"Bismarck's War
By Rachel Chrastil
(Basic, 512 pages, $35)
'Two brothers had left; only one returned," writes Rachel Chrastil. The survivor was Dietrich von Lassberg, a 22-year-old subaltern in the Bavarian army. A year earlier he had exulted in his diary: "War! War with France!" The brother who died was Rudolf, shot in the head in a battle outside Orleans in November 1870. On Christmas Eve, Dietrich sat around the campfire in silent misery, drinking hot grog from a tin cup, dreaming of his family back in Munich, and pondering the "shadow side and horror" of war. In "Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe," Ms. Chrastil, a historian at Xavier University, deftly uses Dietrich's diary and other sources to enliven her larger analysis of the war's origins and progress.
Although the six-month Franco-Prussian War was among the shortest of all major European conflicts, it brought Dietrich and his comrades sights that robbed them of any temptation to triumphalism. The war's combination of lethal new weapons (breechloading rifles, machine guns, steel cannon) and huge armies left mountains of dead and hordes of permanently mutilated wounded: In the murderous engagement at Gravelotte in August 1870, the Prussians lost twice as many men as they had during the entire Austro-Prussian War of 1866.
By July 1870 Prussia's chief minister, Otto von Bismarck, had deftly maneuvered France into declaring a war that he was confident the Prussian-led alliance would win; the spoils of victory would be Germany's unification on Prussian terms. After a brief incursion across the frontier at Saarbrucken, the French took up defensive positions. They were quickly dislodged by three limited if bloody August battles, two in Alsace at Wissembourg and Worth and one further north at Spicheren. Major catastrophes quickly followed, as one French army was surrounded and besieged at Metz and another was surrounded and forced to capitulate at Sedan on Sept 2.
The famous defeat at Sedan proved to be more than military, for the French commander was none other than the emperor, Napoleon III. His capture precipitated a swift and nearly instantaneous revolution in Paris and the collapse of the Second Empire. Explaining how it was possible for a great power to implode in less than a month, Ms. Chrastil follows most previous historians of the war in assigning most of the blame to the emperor.
Although it was Napoleon III's political coup d'etat of 1851 that Karl Marx had in mind when he observed that history repeats itself as tragedy and then as farce, the events of 1870 would have been as appropriate. Napoleon III was a sick man when the war began, in agonizing pain from a gallstone. He should never have been allowed anywhere near the front, but such was the growing fragility of his regime that he felt he had to gamble on achieving a personal triumph. And he lost, not just a battle and army but a throne too, slinking off to exile in England (the ultimate humiliation for a Bonaparte).
The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the best efforts of their courageous troops were frustrated by what Ms. Chrastil calls "strikingly weary and incompetent commanders, all reporting to an exhausted and enervated Napoleon III." As for the Prussians, the author allows that "they were better organized, had a better military education and had more manpower" but is at pains to bring out their limitations and mistakes. She also stresses how small was the margin separating success from failure: If only the French had done this or that or the other, she conjectures, all might have been very different.
While this subjunctive exercise can be a useful corrective to the triumphalist narrative of German nationalist historians, here it is perhaps taken too far. Once every reservation has been noted, the fact remains that the Prussian chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, brought off a series of dazzling victories that changed European history. Napoleon III's uncle, the great Napoleon, is said to have asked, when a subordinate was proposed for promotion: "I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?" Moltke was certainly lucky, but he was also brilliant.
Ms. Chrastil does her best to keep the momentum going after the drama at Sedan, when a slogging war of attrition developed, but the pace slackens as one inconsequential engagement follows another. Paris was surrounded by the end of September and a long and increasingly terrible siege began, made all the worse by an unusually severe winter. As starvation intensified, even the zoo animals were slaughtered and eaten, including the two elephants, Castor and Pollux.
Outside the capital there was plenty of horror still to come, as counterproductive resistance from partisan francs-tireurs was crushed by equally counterproductive reprisals from the German invaders. At the German occupiers' headquarters at Versailles, on Jan. 18, 1871, the German princes proclaimed Wilhelm of Prussia the first emperor of a united Germany. ("Mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria provided evidence of his basic sanity by refusing to attend.) A week later an armistice was signed, and the war came to an end -- so far as the Germans were concerned, although a civil war erupted in Paris in March.
This is a most engaging book, distinguished by sharp insight, powerful characterization and a strong narrative flow. It is the best modern account of the war and deserves to stand with Sir Michael Howard's classic study of 1961. Howard closed by observing that "Germany's magnificent and well-deserved victory was, in a profound and unforeseeable sense, a disaster: for herself, and for the entire world." Rachel Chrastil's assessment is equally bleak: "The Franco-Prussian War did not create the atrocities of the World Wars, but it made them more thinkable and created their possibility."
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Mr. Blanning is emeritus professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of "Frederick the Great: King of Prussia," among other books." [1]
1. A Fast But Fateful Fight. Blanning, Tim. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 Oct 2023: A.15.
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