Then, at the beginning of July, a small cloud had passed across the sun. To fill the vacant throne of Spain, Bismarck suddenly advanced a Hohenzollern candidate, Prince Leopold of Sigmaringen. So violent, however, was the alarm expressed in France at this threatened act of ‘encirclement’ that the candidate was promptly withdrawn. Relieved, Lord Granville chided the French Government for resorting to such strong language, and the Illustrated London News devoted its July 16th frontispiece to Queen Victoria dispensing prizes amid the peaceful surroundings of Windsor Park. Manet began to make plans for his holidays at Boulogne, and the clouds seemed to have evaporated. But the truth was that France, like a mass of plutonium, had reached the ‘critical’ stage. Ever since Sadowa she had not forgotten the apparent Prussian affront to her grandeur, and in 1868 one of her most intelligent men, Prévost-Paradol, had predicted that no French Government, however patient, could stand idly by while Prussia proceeded to unite Germany under her, without eventually ‘drawing her sword’. When dashing General Bourbaki of the Guard heard that the Prussians had climbed down over Spain, he hurled his sword down to the ground in disappointed rage. The country’s mood, that of a great power which sees its position of eminence being speedily eroded, was dangerous, and the Press, led by Le Figaro, now set to whipping up flames of bellicosity by inflammatory articles. After all the failures of Louis-Napoleon’s foreign policy in previous years, mounting pressure was applied upon the Government to seize this opportunity of pulling off, at any cost, a brilliant coup. Neither the Emperor (who still heard his cousin Prince Napoleon’s whispered warning that an unsuccessful war would mean the end of the dynasty) nor Ollivier actually wanted war. But the ailing ruler was being pushed hard, on one side by his heavy-handed Foreign Secretary, the Duc de Gramont, who has never forgiven Bismarck for calling him ‘the stupidest man in Europe’, and on the other side by his own Eugénie who, pointing to the Prince Impérial, declared, ‘this child will never reign unless we repair the misfortunes of Sadowa’.
Gramont now began to adopt towards Prussia a plaintive, hectoring tone. It was not enough that Prussia had retracted; she must be humbled for her presumption, and accordingly Gramont cabled his Ambassador in Prussia, Bénédetti, to keep the crisis hot. The King, who was taking the waters at Bad Ems, received Bénédetti on July 13th with the greatest courtesy. No one wanted war less than he; the unification of Germany he regarded as ‘the task of my grandson’, not his. But behind him was Bismarck, determined not to wait two generations, who had long since calculated that a war with France would provide the mortar he needed to cement together the present rather loose structure of the German federation. The pretext, however, had to be most carefully selected; one that would cast France in the least favourable light, from the point of view of the other nations of Europe as well as that of Prussia’s own German allies. As he once remarked, ‘A statesman has not to make history, but if ever in the events around him he hears the sweep of the mantle of God, then he must jump up and catch at its hem’. With France showing herself determined to press for further diplomatic victories, to twist the knife in the wound, Bismarck thought he heard the sweep of the mantie. At Bad Ems, King Wilhelm had become irritated by the importuning of Bénédetti for a guarantee that the Hohenzollern candidature would never arise again. He declined to give such a guarantee, also refusing a request by the French Ambassador for a further audience. A telegram giving an account of his interview with Bénédetti was then despatched to Bismarck in Berlin; without actually fudging it, as he has frequently been accused of doing, Bismarck sharpened the tone of the dispatch before handing it to the Berlin Press and expediting it to every capital in Europe.1
In fact, even with Bismarck’s editing, the famous Ems Telegram hardly seemed to contain a casus belli (certainly not according to the usage of modern diplomatic language, where the tone in which de Gaulle rejected Britain’s application to join the European Common Market in 1963 might be construed as only a shade less uncivil). But, although in the eyes of even French historians ‘never had an international cataclysm been unleashed over such a futile pretext’, the telegram was enough to entice Louis-Napoleon’s head into the noose. Throwing to the winds his favourite maxim of Il ne faut rien brusquer, he plunged France into perhaps the most brusqué action of her whole existence.
On July 15th France declared war. At once she found herself branded as a frivolous aggressor with neither friend nor ally. ‘The Liberal Empire goes to war on a mere point of etiquette’, declared the Illustrated London News. Austria had made it clear she would only join France in the event of a successful invasion of southern Germany. Italy would do nothing so long as there were French troops in Rome. Russia, where Tsar Alexander II was still annoyed at Louis-Napoleon’s encouragement of the Poles and further piqued by the apparently Insultingly light sentence passed on Berezowski, his would-be assassin at the Great Exhibition, was coldly neutral. The United States had not forgotten the Mexican adventure, and all hopes of British support were torpedoed on July 25th when Bismarck cunningly arranged for The Times to print the damning text of French proposals for a Franco-Prussian partition of Belgium. Only the Irish, who had regarded Louis-Napoleon’s ‘Principle of Nationalities’s’ as being in their own interest, were on France’s side. Gladstone’s Britain, having declared herself neutral in 1866, had virtually relinquished any influence in European affairs; in any case she was preoccupied with domestic thoughts, so she too would remain, once again, strictly neutral; although sentiment was generally behind Carlyle when he contrasted ‘noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany’ with ‘vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and oversensitive France’. But few thought the ‘noble’ Prussians had much of a chance. On July 17th, Lady Amberley wrote to her mother indignantly, ‘It makes one miserable to think of that lovely Rhine a seat of war’, while Delane of The Times declared: ‘I would lay my last shilling on Casquette against Pumpernickel.’ Fortunately for Delane nobody accepted his wager, but it was not the last occasion when an editor of The Times would be wrong about Germany.
A young American woman, Lillie Moulton, who dined at the Palace of St.-Cloud on the eve of the declaration of war, noted: ‘The Emperor never uttered a word, the Empress sat with her eyes fixed on the Emperor and did not speak to a single person. No one spoke.’ But outside, in both nations, scenes of unparalleled exultation greeted the advent of war.
In Germany, where memories were invoked of the fourteen French invasions that had taken place between 1785 and 1813, the whole of Bonn University, a thousand students, joined the colours. In London, British bystanders gave a cheer to the trainloads of young Germans as they left Charing Cross on their way to join up, chanting ‘Nach Paris!’ In Paris something like hysteria reigned; mobs in the street sang the banned Marseillaise and shouted ‘Vive la guerre!’ endlessly, while the more erudite recited de Musset’s
Votre Rhin, Allemand…
Où le Père a passé,
Passera bien l’enfant.1
The Zouaves paraded a parrot that had been taught to screech ‘À Berlin!’ Le Figaro opened a subscription fund to present every soldier in the Army with a glass of brandy and a cigar; and an enterprising publisher advertised a French-German Dictionary for the Use of the French in Berlin. On every hand, alleged Prussian ‘spies’ were seized and roughed up. For a very small minority in Paris, life continued virtually unmarked by the outbreak of war; young Edwin Child was too preoccupied by the pursúit of an attractive compatriot called ‘Carry’, and Edmond Goncourt too distracted by grief at the recent death of his inseparable brother, for either even to note the event in their respective diaries. There were also a few dissentient voices. Flaubert wrote to his ‘dear master’, George Sand, ‘I am mortified with disgust at the stupidity of my countrymen…. Their wild enthusiasm prompted by no intelligent motive, makes me long to die, that I may be spared the sight of it…. Oh, why cannot I live among the Bedouin?’ From the very first, the war was markedly less popular in the pro
vinces than in Paris, and Eugene Weber1 tells us how the knocking out of front teeth was a regular self-mutilation resorted to, so as to avoid conscription (without them, it was impossible to tear open a musket cartridge), especially in the South West provinces farthest from Paris. From her country retreat in July 1870, George Sand also recorded the contrast between Paris ‘braying with enthusiasm’ and the provinces where the overwhelming feelings were ‘consternation and fear’.
The contrast remained throughout the war in some rural areas; Weber tells how, in one village, ‘a French patrol saw the people running to greet it with food and gifts, only to turn away when they realised the men were not Prussians.’
Exultation could hardly have been so widespread were it not for supreme confidence. Even Gambetta considered it safe to go off on holiday in Switzerland. Frenchmen still regarded Bismarck’s Germany with the kind of amused contempt that Prussians reserved for Austrians. ‘Gérolstein’ was the model, and who could be frightened by an army under command of a ‘General Boum’? Also, it was encouraging to think that German society was perhaps just as decadent as the Second Empire, if one could judge from accounts (which had delighted Paris) of the German princelings at Baden-Baden who had tripped round the famous Cora Pearl and her girls, chanting
We will give anything, even Germany,
To go and drink champagne tonight
With Madame Cora, tra la la.
Of course, there were those who were less sanguine. Mérimée, writing to his friend Panizzi about the enthusiasm for the war and the high morale of the soldiers, added, however, ‘I am afraid the generals are not geniuses’, and a few days later ‘I am dying of fear’. From Washington, Prévost-Paradol, newly appointed French Ambassador, warned his countrymen, ‘You will not go to Germany, you will be crushed in France. Believe me, I know the Prussians’. Then he committed suicide. But, just like the warnings Baron Stoffel, the French Military Attaché in Berlin, had been sending the army, Prévost-Paradol’s forebodings also went unheeded. It was more comfortable to place one’s faith in the smug pronouncement of the Military Almanac, which rated the Prussian Army as ‘a magnificent organization, on paper, but a doubtful instrument for the defensive, and which would be highly imperfect during the first phase of an offensive war’.
In fact, whether on paper or in practice, the Prussian Army of 1870 was a magnificent instrument by any standard. At the top, the King was the first professional soldier to rule Prussia since Frederick the Great; it was a matter of pride to him that he could inspect eighty-seven battalions in twenty-two days, and under his mantle nothing had been too good for the army. Although the combined population of Prussia and the Northern Confederation, at thirty million, was less than that of France, a system of universal service and of reserves organized on a regional basis that was far in advance of the era enabled the German states to produce an army of 1,183,000 men within eighteen days of mobilization. Nothing on this scale had ever been seen before. Moltke, possibly a greater organizer than a strategist, had devoted his entire genius to the creation of the General Staff, recruited from the élite of Potsdam. For this great body of troops it provided a brain and nervessuch as no other nation possessed. No single item was left to chance. Railways built in Germany in recent years had been planned with a particular eye to military needs, especially the requirements of mobilization, and a highly trained corps of telegraphists ensured excellent communications. All aimed at a maximum speed of concentration, for an offensive campaign that would hit the enemy hard before he was ready; the technique would be employed again by the Germans in two later European wars. The Army was issued with maps of France showing roads not yet marked on maps of the French Ministry of War, and when later the Prussians constructed a ‘turning’ railway around Metz, it was reported that a survey had been carried out secretly three years previously. With the invading army came a regular system of military government (virtually unheard of before the twentieth century), including such refinements as a Post Office functionary dispatched to check that the accounts of the enemy’s postmasters corresponded to book entries. The Teutonic ‘organization man’ had arrived.
The gay uniforms of the French Army, the joyous fanfares and the dashing officers with their fierce, emulative ‘imperials’ and expansive confidence made a striking contrast to the Prussians’ sober disdain for any kind of superfluity. In weapons, the French had a distinct advantage in their cartridge-firing chassepot rifle with nearly twice the range of the Dreyse ‘needle-gun’. But they had nothing to compare with the steel breech-loading cannon which Herr Krupp had given Prussia, and which the French military leaders had refused to take seriously. The Prussian guns were superior in range, accuracy, and rapidity of fire, and while the French shells tended to burst noisily but harmlessly in the air, the Prussian percussion-fused shells exploded with demoralizing effect at the foot of their targets. Apart from the renowned chassepot, the French Army placed its faith in a secret weapon called the mitrailleuse. A development of the six-barrelled American Gatling gun, and a primitive precursor of the machine-gun, it consisted of a bundle of twenty-five barrels, which, by turning a handle, could be fired all together or in very rapid succession. In the early days of battle, French newspapers published sketches showing a soldier at his mitrailleuse looking in vain, after a few minutes’ cranking, for one remaining target. But the much-vaunted weapon had two grave defects; it was as large, unwieldy, and vulnerable as a cannon, but without the latter’s range; and it had been such a secret weapon that it was not issued to the Army until a matter of days before mobilization.
In leaders, the imposing triumvirate of Bismarck, Moltkc, and Roon would have required an opponent closer to the stature of the first Napoleon than of his nephew. The Prussians had the edge on the French both in that elusive quality, the will to conquer, as well as in actual battle experience; for them, Sadowa had been what Spain and Poland were to be for the Third Reich. France’s generals were second-raters by almost any criterion, and all particularly short on initiative. Bazaine, MacMahon, Canrobert, Bourbaki had been skilful at chasing Algerians in Algeria, Mexicans in Mexico; there had of course been wars against European powers in the Crimea and Italy, but they had been long ago, and the victories at Magenta and Solferino had lulled the Army into that complacency so fatal to victorious nations. Poor Bazaine, who was later to find himself locked up in Metz with 200,000 men, had previously never commanded more than 25,000, and that only in manœuvres. And at the very summit of the Empire the divine spark of leadership was lacking, with Louis-Napoleon now desperately stricken by the stone in his bladder ‘as big as a pigeon’s egg’.
Although in some respects Louis-Napoleon possessed greater military ability than most of his advisers, on matters of life and death he had been tragically impotent to assert his will. Against strong opposition from the Artillery Committee he had succeeded in pushing through the chassepot, but he had been forced to finance the mitrailleuse out of his own pocket, and completely defeated in his efforts to modernize the artillery. Thus, despite Marshal Lebœuf’s famous boast about the Army being ready down to the last gaiter-button (which wits claimed was largely true, as there was not a gaiter in store anyway), it went to war with muzzle-loading brass cannon that were, compared with the products of Herr Krupp, about as obsolete as the Emperor’s Roman ballistœ. Worst of all, however, parsimonious and complacent politicians had repeatedly frustrated his attempts at reforming Army organization so as to introduce something resembling Prussia’s compulsory service. The feudal system of ‘substitution’—or ‘blood tax’—whereby a rich man could ‘buy’ a less affluent citizen to take his place with the colours still prevailed, and it was as demoralizing as it was inefficient. The Left had vigorously attacked any expansion of arms spending, with Jules Favre questioning what possible interest there could be for Prussia to war with France; although later no faction would be quicker to chastise the regime for its incompetence in prosecuting the war. For the Garde Mobile, the territorials that were to provi
de the answer to the Prussian reservists, Marshal Niel, the Minister of War, had asked for 14 million francs and got 5. Then, typical of Louis-Napoleon’s bad luck, Niel—perhaps the one man who might have reformed the Army—died in 1869. Extremely unpopular in the provinces the Garde Mobile was still little more than an idea as France entered the war.1
During those first days, France’s highly centralized mobilization machinery produced scenes of indescribable chaos. Soldiers from the Pas de Calais had to rejoin their depots in the south, or in the west, finally to be sent to fight in the east. The whole nation surged with men travelling frenetically to and fro. A retired major watching the commotion at the Gare de l’Est said ‘It was like that during our embarkments for the Crimea and Italy; the memory reassures me’. But the commanders found less cause for comfort. On the third day of mobilization, General Micheler telegraphed in despair: ‘Have arrived at Belfort. Can’t find my brigade. Can’t find the divisional commander. What shall I do? Don’t know where my regiments are’. When travel-weary troops finally reached their destination, there was often nowhere to sleep because the tents could not be found. Magazines were discovered to be empty. Gunners became separated from their guns. In Metz, France’s chief war depot, there were no stores of sugar, coffee, brandy, or rice—and worst of all no salt. At Douai, a gunner general reported ‘finding a fine stock of horse-collars, but one-third of them were too narrow to fit any animal’s neck’. From Brest, the Admiral Commanding complained that he was putting to sea without charts of the Baltic or the North Sea; and in a final display of combined arrogance and incompetence, the only maps issued to the Army were of Germany, not France. They were never to be used. Summing up the horrible improvidence with which France went so gaily to war against the finest army since the Grande Armée, Émile Zola wrote of a ‘Germany ready, better commanded, better armed, sublimated by a great charge of patriotism; France frightened, delivered into disorder… having neither the leaders nor the men. nor the necessary arms’.
The Fall of Paris Page 7