ARTICLE: Visualising the Franco-Prussian War

I’ve done a couple of articles on it now, and I’m still up to my eyes in translations, but along the way I’ve been finding images associated with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and it occurred to me that it might make sense to post them. This isn’t WW1; we don’t have a built in point of reference of men wearing tin helmets and sitting in trenches. It isn’t WW2, where we’ve got Saving Private Ryan to help us visualise what happened. This war is important. It’s the prequel to all of that, for a hundred and one different reasons all of which manifested themselves in different attitudes, fears and behavioural patterns in the 20th Century. It’s also unique in that this war sits on the cusp. It’s not Waterloo, where everything we have comes in the form of a painting or a sketch done later on; and it isn’t yet the First World War, where people could walk about with little cameras and take candid snapshots of what was going on. This is a bit of both, so, here are some of each to help you reimagine what happened when Germans invaded France, again. Because for anyone over the aged of 60, they may well have remembered the reign of terror by Blücher’s occupying Prussians after the downfall of Napoleon. For a few young enough, they’d fight their way through this, and volunteer to serve again in 1914…

This image (of German origin) is probably what you’re expecting. A big, pitched battle with guns and horses. And that is what the war was, for a few weeks at the end of summer in 1870. Most of these battles were defeats for France, who wielded an insufficient army and no properly organised reserve of men against clinical Prussian forces (plus other Germans) masterminded by none other than Bismarck. It was not a fair fight, and it was over quickly. This particular image is a scene from the Battle of Sedan, which was an absolute catastrophe that had an impact far beyond the battlefield. It ended the first phase of the war because the French Army basically disintegrated, but it also toppled the Second Empire, taking with it Napoleon III, the nephew of the original. For those of you who are First World War bunnies, that’s how the Empress Eugenie comes to be living up the road from me in Farnborough as an old lady in WW1, helping the wounded.

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