The Franco-Prussian War was a very short war which was fought between France and Prussia between July 1870 and January 1871. The war came at the end of a period of significant expansion of Prussia, the largest and most powerful of the north German states, as it waged wars against Denmark and Austria in the 1860s. It then turned on France and inflicted a punishing defeat on the French, forcing the abdication of Emperor Napoleon III and the collapse of the Second French Empire. With the fall of Paris in January 1871 the Prussians inflicted a punitive treaty on the French through which they seized the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in eastern France and imposed a huge war indemnity. The war also allowed the Prussian statesman, Otto von Bismarck, to bind the 24 other German states effectively under Prussian rule as the new German Empire, with King Wilhelm of Prussia becoming Emperor Wilhelm I. The war led to significant migration in and out of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.[1]
Franco-Prussian War chronology of events
In the middle of the nineteenth century Germany was still divided into over two dozen states. These included kingdoms like the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Kingdom of Saxony, grand duchies such as the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Grand Duchy of Hesse, and a number of smaller polities such as the old free Hanseatic cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck. There was a growing rivalry between the two most powerful German states, Prussia, which controlled much of northern Germany and large parts of Poland, and Austria, the great power of the southern parts of historic Germania. Both were vying to possibly unite the two dozen smaller German states under their leadership, particularly so after Italy had provided a model for how this could be achieved when the unification of the dozen or so states that made up the peninsula there had been largely achieved in 1861.[2]
Prussia, under the leadership of the brilliant statesman, Otto von Bismarck, took the initiative. In 1864 it went to war with Denmark to acquire the region of Schleswig-Holstein and then two years later it waged war on Austria and many of the other smaller German states in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The latter, in particular, saw Prussia heavily defeat Austria and then bind the smaller German states into an alliance with it, the North German Confederation. With this Prussian mastery of Germany edged closer. But Bismarck wanted one more war, this time with the French, to further expand Prussian territory and fully unite the German states politically.[3]
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The Franco-Prussian War began on the 19th of July 1870 after Bismarck exploited diplomatic tensions between France and Prussia concerning the succession to the throne of Spain to push France into a declaration of war on Prussia. Most of the smaller German states soon joined the conflict with Prussia. The declaration of war was a spectacular error by the French ruler, Emperor Napoleon III. The Prussians had the most effective army in Europe at the time and soon took the war onto French soil and laid siege to the city of Metz in the eastern province of Lorraine in mid-August 1870. It would be October before Metz fell. By then Napoleon had abdicated and Paris was under siege by a Prussian-German army. A desperate battle for the French capital ensued. It finally fell in January 1871, bringing the war to an end in a swift Prussian victory.[4]
Peace negotiations at the Palace of Versailles near Paris led to a humiliating treaty being imposed on the French. Prussia annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in eastern France, which did have something of a German heritage to them, having typically been considered part of the Holy Roman Empire until the late seventeenth century when King Louis XIV of France had conquered them. Many German speakers still lived there by the middle of the nineteenth century. Beyond this, the Treaty of Versailles of 1871 and the end of the Franco-Prussian War was significant for the creation of the German Empire. With victory over the French, Bismarck convinced the rulers of the other two dozen German states to join into a united German state under Prussian leadership, one which it was envisaged would make the German people the dominant state of continental Europe.[5]
Extent of migration after the Franco-Prussian War
The conclusion of the war saw the new German government left in a position of trying to govern the two provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Fearing the possibility of internecine conflict there by individuals who were opposed to German rule, they held out the option for inhabitants to leave for France. Approximately 50,000 people chose this option, comprising about 3.5% of the population there.[6] These settled either in France or in Algeria, France’s major colony in North Africa, the conquest of which had finally been concluded in the late 1860s and early 1870s after decades of semi-genocidal war since the 1830s. To replace the population that left and to Germanize the new provinces, tens of thousands of German colonists were introduced into Alsace and Lorraine. Many of these came in the form of military families as large military bases were established around cities like Metz in expectation of a war at some future date with the French. It would take nearly half a century, but eventually that war came in 1914 and at the end of the First World War in 1918, the French reclaimed the two provinces.[7]
Demographic impact of the Franco-Prussian War
The demographic impact of the war was most keenly felt in the border regions between eastern France and western Germany as tens of thousands of French people left Alsace and Lorraine, often migrating into neighboring parts of France such as the Burgundy region. Similarly, Alsace and Lorraine became more ethnically German as tens of thousands of Germans were brought in to more fully secure the two new provinces. Tangential demographic effects were felt in places like Algeria where some of the colons or Algériens, as the people of the French colonial community were variously referred to, were Alsatians and Lorrainers who arrived in the 1870s.[8]
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References
- ↑ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-franco-prussian-war-150-years-on
- ↑ https://history.state.gov/countries/issues/german-unification
- ↑ https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/timelines/the-franco-german-war-of-1870-1871-1-the-march-to-war/
- ↑ https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/timelines/the-franco-german-war-of-1870-1871-2-from-the-outbreak-of-the-war-to-the-fall-of-the-second-empire/
- ↑ https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/timelines/the-franco-german-war-of-1870-1871-part-3-the-consequences-of-the-fall-of-the-second-empire-and-the-end-of-the-war/
- ↑ https://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/franco-prussian-war-1870-71
- ↑ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-36040-5_8
- ↑ https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/alsace-in-algeria-and-the-notion-of-failure-in-settler-political-culture-c-18701960/214067339B70A12A4E2E1A4572BCF618