The Long Short War

The conflict which began with the French declaration of war on 19 July 1870 was the culmination of a progressive deterioration in Franco-German relations since the Austro-Prussian War. French neutrality in that war entitled them, so they believed, to some form of compensation, of which one possibility was the acquisition of Luxembourg. That option was excluded by the Treaty of London of 11 May 1867 which provided for collective guarantee of the neutrality of Luxembourg and also ended the prolonged Prussian right of occupation of Luxembourg. One of the reasons the French had to be dissatisfied was that European governments were finding it increasingly difficult to engage in the territorial transactions by which they had adjusted the shifting balance of power. This difficulty was no longer just a residue of the territorial settlement of Vienna, fading as its significance was, but was also a product of the growth of nationalist sentiment that made such transactions less acceptable.

While the precise causes of the war remain disputed, both sides invoked and manipulated national sentiment: Napoleon in order to prop up his increasingly fragile and unpopular regime; Bismarck in order to promote Prussian hegemony within the context of a unified Germany. It was, moreover, less the cause than the conduct of the war and its outcome that determined the nature of the occupation and so shocked contemporaries. The sheer speed and extent of the French defeat was remarkable. At the end of what would seem from the perspective of the protracted European conflicts of the twentieth century to be a short war, the European balance of power had been turned upside down, so it seemed to Disraeli. Yet the relative brevity of the war belied the difficulty in ending it, which in turn prolonged and exacerbated the occupation in the process.

Initially it seemed that the siege of one of the French armies in the fortress of Metz and the crushing defeat of the other main army at Sedan on 1 September 1870, ending with the surrender of over 100,000 men and the captivity of Emperor Napoleon, signified the end of the war. From the time of this great victory Bismarck was looking for a peace treaty to end the war.