The Franco-Prussian War

Europe after 1866 and the road to war

When Prussia beat Austria at Königgrätz in 1866 and bound the German states north of the Main into the North German Confederation, the standing of the French Second Empire, the self-declared dominant power of the continent since 1859, was shaken. Prussia annexed Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Nassau, Hesse-Kassel and Frankfurt, enlarging its territory by nearly a quarter to a population of about 24 million. France, which had stayed out of the war, gained nothing, and public opinion called for "revenge for Sadowa". Napoleon III demanded a return to the frontiers of 1814 with the annexation of Luxembourg, most of the Saarland and the Bavarian Palatinate; Otto von Bismarck dismissed this as a "tipping policy", refused, and showed the written demands to Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt, which hastened defensive alliances with the South German states. Bismarck knew that France had to appear as the aggressor if the southern states were to side with Prussia. The constitution of the North German Confederation, in force from July 1867, made the Prussian king its head and Bismarck its chancellor, with a Reichstag elected by universal manhood suffrage; August Bebel of Saxony entered that Reichstag in 1867. 1 2 3

The immediate occasion was the Spanish throne. After Isabella II was driven out in 1868, the vacant crown was offered to Prince Leopold of the Catholic Sigmaringen branch of the Hohenzollerns; when the candidacy became known on 2 July 1870, the French parliament and press raged against encirclement by Prussia and Spain. Under French pressure Leopold withdrew on 11 July, which was already seen as a diplomatic defeat for Prussia. The foreign minister, the Duc de Gramont, went further and demanded that the Prussian king guarantee that no Hohenzollern would ever again be a candidate. On the morning of 13 July the French ambassador, Vincent Benedetti, stopped Wilhelm I on the promenade at Bad Ems and put the demand to him; the king refused, politely but firmly. Heinrich Abeken reported the conversation by telegram to Bismarck in Berlin, and Bismarck cut the king's conciliatory phrases, reduced the text to the statement that the king had refused to receive the ambassador again and had informed him through an adjutant that he had nothing further to say, and released it that evening to the press and the foreign embassies. The French translation by the Havas agency rendered "Adjutant" as "adjudant", a non-commissioned officer, which implied that the king had deliberately insulted the ambassador. Bismarck said the text would have "the effect of a red rag on the Gallic bull". 2 4 5

On 14 July the French papers printed the translation of Bismarck's communiqué, not their ambassador's report. Gramont said he felt he had "just received a slap"; Adolphe Thiers, the monarchist leader in parliament, argued that France had already won the diplomatic battle and had no reason to fight, but was drowned out by cries of "traitor" and "Prussian". The prime minister, Émile Ollivier, said he accepted responsibility for the war "with a light heart", and a crowd of 15,000 to 20,000 marched through Paris demanding war. France ordered mobilisation on the 15th, the North German Confederation mobilised that night, and Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg followed. The legislature voted war credits by an overwhelming majority, and on 19 July France declared war on Prussia. The Second Empire, which had won 7.33 million yes votes in the plebiscite of 8 May and seemed "more popular than ever", went to war without a single ally, hoping that Austria, Denmark and Italy would join in. Historians disagree: some hold that Bismarck deliberately provoked France in order to bring the South German states into the Confederation, others that he exploited events as they unfolded and that Napoleon III had already resolved on war to stabilise his regime. All agree that Bismarck recognised the potential of the new German alliances. 1 2 4

From the frontier battles to Sedan

The difference between the two armies showed in mobilisation. The Prussian General Staff revised its railway mobilisation plans every year, and Helmuth von Moltke, appointed chief of staff for the duration five days after the mobilisation order of 5 July, gained the right to issue orders equivalent to royal commands. The German forces assembled south of Mainz in three armies: the First under Steinmetz, the Second under Prince Friedrich Karl and the Third under the Prussian crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm. On the French side, competing private railway companies and the absence of military control of the lines left reservists and loaded wagons choking the stations, and the army lost 100,000 stragglers before a shot was fired. At the outbreak 462,000 German soldiers stood on the frontier against 270,000 French. The French infantry's Chassepot rifle outranged the Dreyse needle gun, but the Krupp steel breech-loading guns of the Prussian artillery fired farther and faster than the French bronze muzzle-loaders. Napoleon III left for Metz on 28 July to command the "Army of the Rhine", though he was too ill to ride; the brief occupation of Saarbrücken on 2 August was the only French gain on German soil. 1 6 4

The first action came at Wissembourg on 4 August, where the crown prince's Third Army overwhelmed the isolated division of General Douay, who was killed. On the 6th the armies of Steinmetz and Friedrich Karl drove Frossard's II Corps from the heights of Spicheren, and on the same day at Wörth (Frœschwiller) Marshal MacMahon's 35,000 men fought the 140,000 of the Third Army, lost around 10,000 killed and wounded and 9,200 prisoners, and fell back beyond the Vosges. Marshal Achille Bazaine's Army of the Rhine, about 160,000 strong in the fortress of Metz, tried to withdraw towards Châlons on 15 August, but on the 16th at Mars-la-Tour Alvensleben's III Corps of 30,000 men took Vionville against odds of four to one and blocked the road west; the German official history recorded 15,780 German and 13,761 French casualties. The Battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat on the 18th was the largest of the war: 188,332 men under Moltke attacked the entrenched 112,800 of Bazaine, at a cost of 20,163 German and 12,275 French casualties, and the next day the Army of the Rhine withdrew into Metz, where it was besieged. Apart from attempted break-outs at Noisseville on 31 August and Bellevue on 7 October, Bazaine stayed inside the fortress, and historians have criticised his passivity. 1 7 8 9 10

On 17 August Napoleon III and MacMahon formed the new Army of Châlons and set out to relieve Bazaine. The army marched north-east towards the Belgian border to avoid the Prussians, but Moltke detached three corps from the siege of Metz to form the Army of the Meuse under the Crown Prince of Saxony, turned north with it and the Third Army, and caught the French at Beaumont on 30 August. Having lost 5,000 men and 40 guns, the Army of Châlons withdrew into the obsolete seventeenth-century fortress of Sedan. On the morning of 1 September the German armies closed the ring on every side. When MacMahon was wounded, command passed through Ducrot to Wimpffen; General Margueritte's cavalry charged the village of Floing three times, and he was mortally wounded in the first charge. With shellfire pouring in from all sides and every break-out defeated, Napoleon III had a white flag hoisted on the fortress wall. At 11:30 on 2 September Wimpffen signed the capitulation. The French lost 3,220 killed and 14,811 wounded, and 104,000 men passed into captivity with 558 guns. The emperor was sent on 3 September to Schloss Wilhelmshöhe near Kassel; when the news reached Paris, the empress is reported to have asked, "Why didn't he kill himself?" In Germany 2 September was celebrated as Sedantag every year until 1919. 11 1 10

4 September and the Government of National Defence

News of the capitulation at Sedan reached Paris on the night of 3 September, and from the morning of the 4th crowds filled the Palais Bourbon, seat of the legislature, demanding a republic. That afternoon at the Hôtel de Ville, Léon Gambetta proclaimed the Republic: "The people has forestalled the Chamber which was wavering. To save the Nation in danger, it has asked for the Republic." The Second Empire fell without bloodshed. The new Government of National Defence was headed by General Louis-Jules Trochu, the military governor of Paris, with Jules Favre as vice-president and foreign minister and Gambetta as minister of the interior, and was filled out by the republican deputies elected for Paris, among them Jules Ferry, Jules Simon, Ernest Picard and Henri Rochefort. Trochu, an Orleanist, accepted the presidency on a promise that the government would "resolutely defend religion, property, and the family". Though several factions apart from the Bonapartists were represented, real power lay with the Orleanists and the conservatives. Only the United States and Spain recognised the government at once; Bismarck questioned whether a body made up solely of Parisians could speak for France, called Napoleon III "the legitimate ruler of France" and dismissed Gambetta's republic as "un coup de parti". 12 13 1 14

On 6 September Favre declared that France would not "yield an inch of its territory nor a stone of its fortresses", a phrase soon posted on walls all over Paris. Yet Favre, like Trochu, did not believe France could win the war; he opened a channel to Bismarck through the British ambassador Lord Lyons, and proposed to the cabinet that Germany be offered an indemnity in return for evacuating French soil, which was rejected. On 18 and 19 September he met Bismarck at the Château de Ferrières. Favre offered an indemnity of 500 million francs but refused any cession of territory; Bismarck demanded a frontier immune to a French war of revenge, including Strasbourg, Alsace and most of the Moselle department with Metz. When Bismarck asked for the surrender of Strasbourg and Toul as the price of an armistice for elections to a National Assembly, Favre wept and broke off, and on the 20th the cabinet rejected the terms completely. On the 24th the government postponed local and national elections indefinitely: in Gambetta's words, "We could not have elections without an armistice, and the effect of an armistice would be to relax the efforts of the defence." The republic renewed the declaration of war, called for recruits throughout the country and pledged to drive the Germans out by a guerre à outrance. 15 16 1

Meanwhile the German armies were reducing the fortresses of Alsace. After Wörth, August von Werder took 40,000 Baden troops and Prussian Landwehr south to Strasbourg and began bombarding the city on 23 August. The museum of fine arts and the municipal library with its medieval manuscripts burned; the bishop begged for a ceasefire, but the elderly General Uhrich refused to surrender. Running short of shells, the Germans switched to a formal siege, breached the enceinte on 17 September, and the garrison, having learned of Sedan, capitulated on 28 September. The besiegers had fired 202,099 shells, about 4,000 tons; 341 civilians were killed and 10,000 left homeless. In his address of 9 September Marx wrote that Strasbourg "has for six days been wantonly and fiendishly bombarded". The fall of Strasbourg and Toul opened the railway from Germany to the siege lines of Paris, and Werder's corps moved south against Belfort. By 15 September the German armies had reached the outskirts of Paris and Moltke issued the orders for its investment; the ring closed on the 19th, and from the 20th Paris was cut off from the rest of France. 17 18 1 13

The siege of Paris and the war in the provinces

Paris had about 513,000 potential defenders: 60,000 regulars who had escaped from Sedan, 90,000 Mobiles, 13,000 naval seamen and 350,000 National Guards. The 33 km Thiers wall and sixteen detached forts built in the 1840s ringed the city. Moltke never intended to storm the city, and Blumenthal, who directed the siege, and the crown prince opposed a bombardment that would strike civilians; Bismarck, fearing the intervention of neutrals, pressed constantly for an early bombardment. Trochu had little faith in the National Guard, and his proclamation that the governor of Paris would never capitulate raised expectations doomed to disappointment. On 7 October Gambetta flew over the German lines in the coal-gas balloon Armand-Barbès and reached Tours, where as minister of the interior and of war, assisted by the engineer officer Charles de Freycinet, he governed unoccupied France as a virtual dictator. In less than four months eleven new army corps were formed, at an average of six thousand infantrymen and two batteries a day. The North German Confederation, which had mobilised 888,000 men in August, increased its forces by only 15 per cent by the end of the war, so that in November only the troops released by the fall of Metz saw the Germans through a crisis at the front. 19 1 13 12 14

Fighting between German and republican forces began near Orléans on 10 October. The improvised Army of the Loire, made up of francs-tireurs, provincial Mobiles, naval units and zouaves from Algeria, gave up Orléans on the 11th but beat the Bavarians at Coulmiers on 9 November and retook the city. On 27 October, however, Bazaine had surrendered Metz and his starving army of 173,000 men (193,000 in some accounts), freeing Friedrich Karl's Second Army, and the German press reported widely on Bazaine's offer to "cooperate" against the "republican menace". Beaten at Beaune-la-Rolande on 28 November and Loigny on 2 December, the Army of the Loire lost Orléans again on 4 December, and the government delegation moved to Bordeaux. Gambetta split the army in two: Chanzy's Second Army of the Loire collapsed at Le Mans on 11–12 January 1871 with 7,000 killed and wounded, 22,000 captured and 50,000 deserters, while Faidherbe's Army of the North, after Amiens and Bapaume, was scattered at St. Quentin on 13 January. In besieged Paris, on 31 October, the day the surrender of Metz was confirmed, National Guard battalions led by Blanqui, Flourens and Delescluze seized the Hôtel de Ville and held Trochu's cabinet hostage before withdrawing overnight; despite a promise of no reprisals, the government arrested 22 of the leaders, embittering the Parisian left. 1 20 10 19

In the east, Charles Denis Bourbaki's Army of the East, 110,000 strong, marched north to relieve Belfort and fought Werder's 40,000 or so on the Lisaine from 15 to 17 January without breaking through; driven into the mountains near the Swiss border by Manteuffel's Army of the South, Bourbaki attempted suicide. Francs-tireurs cut railways and bridges and surprised small posts, but the Germans treated them as armed civilians without combatant status, shot those they captured and took reprisals on the nearest villages; at Bazeilles beside Sedan, Bavarian troops shot more than thirty inhabitants and burned the village. In Paris the diet moved from horsemeat to dogs, cats and rats and finally to the zoo's elephants, and by January three to four thousand people a week were dying of cold and hunger. The "great sortie" at Champigny on 30 November and the sortie towards Le Bourget on 21 December failed. From 5 January, as Bismarck wished, the Germans fired some 12,000 shells into the city over 23 nights, killing or wounding about 400, but the will to resist held. When the last sortie, against the château of Buzenval on 19 January, ended with more than 4,000 casualties, Trochu handed the governorship of Paris to General Vinoy on the 22nd, and a small rising on the 23rd was crushed by force. 1 21 22 23 24 19 13

The First International and the German Social Democrats against the war

The Second Empire had treated the International Working Men's Association as an enemy before the war began. On the eve of the plebiscite of May 1870 the government raided the association's administrative committees in Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Marseille and Brest on the pretext that it was a secret society plotting the emperor's assassination; at the trial of 22 June to 5 July the conspiracy charge collapsed, yet several members were jailed for their socialist beliefs alone. Because the French sections had told the people that a yes vote meant "despotism at home and war abroad", the workers of the great towns voted no almost as one, but the countryside tipped the balance. When the war crisis broke, the Paris members published a manifesto "to the Workmen of all Nations" in the Réveil of 12 July: "War for a question of preponderance or a dynasty can, in the eyes of workmen, be nothing but a criminal absurdity", and "Brothers in Germany! Our division would only result in the complete triumph of the despotism on both sides of the Rhine". Declarations from Neuilly-sur-Seine and elsewhere followed, and the prefect of police, Piétri, banned all street politics when the peace demonstrations of the working-class faubourgs grew too large. In Germany a mass meeting of workers at Brunswick on 16 July endorsed the Paris manifesto and declared "We are the enemies of all wars, but above all of dynastic wars"; at Chemnitz a meeting of delegates representing 50,000 Saxon workers called the war "exclusively dynastic"; and the Berlin branch replied that "neither the sound of the trumpets, nor the roar of the cannon, neither victory nor defeat, shall divert us from our common work". 25

On 23 July the General Council in London issued its first address, written by Karl Marx. It called the "war plot of July 1870" an "amended edition of the coup d'état of December 1851" and predicted that "the death-knell of the Second Empire has already sounded at Paris. It will end, as it began, by a parody." On the German side the war was defensive, but what had put Germany in that position was Bismarck's Prussia, which had conspired with Bonaparte to crush opposition at home and annex Germany to the Hohenzollern dynasty; if the German working class allowed the war "to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous". Russia loomed in the background, and the Germans would forfeit all sympathy the moment the Prussian government accepted "the help of the Cossack". In the Reichstag of the North German Confederation the two deputies of the Social Democratic Workers' Party, the Eisenachers August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, abstained in the vote on war credits on 21 July (19 July in the German-language source), a compromise Bebel devised so as neither to support the Prussian government nor to appear to favour Napoleon. The party's central committee in Brunswick, Wilhelm Bracke and Samuel Spier, who like Marx saw the first phase of the war as a legitimate defence against aggression, clashed fiercely with the two deputies who had refused a war "against brothers", and the year-old party came close to breaking apart. 25 26 27 28

After Sedan the Brunswick committee too turned against continuing the war. In a letter to the committee of about 1 September, Marx and Engels overturned the claim that annexing Alsace-Lorraine would protect Germany from war for ever: it was "the best means of turning this war into a European institution", the surest way of perpetuating military despotism in the new Germany as the price of holding "a western Poland", and would turn the coming peace into "a mere armistice until France has recovered sufficiently to demand back her lost territories". On 5 September the committee issued its manifesto: "We protest against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. And we are conscious of speaking in the name of the German working class", demanding an "honourable peace" with the French republic and the extradition of Louis Bonaparte. On the orders of the commanding general Vogel von Falckenstein the manifesto was confiscated, and all the committee members, down to the printer, were arrested and taken "in chains like common criminals" to Lötzen in East Prussia, a thousand kilometres from Brunswick. Marx reported this in the Pall Mall Gazette on 15 September. The liberal Johann Jacoby was also imprisoned for protesting against the annexation. The General Council's second address of 9 September declared that "the war of defense ended, in point of fact, with the surrender of Louis Bonaparte, the Sedan capitulation, and the proclamation of the republic at Paris", refuted point by point the case for annexation as a "material guarantee", and argued that making military considerations the principle of national boundaries "carries within it the seed of fresh wars"; by driving France into the arms of Russia, annexation would lead to "a war of races", "with the Slavonic and Roman races". It hailed the republic while warning that the Orleanists held the army and the police; the French workers were told that any attempt to upset the new government with the enemy at the gates of Paris "would be a desperate folly", and to use republican liberty for their own class organisation. 29 28 18 30

When the North German Reichstag took up further war credits on 26 November, Bebel and Liebknecht moved a peace proposal "renouncing any annexation of French territory" and voted against the credits. The debate turned into accusations of treason against the two deputies, followed by tumults and physical attacks, especially on Liebknecht. On 17 December the two were arrested together with Adolf Hepner, the second editor of the party organ Der Volksstaat. Liebknecht greeted unification under Prussian leadership with the slogan "For this system, not one man and not one penny!", which became the watchword of the party's opposition to the Bismarckian state. After Bebel won a seat in the election to the new German Reichstag on 3 March 1871, the government bowed to pressure and released the three on 28 March. In the Reichstag Bebel hailed the Paris Commune as a "preliminary skirmish" in the long campaign of the international working class. Since the war was over, no trial for Landesverrat (treason against the country) was possible; Bismarck pressed on, and the charge became Hochverrat (high treason). At the trial before the Leipzig jury court from 11 to 26 March 1872 Hepner was acquitted; Bebel and Liebknecht were found guilty by exactly the required minimum of eight jurors and sentenced to two years' fortress confinement, and Bebel was stripped of his seat. Liebknecht called himself "a soldier of the revolution" before the court, and because the prosecution had read the Communist Manifesto, then out of print, into the record, the Social Democrats could republish it legally. At the by-election of January 1873 Bebel was re-elected with more than 4,000 votes more than in the first round. 31 27 26

The empire proclaimed at Versailles, and the armistice

The victories of August and September drew the South German princes into the North German Confederation. In November 1870 Baden, Hesse, Württemberg and Bavaria signed treaties; on 8 December the Bundesrat voted to rename the Confederation the "German Empire" and to make the king of Prussia German Emperor, and on 9 and 10 December the Reichstag voted to offer the title. The new constitution came into force on 1 January 1871. Wilhelm I feared the imperial title would overshadow his Prussian crown and wanted to be "Kaiser von Deutschland", but Bismarck warned that the South German princes and the emperor of Austria would protest, and "Deutscher Kaiser" was settled on. The proclamation was fixed for 18 January, the anniversary of the coronation of the first Prussian king in 1701. That day the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles was crowded with delegations of the regiments holding their battle-torn colours; a field altar stood in place of a throne, a service was held, and Bismarck read out the proclamation. Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden, Wilhelm's only son-in-law, avoided the constitutional title and shouted "His Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm", and those present repeated it three times. Wilhelm stressed the religious character of the ceremony, while Bismarck openly criticised the emperor for not seeing himself as holding authority over the princes but as a commander triumphing with his comrades. Held in the palace of the besieged enemy capital, the ceremony was remembered in France as a national humiliation. 32 33 3 24

Over the winter tensions grew within the German leadership. Moltke and Blumenthal wanted a methodical siege that would reduce the detached forts one by one; Bismarck wanted a quick end, fearing that a long siege would strain the economy, give France time to raise new armies and draw in the neutrals. On 25 January Wilhelm I overruled Moltke and ordered him to consult Bismarck on all future operations, and Bismarck at once had the city bombarded with large-calibre Krupp siege guns. Favre, empowered by the cabinet on 23 January to seek a general armistice, reached Versailles that evening. When he voiced his fear that the National Guard would rebel, Bismarck advised him to "provoke an uprising, then, while you still have an army with which to suppress it". The terms agreed were the surrender of the forts around Paris, the disarming of the regular troops less one division, the National Guard keeping its arms, an indemnity of 200 million francs, an armistice until 19 February and elections to a National Assembly. The guns fell silent at midnight on the 27th, and on 28 January Favre and Bismarck signed the convention. The departments of Jura, Doubs and Côte-d'Or were excluded at French request so as to preserve the fortified region of Belfort; Favre neglected to tell the government at Bordeaux, and the Army of the East under Clinchant, operating there, halted in the belief that the armistice applied and was surrounded by Manteuffel's Army of the South. On 1 February the last French army, 87,000 men, crossed from Pontarlier through Les Verrières into Switzerland, where it was disarmed and interned. The National Guard's retention of its arms later made the rising of the Paris Commune possible. 19 15 1 16

In Bordeaux, Gambetta received the news of the surrender by telegram on 29 January, was furious and refused to accept it. On 6 February Gambetta resigned and handed the provincial armies to the government. The elections of 8 February, held with 43 departments under occupation and all public meetings banned so that only Paris saw a campaign, returned a large majority of Legitimists and Orleanists pledged to peace. Gambetta was elected in eight departments, but Thiers was returned simultaneously in many constituencies (23 or 86, depending on the source). The Assembly met in Bordeaux on 12 February, made Thiers chief executive, and on the 19th its members swore the "Pact of Bordeaux", a truce that left the question of republic or monarchy open. The preliminary peace was signed at Versailles on 26 February; on 1 March 30,000 Prussian, Bavarian and Saxon troops paraded through a silent Paris draped in black and withdrew after two days to encampments east of the city. The same day the National Assembly formally declared the emperor deposed and placed the blame for the defeat on him. Once peace was arranged Bismarck released Napoleon III, who crossed to England on 20 March, settled at Chislehurst in Kent and died on 9 January 1873 after operations for bladder stones; his last words are reported as "Isn't it true that we weren't cowards at Sedan?" 15 13 34 12 19 4

The Treaty of Frankfurt and Alsace-Lorraine

On 10 May 1871 the German Empire and the French Republic signed the peace treaty at Frankfurt. France ceded the Alsatian departments of Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin, except Belfort and its territory, and in Lorraine most of the Moselle department, a third of Meurthe including Château-Salins and Sarrebourg, and the cantons of Saales and Schirmeck in the Vosges: 1,694 villages and towns, 1,447,000 hectares and 1,597,000 inhabitants, together with 20 per cent of France's mining and steel potential. The inhabitants had until 1 October 1872 to opt for French nationality and emigrate, or to stay and become German citizens. The indemnity was five billion francs in gold, payable within five years; one billion had to be paid in 1871 before any German withdrawal, and parts of France remained occupied until the sum was paid in full. The figure was proportioned by population to be the exact equivalent of the indemnity Napoleon I had imposed on Prussia in 1807. France recognised Wilhelm I as German Emperor. France paid the indemnity faster than agreed, and the German troops withdrew in September 1873. The German military regarded Alsace up to the Vosges and the route between Thionville and Metz as essential for any future war with France. The new border largely followed the linguistic one, but the annexation of French-speaking Metz caused outrage in France, and resources such as iron and coal do not appear to have motivated the annexation. 35 1

On 28 June 1871 the annexed land became the "Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine", not a constituent state but a territory governed directly by a governor appointed by the emperor. Prussia held that the population first had to be "Germanised" and initially treated the region as occupied territory. About 90 per cent of the inhabitants spoke German dialects, but Catholics were sceptical of unification under Protestant Prussia, and when the Kulturkampf reached the territory in 1872–73 the Catholic Church became a vehicle of resistance. 160,878 people, 10.4 per cent of the population and 20.3 per cent in Upper Alsace, opted for French nationality, though only about 50,000 actually left for France; some estimates put the optants as high as 280,000 and those who left at 130,000. When the territory received 15 Reichstag seats in 1874, between six and ten of those elected were "protest deputies" opposed to the annexation; their French-language motion asking that "the population of Alsace-Lorraine, which has been incorporated into the German Empire by the Treaty of Frankfurt without having been consulted, be called upon to express its opinion on this annexation" was rejected by a large majority. Nor was the population consulted when it returned to France in 1918. Whether Bismarck wanted the annexation or was pushed into it by the army and a wave of public opinion is debated among historians; his biographers hold that he "reluctantly gave in", and count the annexation his main mistake, because it turned France into a permanent enemy. 36 5 35

Germany sent 33,101 officers and 1,113,254 men into France and lost 28,306 in battle (17,585 killed in action and 10,721 dead of wounds), with 12,147 more dead of disease, 6,965 of them from typhoid; 89,732 were wounded. French battle deaths were 77,000 (41,000 killed and 36,000 dead of wounds) and more than 45,000 died of sickness, for a total of 138,871 dead; 137,626 were wounded and 383,860 taken prisoner, while 90,192 were interned in Switzerland and 6,300 in Belgium. Prussian executions of prisoners (more than 200 French soldiers at Dornach) and violence against civilians were also recorded. The war was over, but the fight for Paris was not. During the siege the National Guard of the working-class districts had become politicised enough to elect its officers and refuse orders from the national government, and on 18 March 1871, when regular troops tried to remove the cannon on Montmartre, it resisted and killed two generals. The government and the army withdrew to Versailles and a Commune was set up in Paris. In the Bloody Week of 21–28 May the regular army retook the city; the Communards killed by government troops were long estimated at between 7,000 and 30,000, and more recent studies of cemetery burials put the figure at 6,000 to 10,000. The survivors were amnestied in 1880 by a bill introduced by Gambetta. 1 15

Assessment

Accounts of the war's origins still diverge. Bismarck himself fed the myth of a master plan by writing in his memoirs that he "always considered that a war with France would naturally follow a war against Austria", and some historians hold that he deliberately provoked France to bring in the South German states. Others argue that the Ems dispatch played only a minor role and that Napoleon III had already chosen war because he believed he would win, while the French historians François Roth and Pierre Milza see the emperor as pushed by a bellicose press and public opinion. In Germany the character of the war is debated. Tobias Arand treats the war up to Sedan as a classic cabinet war, transformed afterwards by the Government of National Defence's mobilisation of civilians and by the German demands for territory. Alexander Seyferth classes it as a stage on the road to the total wars of the twentieth century because of the mobilisation and propaganda of the home front, while Christine Krüger objects that the home front is only one feature of total war among many, and that the humane treatment of prisoners and the relatively quick end of the confrontation set it apart from the world wars. 1 2 5 24 4

The figures vary by source. The force that surrendered at Metz is given as 173,000 in the overview article and as 193,000 in the article on the siege (6,000 officers and 167,000 men taken prisoner, with 20,000 sick left behind). The French strength at Gravelotte is 112,800, while the Napoleon III article puts Bazaine's army shut up in Metz at 175,000. For Alsace-Lorraine the official count of 160,878 optants for French nationality stands beside estimates of up to 280,000. Thiers is said to have been elected in 23 or in 86 constituencies in February 1871; the date of Bebel's and Liebknecht's abstention on war credits is 21 July in the English source and 19 July in the German one, and their arrest is dated December 1871 in the English Bebel article but 17 December 1870 in the Liebknecht article and the German article on the trial. For the Commune the traditional estimate of 7,000 to 30,000 dead confronts the 6,000 to 10,000 of studies of burial records. This account gives the range at each point. 1 10 4 36 34 12 26 27 31

For the socialist movement the war left two precedents. The first was that the workers' organisations of the two belligerents exchanged messages of peace, and that the General Council, having denounced the "dynastic war" in two addresses, opposed the victor's annexation the moment the war lost its defensive character. Marx went beyond the German workers' critique of "material guarantees" to foresee that annexation would drive France into the arms of Russia and bring on a "war of races", "with the Slavonic and Roman races", and called the unified German Empire "a military despotism cloaked in parliamentary forms". Later historians likewise count the annexation Bismarck's main mistake, though they note that revanchism faded in the 1880s and that the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine became a French war aim only after the First World War had begun. The second precedent was the vote in parliament. The abstention and the no vote of Bebel and Liebknecht, the chains of the Brunswick committee and the fortress sentences of Leipzig made "not one man and not one penny for this system" the watchword of German Social Democracy, and once German nationalism after 1871 defined itself against France and by excluding the "enemies of the Reich" (Poles, Danes, Catholics and Social Democrats), the watchword became the party's identity. Yet the same Bebel supported the military budget of 1913 on condition of a property tax, foreshadowing the vote for war credits in 1914; the precedent of 1870 was not kept in 1914. 25 18 37 5 1 27 24 26