The Franco-Prussian War

Michael Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000385847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In 1870 the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck ordered the Prussian Army to invade France, inciting one of the most dramatic conflicts in European history. It transformed not only the states-system of the European continent but the whole climate of European moral and political thought. The overwhelming triumph of German military might, evoking general admiration and imitation, introduced an era of power politics, which was to reach its disastrous climax in 1914.

Michael Howard's The Franco-Prussian War is widely acclaimed as a classic and the definitive history of one of the most dramatic and decisive conflicts in the history of Europe. Evoking a palpable sense of the struggle and the high stakes of the war, Howard analyses the tactics, political dynamics, morale and actions that determined the course of the conflict. He also describes the crucial role played by key figures in the war, including Bismarck, the Prussian military commander Helmuth Von Moltke, and the French generals MacMahon, Chanzy and Trochu. He also sheds fascinating light on how difficult it was to bring the war to an end, with extremists in both France and Prussia pushing to prolong the conflict.

A tour de force of both European and military history, The Franco-Prussian War is a superb account of this dramatic and hugely important conflict, ideal for the student, historian and general reader alike.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Bertrand Taithe.

1

The Antagonists

1. The Technical Background

In the summer of 1870 the kingdom of Prussia and her German allies totally destroyed the military power of Imperial France. For nearly eighty years the defeated nation had given the law in military matters to Europe, whereas the victor, ten years earlier, had been the least of the continent’s major military powers. Within a month Prussia established a military pre-eminence and a political hegemony which made the unification of Germany under her leadership a matter of course, and which only an alliance embracing nearly every major power in the world was to wrest from her half a century later.

There was little precedent in the history of Europe for so dramatic a reversal. To find one we must go back at least to the campaign of Breitenfeld in 1631 when within a few weeks Gustavus Adolphus broke the supremacy of the Catholic powers; and Gustavus had fought for years against the Danes, Poles, and Russians with an accumulating success which already marked him out as one of the great captains of history. In 1870 the Prussian army had to its credit the brilliant campaign of 1866 against Austria, but this was only one in the long series of defeats which the Hapsburgs had suffered at the hands of Prussia and France since the days of Eugene of Savoy. The completeness of the Prussian success in 1870 thus astounded the world. The incompetence of the French high command explained much: but the basic reasons for the catastrophe lay deeper, as the French themselves, in their humiliation, were to discern. The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. The French had good reason to look on their disasters as a judgment. The social and economic developments of the past fifty years had brought about a military as well as an industrial revolution. The Prussians had kept abreast of it and France had not. Therein lay the basic cause of her defeat.

The military implications of the industrial changes and scientific discoveries which were transforming the world were little explored during the first half of the nineteenth century. Conservative War Ministries and parsimonious Treasuries allowed projects of every kind to collect dust in pigeon-holes or to be frittered away in endless experiment. This indolence was disturbed only by the change which occurred in the relations between the Great Powers in the 1850s. The Crimea showed that major war was still possible, and the growth of nationalist movements with the active encouragement of a new French Empire made it seem likely. Throughout Europe military writing began to multiply. The wars of the first Napoleon provided an inexhaustible field for study, and the principles which such authorities as Jomini, Willisen, Clausewitz and Rüstow derived from them provided the broad foundations for a theory of war equally valid for all ages. But two major technical questions were entirely open to speculation. How would the new means of communication—railways and the electric telegraph—affect strategy? And how would the development of breech-loading rifled firearms affect tactics?

The significance of railways for military operations had been discerned as soon as they were developed, in the 1830s. German writers were particularly alert to their possibilities, at a moment when a weak German Confederation once again seemed to lie at the mercy of a revived and ambitious France.¹ Some of them, notably Friedrich List, saw even deeper implications in the new form of transport. Hitherto, lying in the centre of Europe, Germany had been at the mercy of her more powerful and united neighbours. Railways would not only give her a new economic unity; they would transform her central position into an asset, enabling her to concentrate her forces rapidly at any point on her frontier to repel invasion.² It was in railways, therefore, that the real strength of national defence lay. “Every new development of railways”, wrote Helmuth von Moltke, “is a military advantage; and for the national defence a few million on the completion of our railways is far more profitably employed than on our new fortresses.”³ Opinion in France and Austria was equally impressed by the military advantages of railway development and the military dangers offered by the advances of their neighbours. In 1842 alarmed French publicists urged the construction of a line from Paris to Strasbourg to counter the convergence of German lines on the Rhine; and even the British grew alarmed at the possibilities of a sudden French concentration on the Channel ports. In the campaign of 1859 the French and Hapsburg Empires, using railways, moved troops into Italy within a fortnight, which would have taken sixty days to march over the same distance. It was clear that the railway age would open a new chapter in the history of warfare.

Speed of concentration was only one of the advantages which railways provided. They carried troops rapidly to the theatre of war; and they enabled them to arrive in good physical condition, not wearied and decimated by weeks of marching. Armies needed no longer to consist of hardened regular troops; reservists from civil life could be embodied in the force as well, although the incidence of sickness and exhaustion in the combat area itself was consequently increased. Further, the problem of supplying large forces in the field was simplified. Military movements had hitherto been dictated by the necessity of living off the country, or from laboriously accumulated magazines: now, if the railway lines were intact, the trains smoothly organised, and supply from the railhead unhampered, armies could keep the field so long as there was blood and treasure in the nation to support them—and of this power of endurance the American Civil War provided the first great example. Supplies and reinforcements could come daily from home and the wounded could be quickly evacuated to base hospitals. With the burden of their supply-columns lightened, armies could be more mobile and their members more lightly equipped. Moreover, the distinction between army and nation was dissolved. No longer was the battle-area remote. Newspaper-correspondents could travel to and fro, sending back their reports by telegraph. Troops could come and go on leave. The wounded could be cared for and entertained at home. The nation at war thus became an armed camp—sometimes a besieged fortress—in which every individual felt himself involved in a mighty communal endeavour. In 1870 there dawned in Europe an age of “absolute war” in a sense which even Clausewitz had never conceived.

Finally, the development of railways gave an entirely new aspect to the fundamental principle of Napoleonic strategy—the concentration of overwhelming forces at the decisive point. This concentration could no longer be effected by movement of armies in the field: it was a matter of elaborate organisation which had to be undertaken long before the war began. The largest available number of men had to be called up, trained, and passed into an easily recallable army reserve. The peace-time armies of the European powers became largely training cadres; before they could take the field at all they had to recall their reservists, clothe and equip them from mobilisation-stores, and reform their units on a war-time basis. Efficient conscription, training, and mobilisation became a necessary preliminary to a successful concentration, and a successful concentration became more than ever the object of all strategy. The army which could first concentrate its masses not only secured an overwhelming advantage in the first, and possibly decisive, battle; it had also the chance of disorganising by invasion or deep raids the mobilisation of its adversary, reducing his plans to chaos, and leaving him defenceless. Prescient or predatory nations had the opportunity as never before to establish a military supremacy over their neighbours before hostilities even began.

The same advantage could be taken of those developments in weapontechnology which nineteenth-century advances in metallurgy, ballistics, and precision-engineering were simultaneously making possible. Between 1815 and 1870 the weapons both of infantry and of artillery were transformed. The muskets of the Napoleonic era were smooth-bores, barely accurate at fifty yards, and useless at more than two hundred. They were loaded at the muzzle and a skilled man might fire three shots in a minute if his flintlock mechanism did not misfire, as in wet weather it usually did. These weapons had remained virtually unchanged since the days of Marlborough, and so had the essence of infantry tactics. Infantry battalions deployed in line, two or three deep, to make the best use of their erratic fire; a formation of proved value in defence but of less use in the attack. For the attack the French army had developed a new technique: a line of skirmishers to wear down the defence with aimed harassing fire, columns of infantry to feed the firing line and where possible to charge, and, most important of all, mobile and powerful artillery to disorganise the defence before the infantry closed in. The guns, like the muskets, were smooth-bore muzzle-loaders, as virtually all guns had been since the fifteenth century; erratic and wildly inaccurate, with an effective range of a thousand yards or less.⁴ Only in their greater mobility and rate of fire did they differ from the weapons used by the armies of Montecucculi and Turenne. But by 1870 the principal armies of Europe were equipped with rifles scientifically accurate up to at least five hundred yards and with rifled guns which could be effectively employed at ranges of two to three thousand yards. The effect on the battlefield could only be revolutionary.

The revolution was made yet more violent by the simultaneous developments which made it possible to load firearms not at the muzzle but at the breech. This innovation had been regarded by military commanders with considerable suspicion. Only gradually was it discovered how the breech could be entirely sealed to prevent wastage of gas and consequent loss of range; and the advantage of greater speed in reloading seemed to be counter-balanced by the danger of wasting ammunition. The British, French, and Austrian armies therefore clung to muzzle-loading rifles, and with these fought their campaigns of 1854 and 1859. The Prussian army however had adopted a breech-loader, the Dreyse needle-gun, as early as 1843⁵; and although it had been used in minor campaigns in 1848 and in 1864, it was only in 1866, when it was for the first time matched against a first-class army equipped with muzzle-loaders, that its superiority became evident. The Prussian infantry, lying down to reload and firing six shots to the Austrian one, swept the Austrians from the field. Only then did the other Powers hasten to equip themselves with the bre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Abbreviations Used in Footnotes
• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition
• Introduction
• Preface
• 1. The Antagonists
• 2. The Outbreak
• 3. The First Disasters
• 4. The Army of the Rhine
• 5. The Army of Châlons
• 6. The Government of National Defence
• 7. Metz and Strasbourg
• 8. The Battles for Orléans
• 9. The Siege of Paris
• 10. Guerre à Outrance
• 11. The Peace
• Note on Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Index