Britain and France relationship: Post Napoleonic wars.

Both were once foe. before and during Napoleonic wars.
And after the Waterloo. (and the fall of the 'Second Empire'). Bourbons returned to France and restore their catholic tyranny once again. well Brits propped them up.
sometimes in 1840s. French folks fed up with Bourbonic yokes and finally overthrew them (Louise Phillipe and co.). finally created Second Republic.
too bad. the Bonaparte clan had returned. Louise Napoleon became the president. and later the Emperor. The new emperor had staged an arms race against Britain. wishing that there will be the second Napoleonic wars... which he will win.
The Arms race includes
- 1st steam-powered wooden warships
- 1st Ironclads
- 1st Line Infantry 'Rifles'
- 1st deployments of percussion shells.
British government. this time under the administration of Lord Palmerston. initially responded to the arms race as following
- HMS Warrior
- New Fortress design in response of, and to mount rifled artillery (either called Polygonal Fort or Palmerston Forts)
However. France and Britain never went to war against each other as both hoped. instead they finally became friends and close allies (??) shortly after the Arms Race. both are banded together against Russians... The Crimean War.
and later they intervened in the American civil war. this alliance officially sided with the Confederacy.
1. I don't know who initiated this 'alliance' first? Louise Napoleon? or Lord Palmerston? and why? did they still fear each other or do they have a new villans to fight against? and who?
- Russia
- The possibility of united Germany.
- The Union?
- someone else.
2. What are their views on Austria.
3. Did british realized that propping up Bourbons in France is useless? so Brits switched its side to Bonaparte clan?
4. What is the modern french attitude towards Bourbons? and what's theirs towards Bonaparte clan.

1. The Anglo-French 'entente', as it were, dates back really very early. One might say that it began with Talleyrand's suggestion in 1814 of an alliance against Prussia and Russia over Saxony (although that stretches "continuity" a little too far in my opinion). Certainly the British and French had a good working relationship and generally compatible aims in Europe before the 1830 Revolution. The Belgian crisis kinda derailed that, I guess, for a little bit, and certainly the British were at the knives with the French over Egypt and the Rhine crisis. I wouldn't characterize the period of naval building in the 1830s and 1840s as an "arms race", though. A lot of that naval power was used in cooperation, e.g. in China; both powers were expanding their global reach, and modern military technology and large navies were part of that. Anyway, before the formal cobelligerence in 1853-4, I'd say that the French and British had a decent relationship with each other, albeit a developing one. France, unlike the Holy Alliance powers, was ideologically compatible with Britain even under Charles X; French and British interests did not clash in the Balkans (as did those of Britain, Austria, and Russia); they sometimes rubbed up each other in colonial affairs, but cooperated quite well over Iberia and Italy. France was, however, less valuable as an ally than was Russia, and all parties knew it.

2. The British didn't really do a whole lot of "propping up". A new regime with which to work in France was a new regime. I'm not aware of any ideological problems between the two countries that either emerged or vanished in 1830.

3. Orléanisme and Bonapartisme, I think, are pretty much dead. They're not the political force they were in the 1870s, surprisingly enough.

What are the different between Orleanism and Bonapartism? if the same were . they are both Catholic and more or less promoting Monarchy (in any form). and both are henchmen to each of the two clans.
the only difference I know was their master. Orleanism fights for Bourbons. Bonapartism fights for Bonarparte.
And what was British view towards Otto von Bismarc? since he later went war against France. and won.

Didn't Britain and France clash over some colonial disputes like the Fashoda Incident that nearly brought them to war?

aronnax said:

Didn't Britain and France clash over some colonial disputes like the Fashoda Incident that nearly brought them to war?

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They had a lot of colonial disputes, but saying any of them nearly brought them to war might be a tad exaggerating. Fashoda was quite serious though, but that was in the 1890s.

And it was the Third Republic. same time where France wants to swallow Siam whole.

Lone Cat said:

What are the different between Orleanism and Bonapartism? if the same were . they are both Catholic and more or less promoting Monarchy (in any form). and both are henchmen to each of the two clans.
the only difference I know was their master. Orleanism fights for Bourbons. Bonapartism fights for Bonarparte.

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They called Louis-Philippe the "Citizen King" and his France a Liberal Monarchy.¹ Orléanisme is sort of a monarchy for the commercial classes, or at least that was its reputation: a center-right government by the moderates. In terms of foreign policy, it was dedicated to colonial expansion and the acquisition of spheres of influence in order to limit clashes in Europe (when Thiers violated this policy in 1840, the government quickly disowned him, although the nationalistic stirrings he evoked in both France and Germany were real enough). Bonapartisme is a bit different: the Bonapartists were more in favor of a strong dictator of any sort, and Bonapartist claimants have sometimes (implausibly) tried to claim a position on the left wing. Any good leftist would tell you that that's absurd, but hey, the Bonapartes haven't acknowledged silly things like "rules" and "definitions" since 1793.

¹ = They also called Louis-Bonaparte's Empire the "Liberal Empire" after the mid-1860s, when in reality it was rather like a combination - if I might be forgiven for extending a slightly inapt mass politics metaphor - of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s (because of the use of plebiscites and the pandering to a public opinion that the Emperor/Führer ended up creating himself anyway) and pretty much every other paternalistic nineteenth century European monarchy.

Lone Cat said:

And what was British view towards Otto von Bismarc? since he later went war against France. and won.

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The Gladstone government generally wanted to stay out of the war, although Gladstone himself attempted to persuade Bismarck that the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was unnecessary, he made no serious effort to join the war or form a countercoalition. Only near the fall of Paris, when it seemed like the war had gone on forever, did the British even sort of start to make threatening gestures towards an joint Anglo-Russian note to try to compel the Germans to end hostilities.

The British reacted rather angrily to the Krieg in Sicht crisis a few years later, making it clear to everybody that they would not countenance a preventive war.² Later on, they gained his cooperation against the Russians over the Balkans. During Gladstone's 1882 invasion of Egypt, Bismarck used his influence first to moderate the general European response, to prevent an Anglo-French war (of which there was real danger even before Mers-el-Kebir); after that he persuaded the British to act increasingly autonomously, so as to increase the general European resentment against Britain and further sour the chances for an Anglo-French alliance at any point in the future. At Berlin in 1885, the Germans first cooperated with the British to gain colonies, then played them off against the French to gain more; Bismarck alternately pressured the British in the colonial sphere and eased up to form links of friendship, such that the Disraeli and Salisbury ministries were generally between "favorably disposed" and "not unfavorably disposed" to Germany. In 1887, at the climax of Bismarck's alliance system, the British worked together with the Germans to create the First Mediterranean Agreement, which bound the British, Austrians, and Italians together; Bismarck then deflated the Eastern Rumelian Crisis of 1887-8 by turning European attention to Afghanistan and briefly uniting Russia and France with Germany in a temporary alliance against the imperialistic British.

So there is no quick answer to such a question. Gladstone loathed Bismarck by the late 1880s, especially for "pushing" him into his fatal Egyptian mistake, while Salisbury was willing to work with him (better him than the French, at any rate). General British opinion ranged from the Germanophilia of men like Haldane of the Liberals to the outrageously xenophobic sentiment expressed in such invasion "literature" as The Battle of Dorking.

² = It has been plausibly argued that Bismarck did not, in fact, wish to start a war, and used the crisis as a way of getting the General Staff and the more militarist elements of the court off of his back. It's the sort of thing he'd do; if the threats worked, they worked, and if they didn't work, he could claim a political success in Germany. Heads I win, tails you lose: Bismarck's favorite way of operating.

in the second footnote. you're saying that Bismark was forced to fight France because those General Staffs in the royal court wants him eliminated so if there's war. those rivals will be called to the front and stay away from the royal court (and therefore deny any opportunity to address the false accusation (against Bismark) to the King. right?

And about Erm's telegram. (which started the tensions between France and Prussia). did Erm really wants to get rid of Bismark? since he knows that Bismark favors diplomacy over wars.

one more thing I know about Bismark. he never values Balkans as a worthy territory but i can't remember that during Crimean wars. is he already in office?

Lone Cat said:

And about Erm's telegram. (which started the tensions between France and Prussia). did Erm really wants to get rid of Bismark? since he knows that Bismark favors diplomacy over wars.

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I'm lost here. Who's Erm? If you refer to the Ems telegram, it was a message sent to Bismarck by the Prussian king (who resided in Bad Ems then, which named the telegram) to be relayed to the French ambassador, concerning the question of Spanish succession. Bismarck changed its text to make it sound ... a little less diplomatic, and with the fact that the French translator introduced his own mistakes and the whole mess was released to the French public on France's national holiday, it resulted in France being pissed.

Personally I wouldn't call that favoring diplomacy over war, it's more screwing with diplomacy to get a war without being blamed for it.

one more thing I know about Bismark. he never values Balkans as a worthy territory but i can't remember that during Crimean wars. is he already in office?

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He wasn't. Prussia/Germany had no interest in that conflict anyway.

What exactly do you mean with "he doesn't value Balkans as a worthy territory"?

1. I refer to Ems telegram. and I was thinking that it was a name of Prussian ambassador in France.
2. Otto von Bismark repeatedly told King(s) of Prussia (and later on. Kaiser of Germany) that Prussia (and later.. Germany) MUST stay away from Balkans affairs. no intervention UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! His view on Balkans conflicted with the view of Wilhem II. he who believed in a strong expansionism (while Bismark favors more sublime method.. if he has to go war for territory. he MUST finish it QUICK! BEFORE Brits ... and some other bigger nations.. joins the fray) well I don't quite get Wilhem's diplomatic views. he preferred to ally with Austria and get his hands on Balkans affairs. while Bismark never liked Austria (maybe he wants the whole country integrated into Germany itself.)
Bismark's last words... when Wilhem II visited him at his house. warned that messing up in Balkan affairs can drag the whole Europe to war.
and he was right about this. German's role in Balkan conflict turned out ugly for Germany. and subsequently... for Wilhem II himself.

Lone Cat said:

in the second footnote. you're saying that Bismark was forced to fight France because those General Staffs in the royal court wants him eliminated so if there's war. those rivals will be called to the front and stay away from the royal court (and therefore deny any opportunity to address the false accusation (against Bismark) to the King. right?

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It wasn't a cunning plan on the part of Moltke et al. to get rid of Bismarck, it was a plan to fight and defeat France before France could regain its former strength. There wasn't much political about it on the generals' part.

Leoreth said:

I'm lost here. Who's Erm? If you refer to the Ems telegram, it was a message sent to Bismarck by the Prussian king (who resided in Bad Ems then, which named the telegram) to be relayed to the French ambassador, concerning the question of Spanish succession. Bismarck changed its text to make it sound ... a little less diplomatic, and with the fact that the French translator introduced his own mistakes and the whole mess was released to the French public on France's national holiday, it resulted in France being pissed.

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Ehhhhh.

A more factual way to put it would be to simply say that the French went to the Bad Ems spa explicitly looking for an excuse to start a war. That was the whole point. Public opinion was irrelevant; even if Napoleon's government actually did care about it (dubious, even if the man himself was addicted to plebiscites), it had failed to actually form yet, and most relevant newspapers weren't sure what side to pick until the government told them what was going on.

Since "national honor" never became important, we are left with the French ambassador personally visiting the King at the spa - the late nineteenth-century equivalent of knocking on his bathroom door - over a question that the King himself didn't actually care and which definitely was irrelevant to French national security to demand that the candidacy be withdrawn. Which the King did. You know how the Austrians get blamed for starting WWI because the Serbs accepted some of the more minor points of their ultimatum?¹ This is like ten times worse.

So then the French envoy goes back after saying "the Prussians ain't gonna let Leopold do his thing" to the government and asks that the candidacy not only be withdrawn, but that the Prussian government apologize and categorically refuse to do anything like that in the future. ****, if the Prussians had said something like that to Napoleon, they'd go down in history as the blackest, most vile criminals in the history of international relations, right behind Muhammad Shah of Khwarizm. So of course the King says no, with reasonably admirable restraint, they part on reasonably amicable terms, and the King shoots a telegram off to Bismarck in Berlin - who came home early from his own vacation out of fear for his job, since the King was just about ready to hang him out to dry - giving the record of the conversation.

Honestly, having read both the undoctored item and the edited one, Bismarck really didn't change much. I don't really know why he bothered at all. Regardless of what the King actually said, the French were pretty much bent on a war at that point. What Bismarck did was just give the French enough rope to hang themselves with; he didn't particularly want war, but he was willing to resort to it if that's what was necessary. Considering France's recent diplomatic initiatives in Italy and Austria, on one interpretation Bismarck's endorsement of the Hohenzollern candidacy was simply a negotiating ploy to open up a conference for a serious discussion of France's position vis-a-vis the North German Federation in southern Germany, just as there had been the congress over Luxembourg three years prior. It takes two countries to make a war, and the French had literally every possible opportunity to avoid war, even making a bit of diplomatic profit out of doing so. That they didn't, well, speaks to how much Ollivier and Gramont weren't interested in talking.

¹ = Admittedly, the Austrians actually did want a war. That's kind of the point of the comparison. Although the situations aren't that comparable, because Prussians notably didn't shoot the French governor of Alsace.

Lone Cat said:

2. Otto von Bismark repeatedly told King(s) of Prussia (and later on. Kaiser of Germany) that Prussia (and later.. Germany) MUST stay away from Balkans affairs. no intervention UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! His view on Balkans conflicted with the view of Wilhem II. he who believed in a strong expansionism (while Bismark favors more sublime method.. if he has to go war for territory. he MUST finish it QUICK! BEFORE Brits ... and some other bigger nations.. joins the fray) well I don't quite get Wilhem's diplomatic views. he preferred to ally with Austria and get his hands on Balkans affairs. while Bismark never liked Austria (maybe he wants the whole country integrated into Germany itself.)
Bismark's last words... when Wilhem II visited him at his house. warned that messing up in Balkan affairs can drag the whole Europe to war.
and he was right about this. German's role in Balkan conflict turned out ugly for Germany. and subsequently... for Wilhem II himself.

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I hate that story.

In fact, Bismarck spent an incredibly long time dealing with the Balkans. In 1878, he had done exactly what Germany did in the 1900s, antagonizing Russia in support of Austria-Hungary by forcing the Russians to give up their super-Bulgaria from the Treaty of San Stefano. In 1887-8, he scored his greatest diplomatic triumph over the Balkans, the aforementioned Eastern Rumelian Crisis, in which he averted war and successfully remained the man everybody in Europe couldn't do without. The Anglo-Austro-Italian Mediterranean Agreements that he brokered in 1887 were specifically designed to keep the Balkans on ice. Other than Germany itself, the peninsula was arguably the place where the greater part of Bismarck's energies were actually expended. So, in a sense, he knew quite well how dangerous it could be - but withdrawal betokened as much danger as involvement.

At any rate, it was virtually impossible for the Germans to ignore the Balkans in 1914. On their own merits, they were becoming a vital economic interest, if they weren't already. But Germany also had to be involved in the Balkans for Austria-Hungary's sake. For two years, in order to keep a sort of détente with the Entente (hahahahaha puns), Bethmann-Hollweg had sedulously refrained from making so much as a peep as Austria's key rival was vastly expanded in size and power, while Bulgaria, the potential counterweight, was humiliated. By 1914, it had become clear that the price of détente was the loss of Austria-Hungary as an ally, maybe even as a Great Power, and that was something of which the Germans were justifiably terrified.

So blithely saying "Bismarck was right! Germany screwing around in the Balkans was a BAD IDEA and millions of people died" is really kind of annoying.

Thanks for opening up that other perspective. I've never read anything about 19th century German history except from textbooks, and given how ... cautious they are about implying any war Germany waged wasn't desired by Germany, it makes definitely some sense.

On the Balkan issue, was there even anyone who was in favor of Russia's plans for Superbulgaria?

I also dislike the one-dimensional characterization of Wilhelm II as a mouth-foaming expansionist who was up for land grabs wherever possible.

so then. why did Bismark waned Wilhem II about Balkans affairs?
Did Bismark believed that Wilhem was too young to do that extremely risky business there? if Dachs said that Bismark did his missions in Balkans several times to keep Russia in check.
and in the first footnote. Why did Austrial really wants Prussia to go war with Prussia? i'm not sure what did Habsburg emperor thinks about Bismark and his expanding Prussia. did he think that Prussia is still their bane? I'm not sure when did the two nations went war on each other but if both really went to war. Prussia was won and rewarded with some more little nations joined Prussia Kingdom. and in the same time Austria had a big problems with Italian reunionist rebels to the south (the movement was later sponsored by Sardinia, as the Italian victory resulted in the Sardinian king entered Rome as the King of a newly unified nation). Did Austria really suspected that Prussia was helping Italian rebels at any circumstances?

Back to the Ems telegram thing. so you say that France did provoke Prussia first? and why?
1. Did Louis Napoleon wants any of Bonarparte clan to replace Bourbons in Spanish Throne? (while Prince Leopold did assesset how dangerous navigating politics in 19th Century Spain could be? so he withdrew his candicacy for Spanish kingship).
2. Did he still believes that Brits will help him once again just like when they fought Russians in Crimea?
3. Did he underestimate Prussian military might? AFAIK. both were the earliest nations to employ Bolt action rifles as standard issue weapon. by the time they went war. both did even have THAT advanced weapons. France Gen. Staffs did believed the new weapon. a volleygun called 'Mittraileuse' is a pure awesome and ignored the rifled artillery (while Prussia invested ALOT in such weapon. i'm not sure if they even employed breech loading rifled guns in that war?). or do they think that Prussia is too small to fight them?

Returning to Anglo-French affairs for the moment, I got the impression that the United Kingdom (and previous incarnations)'s greatest desire was to prevent a dominant player in Europe. For centuries, France was the biggest threat. After Napoleon, they actually had fairly compatible aims in Europe. They generally teamed up to fight the greatest expansionist threat (first Russia, then Germany) either diplomatically or militarily.

There were still colonial spats that prevented close alliance for a long time (at least a long-term one), but they eventually worked out most of these. Once they established spheres of influence they were content with, I think the greatest difficulties were resolved.

I'll admit I'm not the most well-informed in this area, though. Anyone think I'm on the wrong track?

Leoreth said:

On the Balkan issue, was there even anyone who was in favor of Russia's plans for Superbulgaria?

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Nope! It made the Habsburgs crap their pants, it made the Brits terrified of something bad happening to Egypt, and it made even the French think it was excessive. This is what you get when you listen to panslavist crazies like your army officers (SKOBELEV 4LYFE), guys!

Leoreth said:

I also dislike the one-dimensional characterization of Wilhelm II as a mouth-foaming expansionist who was up for land grabs wherever possible.

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Oh, me too. Don't get me wrong, Wilhelm was a total dick, and the revised biographies of him these days make him look even more like a dick, but he wasn't Hitler 1.0.

Lone Cat said:

so then. why did Bismark waned Wilhem II about Balkans affairs?
Did Bismark believed that Wilhem was too young to do that extremely risky business there? if Dachs said that Bismark did his missions in Balkans several times to keep Russia in check.

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Maybe! Bismarck was that kind of egotistical guy. He probably also wanted to prove how indispensable he was. Hell, his very last act to try to stay in office and keep Wilhelm from dumping him were an attempt to sabotage the Russo-German relationship and claim that only he could put it back together.

Lone Cat said:

and in the first footnote. Why did Austrial really wants Prussia to go war with Prussia? i'm not sure what did Habsburg emperor thinks about Bismark and his expanding Prussia. did he think that Prussia is still their bane? I'm not sure when did the two nations went war on each other but if both really went to war. Prussia was won and rewarded with some more little nations joined Prussia Kingdom. and in the same time Austria had a big problems with Italian reunionist rebels to the south (the movement was later sponsored by Sardinia, as the Italian victory resulted in the Sardinian king entered Rome as the King of a newly unified nation). Did Austria really suspected that Prussia was helping Italian rebels at any circumstances?

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Mmm.

The Austro-Prussian relationship is kinda complicated, and it'd take a long time to hash it all out. I'd really prefer to leave it to a whole history article, which I might write after I finish my backlog of alternate histories for the NES forum.

But in a nutshell, the reason the French expected the Austrians to go to war with Prussia in 1870 was that the French believed the Austrians wanted revenge for the war of 1866, when the Prussians defeated the Austrians and took control of northern Germany while establishing strong links to the southern states. There were good reasons to think this would happen. Friedrich von Beust, the Austrian head of government, was in fact a Saxon, and was well known to harbor anti-Prussian sympathies. And Napoleon himself had managed to come to an "understanding" with Beust that, while it did not commit the Austrians to a war, left him to believe that the Austrians would act in his favor when the time came and if the French were successful enough early on. After all, the Austrians were still reeling from the last war, and the Ausgleich - the "Compromise" of 1867 that divided the country into Austria-Hungary - had left them fiscally insolvent and militarily divided. They had to have a good reason to believe the French weren't just going to leave them hanging if they decided to try conclusions with the Prussians.

Unfortunately, Napoleon's military actions made that whole plan nonsense. Instead of boldly striking across the Rhine into southern Germany to overawe Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg and bring the Austrians on-side, the French made a halfhearted push a few miles towards Saarbrücken and called it a day. They had actually mobilized faster than the Prussians did (albeit with a much worse supply situation), and rapid action was what the army of the Second Empire was basically designed around. So, of course, the French promptly didn't do any "rapid action". By the second week of August, the Prussians had arrived in force and were pushing the French back into Lorraine. So much for early successes to gain the support of Austria.

Lone Cat said:

Back to the Ems telegram thing. so you say that France did provoke Prussia first? and why?
1. Did Louis Napoleon wants any of Bonarparte clan to replace Bourbons in Spanish Throne? (while Prince Leopold did assesset how dangerous navigating politics in 19th Century Spain could be? so he withdrew his candicacy for Spanish kingship).
2. Did he still believes that Brits will help him once again just like when they fought Russians in Crimea?
3. Did he underestimate Prussian military might? AFAIK. both were the earliest nations to employ Bolt action rifles as standard issue weapon. by the time they went war. both did even have THAT advanced weapons. France Gen. Staffs did believed the new weapon. a volleygun called 'Mittraileuse' is a pure awesome and ignored the rifled artillery (while Prussia invested ALOT in such weapon. i'm not sure if they even employed breech loading rifled guns in that war?). or do they think that Prussia is too small to fight them?

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1. No. That wasn't a serious issue. Competition over claiming thrones was more like a problem of 1570, not 1870. If a Hohenzollern - not a Prussian, but one of the south German Catholic Hohenzollerns from Sigmaringen - got on the Spanish throne, the most he could do would be to influence the government slightly, not force it into military protagonism and alliance against France. Especially considering that the reign of Isabel II had just been ended in revolution because she was in the habit of making such autocratic decisions.

2. Not really; as I said before, the Austrians were the key trump. Or, at least, they were supposed to be, but Napoleon failed to play it.

3. The French generally believed that they had a superior army to Prussia. Where the Prussian army was built around large amounts of manpower, the French had a qualitatively superior long-service army that was designed to get a quick blow in, then sit back and use its defensive firepower to wipe the enemy out. Such an army had worked quite well in 1859 against the Austrians in northern Italy, despite there being no actual command authority on the French side. It worked well in Algeria, Greece, China, Vietnam, and a host of other trouble spots around the world.

Part of the problem in 1870 was that the French had recognized the potential benefits of the Prussian system and had begun to implement reforms to increase the size of their mobilized army. Unfortunately, such reforms were administratively half-implemented, such that the French got all the inconveniences of being between systems and none of the benefits.

It's true that the French had qualitatively better arms. The chassepot was arguably the best infantry rifle in the world, with the reloading speed of the Dreyse needle gun that the Prussians used but much more accuracy and range. And the mitrailleuse, a sort of machine-gun artillery weapon, was properly employed from about the second week of hostilities onward. But the Prussians also had a qualitatively superior arm, which nobody really recognized for awhile: the artillery. Prussia's Krupp breech-loading guns, under the command of a group of officers, like Prince Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, who actually Knew What They Were Doing, pretty much blasted the French lines apart whenever they needed to be broken. France's bronze-cast rifled guns were both inferior in range and volume of fire and were poorly directed. Their gun control was too centralized: the French held back many of their pieces for the decisive moment, like Napoleon I had done, but the decisive moment never came, while the Prussians kept bringing up their guns into new gun lines and blasting apart the French formations.

Anyway. Focus. So the French had a really good army. And in terms of casualties inflicted, they did a damnably good job of doing what they were supposed to: the Prussians took sickening amounts of losses. But the French army never actually fought as an army. Isolated corps engaged ever-increasing numbers of Prussians, who took horrifying losses but kept coming and overlapping the French flanks. None of the battles that the Second Empire's army fought, except maybe Sedan, was one big coordinated battle. Instead, the French fought a series of barely connected engagements. Individual corps achieved some impressive defensive successes, but because there was effectively no higher-level command, none of the successes could be exploited. At Mars-la-Tour and again at Gravelotte-St. Privat, the French got the Prussians into a bad jam and then, incomprehensibly, failed to close their jaws. The Prussians recovered, built up again, and moved out.

Part of this problem was bad army-level command. MacMahon and Bazaine had been good fighting soldiers, but Bazaine in particular seems to have been extremely uncomfortable at army command and frequently reverted to the level of divisional commander, going around helping out individual units. This sometimes happens. The Federal general Gordon Granger was generally a decent corps commander, but under pressure in the Siege of Chattanooga, he lost his nerve and ended up taking command of a single gun battery instead of directing his corps. But where Granger had Grant to step in and bawl him out, Bazaine had Napoleon III - and Napoleon was not a battle captain, and was feeling sick (and apparently had to deal with kidney stones) to boot. Prussia also had problems at army-level command. Karl von Steinmetz was both dubiously competent and willfully insubordinate, something that applied to neither Bazaine nor MacMahon. But in Wilhelm I and Moltke, the Germans had a much better ability to resolve those difficulties.

So it wasn't unreasonable for the French to expect a victory before the war. The problem was that they didn't fight the war the way their own doctrine said to fight the war, and contingent events did the rest.

Louis XXIV said:

Returning to Anglo-French affairs for the moment, I got the impression that the United Kingdom (and previous incarnations)'s greatest desire was to prevent a dominant player in Europe. For centuries, France was the biggest threat. After Napoleon, they actually had fairly compatible aims in Europe. They generally teamed up to fight the greatest expansionist threat (first Russia, then Germany) either diplomatically or militarily.

There were still colonial spats that prevented close alliance for a long time (at least a long-term one), but they eventually worked out most of these. Once they established spheres of influence they were content with, I think the greatest difficulties were resolved.

I'll admit I'm not the most well-informed in this area, though. Anyone think I'm on the wrong track?

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That was ostensibly British policy for a long time, and it was certainly a long-standing common thread, but it was never consistent enough to assume the kind of causal link that some people think it did.

Castlereagh, the greatest diplomat the British ever produced, correctly realized that this path was pretty stupid, for instance, and inaugurated a period of cooperation. Paul Schroeder has described the Congress era as one of a dual Anglo-Russian hegemony over Europe, and claims that such was one of the most stable constructs of its kind. On that reading, the Anglo-French relationship of the early nineteenth century was good, like I said - but it was fundamentally unequal, with the French recognizing British supremacy. Per this model, the British progressively abandoned their stable hegemony in favor of balance-of-power politics with the ascension of Palmerston in the 1830s and 1840s, but the system worked well enough that one country playing outside the rules didn't unduly screw it up. When Louis Napoleon came to power in France was when the system broke down, and the immediate result was the Crimean war.

I read a journal article that was so good that I added it to the Wikipedia page on the Franco-Prussian War a few months back. Granted, it's a bit ancient, but I've not read much that updates the historiography of 1870.

"The primary cause of the French military collapse in 1870 was previous reliance upon a vicious system for the education, promotion, and assignment of officers. This system was unable to suffocate all intellectual progress in the army, although it was marvelously suited for that purpose. But it was almost completely effective in excluding the army's brain power from the staff and high command. To the resulting lack of intelligence at the top can be ascribed all the inexcusable defects of French military policy... Criticism of the French officers for their ineffectiveness in the opening campaigns of this war, however, would be largely misdirected, for with some exceptions they did the best they knew how and very bravely. The cause of their difficulties was insufficient preparation for war of the proper sort in time of peace, particularly intellectual preparation."

Irvine, Dalas D. "The French and Prussian Staff Systems Before 1870". The Journal of the American Military History Foundation Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1938), 192–203, (accessed June 18, 2010): 192, 203.

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It's true that intellectualism was looked down upon in the Second Empire's army and that "soldierly" qualities were more highly valued. Some people have referred to it as an army of sergeants. But the whole basis of the "Système D" contempt for plans was the quite sensible recognition that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Hell, that's practically Clausewitzian. The French army had to deal with so many varied and multifarious military situations under the Second Empire that creating an intellectual framework and hashing out war plans would have been pointless. It was part of the problem, but it wasn't an insurmountable part of the problem.

Dachs said:

Unfortunately, Napoleon's military actions made that whole plan nonsense. Instead of boldly striking across the Rhine into southern Germany to overawe Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg and bring the Austrians on-side, the French made a halfhearted push a few miles towards Saarbrücken and called it a day. They had actually mobilized faster than the Prussians did (albeit with a much worse supply situation), and rapid action was what the army of the Second Empire was basically designed around. So, of course, the French promptly didn't do any "rapid action". By the second week of August, the Prussians had arrived in force and were pushing the French back into Lorraine. So much for early successes to gain the support of Austria.

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How certain was the involvement of the southern German states before the war? And how much did they matter?

Prussia's Krupp breech-loading guns, under the command of a group of officers, like Prince Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, who actually Knew What They Were Doing, pretty much blasted the French lines apart whenever they needed to be broken.

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I don't know why, but it always cracks me up when you capitalize things that way

Leoreth said:

How certain was the involvement of the southern German states before the war? And how much did they matter?

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They all had defensive alliances with Prussia against France, which conveniently activated when the French declared war. But Bavaria in particular was uneasy about fighting alongside the Prussians and the government (as opposed to King Ludwig, who had been bribed enough to love the Prussians forever) was potentially amenable to switching sides.

As for whether they mattered, well, think of this. Bazaine's army went down, but the Prussian army pretty much gave its lifeblood at Gravelotte-St. Privat to get it there. The army that marched to Sedan and fought MacMahon's Army of Chalons was in every sense a "German" army; the Prussians were in equal number with Bavarians, Württembergers, and Saxons. Without von der Tann and his two corps, the Prussians would've been in a pretty tight spot. Notably, the Bavarians stormed Bazeilles, a key French strongpoint garrisoned by their elite marines (for comparison, Bazeilles has gone down in French military history along with Puebla). Unfortunately, their postwar reputation was somewhat tarnished by a few relatively minor incidents that the Prussians ended up blowing out of proportion, like a brief retreat in the face of French cavalry near the end of the battle of Sedan.

So yeah, I'd say they mattered.

Dachs said:

Nope! It made the Habsburgs crap their pants, it made the Brits terrified of something bad happening to Egypt, and it made even the French think it was excessive. This is what you get when you listen to panslavist crazies like your army officers (SKOBELEV 4LYFE), guys!

Oh, me too. Don't get me wrong, Wilhelm was a total dick, and the revised biographies of him these days make him look even more like a dick, but he wasn't Hitler 1.0.

Maybe! Bismarck was that kind of egotistical guy. He probably also wanted to prove how indispensable he was. Hell, his very last act to try to stay in office and keep Wilhelm from dumping him were an attempt to sabotage the Russo-German relationship and claim that only he could put it back together.

Mmm.

The Austro-Prussian relationship is kinda complicated, and it'd take a long time to hash it all out. I'd really prefer to leave it to a whole history article, which I might write after I finish my backlog of alternate histories for the NES forum.

But in a nutshell, the reason the French expected the Austrians to go to war with Prussia in 1870 was that the French believed the Austrians wanted revenge for the war of 1866, when the Prussians defeated the Austrians and took control of northern Germany while establishing strong links to the southern states. There were good reasons to think this would happen. Friedrich von Beust, the Austrian head of government, was in fact a Saxon, and was well known to harbor anti-Prussian sympathies. And Napoleon himself had managed to come to an "understanding" with Beust that, while it did not commit the Austrians to a war, left him to believe that the Austrians would act in his favor when the time came and if the French were successful enough early on. After all, the Austrians were still reeling from the last war, and the Ausgleich - the "Compromise" of 1867 that divided the country into Austria-Hungary - had left them fiscally insolvent and militarily divided. They had to have a good reason to believe the French weren't just going to leave them hanging if they decided to try conclusions with the Prussians.

Unfortunately, Napoleon's military actions made that whole plan nonsense. Instead of boldly striking across the Rhine into southern Germany to overawe Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg and bring the Austrians on-side, the French made a halfhearted push a few miles towards Saarbrücken and called it a day. They had actually mobilized faster than the Prussians did (albeit with a much worse supply situation), and rapid action was what the army of the Second Empire was basically designed around. So, of course, the French promptly didn't do any "rapid action". By the second week of August, the Prussians had arrived in force and were pushing the French back into Lorraine. So much for early successes to gain the support of Austria.

1. No. That wasn't a serious issue. Competition over claiming thrones was more like a problem of 1570, not 1870. If a Hohenzollern - not a Prussian, but one of the south German Catholic Hohenzollerns from Sigmaringen - got on the Spanish throne, the most he could do would be to influence the government slightly, not force it into military protagonism and alliance against France. Especially considering that the reign of Isabel II had just been ended in revolution because she was in the habit of making such autocratic decisions.

2. Not really; as I said before, the Austrians were the key trump. Or, at least, they were supposed to be, but Napoleon failed to play it.

3. The French generally believed that they had a superior army to Prussia. Where the Prussian army was built around large amounts of manpower, the French had a qualitatively superior long-service army that was designed to get a quick blow in, then sit back and use its defensive firepower to wipe the enemy out. Such an army had worked quite well in 1859 against the Austrians in northern Italy, despite there being no actual command authority on the French side. It worked well in Algeria, Greece, China, Vietnam, and a host of other trouble spots around the world.

Part of the problem in 1870 was that the French had recognized the potential benefits of the Prussian system and had begun to implement reforms to increase the size of their mobilized army. Unfortunately, such reforms were administratively half-implemented, such that the French got all the inconveniences of being between systems and none of the benefits.

It's true that the French had qualitatively better arms. The chassepot was arguably the best infantry rifle in the world, with the reloading speed of the Dreyse needle gun that the Prussians used but much more accuracy and range. And the mitrailleuse, a sort of machine-gun artillery weapon, was properly employed from about the second week of hostilities onward. But the Prussians also had a qualitatively superior arm, which nobody really recognized for awhile: the artillery. Prussia's Krupp breech-loading guns, under the command of a group of officers, like Prince Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, who actually Knew What They Were Doing, pretty much blasted the French lines apart whenever they needed to be broken. France's bronze-cast rifled guns were both inferior in range and volume of fire and were poorly directed. Their gun control was too centralized: the French held back many of their pieces for the decisive moment, like Napoleon I had done, but the decisive moment never came, while the Prussians kept bringing up their guns into new gun lines and blasting apart the French formations.

Anyway. Focus. So the French had a really good army. And in terms of casualties inflicted, they did a damnably good job of doing what they were supposed to: the Prussians took sickening amounts of losses. But the French army never actually fought as an army. Isolated corps engaged ever-increasing numbers of Prussians, who took horrifying losses but kept coming and overlapping the French flanks. None of the battles that the Second Empire's army fought, except maybe Sedan, was one big coordinated battle. Instead, the French fought a series of barely connected engagements. Individual corps achieved some impressive defensive successes, but because there was effectively no higher-level command, none of the successes could be exploited. At Mars-la-Tour and again at Gravelotte-St. Privat, the French got the Prussians into a bad jam and then, incomprehensibly, failed to close their jaws. The Prussians recovered, built up again, and moved out.

Part of this problem was bad army-level command. MacMahon and Bazaine had been good fighting soldiers, but Bazaine in particular seems to have been extremely uncomfortable at army command and frequently reverted to the level of divisional commander, going around helping out individual units. This sometimes happens. The Federal general Gordon Granger was generally a decent corps commander, but under pressure in the Siege of Chattanooga, he lost his nerve and ended up taking command of a single gun battery instead of directing his corps. But where Granger had Grant to step in and bawl him out, Bazaine had Napoleon III - and Napoleon was not a battle captain, and was feeling sick (and apparently had to deal with kidney stones) to boot. Prussia also had problems at army-level command. Karl von Steinmetz was both dubiously competent and willfully insubordinate, something that applied to neither Bazaine nor MacMahon. But in Wilhelm I and Moltke, the Germans had a much better ability to resolve those difficulties.

So it wasn't unreasonable for the French to expect a victory before the war. The problem was that they didn't fight the war the way their own doctrine said to fight the war, and contingent events did the rest.

That was ostensibly British policy for a long time, and it was certainly a long-standing common thread, but it was never consistent enough to assume the kind of causal link that some people think it did.

Castlereagh, the greatest diplomat the British ever produced, correctly realized that this path was pretty stupid, for instance, and inaugurated a period of cooperation. Paul Schroeder has described the Congress era as one of a dual Anglo-Russian hegemony over Europe, and claims that such was one of the most stable constructs of its kind. On that reading, the Anglo-French relationship of the early nineteenth century was good, like I said - but it was fundamentally unequal, with the French recognizing British supremacy. Per this model, the British progressively abandoned their stable hegemony in favor of balance-of-power politics with the ascension of Palmerston in the 1830s and 1840s, but the system worked well enough that one country playing outside the rules didn't unduly screw it up. When Louis Napoleon came to power in France was when the system broke down, and the immediate result was the Crimean war.

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I do agree with the unequal relationship between the UK and France. Are you placing the blame for the Crimean War on Louis-Napoleon, though? Why would the UK join the war as well?