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