Michael Howard - The Franco-Prussian War : The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871

The Franco-Prussian War

A superb study

The Guardian

A most valuable addition to historical literature

A. J. P. Taylor

I read it once a year. A beautifully written account of a close-run thing

Sir Julian Critchley

Michael Howard has analysed the origins and the events of this great war with thoroughness, clarity, and high narrative skill.

The Times

Of far wider significance than a simple history of a nineteenth-century war.

Spectator

Michael Howard has established himself as an historian of a high order.

The Times Literary Supplement

The Franco-Prussian War

THE GERMAN INVASION OF FRANCE, 18701871

MICHAEL HOWARD

FOR

Max Reese

AFTER TWENTY YEARS

First published 1961 by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd

Reissued 1979 by Granada Publishing Ltd

First published as a University Paperback 1981 by

Methuen & Co. Ltd

Reprinted 1988, 1989, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2000

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Second edition first published 2001

Reprinted 2002, 2006

Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1961, 2001 Michael Howard

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

TJI Digital, Padstow, Cornwall

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 10: 0-415-26671-8

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-26671-0

Contents

Maps

Abbreviations Used in Footnotes

Introduction

I T is now nearly fifty years since I started research for this book. I was when beginning to learn my trade as a military historian and this topic almost selected itself. I was fascinated by the transformation that had occurred in the whole nature of warfare between the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of the Somme, and I felt rightly as it turned out that if I studied a war that occurred midway between the two I might begin to understand it. Senior Prussian commanders, including the King himself, had witnessed the last great battles of the Napoleonic wars. Whilst young Prussian lieutenants, notably Paul von Hindenburg, would preside over those of the First World War half a century later. There was an enormous amount of material easily available. True, much of the German documentation had been destroyed, but the bulk of it was available in print, as were most of the French documents in the military archives at Vincennes. I also hoped that by selecting a war in which my own country had not taken part I could rely on myself to write a reasonably dispassionate account. Finally, the battlefields themselves were accessible, and were still little changed since the war fought over them eighty years before.

Like most neophyte military historians, at least of those days, I expected to be able to explain the wars outcome through events on the battlefields themselves; the skill of the commanders, the nature of the armaments, the efficiency of the supply systems, the discipline and courage of the troops. But it rapidly became clear that these explanations were not in themselves enough. Certainly the German or more specifically, the Prussian armies were better commanded, better disciplined, and better supplied; but why? What had happened within Germany itself during the past fifty years to make this possible? Conversely, what had happened, or failed to happen, to France since the days of Napoleon to produce an army that turned so quickly into such a rabble? Gradually I came to realise, as I expressed it on the first page of the book, that the outcome of the war was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. So a study of the war, indeed of any war, had to be rooted in a study, not simply of the armies, but of the societies that fought it. Military history was too serious a matter to be left to the military historians.

Even in terms of purely technical military history, the war remains a fascinating study. It was, like the American Civil War, on the cusp of military development, involving as it did the first large-scale use of railways and breech-loading firearms, with all these meant for strategy and tactics. Their mastery of these new tools goes far to explain the victories of the German armies up until the Battle of Sedan. But what I had not realised was the importance of events after Sedan and the surrender of Metz, when the whole of the French regular army had been taken prisoner but the war still continued, as a Peoples War for another five months. There had been a precedent of a sort in the spontaneous guerrilla campaigns against Napoleon in Spain, but never before had an entire nation continued fighting after its professional armies had been destroyed. From the point of view of the military historian, the Peoples War is a melancholy affair, but from that of the historian of war it is fascinating and sinister. It showed that in an age of democracy, wars cannot be won simply by the defeat of armies in the field: the will to fight has to be eradicated from the peoples who sustain them. In the First World War this would be done by bleeding the armies themselves to death and starving the civilian population. In the Second, that population could be directly attacked from the air. No one as yet has risked a Third.

It is pleasant for an author to find that his first work is still in print after forty years and is regularly consulted. French and German historians have said kind things about it, but it has not yet been translated into either language; perhaps because it describes a triumph of a kind that Germans nowadays do not want to remember, and a humiliation that the French do not want even a friendly foreigner to recall. But I hope that the book will continue to be read, if only as a chronicle of the emergence of what Gerhard Ritter well described as the sinister problem of modern national war, from which the great catastrophes of our epoch have developed; catastrophes that blighted the entire twentieth century, and in whose shadow we still live.