The Frankfurt debates also addressed the basis on which ‘Germany’ might be unified. Was it to be a ‘Greater Germany’, incorporating all the Confederation plus some Germans currently beyond its borders? Or a ‘Little Germany’ excluding the Habsburg lands? The ‘Greater Germany’ solution included Austria and looked to her for leadership, and was favoured by the predominantly Catholic southern states. The ‘Little Germany’ solution looked to Prussian leadership and was favoured by representatives of the predominantly Protestant northern states. It was this view that prevailed by a narrow majority and led to the abortive offer of a German imperial crown to the King of Prussia.
Austria, shaken by revolution throughout her multi-national empire, was temporarily in no position to reassert her leadership in Germany. In 1848 her armies were busy suppressing revolts by her Czech and Italian subject nationalities, before retaking Vienna from the revolutionaries by storm in October. The Hungarian revolt was crushed with the help of the Russian army in 1849. The multi-national nature of her empire made Austria unwilling to countenance the creation of a German nation-state. Nor would she tolerate Prussian pretensions to lead one.
For, even after his refusal of the imperial crown offered by the German Parliament, Friedrich Wilhelm nurtured hopes of creating a German Union by agreement with his fellow princes, but one with an authoritarian constitution like the one he promulgated in Prussia. He had some success in building a league while Austria remained weakened by insurrection, but in 1850 she returned to the German arena to thwart his ambitions. The cooperation of three decades after 1815 had given way to naked rivalry between Austria and Prussia. So likely did war between them appear in 1850 that President Louis-Napoleon of France secretly offered Prussia an alliance, at the price of ceding France the Bavarian Palatinate in the event of victory: but no Prussian government with aspirations to lead and defend the German national cause could afford to buy French support at such a price.
Armed confrontation between Austria and Prussia came in October 1850 over whether Prussia or Austria had the right to intervene in the troubled small state of Hesse-Cassel, through which ran the road connecting Prussia’s eastern and western provinces. Austria led the Diet in a vote to field a large army to enforce its power. Both sides used the nascent German railway network, begun in 1834, to concentrate their troops: Austria and her allies relatively smoothly, Prussia ineptly and with much confusion. Skirmishing between the two forces had begun when Friedrich Wilhelm backed away from conflict, swayed partly by the Czar’s intimation of Russian intervention in Austria’s favour. Hesse-Cassel was occupied by Confederation troops. At Olmütz in Moravia in November, Prussia agreed to the dissolution of her ‘Erfurt Union’, to demobilization, and to the re-establishment of the old Confederation, which resumed fully in 1851. Friedrich Wilhelm swung back to the policy favoured by Prussian conservatives of solidarity and reactionary cooperation with Austria.
Thus any hope of creating a unified Germany by agreement between the princes seemed as dead as that of one created by Liberal politicians. The groundswell of middle-class support for German unity in 1848 was no transient phenomenon, yet it proved powerless to achieve its goal. Only if the balance between the Great Powers that produced deadlock in 1850 were ever to shift significantly might the intractable ‘German question’ be reopened.
A Franco-German Crisis, 1859
A shift in Great Power relations came sooner than anyone foresaw, as a result of the Crimean War of 1854–6, in which Britain and France combined to defeat Russia’s attack on the ailing Turkish Empire. The defeat her army suffered at allied hands at the long siege of Sebastopol exposed Russia’s weaknesses and discouraged her from active intervention in European politics for two decades while she undertook internal and military reforms.
The war had another important consequence for European and German politics: it isolated Austria. Like Prussia, Austria had wished to stay neutral, but Russian forces at the mouth of the Danube intruded on her vital interests. Her long resistance to joining the western camp won her no friends; yet her eventual signature of an ultimatum to Russia weighed heavily in Russia’s decision to accept peace terms. Russia regarded Austria’s action as rank ingratitude for the military help she had received in 1849, and an intolerable betrayal by a fellow conservative power. In future Austria could expect no Russian help if she needed it; indeed, Russian court circles desired to see her punished. Prussia, which had not intervened against Russia and had a common interest in keeping the Poles suppressed, was on the contrary seen as Russia’s only friend in Europe.
If Russia and Austria were losers, victorious France gained prestige. Napoleon III’s army had acquitted itself well, albeit at the cost of 95,615 French lives.1 It had made up the majority of allied land forces and had shown itself less incompetent than any other in the field; even if the latest communications technology, the electric telegraph, had proved a mixed blessing. One French commander-in-chief in the Crimea, Canrobert, had resigned in despair over orders wired direct from the Emperor in Paris. The 1856 peace conference was held in Paris, where Napoleon invited the delegates to banquet and waltz at the Tuileries Palace and savoured his moment as arbiter of Europe. His chances of founding a stable dynasty improved when the Empress Eugénie gave birth to a healthy male son, Louis, the Prince Imperial.
In 1858 Napoleon exploited his diplomatic and military advantages in the hope of ‘doing something for Italy’. Having long desired to help the Liberal and national cause there, he secretly agreed with the Kingdom of Piedmont to drive the Austrians out of the parts of Italy they had occupied since 1815. Napoleon was mixing idealism with opportunism, for he had the chance to achieve military success, weaken reactionary Austria while she was isolated, create client states in northern Italy, and regain Nice and Savoy as the price of his support. Yet, as conflict became imminent, his resolve faltered, even once he was sure of Russia’s neutrality. Napoleon was finally pulled over the brink only when, provoked by Piedmontese military preparations, Austria obligingly declared war in April 1859.
The Italian campaign showed how much warfare had changed since Waterloo. The French army was transported by railway and steamship, debouching over the Alps and to the port of Genoa in three weeks. At close hand there was much that was chaotic about French supply arrangements: Napoleon lamented privately to his War Minister that ‘What grieves me about the organization of the army is that we seem always to be … like children who have never made war … Please understand that I am not reproaching you personally; rather the general system whereby in France we are never ready for war.’2 Yet to outside observers it seemed that the French army was again proving itself the best in the world. With no interference from the sluggish Austrians it completed its concentration, outmanoeuvred the enemy and marched across the north Italian plain, winning bloody battles at Magenta and Solferino in June. If little tactical brilliance was on display, French troops showed the superior élan and willingness to get to close quarters that made them so formidable. Their senior commanders, driven by the instinct that getting close to the enemy was the path to honours and promotion, included men who would command armies in 1870. The courtly aristocrat Maurice MacMahon, already distinguished for his successful assault on the formidable defences of Sebastopol in the Crimea, won his marshal’s baton and the title of Duke for his performance as a corps commander at Magenta.
Decorations, promotions, and victory parades in Milan and Paris were one side of French success in Italy, but another shocked European opinion. Solferino, a savage battle involving 300,000 men, produced 36,000 casualties by the time a thunderstorm of extraordinary violence put an end to fighting. With none of his uncle’s ruthless indifference to high casualties, Napoleon III was sickened by what he saw and smelled on the battlefield next day. In a famous pamphlet, the Swiss traveller Henry Dunant described the horrors of the battlefield. The army medical services were overwhelmed. Dunant’s lurid description rallied widespread support for the initiative of a group of Swiss
philanthropists, who in 1863 founded the International Society for Aid to the Wounded, later known as the International Red Cross. The Society’s efforts gave birth to the Geneva Convention of 1864, which laid down an international code for the humane treatment of wounded enemies and prisoners of war, and conferred neutral status on medical personnel. Prussia was among the first and most enthusiastic states to sign the Convention. France signed too at the Emperor’s behest, despite the reservations of military men who had no wish to see hordes of civilian volunteers working in the battle zone.
This was for the future. In the wake of Solferino Napoleon decided to end the war. He and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria met and agreed peace terms at Villafranca on 11 July. It was not simply that Napoleon had little stomach for further battles. Typhus was spreading in his badly fed army, camped under the torrid Italian sun. He had conquered Lombardy for Piedmont, but if he wanted to force the Austrians out of Venetia he faced a long and difficult war for which there would be diminishing support in France. Revolutionary support for Italian unification in central Italy was getting out of hand, threatening the Papal territories around Rome and alarming French Catholics. Worryingly, too, Prussia was mobilizing her army.
In the German states, Napoleon’s war in Italy was execrated as naked aggression against Austria. Fear that Napoleon’s next goal would be the Rhine revived enthusiasm for and debate about German unity as nothing else could. Newspaper and pamphlet denunciation of French ambitions was as virulent as in the crisis of 1840, and much slower to subside. Yet popular sentiment did not produce cooperation between Prussia and Austria. As she had in the Crimean War, Prussia obstructed proposals for the German Confederation to mobilize forces to support Austria. Finally, in mid-June, Prussia mobilized six of her nine army corps, but as the price of her support sought command of Confederation forces on the Rhine front. The suggestion made sense while Austria was under attack in Italy, but her mistrust of Prussian ambitions in Germany was such that she refused to yield precedence on this point. For the Austrians too, Prussian mobilization provided an incentive to make peace rapidly.
Even without an ultimatum, Prussia’s show of strength was sufficient to cause Napoleon alarm for his eastern frontier. He feared that the Prussians could put 400,000 men on the Rhine in a fortnight. This expectation was slightly exaggerated. Helmuth von Moltke, the studious and methodical Prussian Chief of General Staff, worried that in the present state of the German railway network – much of which was still single-tracked – it would take at least six weeks to move a quarter of a million men to the frontier. At all events, Napoleon concluded that he was in no position to fight the Prussians while continuing his campaign against Austria. Peace was concluded. The Prussians demobilized from 25 July, and the French eventually withdrew all their forces from Italy save for a garrison to protect the Papal territory of Rome, which Catholic opinion at home demanded. As his price for accepting the transfer of the central Italian states to Piedmont, Napoleon received Nice and Savoy following plebiscites in all the affected areas. The recovery of these two territories on France’s south-eastern border was his first reversal of a loss France had suffered in 1815: a gain which boosted the popularity of his regime at home. The other powers, and particularly the German states, were greatly alarmed that it might not be his last. After his Italian adventure it was hardly surprising that Napoleon III was feared as the ruler most likely to disturb the peace of Europe.
Chapter 2
Prussia Conquers North Germany
Prussian Army Reform
The confrontation with France in 1859 added urgency to military reforms Prussia had initiated under her new ruler, Prince Wilhelm, who became regent in 1858 after his brother’s stroke and was crowned king on Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s death in 1861. Wilhelm I, an upright, impressively bewhiskered man in his sixties, was a professional soldier through and through. Although not brilliant intellectually, he was hard-working, experienced, pious, and very clear about what he wanted; a strong professional army directly under royal control. In his teens in 1814 Wilhelm had fought in the Prussian army against Napoleon I in France, winning the Iron Cross at the Battle of Arcis-sur-Aube. His advocacy of force against the 1848 revolutionaries earned him the nickname ‘Prince Grapeshot’, which he lived up to the following year. In 1850 he had argued against his brother’s reluctance to face military confrontation with Austria, and was determined that Prussia should never again be as weak in the international arena as she had appeared at Olmütz.
Wilhelm demonstrated a capacity for military decision-making uncharacteristic of his brother. He was convinced of the suitability for general infantry use of the breech-loading rifle patented by Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse in 1838. The expensive ‘needle gun’ (so called for its novel bolt and firing-pin system) had been in production since 1841, and after extensive testing had been issued to selected regiments over the following years, as the rate of manufacture permitted. Wilhelm cut short the continuing debate about the extent to which rifled muzzle-loaders should be retained, ordering the needle gun to be issued to all remaining regiments. He had been similarly impressed by the cast-steel breech-loading cannon developed by Alfred Krupp, whose Essen factory lay in the western territories acquired by Prussia in 1815. Krupp had for years importuned the government with limited success for railway and armament contracts to bolster the viability of his business, but the Prince Regent’s favour opened doors. In 1859 Wilhelm ordered 300 of Krupp’s expensive but amazingly durable barrels five days after witnessing tests: triple the number recommended by the responsible army commission.
Wilhelm appointed his son’s aide-de-camp, Moltke, Chief of General Staff; at this stage a considerably less important post than that of War Minister. Moltke had a long-standing interest in the technical challenges of adapting Prussia’s expanding commercial railway network to military uses. He addressed weaknesses exposed by the mobilization of 1859, sending staff to study French railway mobilization for the Italian campaign, and planned how to transport hundreds of thousands of men in formed units rapidly to the western frontier. One of his staff represented Prussia on the Austrian-chaired commission set up by the Federal Diet in 1861 to study how German railways should be utilized in the event of an attack by France. The commission’s recommendations stressed the need for double track, for all civilian traffic to be halted during mobilization, and for a central authority including both military and railway men to oversee the transportation operation. Its report formed the embryo of plans that were elaborated over the next decade. In Prussia in 1861 orders were given for Field Railway Detachments to be formed to deal with breakdowns. NCOs were trained in transporting their units by rail. Detailed regulations on how military trains should be loaded and moved were laid down and practised.
Such technical problems of armament and transportation could be settled by royal authority, but the biggest military reform provoked a political crisis. Wilhelm, abetted by his huge, beetle-browed War Minister, General Albrecht von Roon, wanted radical changes to the conscription laws to greatly enlarge his army. This was not unreasonable, given that Prussia’s population had nearly doubled since 1820 when the existing quotas had been set, but Liberals in the Prussian Parliament – the Landtag – strongly objected to changes that would transform the army’s character. Under the current system the territorial militia, the Landwehr, had a prominent role in the active army. This was intended to give civilians a stake in the country’s defence. Wilhelm and Roon objected to this system on grounds of military efficiency. They mistrusted these imperfectly disciplined ‘civilians in uniform’, who included older, less fit men, often with families. They wanted to relegate the Landwehr to garrison duty and to replace it with a highly trained professional army which could be rapidly expanded in wartime by calling on reservists who had undergone the same level of training. Thus men would serve three years in the active army, five in the reserve and eleven in the Landwehr (as opposed to two and a half, two and fourteen years respectively under the existing syste
m).
The reform met bitter opposition in the Landtag which, under even the emasculated constitution of 1850 which Wilhelm had sworn to observe, had to vote the necessary increases in expenditure. Beyond wrangles over money and periods of service, Liberals feared that the reforms would create a military machine in the service of reaction, dominated by an aristocratic officer class: and indeed Wilhelm wanted an army of full-time regulars who would be unquestioningly obedient to the crown in the event of civil unrest.
For three years the impasse worsened. Wilhelm resented Parliament’s attempt to dictate to him in military questions, and in 1861 he dedicated the flags of forty-nine new regiments over the tomb of Frederick the Great in Potsdam. When a furious Landtag rejected the next military budget Wilhelm dissolved it, but his opponents returned triumphant at the May 1862 elections. Roon was by now prepared to compromise on a two-year term of active service, but Wilhelm obstinately insisted that three years were essential to master the needle gun and to imbibe the necessary degree of professionalism and loyalty. He threatened to abdicate if he did not get his way. The Prussian monarchy seemed to be approaching a crisis. Hard-liners urged Wilhelm to disperse the Landtag by a military coup. Instead, he allowed Roon to persuade him to try the political skills of the Prussian Minister in Paris. Anxious lest the king change his mind, Roon forthwith telegraphed his friend, Otto von Bismarck: ‘Danger in delay. Come quickly.’
Bismarck Comes to Power
Following an interview with the king on 22 September 1862, Bismarck was appointed Minister-President and Foreign Minister of Prussia. Tall, with a bald pate, hooded eyelids, a fearsome stare and heavy moustache, he liked to project himself as the archetypal Junker, or country nobleman. Born on his father’s estate of Schönhausen in Brandenburg in 1815, he retained a lifelong taste for hunting and the rural life, a gargantuan appetite for food and drink, and distaste for the new Prussia of burgeoning industrial cities and smoke belching factory chimneys. But he was anything but a typical backwoods squire. His maternal grandfather had been a high official at the Prussian court, and though Bismarck had spent his university days at Göttingen in duelling and drinking, he had a formidable and incisive intellect. Too wilful to make a good civil servant, yet restless and unhappy managing his estate, he entered political life in 1847. Throughout the revolutionary turmoil of 1848–9 he had been a stalwart royalist and champion of reaction. He had initially been an advocate of conservative cooperation with Austria, and had been rewarded with the post of Prussian Minister to the Federal Diet from 1851 until 1859, when he had been moved to the post of Minister to Russia at St Petersburg, then in May 1862 to Paris as Minister to France. Although he considered himself above all a loyal servant of the king, his independence of mind, unconventional behaviour, and ability to express provocative views in lucid, forceful German prose had branded him as a maverick.
Sedan 1870- The Eclipse of France Page 3