The Franco-Prussian War

By destroying Austrian influence in the Italian peninsula and in North Germany, and by creating an aggressive North German Confederation dominated by Prussia, the nationalist wars of the 1860's succeeded in destabilizing central Europe. The Second French Empire sought to maintain French hegemony in Europe, while the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation sought to expel French influence from central Europe. Particularly after the 1867 Luxembourg Crisis, when the North German Confederation kept the France from acquiring the autonomous Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, war between the established French state and the rising German federation was widely thought to be inevitable.

The casus belli appeared in the summer of 1870, when the Imperial Household of France was offended by the candidacy of a member of the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty for the vacated Spanish throne. An ill-written French denunciation was matched by a Prussian distortion, and soon the French Empire and the North German Confederation -- joined by the south German states of Baden, Württemburg, and Bavaria -- were preparing for war.

Hostilities began in August. From the start, France was fatally handicapped by its failure to adopt modern industrialized patterns of warfare. France's reserves along the Rhineland border were insufficient to keep back the German armies. A series of increasingly desperate battles were waged by the French Imperial Army and local Alsatian and Lorrainer militias, culminating in the disastrous Battle of Saverne, on the 1st of September. At that northern Alsatian town, the main French army was crushed and the Emperor Napoléon III himself captured by the Prussian and Baden forces. In the two weeks after Saverne, the German armies continued their drive towards Paris and central France. After the fall of Nancy, in Lorraine, the despairing Emperor abdicated. The day after, on the 19th of September, the Third French Republic was declared in Paris. The Provisional Government of France sought peace.

The terms of the Treaty of Brussels that brought an end to the war were harsh: Not only was France compelled to pay an indemnity of two thousand million francs to the German Empire, but it was forced to cede the eastern two-thirds of Moselle département and the entire Bas-Rhin département - including the major city of Strasbourg - to the Kingdom of Prussia. The collapse of the Second Empire on the battlefield and subsequent humiliation of France thoroughly discredited the Bonapartist party. Though radicals favoured maintaining the Republic as a permanent institution, by far the largest part of the population favoured the reinstatement of either the elder or younger lines of the Bourbon family in a constitutional monarchy. In October of 1871, the Second Orleanist Kingdom was founded by a margin of three-to-one in a national referendum.

On the 1st of September 1871, in commemoration of the first anniversary of the French defeat at Saverne, the German Empire was declared by the new Reichstag in Berlin. From now on, the French and Germans would see the other as their major enemy, with fatal results in the First World War.