Franco-Prussian War

Primarily, the connection is through the loss by France of the Alsace-Lorraine region of northeastern France to the Germans, and the consolidation by Otto von Bismarck, "Iron Chancellor" of Prussia, of all the various smaller German states surrounding Prussia into what became the powerful nation of Germany of World Wars 1 and 2.

The French and the Germans and the Spanish and the Dutch and practically everybody else in Europe had been waging war for control of the strategically vital Alsace-Lorraine region for centuries. By 1870 the area was in French hands, during the reign of Napoleon III, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon III had started out as president of the French Second Republic (1848-1852), but engineered a coup in 1851 which abolished the Second Republic and established Napoleon III as Emperor of the French in what is called the Second Empire (the First Empire had been his uncle's).

In 1866, Prussia, under Bismarck as Chancellor and William I of the house of Hohenzollern as King of Prussia, fought and won a war with Austria that gave Prussia control over most of northern Germany. This was a massive expansion of Prussian power and influence and, from the French point of view, upset the balance of power in Europe. The French felt severely threatened by the abrupt emergence of Prussia as a major player in European power politics. There followed a period of intense political maneuvering and secret agreements, with the intent by Napoleon III of restoring the upset balance of power and (of course) French Honor. Bismarck, on the other hand, was intent upon further consolidating Prussian power (and Prussian Honor) by bringing the South German states into the Prussian sphere and creating a Prussian [German] Empire, with William I (Hohenzollern) as its first emperor. This ultimately put France and Prussia on a collision course.

By the spring of 1870, there had been enough relatively minor crises to bring both sides, Prussia and France, to the point where Napoleon and Bismarck were both actively seeking a war to settle this "balance of power" and "national honor" thing. As is usual in such cases, both sides believed they could easily win a small, glorious war, since most European wars had tended to be small and glorious unless you happened to be one of the poor pawns on the battlefields, in which case, for you personally, it was bloody, dirty and, for the most part, stupid, but you went anyway, for The Honor of France [Prussia]. Notice especially what a major part National Honor plays into all this. It was no joke. People took it all very seriously.

The spark that set off this particular powder keg occurred in Spain. Up until 1868 Isabella, a relative of the Bourbons, the former monarchs of France until the French Revolution of 1789, was the queen on the Spanish throne. She was very unpopular in Spain as she cared little for the people of Spain and spent most of her time intriguing, but the French liked her because she was French by blood. In 1868 there was a military coup that overthrew her and sent her into exile in France, after which there were a couple of years of relative anarchy in Spain. This had, of course, a destabilizing influence on the rest of Europe. Finally it was decided that Spain should have a monarch again (anybody but Isabella) and all the Crowned Heads of Europe began casting about for candidates, not unlike a presidential race in America only with princes. The French wanted somebody French. The Prussians wanted somebody Prussian, which would be offensive to the French because it would put Prussian Kings on both their eastern and western borders, which the French would perceive as an unacceptable threat to peace.

As the battle raged over who would be the next King of Spain, Bismarck was back stairs intriguing to get a Hohenzollern onto that throne. His candidate was a relatively minor prince, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The French discovered Bismarck trying to sneak Leopold in by the rear entrance, and they erupted in towering fury since having Hohenzollerns on both sides of them would be simply inadmissible. To make matters worse, Leopold was a Catholic. The French raised so much Cain that Leopold's father personally renounced the candidacy on Leopold's behalf (Leopold was ignorant of the whole brouhaha, since he was off hunting someplace in the Alps).

One would think that that would have been the end of it, but the French wanted more; now they wanted to humiliate the Prussians. Napoleon III demanded that William I of Prussia personally apologize to the French for having tried to sneak a Hohenzollern into Spain behind their backs. William I was perfectly willing to renounce the candidacy of Leopold, but an apology was out of the question. The King of Prussia did not apologize to anybody. Bismarck, intriguing as always, altered the language of the dispatch that relayed what William had said to the French ambassador in such a way as to make it sound more heated than it was, thus insulting the French. Now the French had insulted the Prussians, and the Prussians had insulted the French. This was like two countries slapping each other across the face. What more was there to be said? National Honor was at stake! It had to be War!

At this time the French Army had a reputation as being the best in the world. Napoleon III declared war, mobilized the supposedly invincible French Army and tried to invade Prussia along the eastern French border, but the Prussians, who had been secretly planning for this scrap for a long time, beat the French to the punch and invaded France along a broad front. Bismarck had been intriguing for years with the south Germans and, to the vast surprise of the French, the south Germans came into the war on the Prussian side, all of them mobilizing much more quickly than French planners had expected. The upshot was that the Prussians invested the French Army at Metz, in the Lorraine region, bottling it up and besieging it in the famed Vauban fortresses. The Prussians couldn't actually capture this French Army, but neither could the French Army come out and fight. Meanwhile, Napoleon III himself, who had for some inexplicable reason chosen to lead his army personally, tried to extricate himself from this shambles by leading a new French army to relieve Metz. He took them north in a wide flanking maneuver and got this Army caught in a Prussian pincers movement at Sedan in northeastern France, where he and his entire army were forced to surrender to the Prussians. While Napoleon was a prisoner of the Prussians, the French liberals held a revolution and deposed him, declaring the Third Republic. But the new Republic, once again citing National Honor, chose to continue the war, so the aggressive Prussians surrounded and besieged Paris itself.

The French fought very hard, but on January 28, 1871, Paris surrendered and the "glorious little war" was over. Ten days earlier Bismarck had had William I of Hohenzollern crowned as Emperor of the brand-new German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at the old French Royal Palace of Versailles (the location chosen was no accident). Prussia had now consolidated all the smaller German states into the Germany that fought two World Wars in the 20th Century. Germany had crushed and humiliated France, and Germany had seized a good deal of what had been French territory, including and especially the Alsace-Lorraine region, to become part of western Germany as a kind of buffer zone against another encroachment by the French.

But the loss of the Alsace-Lorraine to Germany was a bitter, bitter pill for the French to swallow, and it started what became known as the revanchist (revenge) movement to get back the Alsace-Lorraine and, of course, the Honor of France which had been so debased at Metz and Sedan. For the next 43 years there was uneasy peace in Europe as each major power (not just Germany and France but also Austria and Russia and Turkey and on and on) furiously rearmed and entangled themselves in alliances, each power looking to "defend" itself against the other, until all of Europe was a powder keg by 1914, just waiting for a spark.

The spark came on June 28, 1914: Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Austria demanded that Serbia punish the guilty parties, and when Serbia didn't act fast enough to satisfy the Austrians, Austria declared war on tiny Serbia. As usual, everybody expected a short war and a happy one, but by this time the tangle of alliances was immense. Basically Russia had to mobilize on behalf of Serbia, and Germany had to mobilize on behalf of Austria, which gave the French their long-awaited chance to regain the Alsace-Lorraine and the French National Honor lost in the Franco-Prussian debacle of 1870-71 by coming in on the side of Serbia, and the British had also to get in on the side of Serbia, and in the single month of August, 1914, the whole of Europe toppled down like dominos into what became the almighty tragedy of the First World War. And when it ended four long, bloody years later, the seeds were sown for World War, The Sequel, but that's another story.

For further reading on this fascinating subject, may I recommend the following books:

A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the origins of the Franco-Prussian War / by Wetzel, David. University of Wisconsin Press, c2001.

The Franco-Prussian War; the German invasion of France, 1870-1871. by Howard, Michael Eliot, Macmillan,1961.

The Guns of August. by Tuchman, Barbara W. Macmillan, 1962.

The Provinces of Alsace & Lorraine were ceded to Germany as a result. France was devastated by the loss. Prussia had been humiliated by Napoleons invasion of 1806.