Wilhelm would not be pushed into war prematurely to keep to his generals’ timetables, but he did clarify the chain of command for the coming campaign. On 2 June he empowered Moltke to issue orders directly to field commanders – a mark of the value he had learned to place on his advice. Moltke, not the War Minister, would be the king’s principal adviser on campaign. Although all orders came nominally from the king, Moltke as Chief of General Staff became de facto director of military operations.
As soon as hostilities began, the German states’ forces had to be eliminated. They might have joined the Austrians, giving them a heavy numerical advantage, or have threatened Prussia’s supply lines as her armies moved south. In practice, the state contingents were disunited, and some were amateurish compared to Prussian infantry. Within days Prussia occupied Saxony, Hanover and Hesse-Cassel. The 23,000-strong Saxon contingent managed to slip southwards to join the Austrians. The King of Hanover’s small army at least gave an incautious brigade of Prussian Landwehr a bloody nose at Langensalza before being surrounded and forced to capitulate on 29 June. Bavarian forces were forced westwards. Prussia had effectively conquered Germany in a fortnight.
The three main Prussian armies, a quarter of a million men directed by Moltke by telegraph from Berlin, began crossing the borders of the Austrian Empire on 22 June. They moved concentrically, like a huge line of beaters, seeking to find the main Austrian force and to pin it in front while lapping round its flanks and rear. Within a week they secured the mountain passes into Bohemia, fighting actions that revealed the devastating fire power of the needle gun. Austrian troops launching massed bayonet charges suffered four times more casualties than the Prussians. Shocked and demoralized survivors saw comrades slaughtered by bullets fired by a largely unseen enemy.
Yet not everything ran like clockwork for the Prussians as their columns marched down into the Bohemian plain. The level of central planning and control that had been applied to moving men by rail was lacking for transporting supplies. As would happen to the French in 1870, rations piled up at railheads far distant from the units they were intended to feed. Rain-soaked Prussian infantrymen were forced to rely on requisitions from a hostile Czech population, and many went hungry. The two main Prussian forces, First Army commanded by Prince Friedrich Karl and Second Army commanded by his cousin the Crown Prince, remained widely separated. Moltke, now in the field accompanying the king, planned to bring these forces onto the battlefield simultaneously only once the Austrian main force was found.
The polyglot Austrian army lacked firm and imaginative direction. Hungry and exhausted by long marches from every corner of the empire, it took position overlooking the Bistritz stream, north-west of the fortress of Königgrätz. Once Prussian scouts had located it late on 2 July, an officer on a fast horse was despatched through the dark to summon the Crown Prince to close in on the Austrian right flank while First Army attacked their left.
The climactic battle of the long rivalry between Austria and Prussia was fought on 3 July 1866. It was the largest in Europe since Leipzig, with 221,000 Prussians confronting 215,000 Austrians and Saxons, each army having about 770 guns. Fighting defensively, using earthworks and bringing well-handled artillery to bear, the Austrians severely bloodied First Army, keeping it at bay throughout a drizzly morning. On their left, the Saxon Corps, ably commanded by Crown Prince Albert, inflicted punishment on the Elbe Army, Moltke’s third force. But at the northern apex of their line the Austrians squandered brigade after brigade in piecemeal bayonet charges into forests where the Prussians had penetrated. The needle gun filled these pulverized, smoke-filled acres with thousands of Austrian corpses. To reinforce this sector, the Austrians had unwisely denuded their right wing when the Prussian Second Army struck it in full force in early afternoon. Austrian units holding isolated villages found themselves cut off by swarms of spike-helmeted skirmishers moving through mist and sodden crops to right and left. Desperately but in vain the Austrians fought to hold back the tide in and around burning villages. Finally, their massed batteries succeeded in holding open a line of escape and the Prussians failed to close a ring around them. By evening, the badly beaten Austrian army was in flight south-eastwards, having lost over 44,000 men killed, wounded, missing or taken prisoner. The victorious Prussians suffered over 9,000 casualties.
The war lasted only another three weeks. Despite lengthening supply lines and the appearance of cholera in the army, King Wilhelm and his generals wanted a triumphal entry into Vienna and major annexations from the defeated enemy. Bismarck vehemently opposed such a course. The war for him had been a high risk for a high stake, yet it had been fought for a specific objective – the exclusion of Austria from Germany. That objective was attainable without seizing Habsburg territories which Prussia did not need. Such demands might drive Austria to seek allies alarmed by Prussian success. Following a tempestuous scene between Bismarck and the king, Wilhelm agreed to ‘bite the sour apple’ of a moderate peace with Austria.
The Austrians for their part wished to conclude a disastrous conflict before it imperilled the existence of their empire. They had salvaged honour on the southern front, having defeated the Italians at Custozza on 24 June and having sunk the pride of the Italian fleet off the island of Lissa in the Adriatic on 20 July. But even before the Battle of Königgrätz (or Sadowa as it became known outside Germany), they had approached the Emperor of the French to mediate on the southern front, agreeing to cede Venetia to him immediately. Napoleon’s diplomatic intervention after the battle sharpened Bismarck’s arguments for an early peace and shaped the final settlement of this ‘Seven Weeks’ War’.
Germany Reshaped
On 4 July 1866 Napoleon, suffering from chronic bladder stone, was preparing to leave Paris to take a cure at Vichy when news of the Battle of Sadowa arrived ‘like a thunderclap’ from the summer sky, confounding expectations.7 As the extent of the Austrian disaster became known in Paris the shock was palpable. ‘We felt’, wrote one commentator, ‘that something in the landscape of the old Europe had just crumbled.’8 Next day the Council of Ministers, convened by the Emperor at his palace of Saint-Cloud, was divided on how to respond. The Empress Eugénie, the Foreign Minister and the War Minister were for massing forces on Prussia’s frontier to restrain her and enforce arbitration, and initially Napoleon agreed. On the other side of the debate Interior Minister La Valette and the Emperor’s spokesman in the Legislature, the tough Auvergnat lawyer Eugène Rouher, advised caution. To launch a war from a standing start would be unpopular with the overwhelmingly pacific French public. Did the Emperor wish to tie himself to the corpse of Austria, bastion of the 1815 settlement, against the forces of German and Italian nationalism which he had aspired to champion? How would this look once his promotion of the Prusso-Italian alliance became known? Since the Austrians had agreed to cede Venetia to him, and the King of Prussia seemed receptive to his telegrammed proposal of an armistice, was force necessary or justified? And if her bluff were called, could France be sure of victory, with her troops armed with muzzle-loaders and her best regiments in Algeria and Mexico? Napoleon pondered such arguments overnight and next day deferred mobilization, presenting himself instead as a benevolent mediator. An official announcement that France had secured Venetia for the Italians and implying that an armistice was imminent was greeted by illuminations in Paris and across the country as relieved crowds celebrated that France had kept out of the war while apparently maintaining her prestige as arbiter of Europe.
Bismarck later boasted that he had frightened Napoleon off intervention by threatening to unleash German national passions against French forces, but at the time he took care to accommodate Napoleon’s views about the future shape of Germany. He was pleasantly surprised when the Emperor willingly accepted that Prussia should be dominant north of the Main, stipulating only that Saxony should retain its identity rather than be annexed outright. South of the Main, Napoleon insisted that Bavaria, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt and Baden should ma
intain an independent existence. Austria, like the other defeated states, would pay Prussia a war indemnity, but would lose no territory except Venetia. Thus North Germany was united, giving partial satisfaction to German national aspirations. But the former German Confederation was actually divided into three, leaving the appearance that a balance of power was being maintained in Central Europe. The middle tranche – the South German states – might even prove a fertile field for French influence. Napoleon also asked that the Danes of Northern Schleswig should be allowed a free vote on whether they wished to join Denmark.
Bismarck incorporated these points in the peace preliminaries signed by Prussia and Austria at Nikolsburg on 26 July and formalized in the Treaty of Prague of 23 August. By its terms the Emperor of Austria ceded Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia, accepted the dissolution of the German Confederation and Austria’s exclusion north of the River Main, and agreed to recognize whatever arrangements Prussia made there.
Bismarck proceeded to make those arrangements speedily and without regard for the principle of legitimacy. In addition to Schleswig-Holstein, the defeated states of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and Nassau were annexed and occupied. Their rulers were deposed and their fortunes confiscated: a violation of the monarchical principle shocking to Prussian conservatives and the Czar. From the Liberal city of Frankfurt-am-Main, refuge of his critics, Bismarck spitefully demanded such a huge indemnity that the city’s mayor hanged himself.
However, most Germans north of the Main were jubilant at the transformation that had been wrought. Though at its outbreak the ‘Cabinet war’ of 1866 had been unpopular, many former critics now lionized Bismarck, who had cut the Gordian knot of the German question and had presented them with the object of their ambitions. Elections in Prussia saw substantial conservative gains at Liberal expense. Bismarck capitalized on success not by dispersing the Landtag and curtailing the constitution, as reactionaries hoped, but by offering Liberals an olive branch – albeit one designed to divide them. The Indemnity Bill legalized the government’s collection of taxes since 1862, so acknowledging that the Landtag’s consent was necessary for budget bills.
Rather than seeing this as a Faustian bargain, most Liberals welcomed release from a political impasse that had sapped their support in the country. After all, the king was nearly 70: neither he nor Bismarck could last much longer before the Liberal-inclined Crown Prince succeeded to the throne. The Indemnity Bill, passed on 3 September 1866 by 230 votes to 75, ended the bitter constitutional conflict.
Thus the political map of 1815 had been redrawn in Prussia’s favour by her startling and hard-fought victory. She had joined up the divided territories assigned her by the Congress of Vienna. Her population had grown at a stroke from 18 million to nearly 25 million and she had displaced Austria as the dominant German power. Her industrial and military might made her henceforth a Great Power to be reckoned with, and a formidable neighbour for France.
Chapter 3
Dark Clouds on the Horizon
The French Search for ‘Compensation’
How France should react towards the newly enlarged Prussia was warmly debated in the government and the country in the months following Sadowa. War Minister Marshal Randon’s bitter verdict that ‘It is we who have been defeated at Sadowa’1 expressed the views of many generals and of the Catholic right, notably the Empress. Sympathizing with Austria, they held that France should take a hard line with Prussia, demand territorial compensations, and revert to the centuries-old French security policy of keeping Germany divided. Among many Liberals and republicans, conversely, the defeat of the reactionary Habsburg Empire was welcome, and there was a conviction that if France were sincere in championing the principle of self-determination she must accept the new German power and seek to promote a Europe based on mutual cooperation and peace. Over the next four years each side was to blame the Emperor for favouring the other policy, but the greatest failing of his government was that it veered inconsistently from one policy to the other, only to demonstrate that ‘between two stools the fool falls to the ground’.
In accepting German unity north of the Main, Napoleon had seemed a disinterested mediator, but public opinion soon swung strongly to the view that France should have made gains. ‘People say we played the game badly,’2 reported an official from Toulouse, and such opinions were voiced across the country. A minister advised Napoleon that, ‘Everybody says that greatness is relative and that a country can be diminished while remaining the same when new forces increase around it.’3 Yielding to such pressures, Napoleon belatedly submitted what Bismarck contemptuously dubbed his ‘inn keeper’s bill’. Just before the Peace of Nikolsburg was signed, France secretly asked for the restoration of the frontiers of 1814, the Bavarian Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine, including the city of Mainz, and Luxembourg. In brazenly asking for such a generous slice of German-speaking territory, the French urged the great service their neutrality had supposedly rendered to Prussia.
Bismarck was no longer a supplicant, anxious for French neutrality, nor bound by any treaty with France. To surrender any German-speaking territory to her would put him in serious political danger at home. He refused the request, then demonstrated just how clever and ruthless a political operator he was by leaking details of the French demands to the Paris press, letting it be known for home consumption that war might result if the French persisted. The German press was outraged, and bayed for war rather than yield an inch of German territory.
Napoleon was publicly humiliated. He appeared before Europe to be repeating his Italian strategy of 1859–60, fomenting war in the name of national self-determination in the hope of territorial gain. He disowned the policy by sacrificing his Foreign Minister, but within a fortnight returned with a variation of the compensation strategy. At the urging of Rouher, French ambassador Vincent Benedetti was instructed to seek an alliance with Prussia. Under the terms proposed, France would not oppose a future union between North Germany and the South German states, but in return Prussia would facilitate the French acquisition of Luxembourg and would give France armed support should the Emperor ‘be led by circumstances to have his troops enter Belgium or to conquer it’.
Benedetti drafted the treaty in his own hand in late August and left a copy with Bismarck, who kept it safe. Before the war of 1866 Bismarck had encouraged the French government to expect his support if it chose to expand ‘wherever French is spoken’, but he had no interest in allying with France to fight the British, as must inevitably happen if she seized Belgium. He became evasive, went sick, then let the matter drop. When the French tried to raise it again in connection with the North German settlement, he flew into a rage and accused them of meddling in German internal affairs.
Bismarck’s publication of the earlier French demands for compensation had enabled him to start subverting the provisions of the Treaty of Prague relating to South Germany even before the document was signed. The revelation of French designs on their territory, combined with Bismarck’s offer to reduce the war indemnities he had imposed on them, pushed the South German states in mid-August into secret offensive-defensive alliances with Prussia. By their terms the troops of these states would come under Prussian command if they were attacked, and would be trained to Prussian standards. It would take two or three years for southern troops to be fully trained and integrated with Prussian forces, but military union between North and South Germany had begun. Had Napoleon known this, he might have been even more ‘alarmed at his Frankenstein’, as a British diplomat put it.4
Having come away empty-handed from the reshaping of Europe, Napoleon put the best face he could on things for the benefit of the French public. A circular published on 17 September declared that France had gained by the final destruction of the treaties of 1815 and the break-up of the alliance of the other European Powers against her. Italy had been unified by French efforts, and the application of the national principle to Germany was to be welcomed, not feared. What was the rationalization of the
number of smaller states but a continuation of the work of his uncle, Napoleon I? With ostensible reference to Northern Germany, but with a covert allusion to his designs on Belgium and Luxembourg, the circular questioned whether ‘it should be a matter of regret that an irresistible force is driving peoples to join themselves together in large groupings, while causing minor states to disappear?’
In all, the circular argued, France was still a Great Power and had nothing to fear: ‘The Emperor does not believe that the greatness of a country depends on the weakness of neighbouring peoples, and sees a true balance of power only in the satisfied aspirations of the nations of Europe.’5 But if this reassuring picture was true and France secure, why did she need to ‘perfect her military organization without delay’? The circular did little to allay a growing French sense of grievance, and a perception that their ruler had been duped by the Prussians. By autumn the possibility of war was being openly talked of, especially in the eastern regions of the country, even though they would have most to suffer.
The Luxembourg Affair
Sedan 1870- The Eclipse of France Page 5