The Franco-Prussian War: If you blink, you’ll miss it

I guess I should’ve noticed this sooner, but the Franco-Prussian War was not what you’d call a long conflict. It lasted from July 19, 1870 to May 10, 1871. That’s less than a year. I’ve got stuff in my freezer that’s been there longer.

Generally I read about long wars with multiple campaigns and a revolving cast of characters spread out over long distances, even between continents. Such books include pages of maps and jarring, six-month leaps in time. (“The following winter, General Robert E. Lee was still …”)

So this book moves at a pretty slow pace, which is to be expected if you’re spending 456 pages on a 9-month war. That’s like one and a half pages per day, although of course it doesn’t work out that way with all the analyses of forces and such.

This means I’m occasionally looking up and saying things like: “Aren’t we done mobilizing yet?” and “When does the first general get fired?” and finally: “My God, I’ve read 80 pages and it’s not even August yet — when is somebody going to start shooting?”

But enough with the complaining. It’s time to present the crucial element that begins any bloody conflict between two proud and battle-hungry combatants: The Trivial Incident.

As such Incidents go, the one that sparked the Franco-Prussian War was one of the weird ones. It was called “The Hohenzollern Candidature.” (1)

Spain in 1780 didn’t have a king. I don’t know why, or why they couldn’t pick a nice Spaniard to do the job, but they asked a German named Leopold.

This was OK with Leo and Prussia’s King William I, but when the French found out, they went absolutely bananas. Leo withdrew his bid for the throne, but that wasn’t good enough for France. They wanted Prussia humiliated. Some cranky comments by King William about the whole affair get leaked to the press, and the next thing you know, everyone’s declaring war over an unstable throne that nobody really wanted anyway.

Prussia lost no time lining up its three armies as planned. King William’s nephew Frederick Charles — Howard called Fred “cautious to the point of timidity” — would lead the 2nd Army. The Crown Prince drew the 3rd Army, which was full of unenthusiastic southern Germans. The 1st Army went to a man called Steinmetz, who Howard called “willful, obstinate and impatient of control.”

France had planned for three armies as well, but at the last minute Napoleon III threw out that plan in favor of one big army under his personal command. The mobilization of the French troops was total chaos and soldiers were gravely short of both food and discipline.

Everyone assumed the France would attack Germany right away – nobody considered an invasion of France. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of staff of the Prussian army, knew that every day that went by without a French attack tilted the balance in his favor. But France was too screwed up to attack. “By the beginning of August, as trains from all over Germany poured uninterruptedly into the Rhine, Moltke could scarcely believe his fortune.”

Meanwhile, Lebouf, France’s minister of war, felt pretty good about his own country’s mobilization until he came to Metz and looked things over. Supplies were piled up everywhere. Not enough men were gathering to invade Germany. There were barely enough around to defend Metz.

Napoleon III turned up on July 28, but he was little help. “The campaign of 1859 had shown his total incapacity for generalship even when in good health,” Howard said. “Now he was suffering agonizingly from the stone and in constant pain.”

On Jul y 31, the French army started a series of confused marches in the rain, then performed the easy task of taking Saarbrucken with great style. And so hostilities began.

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(1) Soon to be a Hollywood thriller starring Matt Damon as Jason Hohenzollern.