Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (95 page)

The news of mobilization and the subsequent French declaration of war set off a wave of patriotic emotion in Prussia and the other German states. As he returned by train from Bad Ems, William I was mobbed at every station by cheering crowds. Even the South Germans were outraged by the bellicosity and arrogance of Gramont’s speech to the French parliament and indignant over his insolent treatment of the Prussian king. The mood in the foreign office and the ministry of war was one of confidence, and with good reason. Plans were already in place to coordinate military operations with the south German states under the terms set out in their alliances with the North German Confederation. The diplomatic setting was also auspicious: Vienna was still struggling with the consequences of far-reaching domestic reforms and was reluctant to risk any joint action; a draft treaty of 1869 thus remained unsigned. As for the Italians, they were unlikely to help Paris while French troops continued to occupy what remained of the Papal States (thereby preventing the absorption of Rome and its hinterland into the Kingdom of Italy). Britain had already made its peace with the idea of a unified Germany dominated by Prussia, and the Russians were easily won over by Bismarck’s promise that Prussia would support St Petersburg in revising the most burdensome stipulations of the Crimean peace settlement. There was thus little reason to fear that Russia would intervene in support of France.
⁵¹
The window of opportunity created by the Crimean conflict was still open.

In military terms, the Prussians were well placed – better indeed than most contemporaries were aware – to win. They had – at full force – a larger, fitter and more disciplined army than the French. They also outperformed them in tactics and infrastructure. As in the Austrian war, the superiority of Prussian military organization was crucial. By contrast with the Prussian-German General Staff, which reported directly to the king, the French General Staff was a mere department of the ministry of war; in matters of strategy,
tactics and discipline it was always subject to political pressure from the left-leaning National Assembly. The Prussian General Staff, its reputation sealed by the victory of 1866, had continued in the aftermath of the Bohemian war to introduce improvements to transport and supply, with the result that Prussia mobilized much more swiftly than her adversary, transporting over half a million men to the frontier with France while the French army on the Rhine still numbered only 250,000. The antique smooth-bore field guns that had performed so lamentably against the Austrian artillery in 1866 were phased out and replaced by rifled cannon incorporating the latest technology. Enormous effort was expended on improving the tactical deployment of artillery in support of infantry, an area where the Prussians had fallen down in 1866.

None of this made a Prussian victory inevitable. For all the efforts of the General Staff, the weaponry of the two sides was more closely matched in 1870 than in the previous conflict. The decisive advantage bestowed by the needle-gun in Austria was cancelled out in 1870 by the excellent infantry rifle (known as the
chassepot
) of the French, not to mention the
mitrailleuse
, an early machine gun that sowed havoc wherever it came into action against Prussian troops. The Prussians were dogged by the usual misunderstandings and false steps. General Steinmetz once again distinguished himself by his blithe disregard of instructions from the General Staff, and the August engagements at Spicheren, Wissembourg and Froeschwiller were stumbled into rather than planned. Even Moltke made some serious errors, most notably at the outset of the campaign, when he route-marched more than 200,000 men across the French front, exposing his forces to a devastating flanking attack; fortunately for the Prussians, the French commander, General Bazaine, failed to seize the opportunity.

The Prussians also exploited their marginal superiority in artillery with increasing skill, using their field guns to draw French fire away from advancing Prussian infantry. Most importantly, perhaps, the Prussians made fewer mistakes than their opponents. At Mars-la-Tour, Bazaine, commander of the French Army of the Rhine, failed to mount an offensive, transforming a potential French victory into a disaster that left the strategic strongpoint at Verdun exposed to a German advance. By early September 1870, barely six weeks into the war, the French had lost a series of decisive battles and with them, an irreplaceable reservoir of
weaponry, officers and experienced cadres. After the crushing defeat and capitulation of the French forces under General Patrice de MacMahon on 1 and 2 September at Sedan, Napoleon III himself was taken prisoner, along with 104,000 men. The war dragged on for many more weeks as the Germans took Strasbourg and Metz and dug in for a protracted siege of Paris, while
francs-tireurs
took a rising toll in casualties behind the lines. After arduous negotiations with the new republican prime minister, Adolphe Thiers (the very man whose loose talk of French annexations in 1840 had triggered the Rhine crisis), a provisional peace was signed at the end of February. It was not until 10 May 1871, after French government forces had crushed the uprising of the Commune in Paris, that a final treaty was agreed at Frankfurt. In the meanwhile, Bismarck had overcome the objections of the southern states and secured their agreement to a union. On 18 January 1871, a new German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Exactly 170 years to the day after the coronation of Frederick I as Prussian king, King William I accepted the title of German Emperor.

For centuries, Europe’s German centre had been politically fragmented and weak. The continent was dominated by the states on its periphery, whose interest was to maintain the power vacuum at the centre. Now, however, for the first time, the centre was united and strong. Relations among the European states would henceforth be driven by a new and unfamiliar dynamic. Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the Conservative opposition in the House of Commons, saw this more clearly than most: ‘This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French,’ he declared before the House. ‘There is not a single diplomatic tradition that has not been swept away.’
⁵²
How true these observations were would only gradually become clear.

The era of Austro-Prussian dualism – once the structuring principle of political life among the German states – was over. As early as May 1871, the Austrian foreign minister, Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust, recognized the futility of a policy of containment and advised Emperor Francis Joseph that Vienna should henceforth seek ‘an agreement between Austria-Hungary and Prussia-Germany embracing
current affairs’.
⁵³
Beust himself did not survive to oversee the new orientation – he was dismissed in November 1871 – but his successor, Count Gyula Andrássy, pursued the same general line. Its first fruit was the Three Emperors’ League of October 1873 between Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany; six years later, Bismarck negotiated the more comprehensive Dual Alliance of 1879 that transformed Austria-Hungary into Germany’s junior ally. Henceforth, Austrian policy would aim to engage Berlin as deeply as possible in the security interests of Austria-Hungary, even if this meant accepting subordinate status within the relationship. The two states would remain bound to each other until 1918.

47. 18 January 1871: King William I of Prussia is proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles; engraving after a drawing by Anton von Werner

The war of 1870 also placed the relationship with France on an entirely new footing. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine – strongly advocated by Bismarck – traumatized the French political elite and imposed a lasting burden on Franco-German relations.
⁵⁴
Alsace-Lorraine became the holy grail of the French cult of
revanche
, providing the focus for successive waves of chauvinist agitation. Pressing for it may well have been the ‘worst mistake’ of Bismarck’s political career.
⁵⁵
Even without the annexation, however, the very existence of the new German Empire would have transformed the relationship with France. German weakness had been one of the traditional mainstays of French security policy. ‘It is easy to see,’ French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier Count Vergennes wrote in 1779, ‘what advantage [Germany] would have over us if this formidable power were not limited by the form of its constitution. [… ] We thus owe our superiority and our security to the forces of [German] disunity.’
⁵⁶
After 1871, France was bound to seek every possible opportunity to contain the new power on its eastern border. A lasting enmity between France and Germany – despite intermittent efforts on both sides to achieve a rapprochement – was thus to an extent pre-programmed into the European international system after the wars of unification.

If we consider these two factors – the close bond with Austria-Hungary and the lasting enmity with France – as fixtures of the European scene in the post-unification decades, then it becomes easier to see why Prussia-Germany found it so difficult to avoid the drift into isolation that was such a striking feature of the decades before 1914. From Paris’s perspective, the chief objective had to be to contain Germany by forming an anti-German alliance. The most attractive candidate for such a partnership was Russia. Berlin could prevent this only by attaching Russia to an alliance system of its own. But any alliance system incorporating both Russia and Austria-Hungary was bound to be unstable: having been shut out of Germany and Italy, Austro-Hungarian foreign policy focused increasingly on the Balkans, a region where Vienna’s interests conflicted directly with those of Russia.
⁵⁷

It was tension over the Balkans that broke the Three Emperors’ League in 1885. Bismarck managed to patch up German relations with Russia by negotiating the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, but by 1889 it had become increasingly difficult to reconcile Berlin’s commitments to Austria-Hungary with its obligations to Russia. In 1890, Bismarck’s successor, Leo von Caprivi, allowed the Reinsurance Treaty to lapse. France promptly leapt in, offering St Petersburg generous loans and armaments subsidies. The result was the Franco-Russian military convention of 17 August 1892 and the fully fledged alliance of 1894, both of which clearly envisaged Germany as the future enemy. It was to compensate for this adverse development that Germany in turn moved closer to Turkey in the 1890s, freeing Britain from its traditional role as
guardian of the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits and allowing it (after 1905) to pursue a policy of appeasement
vis-à-vis
Russia.
⁵⁸
The bi-polar Europe that would go to war in 1914 was now in place. This does not mean that the statesmen of united Germany should be cleared of blame for the epic blunders and omissions that did so much to undermine Germany’s international standing during the last decade and a half before 1914. But it does suggest that the momentous drift into isolation can only partly be explained in terms of political provocation and response. It represents, at a deeper level, the unfolding of the structural transformation wrought by Prussia’s ‘German revolution’ of 1866–71.

In the spring of 1848, as crowds thronged through the streets of revolutionary Berlin, King Frederick William IV declared that Prussia would ‘henceforth be merged into Germany’ (
Preussen geht fortan in Deutschland auf
). His words were premature, but prescient nevertheless. They hinted at the ambivalent portent of national unification for the Prussian state. Germany was unified under Prussian leadership, but the long-awaited consummation inaugurated a process of dissolution. With the formation of a German national state, the Prussia whose history we have traced in this book came to an end. Prussia was no longer an autonomous actor on the international stage. It had to learn to inhabit the large and ponderous body of the new Germany. The demands of German nationhood complicated the inner life of the Prussian state, amplifying its dissonances, disturbing its political equilibrium, loosening some bonds while reinforcing others, bringing at once a diffusion and a narrowing of identities.

In formal terms, Prussia’s place within the new Germany was defined by the imperial constitution of 16 April 1871. This remarkable document was the fruit of a complex historical compromise. A balance had to be struck between the ambitions of the sovereign entities that had come together to form the German Reich. Bismarck himself was mainly concerned with consolidating and extending Prussian power, but this was not a programme that held much appeal for the governments of Baden,
Württemberg or Bavaria. The constitution that resulted was emphatically devolved in character. Indeed, it was not so much a constitution in the traditional sense as a
treaty
among the sovereign territories that had agreed to form the German Empire.
¹
This was made abundantly clear in the preamble, which opened with the words: