight openly, cooperate, snipe, or join the army? hide food or pay requisitions? Without a playbook for coping with invasion and facing the highest of stakes, civilians improvised to defend their towns and fight for survival. The wrong choice could bring retaliation upon their entire town. The village of Bazeilles, a suburb of Sedan, was reduced to rubble in the fighting of that battle. Châteaudun was later burned to the ground and Fontenoy-sur-Moselle destroyed for having been the sites of civilian resistance.
Meanwhile, German civilians living in France faced suspicion as national enemies. Even if they had lived in Paris for decades, they were deemed dangerous spies who might turn on their neighbours. They were required to register with local embassies for a passport so that they could be tracked.
At the same time, the Franco-Prussian War was the first major conflict in which the combatants were signatories to the Geneva Convention that protected sick and wounded soldiers and their caregivers under the banner of the Red Cross. It was also the first war in which a humanitarians came from the outside—in this case, from Switzerland—to assist in extending care to civilian victims of war. Citizens created volunteer fire brigades and food services.
French citizens also took up arms as volunteers both in the regular army and in loosely organized units of guerrilla fighters known as francs-tireurs. These sharpshooters, which were technically under the aegis of the French army, were viewed by the Germans as unlawful partisans whose presence in a town could bring retribution to all. The francs-tireurs sabotaged German railroads and sniped at soldiers, killing about a thousand Germans and causing out-sized fear and hatred. This experience deeply shaped the treatment of civilians during the early days of the Great War, particularly during the German invasion of Belgium.
Finally, the Franco-Prussian War convinced national governments that the near-universal conscription of male citizens, as well as the use of soldiers conscripted from colonial territories, would be necessary for future national survival and shaped the assumptions of what it meant to be a man. The war was furthermore a harbinger of the civil conflict that can arise under the societal strain of war. In 1871, less than two months after the Franco-Prussian War came to an end, long-standing political and social grievances led to the uprising known as the Paris Commune that resulted in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Parisians.
The Franco-Prussian War made the atrocities of the twentieth century more possible and thinkable. It was imaginable now to make civilians pay for the actions of soldiers, to see them as national enemies who could never be redeemed, to target them with impersonal bombardment and to utterly destroy villages in the way of armies. While jurists attempted to create international law to protect civilians, they were unable to do so before 1914. However, one author—George Sand—hoped for a different outcome. In her 1870 published journal, read by thousands, Sand wrote, ‘War will never be an instrument of life because it is the science of destruction; to believe that we can suppress it is not utopian. The realization of the dream of the alliance of the peoples is not so far off as we believe. It will be perhaps the work of the twentieth century.’
Rachel Chrastil is Professor of History and Provost at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the author of Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe.
