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Title: The Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871 (Essential Histories) by Stephen Badsey ISBN: 1-84176-421-3 Publisher: Osprey Pub Co Pub. Date: March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Convenient and Well-Packaged Summary
Comment: Despite the fact that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 had major repercussions for later European history, there has been very works written about in the last forty years except for Michael Howard's excellent The Franco-Prussian War (1871) and Alistair Horne's The Fall of Paris (1967). Thankfully, Sandhurst professor Stephen Badsey has written an excellent summary of the Franco-Prussian War that is not a condensation of those previous works and which constitutes a fresh look at this neglected subject. Foremost in value, is the fact that Badsey's volume looks at the war in its entirety, rather than just the first action-packed month. Overall, Badsey's Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871 is an excellent synopsis and reference source for this critical phase in the development of European military thought and weaponry.
After some brief sections detailing the background to the war, followed by equally brief sections on the opposing sides and the outbreak of war, Stephen Badsey moves into his main 24-page narrative of the war. This narrative is supported by ten maps: Europe in 1870, the main campaigns of the war, the battles on the frontier, the situation at Metz on 14-15 August 1870, the Battle of Mars-la-Tour, two maps on the Battle of Gravelotte-St Privat, the Battle of Sedan, the siege of Paris, and Europe after the war. The illustrations throughout the text are also excellent. Additionally, the concluding sections, such as Portrait of a Soldier, are also quite good. Overall, The Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871 probably packs more into the Osprey Essential Histories format than any other volume to date.
Badsey notes that the French performance in 1870 was so poor that it surprised both sides. Despite possession of superior weaponry (early machine guns, better breech-loading rifles), the French army was handicapped by sloppy staff work and a primitive reserve mobilization system. In essence, the French war machine was brave and well equipped, but totally disorganized. French senior leadership, including the Emperor Napoleon III, was so terrible as to defy rationale explanation. Amazingly, the French declared war on Prussia then had no plans or preparations for an offensive war. Furthermore, the French were diplomatically isolated and had to face an undistracted and increasingly unified German nation-in-being. Badsey notes that, "within a week of the fighting starting, two French armies ...were in full retreat." While the French army performed well at the tactical level - and came close to winning the major Battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat - it was clearly out-performed on the operational level and the two French armies always found themselves outmaneuvered by the Prussians. After a month of war, both French field armies and the Emperor were surrounded and combat ineffective.
Badsey's approach to this subject differs from the conventional interpretation, which tends to see the war as decided in the first four weeks. In particular, Badsey notes how naval power shaped the rest of the conflict, "but critically for this stage of the war, Prussia had no effective navy. French maritime trade and commerce were largely unaffected by the end of the Second Empire and so was French credit overseas; the French economy did not collapse, and the war continued to be financed, in part by borrowing on foreign money markets. French troops were brought back from garrisons overseas and weapons shipped in from other countries." While the newly raised and poorly trained armies of the Third Republic achieved few successes on the battlefield, Badsey notes that they did succeed in protracting the war far beyond what the Prussians had expected. Furthermore, the specter of revolution that appeared in Paris during the Communard scared the Prussians sufficiently to actually assist in rebuilding the French army in order to suppress that political cancer, lest it spread to other European countries. Thus, in Badsey's approach, the reader is presented with a more comprehensive look at the conflict than just a discussion of the frontier battles.
The Franco-Prussian War was also important for several changes in the western manner of warfare. The first Geneva Convention agreements had been signed just prior to the war by both Prussia and France, and the conflict was the first where prisoners and enemy wounded were treated much better than had been heretofore the case. Although war correspondents had appeared in the Crimean War and the American Civil War, their role increased in this war and the telegraph allowed them to report on the fighting in near real-time. While Badsey claims that the Prussian "terror" bombardment of Paris was an innovation in that it targeted civilians to achieve the city's surrender, in fairness, the French should get credit for that "innovation" when Louis XIV's army used mortars to devastate the German city of Koblenz in 1688.
However, Badsey's conclusion is a bit less sure, when he asserts that the result of the war was "the replacement of France by Germany as the dominant power in Europe." France before the war, which lacked any allies, was certainly not the "dominant power in Europe" that Badsey suggests, nor did Prussia's victory and German unification reduce Russian, British or Austrian influence in Europe. While there is no doubt that the war enhanced Germany's military reputation, it did not alter the essentially multipolar balance of power that had been prevalent in Europe before the war. Indeed, in the long run, the victory may have hurt Germany because France realized the need for alliances and assiduously went about coalition building for a future war. Germany on the other hand, which fought and won the war without allies, spent much less effort on cooperative diplomacy and paid for that mistake in 1914-1918.
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