Bismarck's War
The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'Superb on the human consequences of war, ravishing in its evocations of wartime life' The Times
'Compassionate and thought-provoking history' Daily Telegraph
Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe's pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. Pushing aside further French resistance, a new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.
Bismarck's War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century.
Drawing on a remarkable variety of sources, Chrastil's book explores the military, technological, political and social events of the war, its human cost and the way that the sheer ferocity of war, however successful, has profound consequences for both victors and victims.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 was "not a war of angels," according to this fine-grained chronicle from historian Chrastil (How to Be Childless). In July 1870, France declared war on Prussia over the succession to the Spanish throne, a crisis engineered by the "guiding hand" of Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck to ensure the dispute could not be resolved peacefully. Bismarck's goal was to forge German unification through "shared victory" over the Second Empire of France under Napoleon III. When German soldiers crossed over into French territory, Chrastil notes, France "acted without precedent" to expel German civilians, laying the groundwork for "large-scale, forced migration and deportations" around the world in the 1880s and beyond. Chrastil argues that as the conflict continued, so too did the "intensification of brutality," leading to the first international humanitarian intervention on behalf of civilians during wartime (when a Swiss group led residents of Strasbourg to safety), as well as the modernization of European militaries so that armies could mobilize and concentrate forces rapidly and on a large scale. Marshaling a tremendous amount of information, Chrastil clearly demonstrates how this conflict set the stage for the world-shattering violence of the 20th century. It's an outstanding synthesis of a complex and vicious war.
