The Franco-Prussian War: Turning-Points in European Experiences and Perceptions of Military Conflict 103237392X, 9781032373928

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
Introduction
Part 1 Military and diplomatic repercussions
1 Tactics, learning and the civil-military interface in Europe, 1870–1875
2 The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality
3 The Franco-Prussian War and the Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik
4 Political discourses between militarism and pacifism in th
Part 2 Nationalism and race
5 The impact of the war on definitions of the nation in France and Germany
6 Historiographical nationalism as a legacy of the Franco-Prussian War
7 Racist responses to the national calamity
Part 3 Perceptions and memories
8 Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists in the Franco-Prussian War
9 Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler on the battlefields of 1870–71
10 Map representations of the war of 1870–71 in German school textbooks
Part 4 Cultural representations
11 Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat
12 The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain
13 The war of 1870–71 as a digital event on Twitter and YouTube
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 has traditionally been seen as a limited conflict between French and German forces. This edited volume challenges this view and shows that it was a war of ideas, values, and perceptions, which transformed the political, diplomatic, and military culture across Europe. Based on interdisciplinary research, the book suggests that the war raised new questions about power, the nation, violence, and notions of civilization, which brought about a decisive shift in how warfare was experienced and perceived. While the Franco-Prussian War may have begun as a traditional dynastic struggle, it became a modern war and an important precursor to the First World War in its use of new weaponry and industrialized warfare. At the same time, the development of humanitarian movements and international law on the conduct of war meant that the fighting was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny, while new technologies accelerated the pace at which narratives about the war were constructed and consumed. This volume will appeal to scholars in the fields of war studies, international relations and diplomacy, and intellectual and cultural history. It will also be a useful addition to undergraduate and postgraduate courses on nineteenth-century European history and cultural studies. Karine Varley is Lecturer in French and History at the University of Strathclyde, UK.

Routledge Studies in the Modern History of France Series Editor Rachel Utley University of Leeds, UK

Titles in the series: French Soldiers’ Morale in the Phoney War, 1939–1940 Maude Williams and Bernard Wilkin Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France Sally Debra Charnow The Man Who Murdered Admiral Darlan Vichy, the Allies and the Resistance in French North Africa Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon Translated by Richard Carswell The Making of the Citizen-Worker Labour and the Borders of Politics in Post-revolutionary France Federico Tomasello The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France Primitive Accumulation and Markets from the Old Regime to the post-WWII Era Xavier Lafrance and Stephen Miller France Since the Liberation Between Exceptionalism and Convergence Gino Raymond The Franco-Prussian War Turning-Points in European Experiences and Perceptions of Military Conflict Edited by Karine Varley

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studiesin-the-Modern-History-of-France/book-series/FRENCHHISTORY

The Franco-Prussian War

Turning-Points in European Experiences and Perceptions of Military Conflict Edited by Karine Varley

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Karine Varley; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Karine Varley to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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 Names: Varley, Karine, editor. Title: The Franco-Prussian war : turning-points in European experiences and perceptions of military conflict / edited by Karine Varley. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge studies in the modern history of France | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024001633 (print) | LCCN 2024001634 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032373928 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032373935 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003336792 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871. | Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871—Influence. Classification: LCC DC289 .F725 2024 (print) | LCC DC289 (ebook) | DDC 943.08/2—dc23/eng/20240124 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024001633 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024001634 ISBN: 978-1-032-37392-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-37393-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-33679-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of contributors Introduction

vii 1

KARINE VARLEY

PART 1

Military and diplomatic repercussions 1 Tactics, learning and the civil-military interface in Europe, 1870–1875

13 15

MARK BENNETT

2 The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality

27

MARIO DRAPER

3 The Franco-Prussian War and the Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik

40

GIORGIO ENNAS

  4  Political discourses between militarism and pacifism  in the Ottoman Empire

54

UYGAR AYDEMIR

PART 2

Nationalism and race

67

  5  The impact of the war on definitions of the nation  in France and Germany

69

CORENTIN MARION

vi

Contents

6 Historiographical nationalism as a legacy of the Franco-Prussian War

82

GUILLAUME LANCEREAU

7 Racist responses to the national calamity

97

MACIEJ GÓRNY

PART 3

Perceptions and memories

111

  8  Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists in the  Franco-Prussian War

113

NINA KREIBIG

9 Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler on the battlefields of 1870–71 

126

TOBIAS ARAND

10 Map representations of the war of 1870–71 in German school textbooks

141

CAROLIN HESTLER

PART 4

Cultural representations

151

11  Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat 

153

MARION GLAUMAUD-CARBONNIER

12 The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain

167

KATHERINE ASHLEY

13 The war of 1870–71 as a digital event on Twitter and YouTube

183

CATHÉRINE PFAUTH

Select bibliography Index

192 194

Contributors

Tobias Arand studied at the University of Münster and then worked as a research assistant in Münster, Aachen, Essen and Heidelberg and, since 2009, is Professor of History and its didactics at the Ludwigsburg University of Education, Germany. He is the author of 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen (Hamburg, 2018). Katherine Ashley is Associate Professor of French and interim Vice President Academic at Acadia University. She researches nineteenth-century literary history and Franco-British literary relations. Her books include Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (EUP) and Edmond de Goncourt and the Novel (Rodopi). Uygar Aydemir holds the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Üsküdar University, Istanbul, focusing on modern European and late Ottoman history. His research and publications encompass a range of subjects including political history, cultural studies and literature. Mark Bennett is Research Manager of the Royal Armouries, the UK’s national collection of arms and armour. His research connects the global history of war with intellectual geography, specifically through the transnational circulation of military and political concepts in the nineteenth century. This chapter is written in his personal capacity. Mario Draper is currently Senior Lecturer in Modern British and European Military History at the University of Kent, UK. He specialises primarily in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Belgium but has broader research interests in neutrality studies and transnational soldiering. Giorgio Ennas is Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct Professor at Franklin University Switzerland in Lugano. Among his publications are the article, ‘Connecting the Two Seas: Negotiating an International Modus Vivendi – Italian and Ottoman Diplomacies in the Suez-Red Sea Area’ (2022), and the book, Reports of Cesare Durando Italian Vice-Consul in Sarajevo (1863–1867) (Isis Press, 2020).

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Contributors

Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier is Research Associate at the Centre Zola (Paris). She holds a PhD in French Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She was awarded an Individual Fellowship from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for a project on The Family at War in French Culture (1870–1914). Maciej Górny is Professor and Deputy Director at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences. His latest publications include Forgotten Wars: Central and Eastern Europe 1912–1916 (Cambridge, 2021) (together with Włodzimierz Borodziej) and Drawing Fatherlands: Geographers and Borders in Inter-war Europe (Leiden, 2022). Carolin Hestler studied history, English and religious studies at the University of Education in Heidelberg and worked as a teacher and as a lecturer at the University of Education in Ludwigsburg. She gained her PhD in the history of maps in school books in 2017. She is Lecturer in History and its didactics in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Nina Kreibig studied prehistory and anthropology in Göttingen. In 2020, she completed her doctorate in history at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, on nineteenth-century waiting mortuaries. Since 2021, she has been a researcher in Berlin on the Wittelsbach compensation fund during the Weimar Republic. She is co-editor of the transcript series, Tod und Agency. Guillaume Lancereau is a historian of nineteenth-century Western Europe and Russia. He has published on the historiography of the French Revolution, the making of the history discipline and historiographical nationalism. At the European University Institute, Italy, he studies the transnational history of positivism from Auguste Comte to the interwar years. Corentin Marion is a researcher at the German Historical Institute in Paris, France. His research focuses on transnational European history of the nineteenth century and the history of concepts. His dissertation project deals with the transnational history of the concept of the nation between 1848 and 1871 in parliamentary debates in France and Germany. Cathérine Pfauth studied history and English at the University of Education Ludwigsburg for her M.Ed., state examination as a teacher, in 2023. She currently works as a teacher for history and English at a secondary school and a lecturer for history at the University of Education Ludwigsburg, Germany. Karine Varley is Lecturer in French and European History at the University of Strathclyde, UK. Her publications include Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War of 1870–71 in French Memory (Palgrave, 2008) and Vichy’s Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Introduction Karine Varley

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 marked an important step towards modern warfare, transformed French and German nationalism and was a significant factor in the international tensions that led to the First World War. The conflict had a destabilising effect across the continent, undermining old certainties and raising new questions about power, the nation, violence and concepts of civilisation. In bringing the unification of Germany and the decline of French power, it destroyed the existing European equilibrium. Nevertheless, it has traditionally been seen as a limited war, comprising a ‘duel’ between French and German forces that was decisively concluded in just six months. This edited volume seeks to challenge such views by suggesting that the years 1870–71 brought a decisive shift in how war was experienced and perceived, which meant that the consequences of the conflict played out not just in the belligerent nations but internationally and transnationally as well. While the Franco-Prussian War may have begun as a traditional conflict, it soon became a modern war. In its use of new weaponry and industrialised warfare, it became an important forerunner to the First World War. It brought a clash of ideas and values whose impact helped transform the political, diplomatic and military culture across Europe. The experiences of the war, as well as its consequences, triggered a set of national, international and transnational turning-points. Based on a conference hosted by the University of Strathclyde in April 2021, this edited volume brings together research that incorporates national, international and transnational perspectives by scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Contributors demonstrate that the Franco-Prussian War brought a transformational shift in how conflicts were conducted and perceived. On the one hand, it was experienced as a people’s war that transcended the traditional military domain. The use of irregular forces, the presence of non-combatants on the front line and the destructive impact on culture and heritage served to blur the distinctions between soldiers and civilians as actors, witnesses and victims. On the other hand, public opinion became a critical new factor in warfare, helping to transform perceptions of death and suffering in military conflicts. While new weaponry made the conflict more deadly, the development of humanitarian movements and international law on the conduct of war meant that the fighting was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. New technologies accelerated the pace at which narratives about the war were constructed and consumed as well. DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-1

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Context The Franco-Prussian War erupted ostensibly over the disputed Hohenzollern candidacy to the Spanish throne. In declaring war on 19 July 1870, however, Napoleon III sought a quick victory that would arrest the rising ambitions of Prussia while shoring up his own beleaguered regime. The reality turned out to be very different. As David Wetzel suggests, ‘French rulers blundered into a war that was not unwelcome to them, and Bismarck, though taken by surprise, turned their blunder to his advantage’.1 Indeed, the conflict marked the final successful stage in Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck’s project to create a unified German Empire.2 Under Bismarck’s political leadership and Helmut von Moltke’s military leadership, it soon became clear that the Germans were more effectively commanded than the French. The French army was too weak and insufficiently prepared to wage the kind of war Napoleon III had anticipated. It failed to meet the logistical challenges of mass mobilisation as well. By contrast, more efficient organisation and use of the railways enabled German forces to mobilise in significant numbers and in a state of battle-readiness. These factors, combined with French artillery shortages, meant that the army of the Second Empire was unable to take the offensive at the outset of hostilities. Early success at Saarbrucken on 2 August 1870 was short-lived. The first major clashes at Wissembourg, Woerth and Reichshoffen in Alsace on 4 and 6 August brought major defeats for the French. They were followed by further collapses at Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte on 16 August. By then, any French hopes that European allies might come to the rescue had been dashed. France would be left to fight the rest of the war alone. With Strasbourg and then Metz being held under siege, matters came to a head at Sedan in late August. Exhausted and demoralised French soldiers faced enemy forces twice their strength. Beset by illness and having lost all hope of victory, on 1 September, Napoleon III surrendered along with 83,000 of his men. Three days later, an uprising in Paris brought the end of the Second Empire and the creation of a new French Republic. The war might have ended there, but despite facing comprehensive defeat, the republican French government would only enter negotiations on its own terms. In a diplomatic memorandum issued on 6 September 1870, Foreign Minister Jules Favre argued that Prussia had no right to continue the war or to demand any French territory because it was the Second Empire, not the Republic, that was responsible for starting it.3 Such claims were roundly rejected not just by the Prussian government but by the international community as well. With Bismarck continuing to demand Alsace-Lorraine and German nationalism gaining strength from military success, the war had assumed a greater significance than the conflict of interests that had triggered its outbreak. As it entered a new phase, the hardships and atrocities became amplified. The besieging and subsequent German bombardment of Paris were particular low points, triggering international outrage. The end finally came after further French military reverses culminated in Paris being starved into surrender on 28 January 1871. With Germany triumphant and unification having been proclaimed at the Palace of Versailles on 18 January 1871, the French

Introduction 3 government had little alternative but to accept the punitive peace terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt.4 As a major colonial power and global economic player, the collapse of France reverberated not just across Europe but across the world as well. The fall of the Second Empire revealed the weakness of French power, fuelling disorder and mutinies in North Africa that would explode into a major revolt of up to 800,000 Kabyle people in 1871.5 In Martinique, meanwhile, it triggered the most significant unrest since 1848. As the world’s second banking power, the fall of France had significant economic implications as well, threatening to unleash international financial instability and even global recession.6 Over 150 years on, the Franco-Prussian War may often be overshadowed by the conflicts of the twentieth century and beyond, but it is far from being a ‘forgotten war’.7 Recent years have seen the publication of several significant new books on the conflict. In one of the most important re-evaluations, Nicolas Bourguinat and Gilles Vogt have gone beyond traditional military history to explore the war’s wider international repercussions.8 A related volume, based on a conference held at the Université de Strasbourg in February 2020, develops this approach further.9 Rachel Chrastil’s major new book also takes a broader approach to the war, encompassing military, political, diplomatic, social and cultural aspects while placing the human dimension at centre stage.10 The research of Tobias Arand, meanwhile, has made a significant contribution to the exploration of cultural representations and memories of the war.11 These publications may be contrasted with the scholarship that has framed the Franco-Prussian War in purely Franco-German terms or examined it with a narrower focus on military and diplomatic dimensions.12 The contention that the experiences and consequences of the Franco-Prussian War heralded a series of turning-points builds upon and challenges the existing scholarship. The notion of a historical turning-point is, however, perhaps inevitably hostage to fortune. Indeed, while the war might have heralded a new diplomatic, military, political, cultural and intellectual age, it was not necessarily perceived in such terms at the time. In some cases, it was only after the outbreak of the First World War that the significance of 1870–71 became clear.13 This volume, therefore, approaches turning-points not as moments of sudden rupture but as a series of short-, mediumand long-term national, international and transnational shifts. It seeks to construct a wider framework for understanding the conflict, arguing that the experiences, as well as the outcome, had a profound impact across the continent, triggering upheavals that encompassed the international arena, perceptions of war and ideas on the nation. Experiences The distinctive aspects of the experience of the Franco-Prussian War comprised the transition to more modern warfare, the use of violence, the impact of humanitarianism and the significance of public opinion. These developments played out as turning-points in European warfare and international relations, ideas of the nation and how the war was subsequently remembered and represented.

4 Karine Varley The Franco-Prussian War is often seen as the first war between nations. Driven by nationalist ambitions and fuelled by nationalist sentiments, both sides claimed it was being fought for a higher cause than the seemingly mundane diplomatic fallout which had triggered it. Indeed, each side came to portray it as a battle for the survival of their nation. These factors, combined with the new, more powerful weaponry, technological developments and the targeting of civilian populations, foreshadowed many aspects of the wars of the twentieth century.14 For Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler, the conflict represented a transitional stage between a ‘people’s’ war, fought for nationalist reasons and with modern qualities, and the ‘total’ war of 1914–18.15 Other historians have pointed to the persistence of more ancient practices, however. Jasper Heinzen observes that notions of military honour, in which individual integrity militated against total devotion to the nation, remained prevalent in the officer class.16 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, meanwhile, argues that the conflict may have marked a decisive step towards total war, but codes of honour limited its brutality.17 Taking these nuances into consideration, Mareike König and Odile Roynette have concluded that characterising the Franco-Prussian War as a modern conflict imposes an overly homogenous perspective which does not fully accommodate the diversity of experiences.18 Nevertheless, after the fall of Napoleon III, French Republicans inspired by the ideals of the 1790s gave the conflict a more violent nationalist character. The capture of hundreds of thousands of French soldiers as prisoners of war and the many thousands more who were held under siege in Metz, Belfort, Strasbourg and Paris meant that the Government of National Defence had to create new armies after September 1870. On 2 November 1870, all men aged between 21 and 40 were requisitioned, although, in practice, only unmarried men were called up.19 Seeking to mobilise the entire French nation, the Government of National Defence proclaimed an all-out war (guerre à outrance) against the invaders.20 This guerre à outrance heralded an uncompromising ambition for unconditional victory. The corollary to such reasoning was that defeat would no longer be purely military but one which encompassed the whole nation.21 For their part, efforts to limit the war by Wilhelm I and Bismarck clashed with the imperatives of German nationalism and the military objectives of von Moltke. Thus, while the Prussian king proclaimed that his men were fighting against the French army, not the French people, and while Bismarck wanted a short war for German unification and national security, Moltke saw it as a ‘duel between two determined nations’, which must end with the destruction of France as a great power.22 As the French resistance continued into the winter of 1870, the German armies deployed increasingly brutal methods that were to have devastating effects upon civilians as well as the armed forces. The conflict stood at a crossroads not only in how wars were conducted but also in how they were perceived. Eyewitness accounts were struck by the scale and nature of the casualties resulting from the new weaponry and the ways in which it was being deployed. Indeed, battlefield encounters were the deadliest since the Napoleonic Wars. The French Chassepot rifle, which could hit men 1200 metres away, had a longer range than even the Prussian needle gun. The Prussian Krupp

Introduction 5 canon had a further and more accurate range than anything the French had. Meanwhile, the French mitrailleuse introduced an early kind of fixed-position machine gun to the battlefield. However, these developments clashed with changing attitudes towards war. Bertrand Taithe suggests that it was not that the Franco-Prussian War was more brutal than previous conflicts but rather that the brutality became a focus of how it was perceived and represented.23 Both sides sought to shield their people and armed forces from the realities of soldiers’ suffering. Photographers were banned from the front line or heavily restricted. Nevertheless, the sense that this war was somehow worse than what had been witnessed before filtered through to civilian and international audiences in the accounts recorded by combatants and observers. At the same time, developments in international law relating to the conduct of war, as well as the rise of humanitarian movements, meant that the conflict was subjected to intensified scrutiny. The experiences of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had revived debates about just war and the notion that states should not use greater force than necessary.24 The Crimean War of 1854–56 and the Italian and German wars of unification between 1859 and 1866 brought further shifts in the debates and attitudes towards the conduct of war. Perhaps above all, however, the Geneva Convention of 1864 represented a major step in the development of international humanitarian law. With the creation of the Red Cross movement and the increased presence of medical staff as well as humanitarian charities on the front line, many observers expected that warfare would be waged in a more controlled and civilised manner than had previously been the case.25 In this context of heightened humanitarian sensibilities and expectations, the harsh realities, communicated with unprecedented speed to domestic and international audiences, acquired an intensified significance. War reporting also had a major impact on public opinion about the conflict not just in the belligerent nations but across the globe as well. Technological innovations, such as steamships and the telegraph, accelerated the pace at which narratives were constructed and consumed. Following the European conflicts of the 1850s and 1860s, the demand for daily news had increased as well. In consequence, as Quentin Deluermoz observes, the Franco-Prussian War became an ‘information war’.26 Such was the international appetite for reports on the conflict that in the first week of the bombardment of Paris in early January 1871, the Franco-Prussian War represented 42% of all global news.27 The Crimean War and the American Civil War had transformed the nature of war journalism as newspapers started to employ correspondents who reported from the front lines. As civilian witnesses who were sometimes embedded within armies, they exposed the handling of the war by governments and military leadership to critical audiences back home. Journalists’ accounts of the suffering of soldiers and civilians helped make the French and German governments’ leaders more accountable internationally as well. Public opinion thus became a critical new factor in warfare. It helped shift the locus of diplomacy from the corridors of political power to the public sphere.28 Unable to persuade European governments to support its cause, it was to European opinion that the French government turned for sympathy instead. It began an

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international propaganda campaign claiming that since the values of the Republic were universal, Prussia’s ‘barbaric’ war against France was really a ‘barbaric’ war against European civilisation. In October 1870, the French government released a list of alleged German atrocities to the international press.29 It followed this up with accusations that Prussia was waging a ‘war of extermination’ that included arbitrary executions and even the profanation of religious sites.30 The Prussian government responded in kind, focusing especially on the activities of the irregular French francs-tireurs who sometimes fought without uniforms, engaged in sabotage and eschewed conventional military practices. In December 1870, Bismarck also issued a statement claiming that the French deployment of colonial forces had led to a degeneration in the conduct of warfare from accepted European standards.31 Rumours that the African combatants dismembered soldiers’ bodies and kept limbs as trophies of war circulated widely among German forces.32 In response to such allegations and to reports on the horrors of the battlefield, the British, Irish, Dutch, Italian, Austrian and Belgian committees of the Red Cross sent volunteer ambulances to the front lines. Many other international charities joined the medical relief effort as well. However, it was above all the Prussian siege and bombardment of Paris that resonated most widely with international opinion. Governments, commentators and the wider public were horrified at the stories of the starvation of women, children, the elderly and vulnerable and were shocked at news of the effects of the bombardment. Favre appealed directly to European governments and public opinion, accusing Prussia of violating international law by targeting homes, hospitals, schools and churches without warning and of violating moral laws in attacking the ‘capital of the civilised world’.33 In response, the Lord Mayor of London launched a public appeal that raised 250,000 francs to fund food convoys to Paris as soon as the siege was lifted.34 Similar efforts were witnessed in Belgium, Russia, Canada and the United States. One of the other manifestations of the international reach of the Franco-Prussian War was the involvement of foreign volunteer combatants. As the conflict gave rise to a transnational groundswell of opposition to reactionary regimes among republicans, liberals, radicals and socialists, international volunteers often projected their own national struggles onto the Franco-Prussian War.35 French Republican rhetoric resonated with nationalists in the Balkans and Poland in particular, many seeing the French campaign as part of a shared international struggle for liberty.36 While their numbers were relatively small, amounting to no more than around 1% of the total number of combatants, they attracted a greater attention than in previous wars.37 The most famous volunteer was the 63-year-old veteran Giuseppe Garibaldi, who fought on the side of the French Republic. He was, however, just one of many. The Army of the Vosges included 1500 Greek volunteers, 500 from Italy, as well as soldiers from Poland, Spain, Switzerland and Britain.38 Not all volunteers on the French side sympathised with republican values, however. The French narrative of victimhood and German barbarity helped mobilise Catholic and conservative volunteers as well. Individuals such as the Scottish Ronald MacIver, a monarchist and a devout Christian, were joined by men who had served with the Papal Zouaves as part of the Volunteers of the West.39

Introduction 7 Consequences Despite France finding itself militarily and politically isolated for the duration of the conflict, the diplomatic fallout from the Franco-Prussian War was both widespread and profound.40 The conflict had a major destabilising impact upon the non-belligerent states, with global and imperial consequences that went far beyond France and Germany.41 Indeed, albeit with characteristic rhetorical flourish, Conservative Party leader Benjamin Disraeli warned Parliament that the international balance of power had been ‘entirely destroyed’.42 As William Mulligan points out, the collapse of the Second Empire changed the geopolitics not just of Western Europe but of the Mediterranean, the Near East and the United States as well.43 In part, this was a consequence of Bismarck’s manoeuvres to avert European intervention by secretly promising the Russian government.44 The Russian renunciation of the Black Sea clauses of the 1856 Treaty of Paris was the first significant international consequence of the collapse of the pre-1870 balance of power. The Straits question would become a major source of international tension in the period before the outbreak of the First World War. At stake was not only an internationally strategic body of water but the future of the Ottoman Empire as well.45 The great powers’ failure to intervene represented an abandonment of the principles that had underpinned the European concert since the Napoleonic Wars. The Prussian-led German victory marked a turning-point when Realpolitik and aggressive, conservative-infused nationalism triumphed over restraint and the values of international law.46 Thus, while the experiences and outcome of the Franco-Prussian War might not have triggered a crisis of conscience comparable with that seen after the First World War, the shock and pessimism about European civilisation that it fuelled gave rise to new intellectual and cultural discourses on the relationship between race and the nation.47 Since the late eighteenth century, European writers and intellectuals had begun to see war as a cleansing and redemptive experience capable of defining what it meant to be human.48 Later influences of Social Darwinist thinking contributed towards heightening a sense of war as a test of the nation and its people. Defeat, therefore, came to be interpreted not simply in military terms but also as a sign of political and social malaise. Expressions of nationalism drove the differing ways in which the FrancoPrussian War was remembered by the two belligerents. The triumphalism of the German Empire was reflected in the grand, imposing Niederwald monument, which celebrated victory in the war as well as expressed devotion to the Kaiser and the newly unified German state.49 By contrast, French war memorials focused on the martyrdom of the fallen and honoured sacrifice for the nation.50 Nevertheless, changing attitudes towards death in war triggered important shifts in how the conflict was remembered and represented in both countries.51 Cultural representations often obscured the realities of soldiers’ suffering. In France, the vast panoramas painted by Alphonse de Neuville and Edouard Detaille portrayed wounded, dead and dying soldiers but did so in a sanitised manner. German artists, meanwhile, sought to ensure that depictions of suffering legitimised rather than undermined the new Empire.52 In literature, the tendency of writers to focus on small-scale, often

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domestic episodes set against the background of war served to mask some of its more uncomfortable characteristics.53 Structure and outline The structure of this volume reflects the focus on four main themes. The first part explores the international military and diplomatic repercussions of the conflict. The second deals with how the war helped transform thinking about the nation and concepts of race, not just in France and Germany but across the European continent and into the Ottoman Empire as well. The third part explores how the war was experienced, remembered and represented through battlefield tourism and maps. The fourth part analyses cultural representations in literature and in twenty-firstcentury social media. Many of the chapters explore not merely the direct, tangible impacts of the Franco-Prussian War but also the indirect, more opaque impacts. In so doing, they reveal a set of turning-points that operated at temporally varying paces as well as across a diverse range of military, political, intellectual, social, cultural and geographical realms. In the four chapters contained within the first part, contributors reflect on the lessons of military engagement and the impact upon the non-belligerent European powers. Mark Bennett explores how the tactical and strategic lessons derived from the Franco-Prussian War and the 1866 Austro-Prussian War played out in Britain, France and Germany. Adopting a transnational approach, he observes that military learning was constrained by national preconceptions, misunderstandings and institutional inertia. Mario Draper points out that one of the significant and often overlooked consequences of 1870–71 was that the German annexation of AlsaceLorraine fundamentally altered the strategic pattern of future Franco-German conflicts. With Belgium’s Meuse basin becoming the most viable route of invasion, the impact on Belgian domestic, foreign and military policy was profound. In the next two chapters, Giorgio Ennas and Uygar Aydemir turn their attention to the impact of the Franco-Prussian War on the Ottoman Empire. Ennas suggests that the conflict heralded a cultural turning-point in Ottoman diplomacy, accelerating the adoption of Realpolitik. Whereas many European governments pursued destabilising agendas despite retaining their neutrality, the Ottomans maintained their support for the principles of international balance and peace. Turning to the consequences of the diplomatic void in Eastern Europe caused by the French defeat, Aydemir explores how the Ottoman state and people dealt with the shift in the international balance, especially in relation to Russia. He argues that the war contributed to the emergence of pan-Islamism among Muslims and a rise in bellicose anti-Russian rhetoric, which culminated in the coup of 1876 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. In the second part on nationalism and race, the chapters use transnational methodologies to consider the role of cultural exchanges in ideas on the nation as well as the new anthropological approaches that shaped racial interpretations of the war’s outcome. In his chapter on how the Franco-Prussian War influenced concepts of the nation, Corentin Marion argues that French and German intellectuals engaged in a transnational dialogue. While German intellectuals claimed that Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the

Introduction 9 German Empire on racial and linguistic grounds, French intellectuals pointed out that the will of the people had not been consulted in the annexation. Guillaume Lancereau, meanwhile, explores how the conflict contributed towards the modernisation of the historical discipline in part by intensifying cultural transfers between the belligerent nations. Keen to learn from Germany’s success in order to be able to compete with it in the future, French academics incorporated aspects of German scholarship while reinventing their own national historiographical conventions. In his chapter, meanwhile, Maciej Górny shifts the focus onto how the war was perceived not just as a military conflict but also as revealing a deeper truth about the belligerent nations and their respective ‘races’. Exploring the influential writings of Jean-Louis Armand de Quatrefages and the development of European racial anthropology, Górny identifies the close intellectual influence of the Polish émigré writer Franciszek Henryk Duchiński. In the third part, exploring perceptions and memories of the Franco-Prussian War, the contributors turn to explore experiences and representations of the battles themselves. Nina Kreibig and Tobias Arand use the German term Schlachtenbummler to explore the phenomenon of those who attended the battlefields as observers and tourists. Kreibig argues that a transformation in how wars were perceived, including a marked fascination with death and suffering, led to increased numbers of visitors travelling to the front lines so that they could gain their own direct experience of the conflict. Arand, meanwhile, argues that the role of ‘embedded’ journalists and artists in shaping postwar cultures of remembrance has often been overlooked. Whereas some historians have suggested that the realities of German suffering were later glossed over, Arand points out that they were subsumed into a wider narrative of necessity for national unification. Carolin Hestler analyses maps in school history textbooks as neglected sources on how the Franco-Prussian War was represented in French and German education. Turning to the period between the two world wars, Hestler demonstrates how maps presented particular political narratives and thus sought to manipulate their audiences. In the fourth part on cultural memories of the war, contributors reflect upon how the experiences of 1870–71 were a watershed for cultural actors across the national boundaries. Turning to literary representations, Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier argues that writers in France were caught between the conflicting imperatives of remembering and silence. Rather than focusing on the events of the battlefield that risked undermining republican and national narratives, many chose instead to focus on the domestic familial interior to create private and internalised representations of the war. When it came to the reception of such works in Britain, however, Katherine Ashley suggests that limited translations served to obscure the post-1870 transformations in French literature. Books that were deemed excessively patriotic tended to be overlooked in favour of those that took a more ideologically neutral stance. In the final chapter, Cathérine Pfauth proposes a more contemporary, technology-driven kind of turning-point concerning the Franco-Prussian War. Twitter and YouTube projects that ran around the time of the 150th anniversary of the conflict communicated the history and memory of the war to a wider, often younger and international audience, many of whom had previously been unfamiliar with the Franco-Prussian War.

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Notes 1 D. Wetzel, A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the FrancoPrussian War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 180. 2 See, for example, J. Breuilly, The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800– 1871 (New York: Macmillan, 1996); C. M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2007); J. Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3 Archives Diplomatiques, Paris (hereafter AD) 70PAAP1, Ministère aux Affaires Etrangères aux agents diplomatiques, 7 septembre 1870. 4 See R. I. Giesberg, The Treaty of Frankfort: A Study in Diplomatic History September 1870-September 1873 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966). 5 Q. Deluermoz, Commune(s) 1870–1871: Une traversée des mondes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2020), pp. 69–70. 6 Q. Deluermoz, ‘L’année 1870–1871 et le tournant global des années 1860’, in N. Bourguinat, A. Dupont and G. Vogt (eds.), La guerre de 1870, conflit Européen, conflit global: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg des 6 et 7 février 2020 (Montrouge: Editions du Bourg, 2020), p. 332. 7 M. König and O. Roynette, ‘Introduction. Être en guerre (1870–1871): les formes d’un réexamen’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle – Relire les expériences de guerre francoallemandes (1870–1871), 60 (2020/21), p. 75. 8 N. Bourguinat and G. Vogt, La guerre franco-allemande de 1870. Une histoire globale (Paris: Flammarion, 2020). 9 Deluermoz, ‘L’année 1870–1871 et le tournant global des années 1860’. 10 R. Chrastil, Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2023). 11 T. Arand, 1870/71: Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen (Hamburg: Osburg Verlag, 2018). 12 These include: Wetzel, A Duel of Giants; D. Wetzel, A Duel of Nations: Germany, France, and the Diplomacy of the War of 1870–1871 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); R. Chrastil, Organizing for War: France, 1870–1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); M. Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (London: Routledge, 1962); P. Milza, L’année terrible. La guerre franco-prussienne, septembre 1870 – mars 1871 (Paris: Editions Perrin, 2009); S. Audoin-Rouzeau, 1870 la France dans la guerre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1989); F. Roth, La guerre de 70 (Paris: Fayard, 1990); G. Wawro, The FrancoPrussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). M. König and E. Julien, Histoire franco-allemande, vol. 7: Rivalités et interdépendances, 1870–1918 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2018) also published in German, Deutsch-Französische Geschichte, vol. 7: Verfeindung und Verflechtung. Deutschland und Frankreich 1870–1918 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2019) places the Franco-Prussian War in a wider chronological framework albeit focusing solely on relations between France and Germany. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler’s edited volume brought an important comparative perspective to analyses of the conflict’s significance in the development of modern warfare. S. Förster and J. Nagler (eds.), On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Bertrand Taithe, meanwhile, opened up the study of the Franco-Prussian War to explore humanitarian relief efforts. See B. Taithe, Defeated Flesh: Welfare, Warfare and the Making of Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); B. Taithe, Citizenship and Wars: France in Turmoil 1870–1871 (London: Routledge, 2001). 13 R. Vivarelli, ‘1870 in European History and Historiography’, The Journal of Modern History, 53:2 (1981), pp. 167–170; C. E. Barber, ‘The “Revolution” of the Franco-Prussian

Introduction 11

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

War: The Aftermath in Western Europe’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 60:3 (2014), p. 334. On debates about the nature of the Franco-Prussian War, see R. Chrastil, The Siege of Strasbourg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 1–15; S. Förster and J. Nagler, ‘Introduction’, in S. Förster and J. Nagler (eds.), On the Road, pp. 1–26; B. M. Scianna, ‘A Predisposition to Brutality? German Practices against Civilians and Francs-Tireurs during the Franco-Prussian War 1870–1871 and their Relevance for the German “Military Sonderweg” Debate’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 30:4–5 (2019), pp. 968–993; Taithe, Citizenship and Wars, pp. 21–37. Förster and Nagler, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. J. Heinzen, ‘Une question d’honneur entre gentilshommes? Les officiers français prisonniers et l’usage politique de la parole d’honneur pendant la guerre franco-prussienne de 1870–1871’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 60 (2020), p. 110. S. Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘Guerre et brutalité (1870–1918): le cas français’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 1 (1993), p. 99. König and Roynette, ‘Introduction’, p. 84. Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, p. 244. AD 70PAAP1, Ministère aux Affaires Etrangères aux agents diplomatiques, 7 septembre 1870; Ministère aux Affaires Etrangères aux agents diplomatiques, 17 octobre 1870. See also J. Favre, Gouvernement de la défense nationale du 30 juin au 31 octobre, vol. 1 (Paris: Henri Plon, 1871), pp. 228–229. Taithe, Defeated Flesh, pp. 73–74. M. Hewitson, The People’s Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820– 1888 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 422. Taithe, Citizenship and Wars, pp. 164–166. See M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 2–23. C. G. Krüger, ‘German Suffering in the Franco-German War, 1870/71’, German History, 29:3 (2011), p. 410. Deluermoz, Commune(s) 1870–1871, p. 77; Bourguinat and Vogt, La guerre francoallemande, p. 215. Bourguinat and Vogt, La guerre franco-allemande, p. 186. B. Furst and R. Meltz, ‘ “Hier tout allemands, nous voici tout français”: une opinion publique internationale au secours de la France vaincue?’, in N. Bourguinat, A. Dupont and G. Vogt (eds.), La guerre de 1870, pp. 27–50. D. N. Raymond, British Policy and Opinion During the Franco-Prussian War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1921), p. 253. J. Favre, Gouvernement de la défense nationale du 31 octobre au 28 janvier, vol. 2 (Paris: Henri Plon, 1872), p. 446; AD 70PAAP1, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères aux agents diplomatiques, 7 septembre 1870; Ministre des Affaires Etrangères aux agents diplomatiques de la France, 17 octobre 1870; AD 2QO73, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères aux agents de la France à l’étranger, 29 novembre 1870. Bismarck to Bernstorff communicated to Granville by Bernstorff, 9 January 1871, Foreign Office, Further Correspondence Respecting the War between France and Germany: 1870–1871 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1871), p. 255. Krüger, ‘German Suffering’, pp. 411–412. AD 2QO73, Protestation contre le bombardement de Paris, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères aux agents de la France à l’étranger. Favre, Gouvernement de la défense, vol. 2, p. 411. Bourguinat and Vogt, La guerre franco-allemande, p. 287, 402; Deluermoz, Commune(s) 1870–1871, p. 37. H. Danéva-Mihova, ‘L’opinion publique bulgare et la Commune de Paris, 1871’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 19:2 (1972), p. 388.

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37 Deluermoz, Commune(s) 1870–1871, p. 37. 38 Bourguinat and Vogt, La guerre franco-allemande, p. 309. 39 M. Simpson, ‘From Zouaves Pontificaux to the volontaires de l’Ouest: Catholic volunteers and the French Nation, 1860–1910’, Annales canadiennes d’histoire/Canadian Journal of History, 53:1 (2018), pp. 1–28; M. Simpson, ‘Serving France in Rome: The Zouaves Pontificaux and the French Nation’, French History, 27:1 (2013), pp. 69–90. 40 On French isolation, see S. E. Goddard, ‘When Right Makes Might: How Prussia Overturned the European Balance of Power’, International Security, 33:3 (2008/2009), pp. 110–142; On the significance of European neutrality, see M. Abbenhuis, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 96–97. 41 C. Clark, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 137. 42 House of Commons Debate, Hansard, 9 February 1871, https://api.parliament.uk/ historic-hansard/commons/1871/feb/09/address-to-her-majesty-on-her-most. 43 W. Mulligan, ‘Britain, the “German Revolution”, and the Fall of France, 1870/1’, Historical Research, 84 (2010), p. 310. 44 N. Rich, Great Power Diplomacy 1814–1914 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), p. 110. 45 B. Jelavich, The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and the Straits Question 1870– 1887 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. vii; W. E. Mosse, ‘The End of the Crimean System: England, Russia and the Neutrality of the Black Sea, 1870–1’, The Historical Journal, 2:4 (1961), pp. 164–190. 46 Barber, ‘The “Revolution” of the Franco-Prussian War’, pp. 334–335. On restraint, see Goddard, ‘When Right Makes Might’. 47 Bourguinat and Vogt, La guerre franco-allemande, p. 338. 48 D. A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 7; D. Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 15. 49 R. Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artefacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 30. 50 Krüger, ‘German Suffering’, p. 418. 51 See K. Varley, Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War of 1870–71 in French Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); K. Varley, ‘Memories Not Yet Formed: Commemorating the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 14:3 (2021), pp. 231–250. 52 On depictions of the war in art, see J. Milner, Art, War and Revolution in France 1870–1871: Myth, Reportage and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); F. Robichon, L’armée française vue par les peintres 1870–1914 (Paris: Herscher/ Ministère de la Défense, 2000); R. Thomson, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France 1889–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 53 C. Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 53.

Part 1

Military and diplomatic repercussions

1

Tactics, learning and the civil-military interface in Europe, 1870–1875 Mark Bennett

The Franco-Prussian War stands out among European conflicts for its speed and decisiveness. Although France’s residual warfighting ability prolonged the conflict into 1871, only seven weeks passed between the declaration and the utter rout of France’s field armies. This was comparable to the two successive Austrian defeats of 1859 and 1866, which left it clinging to Great Power status. However, such a rapid victory was not anticipated in the popular press of neutral Britain, which generally concluded that only ‘a bold man . . . [would] prophesy in favour of either side’ given how ‘the forces . . . are . . . so equally matched’; ‘the consequences . . . [are] impossible to forecast’.1 Specialist predictions seem to have been little better, as William Howard Russell, the Times correspondent, noted: ‘in the military clubs it was generally supposed that . . . the French would catch the Prussians by surprise’. Indeed, despite prior experience of the Austro-Prussian War, Russell himself ‘was not exceedingly anxious to join the German army’ as correspondent, because ‘every one likes to be on the winning side’.2 Britain’s press had been little more effective in predicting the outcome of 1866, but they were by no means the only ones to get both results badly wrong.3 Such predictive failures suggest that previous conflicts were only partially understood. Would the various observers across Europe fare any better in processing the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War? This chapter answers this question by focusing on what is sometimes called ‘minor tactics’, namely, the fundamental means by which armies operate on the battlefield. First, it explains the main tactical developments of the war. Second, it looks at how effectively these were understood across Europe. Third, it looks at the mechanics by which a transnational community interested in military affairs shared or sought out understandings of the conflict. Fundamentally, the problem with which all observers had to grapple was the rapidity and accuracy of breech-loading arms.4 The only solution was dispersal – for soldiers to reduce the likelihood of being hit by standing further apart on the battlefield. However, this created additional problems of command and control. Junior officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) were now required to act without supervision, out of sight of their superiors. In a Prussian company column, the skirmish line could be nearly 200 metres from the main body and commanded only by a sergeant. Under these circumstances, the tactical challenge was to couple cohesion with survivability. DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-3

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New tactical manuals were the most obvious result of these changing circumstances. However, they formulate only one position, the most official end of a wider spectrum of debate. Close to this official end are serving soldiers writing in military magazines or delivering papers at professional societies; on the other, unofficial end lie journalists who either engaged with these tactical controversies or produced works containing evidence from which explanatory frameworks could be derived. Somewhere in the middle lie amateur or retired soldiers – and, by default, anonymous or pseudonymous authors, whose military status will remain forever unestablished. Although this chapter does engage with official responses to the conflict, it does so primarily to contextualise the broader debate. Rather than the familiar technical, state-oriented fields, it seeks to explore the extent to which this wider community of interest understood the conflict and its lessons. Interpretations of the war’s tactical lessons By and large, works dealing with the war accurately diagnosed the tactical question at its heart. With direct experience of war to draw on, it is relatively unsurprising to find a Prussian captain concluding that ‘great clouds of skirmishers and small tactical units’ were the new ‘form for infantry. . . . All idea of attacking with large company masses, or of drawing them up in line to fire upon one another, is finally exploded’.5 Similarly, the involvement of other German militaries in the war presumably aided the pseudonymous observation in the Darmstadt Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung of ‘attacking infantry rush[ing] against them, 4–5 times in vain, under the deadly iron hail of the superior rifle’ or the Duke of Württemberg’s belief that French defeats were much worse than necessary ‘if the French Infantry had fired better and possessed more manoeuvring power,’ while ‘the attack in Line of Columns on open ground was a useless waste of men’.6 Likewise, we might well anticipate that specialist works on Tactical Lessons of the 1870–71 War would highlight how ‘close order in the first line against breechloaders soon showed itself to be too awkward and costly to be used further for ordinary attacks; therefore the whole battle line was broken up into dense swarms’.7 Yet, we also find a French Garde Mobile NCO – hardly a body which won the most illustrious reputation during the war – concluding ‘we must no longer rely so much on that manoeuvre of the bayonet. . . . Today’s battles will be reduced . . . to an artillery duel’.8 Even the British newspapers which had struggled to predict the war’s outcome did surprisingly well in analysing its effects, considering that ‘even if ultimately successful, the sacrifice of human life rendered the victory far too dearly bought’.9 The more specialist United Service Magazine looked past mere victory to conclude that ‘not only were the German Tactics not the best, but . . . they were bad’ – and was sufficiently confident in this conclusion to argue it out with the official Prussian Militär-Wochenblatt.10 Nevertheless, there remained two fundamental assumptions, nearly universally shared across Europe, which limited the potential quality of analysis. The first was the basic premise of most commentators that meaningful differences in national characteristics precluded a single ‘best’ tactical system. Ardant

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du Picq was not the only French observer to argue that the ‘nature of the French soldier’ made them feel ‘the need to rush forward with the bayonet against the terrible artillery which decimated it without response’.11 Likewise, the adoption by Austria of Prussian tactics – a rational response to defeat – was condemned as ‘servile imitation’; despite their victory, the Germans were still characterised as ‘heavy, lacking that flexibility, that agility, that spirit of initiative necessary for rapid and orderly marches and for fighting in woods’.12 The Prussians likewise considered that ‘creeping is against the nature of the German soldier’ and ‘the offensive element in the soldier . . . has always been a Frenchman’s best point’; so too did the Duke of Württemberg and Austrian commentators feel that France fighting on the defensive was ‘little suited . . . to their national character’.13 The polyglot, multi-ethnic nature of the Austrian empire added additional complexities to this calculus, wherein the ‘tactical use of the breech-loading rifle’ and the ‘fighting with long-range weapons’ might be ‘described as the Germanic’, but the propensity of ‘the Slavic and Magyar nation to practice bayonet warfare’ suggested a division between rifle and shock troops – even if both should be trained in musketry and skirmishing.14 Likewise, the British opinion that ‘[e]ach nation has its own method of fighting, which is natural to it’ was expressed almost verbatim by captains and generals alike.15 While surpassing Germany in ‘the keenness of the individual soldiers in action,’ British troops were ‘manageable in thinner order than foreign troops’ – perhaps because popular liberty conferred the ‘moral force . . . to fight in thin order’.16 Yet, one may note that, while the French felt German stolidity precluded fighting effectively in open order, the British considered that ‘the coolness and steadiness of the British soldier particularly fit him for skirmishing’.17 In other words, national characteristics were vague enough to support contradictory tactics from one nation to another. They could even portray radical reforms as a natural progression of national character: references to ‘fighting with-long range weapons’ being the Germanic way of war made less radical the change from decades of the Austrian army ‘maintain[ing] an offensive spirit in its tactics’.18 The second fundamental assumption was the faith in the charge as the essential ingredient for victory. After their brief defensive interlude, the French seemed anxious to revive ‘the bayonet charge, the triumph of our fathers, which uses so well the qualities of elan and active intrepidity which characterise us’ albeit ‘supplementing it with rifle shots’ to make ‘the effect produced on the enemy . . . much more deadly’.19 While the Prussian Captain Laymann acknowledged ‘close-order bayonet charges’ to be ‘a rare exception . . . only under very special circumstances’, he noted that ‘the moral impression of the attack is at least as strong with open order’ as ‘a skirmish line . . . advances faster . . . [and] offers a large number of hard-to-hit targets’.20 His more senior compatriot General Hermann von Hanneken likewise concluded that ‘[t]he imaginary or actually carried out attack with the edged weapon will always bring about the final decision between two fighting infantry detachments’.21 However, this faith was by no means universal. The minor German states were somewhat more nuanced in their attitudes, with the Duke of Württemberg

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emphasising how ‘the effect of fire has gained so great an ascendancy both in offence and defence, that the bayonet-attack . . . can no longer be placed in comparison with it’ – though the breech-loader meant ‘there is no longer any impediment in the way of carrying through an offensive attack with musketry fire’.22 ‘V.W.’ went further in the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung, concluding that as ‘the infantry battle is decided only by the effect of fire . . . the bayonet . . . has become obsolete and should be completely eliminated’.23 Perhaps surprisingly, given their low reputation for military thinking, it was in Britain where commentators were most frequently found relegating the charge to history. While C. Allanson Winn commented that ‘[t]he time is gone when battles were decided by the troops who showed the greatest bravery and determination with the bayonet’, the United Service Magazine called fire ‘this true military object’ and shock ‘a remnant of ancient chivalry’.24 Yet, elsewhere, the United Service Magazine proposed to ‘discard the bayonet as a weapon’ – but instead to provide ‘one-third of every regiment of infantry . . . with short sharp cut-and-thrust swords . . . [and] no other weapon whatever’, to be kept ‘in rear of the supports . . . close and in hand, always ready to rush forward and complete a victory or arrest a defeat’.25 More surprising that the magazine made this suggestion, leaving a third of a battalion as defenceless as had been the Austrians in 1866, was that they referenced it favourably two years later.26 Nevertheless, all these positions were extreme to one extent or another. Most British approaches more closely resembled the bethedging found in Colonel Gawler’s observation that the charge ‘will now probably be seldom required’, even though ‘it would be absurd . . . to assert that circumstances could never occur to call for its employment’ and ‘firing alone can never settle a battle’, or the belief that a short-range firefight would be ‘intolerable . . . one of the two combatants would certainly put an end to the slaughter by a charge’.27 The Franco-Prussian War featured all three arms to a greater extent than the previous Austro-Prussian War, whose battles were largely clashes of infantry. Nevertheless, most commentators still paid a considerable amount of attention to infantry and their future attack formation. In these published sources, there was a general acceptance that closed order could no longer dominate and that dispersed skirmish tactics had to be adopted. In Austria, ‘the struggles of modern times are nothing more than great tirailleur battles’; in Darmstadt, ‘traditional . . . tactics had to be abandoned and replaced by another one corresponding to the effects of present-day firearms’, namely, ‘the company-column system with numerous squads of skirmishers’.28 The Baron d’Azémar highlighted ‘the conservation of the rigid linear order’, which ‘paralyses the new role that the skirmishers were called to play, and moreover offers to the enemy artillery an assured goal’ as a contribution to French defeat.29 These conclusions did not always result from the war – von Griesheim’s statement that ‘[t]he tirailleur fight is what gives the infantry fight of recent times its special character’ dated not from the third edition of 1872 but at least from 1860’s second edition.30 Nevertheless, they gained force following its events. The exception was in Britain, where multiple observers considered that they had already solved the tactical issue. Colonel J.C. Gawler explained how the war had caught the Prussians with outdated tactics: ‘it was too late to practice the line,

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or to get their skirmishers in hand, so . . . they adopted the “skirmisher swarm” ’.31 Nevertheless, ‘had they been able to adopt the line, they might have achieved the same with half the numbers, and at considerable less loss of life’. Likewise, though ‘X’ complained about light infantry drill, they felt that ‘the British system of infantry drill, as far as concerns movements in close order, is superior to’ the French, Austrian and Prussian equivalents.32 The United Service Magazine argued that although ‘the Prussian swarm system’ could ‘succeed against raw undisciplined Mobiles and demoralised Zouaves’, it was unlikely that ‘steady disciplined British soldiers [would] have given way before the desultory attacks of these organised bush whackers’.33 This was by no means the British exceptionalism it appears on first sight but more an acknowledgement of the weakness of columns under fire. Gawler felt the British strength lay in a ‘pliant well-maintained line of skirmishers’ and that ‘the ready development and effective exercise’ of fire ‘should be the main object of all battle formations’.34 The British decision to revert from breech-loading to muzzle-loading artillery, just as Prussian Krupp breech-loading guns were outshining their French La Hitte muzzle-loading equivalents, seems misguided at best. Certainly, there were few observers who were unambiguously in favour of such a change. William Howard Russell was ‘not at all easy’ at hearing the news, though ‘it must be admitted that our guns are not of the best construction’.35 Likewise, the United Service Magazine considered that the war had proved ‘artillery, as now handled, is . . . the great arbiter of battle’, but the debate over guns ‘has been carried on more in the interest of rival manufacturers than anything else’; ‘when the breech is at any moment liable to be blown out . . . we must be content with our old muzzle-loader, theoretically less perfect, but absolutely far more useful’.36 The more significant development for the British was ‘the admirable Prussian tactical direction’, specifically its ‘massing and stationary tactics’ in contrast to ‘the frequent movements and . . . diffusion of batteries so observable at English manoeuvres’.37 Somewhat ironically, the comment assigned to a ‘distinguished [British] veteran’ who warmly anticipated the return of smoothbore guns would have fitted better in the German language debate.38 It was ‘Arkolay’, a Saxon lieutenant’s pseudonym, who concluded from the events of the Austro-Prussian War that ‘rifled guns . . . are a mistake, a delusion!’.39 In the very year Ratzenhofer argued that ‘the socalled Arkolay dispute . . . is concluded by the experiences of the war’, ‘Arkolay’ published another book which promised to be ‘the Sedan of the new artillery’.40 His argument, repeated by his supporters, was that rifled artillery had ‘renounced its position as a third main weapon’; only through the use of canister shot at close range could it play a full role in battle.41 Yet, in Britain, arguments of ‘Arkolay’ were neither translated nor referenced. The only English language reference to him was from an American ‘Volunteer Cavalryman’, discounting European examples by appealing to Civil War experience of artillery ‘again and again pour[ing] canister into troops armed with long-range rifles, and breech-loaders at that’.42 Surprisingly, though Austria’s rifled artillery had been one of the high points of a dismal campaign in 1866, it was there that ‘Arkolay’ supporters could be most frequently found. The military authorities went as far as trying rifled 4- and 8pdrs

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against smoothbores with canister shot ‘made according to Arkolay’s instructions’ in July 1870.43 Perhaps as part of its wider disagreement with the military establishment, the Neue Militär-Zeitung featured many articles in support of ‘Arkolay’: ‘characterised above all by a strict logic and the truth of their tactical teachings’, although ‘tactical’ excluded ‘his technical artillery views about smooth and rifled artillery’.44 It was not until 1872 that it acknowledged that the Franco-Prussian War ‘made the rifled gun viable in bloody practice’ and resiled from ‘the nameless naughtiness and outrageous rawness with which the work is impregnated’, a tone which it had earlier defended in response to ‘clumsy attacks on his teachings’.45 Eventually, the logic of one ‘Arkolay’ critic won out: ‘the tactics for increased artillery power at greater distances . . . compensate for the lesser effect at closer differences’.46 Observers of the Austro-Prussian War had concluded that the increased power of breech-loaders only marginally affected the power of cavalry on the battlefield, and the Franco-Prussian War did little to shake this. While there was remarkably little German language debate over the role of cavalry, the defeated French drew conclusions like ‘well-conducted cavalry . . . will find many more short moments to rush upon the infantry during the battle’.47 One commentator argued for the ‘general desire of the cavalry to be armed with the lance’, apparently in the belief they could outfight cavalry armed with rifles and sabres.48 In Britain, meanwhile, serious thought was given to the introduction of the cuirass, perhaps stemming from battlefield observations about the scarcity of penetration and bullets bouncing off armour like ‘hail on window panes’.49 This led even to a proposal for an angled cuirass – ‘something like a bees’ cell cut in half . . . made of cuir bouilli rather than metal’.50 Yet, all such proposals had an air of unreality: ‘if the modern horseman requires “æs triplex circum pectus” . . . let no time be lost in the composition of the cavalry dirge’.51 Some notice should also be taken of the mitrailleuse, the early machine gun whose effect on the battlefield was limited by French tactical failings. It was only in Britain where much comment was made and where surprisingly they glossed over its under-performance to highlight its ‘fearful havoc’ and ‘deadly effect’.52 The main dispute, indeed, was who would have custody of the new weapons, with most believing that they should be attached to cavalry.53 However, the British were not that far advanced of the rest of Europe: they were perhaps quicker to see the utility of the gun in the colonial context than as the dominating force of European warfare that it would become.54 Mechanisms of understanding The phrase ‘neue Waffen, alte Taktik’ encapsulated the military conundrum at the heart of the period in which writers sought to update tactics to the new breechloader era. It also sheds light on the networks of transnational communication which were central to shared understandings of the conflict. It originated in an 1868 Moniteur de l’Armée article, which considered Prussian tactics in 1866 and

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urged a return to earlier tactical principles: ‘this unity in action, which the old divisional commanders of the Republic and the Empire . . . possessed’.55 The author noted that the colonel of the 9th Line had encapsulated this as ‘nouvelles armes, vielle tactic’, which he thought an ‘excellent maxim’. The line went viral; a letter to the Spectateur Militaire began a flurry of works responding either to the original quotation or to this letter.56 By the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the phrase had become a general aphorism detached from its original context, no longer referenced to the original source.57 That the quotation continued to spread was presumably aided by its being referenced in one of the most significant works addressing the FrancoPrussian War’s tactical lessons.58 Most commonly cited in France, Austria and Germany, the quotation could also be found in a Russian public lecture on the war.59 Moreover, it had an extraordinarily long half-life that lasted into the twentieth century.60 Whether or not those using the quotation were clear on its origins, the appearance of the phrase was a visible indication of a work’s intellectual heritage. The extent to which the Franco-Prussian War was a European turning-point is clearly illustrated by comparing its literature to the Austro-Prussian War. The defining work of that war was the Tactical Retrospect, a short pamphlet produced by a Prussian captain which, in hindsight, shrewdly diagnosed many of the issues they would encounter against France.61 However, after 1870, a larger volume of longer works like von Boguslawski’s Tactical Deductions, von Helvig’s Tactical Examples and von Scherff’s Studies in the New Tactics of Infantry were all translated rapidly into both English and French. In Britain, as Anthony Hampshire highlights, it was taken for granted that participants in debates would be familiar with these new theorists – perhaps assisted by works such as Messrs. King’s ‘handsome, uniform’ editions of a translated ‘ “German Military Series” ’, some of which have been quoted in this chapter.62 Tactical studies produced after 1870 barely touched on the Austro-Prussian War, with the exception of a fondness for the Tactical Retrospect perhaps enhanced by its author’s death in battle. By contrast, new editions of tactical works such as the doyen of the British Staff College Colonel E.B. Hamley’s Operations of War were rewritten much more substantially after 1870 than they had been after 1866.63 In France, meanwhile, domestic military analysis – at least of tactics – was hit hard by the conflict. Although the United Service Magazine noted with pleasure that its contemporary Spectateur Militaire survived a short intermission caused by the war, the wide variety of French language works dealing with armaments or tactics after the Austro-Prussian War reduced to a trickle after 1870.64 Only part of this was the shock to the system delivered by the war, whereas more was because attention was presumably diverted to questions of military organisation and the creation of mobilisable reserves. Yet, this focus was perhaps misguided: as the First World War illustrated, going into a war with a large army but no answer to the fundamental tactical problems of the day was a recipe for vast casualties with little to show for them.

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Traditionally, models of military learning have focused on the role of civilian outsiders in driving change.65 In this particular tactical scenario, however, civilians played much less of a role than they did elsewhere. It was in Britain that the civil-military infrastructure allowed civilians to be most active: in 1866, William Howard Russell’s intervention had been decisive in accelerating plans for the procurement of breech-loaders. In 1870, however, the input of civilians was limited – perhaps because, as in France, they focused on restructuring the army’s recruitment and reserves rather than its tactics. Though General Codrington asked war correspondents to contribute to the debate with detailed observations of skirmish tactics and company columns, at least one considered this ‘a polite request . . . [to] get themselves shot with neatness and despatch’.66 One serving officer complained of ‘invaluable lessons’ being ‘filter[ed] through the “Times correspondent” ’ and his ‘dissertations on the superior capacity of spherical to cylindro-conoidal projectiles’.67 The most detailed and useful observations of the Prussian army’s tactics identified in the research for this chapter came not from a correspondent but from an officer who spent the war with the 40th Fusilier Regiment.68 However, his book went unnoticed by such publications as the United Service Magazine and the greater circulation their publicity might have offered. Elsewhere, opportunities for civilians to influence the decision-making process were more limited. If French civil society now had the opportunity to exert pressure on a post-imperial state, the absence of debate over new tactics gave it no opportunity to illustrate this. In Germany, meanwhile, it is notable that all the published authors were on the side of change, yet, they were largely outmatched by conservatives in positions of authority who were able to exert real influence over the tactical doctrine and formations of the army.69 Indeed, one might assume that reformers, faced with their inability to effect change, resorted to print – or, to be more accurate, print outside the narrow circle of the Militär-Wochenblatt, whose official status meant it was bypassed in the course of this research. Yet, it is interesting to note that these reformers were little more successful in effecting change in Britain, even though almost every piece of translated tactical literature which British observers consumed pointed towards the need for reformed tactics. Conclusion Although the war was certainly a tactical turning-point, some of its lessons could have been anticipated from the events of earlier conflicts – and some, though noticed, went unimplemented for longer than they should. Nevertheless, it was not lack of information that caused these limitations. Between original observations and the ever-present translations, there was no real shortage of material on which civil or military observers could base their opinion. When this material was filtered through prejudices, presumptions and a fundamental belief in national stereotypes, it produced the limited understanding detailed earlier. Taking the entirety of the tactical debate into consideration, few countries significantly over- or underperformed their peers within this transnational community of interest – whatever the merits of the official tactics that individual states ultimately adopted.

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Notes 1 ‘The Armies of France, Prussia and Spain’, Standard, 12 July 1870, p. 5; ‘France and Prussia: Declaration of War’, Staffordshire Sentinel, 16 July 1870, p. 4; ‘The War Between France and Prussia’, York Herald, 23 July 1870, p. 8. 2 W. H. Russell, My Diary During the Last Great War (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1874), p. 11. 3 M. Bennett, ‘International Analysis of Battlefield Performance in the Austro-Prussian War, 1866–1870’, War & Society, 41:3 (2022), pp. 182–183; S. Lackey, ‘The Habsburg Army and the Franco-Prussian War: The Failure to Intervene and Its Consequences’, War in History, 2:2 (1995), pp. 161–167, 176–178; S. A. Stehlin, ‘Guelph Plans for the FrancoPrussian War’, The Historical Journal, 13:4 (1970), pp. 791–793; W. Mulligan, ‘Britain, the “German Revolution”, and the Fall of France, 1870/1’, Historical Research, 84:224 (2011), p. 310; P. Putnis, ‘Overseas News in the Australian Press in 1870 and the Colonial Experience of the Franco-Prussian War’, History Australia, 4:1 (2007), pp. 1–19. 4 G. Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 306–309; G. Phillips, ‘ “Who Shall Say That the Days of Cavalry Are Over?” The Revival of the Mounted Arm in Europe, 1853–1914’, War in History, 18:1 (2011), p. 22; E. D. Brose, The Kaiser’s Army: The Politics of Military Technology in Germany during the Machine Age, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 4, 11, 16–17; E. W. Kaempfer, ‘Army Doctrine Development: The French Experience, 1871–1914’, Army History, 28 (1993), pp. 14–15; M. Samuels, ‘Command or Control?: Command, Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888–1918’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 1992), pp. 144–147; S. D. Jackman, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder: Close Control and “Old Prussian Drill” in German Offensive Infantry Tactics, 1871–1914’, Journal of Military History, 68:1 (2004), pp. 74–76, 81–88. 5 A. von Boguslawski, Tactical Deductions from the War of 1870–71, trans. Colonel L. Graham (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1872), p. 160. 6 ‘Die Verluste der Infanterie in dem letzten Kriege’, Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung (hereafter AMZ), 5 July 1873, p. 212; W. H. von Württemberg, The System of Attack of the Prussian Infantry in the Campaign of 1870–71, trans. C. W. Robinson (London: W. Mitchell & Co., 1871), p. 11, 27. Italics in original. 7 G. Ratzenhofer, Die Taktischen Lehren Des Krieges 1870–71 (Wien: Verlag der Redaction, 1872), p. 18. 8 J.-B. Banniard, Guerre de 1870–1871. Considérations militaires (Paris: E. Lachaud, 1872), pp. 19–20. 9 ‘Prussian Tactics’, Evening Mail, 24 September 1875, p. 6. 10 ‘German Tactics at Worth and Gravelotte’, United Service Magazine (hereafter USM), 1872 Part 3, p. 42; ‘Editor’s Portfolio’, USM 1872 Part 3, p. 591; 1873 Part 1, p. 108; ‘Critical Notices’, USM 1873 Part 2, p. 395. 11 Des causes qui ont amené les désastres de l’armée Française dans la campagne de 1870 (Brussels: A.-N. Lebègue et Cie, 1870), p. 94. 12 L.G., ‘Les manoevres en tirailleurs dans l’infanterie prussienne’, Le Spectateur Militaire (hereafter SM), 48:33 (1873), p. 217; P. Foullet, ‘Les enseignements de la guerre d’Amérique’, SM, 49:40 (1875), p. 407. 13 Unsere Vorbereitung Auf Das Schützengefecht in Der Schlacht (Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1875), p. 29; von Boguslawski, Tactical Deductions, p. 13; von Württemberg, System of Attack, p. 7. For Austria, ‘Einiges über das Verhalten der Dreiwaffen im gegenwärtigen Kriege (Fortsetzung)’, Neue Militär-Zeitung (hereafter NMZ), 14 December 1870, p. 839; ‘Militärische Rückblicke auf den Feldzug 1870–71’, 26 November 1873, p. 591; ‘Cavallerie’, 15 December 1875, p. 760. 14 Ratzenhofer, Taktischen Lehren, p. 8. ‘Einiges über das Wesen der Feuer- und StossTaktik’, NMZ, 28 September 1870, p. 650; 1 October 1870, pp. 655–656.

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15 Major L. Tellenbach, Upon the Art of Operating under the Enemy’s Fire with as Little Loss as Possible, trans. C. W. Robinson (London: W. Mitchell & Co., 1871), p. 3; General Codrington, quoted in Major E. M. Jones, ‘The Latest Changes Made by the Prussians in Their Infantry Drill-Book’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution (hereafter JRUSI), 16 (1872), p. 542. 16 Tellenbach, Upon the Art of Operating under the Enemy’s Fire with as Little Loss as Possible, p. 3; ‘Prussian Tactics’, Evening Mail, 24 September 1875, p. 6; Colonel J. C. Gawler, The British Line in the Attack, Past and Future (London: W. Mitchell & Co., 1872), p. vi. 17 ‘Critical Notices’, USM, 1872 Part 2, p. 443. 18 J. A. Dredger, ‘Offensive Spending: Tactics and Procurement in the Habsburg Military, 1866–1918’ (unpub. PhD thesis, Kansas State University, 2013), pp. 12–13. 19 L.G., ‘Etudes sur les nouvelles manoeuvres’, SM, 48: 33 (1873), p. 66. 20 Captain Laymann, Prinzipien Der Infanterie-Taktik: Mit Besonderer Rücksicht Der Durch Die Vervollkomnung Der Feuerwaffen in Den Vordergrund Getretenen Fragen (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1874), p. 43. 21 H. von Hanneken, Militärische Gedanken Und Betrachtungen Über Den DeutschFranzösischen Krieg Der Jahre 1870–1871 (Mainz: Victor von Zabern, 1871), p. 233. 22 von Württemberg, System of Attack, p. 40. 23 ‘Ueber die Infanterie – Taktik der Gegenwart’, AMZ, 3 June 1874, p. 172. 24 C. Allanson Winn, What I Saw of the War at the Battles of Speichern, Gorze, & Gravelotte: A Narrative of Two Months’ Campaigning with the Prussian Army of the Moselle (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1870), pp. 226–227. ‘Tactics of the Battlefield’, USM, 1874 Part 3, pp. 310–311. 25 ‘The Tactics of the Future’, USM, 1872 Part 3, pp. 529–530. 26 ‘French Army Reforms’, USM, 1874 Part 3, p. 288. 27 Gawler, British Line, p. 1. ‘More Tactical Lessons of the Autumn Manoeuvres’, Volunteer Service Gazette and Military Dispatch, 21 October 1871, p. 12. 28 ‘Das Gefecht der Neuzeit’, NMZ¸ 22 December 1875, pp. 777–778; ‘Ueber die Infanterie – Taktik der Gegenwart’, AMZ, 3 June 1874, p. 173. 29 d’Azemar, ‘Tactique des feux de l’infanterie’, SM, 49:39 (1875), p. 239. 30 Gustav von Griesheim, Vorlesungen Über Die Taktik (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1860), p. 231; Gustav von Griesheim, Vorlesungen Über Die Taktik (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1872), p. 260. 31 Gawler, British Line, p. 12. 32 ‘X’, Military Essays and Reviews, Part I: On Camps of Instruction and Modern Tactics (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1871), pp. 60–61. 33 ‘Attack and defence’, USM, 1873 Part 1, p. 3. 34 Gawler, British Line, p. 1. 35 Russell, Last Great War, pp. 345–46, 411. 36 ‘The Royal Regiment of Artillery’, USM, 1874 Part 2, p. 65; ‘Naval and Military Register’, USM, 1871 Part 2, pp. 283–284. 37 E. S. Cayley, The War of 1870 and the Peace of 1871 (York: John Sampson, 1871), pp. 92–93. ‘Prussian Tactics’, Evening Mail, 24 September, p. 6. 38 Major General Sir C. Callwell and Major General Sir J. Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, vol. 1 (Woolwich: Royal Artillery Institution, 1931), p. 153. 39 Arkolay [pseud.], Mysterien der Artillerie: kritisch-didaktisch-historisch (Darmstadt: Zernin, 1870), p. vi. 40 Ratzenhofer, Taktischen Lehren, p. 66; Arkolay [pseud.], Lüge Und Wissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Heinrich Keller, 1872), p. iv. 41 W. B., Arkolai und die Artillerie oder die gezogenen Geschütze im Felde: ein Wort zur Aufklärung (Würzburg: Stahel, 1870), p. 8, 36.

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42 Volunteer Cavalryman [pseud.],‘Fighting at Long Range’, United States Army and Navy Journal and Gazette, 8 (1870–71), p. 322. 43 ‘Einiges über die Versuche im Monat Juni vor der Geschütz-Enquête-Kommission’, NMZ, 6 July 1870, p. 461. 44 I. Foster, ‘Military Newspapers and the Habsburg Officers’ Ideology after 1868’, in R. Schmidt and G. Vonhoff (eds.), Patterns of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Münster: MV Wissenschaf, 2010), pp. 17–19. ‘Die Gezogenen und Glatten Feldgeschütze’, NMZ, 13 July 1870, p. 480; ‘Einiges über das Verhalten der Dreiwaffen im gegenwärtigen Kriege (Fortsetzung)’, NMZ, 4 December 1870, p. 840. 45 ‘Extravagante Ansichten über moderne und österreichische Feld-Artillerie’, NMZ, 22 May 1872, p. 317; ‘Bruchstücke aus Arkolay’s letzter Schrift’, NMZ, 12 June 1872, p. 361; ‘Die Gezogenen und Glatten Feldgeschütze’, NMZ, 13 July 1870, p. 480. 46 Hans, Arkolay Und Die Büchsenkartätschen. Kritik von Arkolay’s ‘Mysterien Der Artillerie’ (Wien: L.W. Seidel und Sohn, 1870), pp. 8–9. 47 G, ‘Conduite de l’infanterie contre les attaques de la cavalerie’, SM, 49:40 (1875), p. 219; General Baron d’Azémar, ‘Observations sur la suppression de l’arme des lanciers’, SM, 46:25 (1871), p. 126. 48 General Baron d’Azémar, ‘Instruction d’ensemble, cavalerie’, SM, 48:37 (1874), p. 437. 49 Russell, Last Great War, pp. 87–88; Captain H. M. Hozier, ‘The Employment of Cavalry in War’, JRUSI, 16 (1872), p. 173; Colonel V. Baker, ‘Organisation and Employment of Cavalry’, JRUSI, 17 (1873), p. 383, 395; Captain R. A. Saxton, ‘England, a Military Nation’, USM, 1872 Part 3, p. 184. 50 Baker, ‘Organisation’, p. 403. 51 From Horace: ‘Breast Enclosed by Triple Brass’, ‘X’, Military Essays, p. 51. 52 Count de la Chapelle, The War of 1870: Events and Incidents of the Battle-Fields (London: Chapman & Hall, 1870), p. 24; C. H. Owen, The Principles and Practice of Modern Artillery: Including Artillery Material, Gunnery and Organization and Use of Artillery in Warfare (London: John Murray, 1871), p. 319. For a contrary view, The Daily News Correspondence of the War Between Germany and France, 1870–1 (London: MacMillan, 1871), p. 101. 53 Captain T. B. Strange, ‘Practical Artillery’, JRUSI, 15 (1872), p. 129; Major-General C. Shute, ‘A Memorandum on the Same Subject’, JRUSI, 16 (1873), p. 54. 54 Lieutenant Colonel H. C. Fletcher, ‘The Employment of Mitrailleurs during the Recent War, and their Employment in Future Wars’, JRUSI, 16 (1873), p. 45. 55 Moniteur de l’Armee, 21 September 1868, p. 3. 56 Un Garde Nationale Mobile [pseud.], ‘Lettre à M. Le Colonel Ferri-Pisani de l’étatmajor’, SM, 43:14 (1868), p. 124. For the original, ‘Aus ausserdeutschen MilitärZeitschriften und Notizen’, Streffleurs österreichische militärische Zeitschrift, 9:4 (1868), pp. 188–189; J. Campe, Ueber die Ausbildung unserer Infanterie (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1869), pp. 33–35; Einer Anhänger der alten Taktik [pseud.], Die Compagniecolonne Gegenüber Halbbataillonen Und Neuen Gefechtsformen: Ein Wort Gegen Taktischen Luxus (Darmstadt; Leipzig: Eduard Zernin, 1870), p. 8. For the letter, F. Zarucke, Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland (Leipzig: Eduard Avenarius, 1869), p. 1142. 57 Oberlieutenant Hugo Stadelmann, ‘Die Mitrailleuse entspricht nicht den Bedingungen des Feldkrieges . . . gehalten am 1. April 1870’, Vorträge gehalten in der Militärischen Gesellschaft, München im Winter 1869/70 (München: F. Straub, 1872), p. 131. 58 von Boguslawski, Tactical Deductions, p. 137. 59 B. de S. ‘Principes et procédées tactiques de l’armée prussienne’, Revue militaire de l’étranger, 3 (1873), 123; Capitaine G. d’Azemar, ‘Etude sur le dispositif tactique de l’infanterie’, Journal des sciences militaires, 6 (1873), p. 267; P. v. S., ‘Tactique de l’infanterie, par le capitaine Pontus, du régiment des grenadiers’, Allgemeine Bibliographie der Militair-Wissenschaften, 3:7 (1874), p. 537; F. von Wechmar, Das moderne

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61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69

Mark Bennett Gefecht und die Ausbildung der Truppen für dasselbe: Ein Beitrag zur allmäligen Entwickelung der Taktik (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1874), p. 11; O. Maresch, Waffenlehre Für Offiziere Aller Waffen (Wien: L.C. Zamarski, 1875), p. 70; Secondelieutenant G. Thäter, ‘Die Verluste der letzten Kriege und ihre Schlagschatten,’ Jahrbucher für die Deutsche Armee und Marine, 16 (1875), p. 24; Hauptman Hugo von Molnár, ‘Über Artillerie-Massenverwendung im Feldkriege’, Streffleurs österreichische militärische Zeitschrift, 21:1–2 (1880), p. 284; G. A. Leer, Public Lectures on the War of 1870 between France and Germany up to and Including Sedan (Saint Petersburg: Departmenta Udlov, 1871), p. 257. ‘Taktik der Infanterie und die Thätigkeit der verbundenen Waffen, 1874–1898’, v. Löbell’s Jahresberichte über die Veränderungen und Fortschritte im Militärwesen, 25 (1899), p. 550; Generalleutnant H. Rohne, ‘Studie über Schnellfeuer Feldgeschütze in Rohrrücklauflafette’, Kriegstechnische Zeitschrift, für Offiziere aller Waffen, 4 (1901), p. 415. T. May, Taktische Rückblicke Auf 1866 (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler, 1869). A. J. Hampshire, ‘Continental Warfare and British Military Thought 1859–1880: How the Issues Were Explored and Their Impact on Change’ (unpub. PhD thesis, King’s College London, 2005), p. 216. ‘Critical Notices’, USM, 1872 Part 3, p. 445. Bennett, ‘International Analysis’, pp. 185–186. For praise for the Retrospect, ‘The Tactics of Prussian Infantry’, Evening Mail, 17 January 1872, p. 2; Lieutenant Colonel C. C. Chesney, ‘The Study of Military Science in time of Peace’, JRUSI, 15 (1872), p. 265, Colonel the Hon. Frederic Thesiger, ‘Is a radical change in the tactical formation of our infantry really necessary?’, JRUSI, 17 (1874), p. 411. ‘The Campaign of Metz’, USM, 1871 Part 3, p. 101. L. M. Burke II, ‘Methodologies and Models in Military Innovation Studies’, International Journal of Military History and Historiography, 40:1 (2020), p. 116. Daily News Correspondence, p. 289. Strange, ‘Practical Artillery’, p. 120. J. L. Seaton, Notes on the Operations of the North German Troops, in Lorraine and Picardy, Taken While Accompanying Principally the 40th or Hohenzollern Fusilier Regiment (London: W. Mitchell & Co., 1872). Brose, Kaiser’s Army, pp. 19–21; Jackman, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’, pp. 87–89.

2

The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality Mario Draper

On 1 September 1870, the Army of Châlons suffered a shattering defeat at the hands of the enveloping German armies around Sedan. Within seventy-two hours, it spelled the end of Napoleon III’s Second Empire and all but brought the regular phase of the Franco-Prussian War to a close. Less than five months later, the German Empire, under Hohenzollern stewardship, was established in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Alongside Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s crowning achievement in delivering a unified Germany, the new Reich also acquired the formerly French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The annexation of these territories became the focal point of continued tensions between the two nations for decades to come. More than that, it constituted the basis of French revanchisme that fanned the flames of rivalry until the next great clash in August 1914.1 This was one of the more obvious legacies of the Franco-Prussian War. Less than ten miles north of Sedan lay the Belgian frontier. As Europe’s two premier armies clashed, King Leopold II’s Army of Observation patrolled the border regions. This force had been hastily assembled in response to the diplomatic crisis that emerged in July 1870 over the Spanish succession. Its task was to militarily reinforce Belgium’s perpetual neutrality enshrined in the 1839 Treaty of London to which both France and Prussia were signatories and guarantors.2 On the face of it, Belgian authorities need not have worried. Both France and Prussia, in conjunction with Britain, had reaffirmed their commitments to Belgium in the run-up to hostilities. Still, the potential for military operations to spill over into the neutralised zone remained. In fact, a minor diplomatic incident did occur in the wake of Sedan as fleeing French troops crossed the frontier. While some 4,000 were disarmed and interned, an estimated 5–10,000 are thought to have evaded the over-stretched Army of Observation and regained French territory without consequence.3 Notwithstanding this faux pas, Belgium largely escaped the catastrophe of the FrancoPrussian War unscathed. To those political elites in Brussels who championed the idea of neutrality, this was vindication. Belgium, once again, owed its continued independence to the irrevocable power of international law; proof – if proof were needed – that calls for the introduction of universal conscription was both misguided and dangerous. Yet, for others, the Franco-Prussian War represented the clearest indication to date of Belgium’s military and, by extension, national vulnerabilities. Chief among them DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-4

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was Lieutenant-General Henri-Alexis Brialmont: Belgium’s preeminent soldier and military engineer of the late nineteenth century. In a series of publications over the next three decades, Brialmont advocated for a stronger armed neutrality. Rootand-branch reform in the shape of personal, obligatory, and universal service; the creation of an adequate reserve; and the reformulation of Belgium’s fortress and strategic policy were seen as paramount to the kingdom’s future security. Although few were willing to see it, the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine had fundamentally shifted the strategic paradigm of any future Franco-German war. Given its geographical location and dense railway network, Belgium’s Meuse basin became the obvious route of invasion for both sides attempting to circumvent the increasingly fortified Franco-German border.4 With regard to Belgium, this was the foremost, and often over-looked, legacy of 1870–71. The nineteenth-century Belgian Army faced many challenges. Numbering approximately 100,000 men on a wartime footing – though frequently no more than 40,000 in peacetime – it was barely sufficient to meet its primary responsibility as a deterrent to invasion.5 Recruited predominantly through a ballot system (whose burden fell disproportionately on the poor and spared the wealthy by way of substitution and replacement), the army garnered a reputation as a scourge on society.6 The ‘blood tax’ not only removed men from the economy at the peak of productivity, but the corrupting and insalubrious effects of barrack life frequently affected them for the worse as well.7 Fears that pious Flemish youths were being subjected to the immoral vices of liquor and womanising – not to mention their exposure to Walloon socialism – served to entrench an already deeply rooted anti-militarism throughout Flanders.8 The army proved not to be the ‘melting pot’ through which to forge the nation.9 For the Catholic Party, whose traditional base of support came from these northern provinces, military expenditure became anathema. The emergence of the deeply anti-militaristic Antwerp Meeting Party in the Catholic heartlands further compelled them to stand firm against reform. The slogan ‘Not one man, not one penny more’ featured prominently in political and public discourse.10 Even for the Liberals, who tended to be more receptive to such ideas, supporting an increase to the establishment risked alienating their own voters. These tended to be wealthy urbanites whose personal and commercial interests depended upon keeping their sons and workers out of uniform. In effect, the political establishment found itself beholden to a minority electorate (around 2% of the population) and a public opinion that cared little for the army and preferred to trust in the power of neutrality. Against such odds, many within Belgium’s ruling elite simply followed suit. Such thinking also influenced Belgian fortress policy. Ever since independence in 1830, the question of what to do with the kingdom’s numerous fortifications had been an issue of domestic as well as international concern.11 Much like the army, the destruction or redevelopment of outdated fortifications became highly politicised. Major works at Antwerp from 1859 onwards turned the commercial centre into a formidable National Redoubt. The mastermind behind the project was a young Captain Brialmont, who took inspiration from his travels through Prussia to construct a retrenched camp, featuring a series of eight polygonal forts that

The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality 29 skirted the city at four kilometres distance and were separated from one another by half as much again. By the time of their completion in 1868, Antwerp had not only been transformed into the envy of the military world, but it had also afforded Brialmont a notable trademark and an international reputation.12 Still, such expenditure produced immense public scrutiny and all but denied other strategic points the attention they deserved. The fortifications on the Meuse – notably Liège and Namur, but also to a lesser extent, Huy and Visé – were outdated and in disrepair. Despite featuring as pivots for the field army in a remodelled strategy of central concentration aimed at protecting Brussels, Antwerp remained paramount. As Lieutenant-General Baron Félix Chazal noted in 1859: I will repeat, that to be spread out among twenty different points is to be weak everywhere: by contrast, to be united at a single point, having behind one a good base of operations, a solid fulcrum where all military resources will be concentrated, all the provisions, all the materiel, from where we can break out in force, to bring a compact and well organised mass to bear at the point where its actions will produce the greatest effect, is to be strong everywhere.13 Consequently, a simultaneous programme of demolition began in the 1850s. Peripheral and outdated strongpoints were dismantled, lest they fall tamely into enemy hands. The forts on the Meuse were spared these reductions though were by no means equal to the role with which they were tasked. In fact, local authorities – particularly in Namur – lobbied to have the old installations torn down, citing the restriction of commerce and the city’s likely targeting for bombardment as evidence in favour of demolition. Still, following several investigations by military committees, a war of words in print and press, not to mention numerous debates in parliament, it was categorically decided that the Meuse valley should remain fortified.14 The Franco-Prussian War did not change this fact, though it did reanimate the military debate. Not only had the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine shifted the strategic paradigm by making Belgium the route of a likely transitory – as opposed to a direct – invasion, but the bombardment of Paris had also demonstrated that the installations at Antwerp were already obsolete. Long-range rifled artillery had pounded the fortifications of the French capital from distances unimaginable a decade earlier.15 Over the next quarter of a century, modifications were made to the existing forts covering the National Redoubt. A second ring of eight fortifications was added at fifteen kilometres distance from the city centre, among other minor improvements.16 Equally big changes were projected for the Meuse strongpoints, whose importance was now thrust squarely into the public eye. The problem was that there was very little appetite to tackle the issue headon. No self-respecting government could afford to risk its political capital on costly redevelopments and the associated increases to the establishment. Indeed, the Catholic Party had only narrowly escaped the 1871 Military Commission’s

30 Mario Draper recommendation to introduce personal service in the wake of the army’s shambolic mobilisation in 1870.17 It was not prepared to run the gauntlet once more. Equally, the Liberal Party’s approach, following a return to power in 1878, was understandably cautious. After eight years in opposition, Walthère Frère-Orban’s second ministry prioritised social and educational matters over military reform. A cursory exploration of the Meuse fortifications project was sanctioned in 1882 but proved stillborn following concerted attacks in the clerical press.18 Brialmont, who had been tasked with overseeing the preparatory work, wrote critically of the laxity and ‘invincible optimism in the future’ that seemed to stymie the army at every turn. He beseeched the country to abandon its ‘blind confidence’ in the power of neutrality and to recognise the very real dangers that faced it – now more than ever.19 For the best part of a decade, the cream of Belgium’s military elite had demonstrated the value of the Meuse valley in relation to Antwerp. Brialmont was no different. The bridgeheads remained a key feature of Belgian defensive strategy. The only difference since 1859 was the likelihood of an invasion through its southeastern corridor. Not only had German publications since 1870 stressed the advantages to be gained by advancing through Belgium, but continued improvements to both French and German strongpoints along their mutual border also left few viable alternatives. Despite concerns over Swiss military strength, its mountainous terrain largely eliminated it from the equation. Similarly, fortifications from Belfort, via Toul, Verdun, and Mezières left just a thirty-five-kilometre gap between Stenay and Consevoye to be exploited in a direct German offensive into France. Given the size of the armies likely to be put into the field, the more probable course of action would simply be to outflank the French entirely by way of Chimay.20 The concentration of German rail construction towards Cologne all but confirmed this. Meanwhile, France’s decision to leave its border with Belgium largely unfortified was, as David Stevenson has pointed out, so ‘striking as to raise the possibility that it was deliberate’.21 All sides could see the value of securing the Meuse line through Belgium. Not only did it provide a less formidable military obstacle, but its geographic location and railway density also provided an enticing space/time equation through which to deploy mass armies. As the great nineteenth-century military theorist AntoineHenri Jomini had once commented, ‘whoever is master of the Meuse is the master of Belgium’.22 So it followed that whoever was master of Belgium could seize that all-important strategic and operational initiative that had proved so critical in Prussia’s victories of 1866 and 1870. Without adequate investment in both the Meuse fortifications and a simultaneous expansion of the field army in support, the legacy of the Franco-Prussian War in Belgium was to convert it from a buffer state into a military thoroughfare. The Catholic Party’s return to power in 1884 under Jules Malou did not appear to improve the prospects of national defence. Although a proponent of personal and obligatory service, Malou had already witnessed the effects of a party schism over military reform during his first term in office back in the mid-1870s and was not yet in a position to press the matter. By contrast, his successor, the moderate conservative and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, Auguste Beernaert, was. A recent

The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality 31 convert to the idea of conscription, Beernaert sought to institute a full programme of military reform in the national interest.23 Unfortunately, despite promises that he would be supported in his endeavours, local associations and the more intransigent members of the Catholic Party reaffirmed their anti-conscriptionist credentials. Following an emergency meeting to discuss the latest Catholic rupture, Beernaert was forced to drop his designs for personal service. However, so as to avoid two consecutive defeats at the hands of his own party, the Premier did manage to push through plans to redevelop the Meuse fortifications.24 On 31 December 1886, Brialmont was officially invited to revisit the project he had so vociferously championed in recent years. By 15 January 1887, a report had been furnished advocating a complete overhaul of the defensive installations around both Liège and Namur. Following the principles adopted at Antwerp, the former would feature a belt of twelve forts at seven to eight kilometres distance from the city centre and at approximately five-kilometre intervals. The latter was similarly to be encircled by nine such installations at six kilometres from the city. Instead of standard masonry, which the recent ‘torpedo shell crisis’ had shown to be inadequate, these forts were to be constructed using the latest concrete pouring methods to produce 2.5-metre-thick walls, covered by a further three metres of earth.25 A French observer reported back to Paris that recent experiments with melinite shells at Brasschaët had left Generals Brialmont and Nicaise completely satisfied with the defensive capacity of the new structures.26 Alongside a combined 171 cupolas housing a variety of medium and heavy guns, Liège and Namur would dominate the Meuse valley and control eighteen of its twenty-six river crossings.27 Despite their appearance as miniature retrenched camps, Brialmont remained adamant that these strongpoints were merely to act as bridgeheads. However, the emergence of a transitory invasion along the Meuse, as the more likely threat to Belgian neutrality since 1871, gradually increased their importance. A remodelling of the 1859 strategy of central concentration, which was predicated on a direct invasion towards Brussels, resulted in proposals for a more active defence in the south-east of the country. To be effective, this would naturally require an increase to the establishment – albeit that the new fortifications were designed to be garrisoned by just a handful of troops.28 Politically, this position was untenable, and a number of arguments in favour of the 1859 strategy of central concentration continued to be expounded. Officially, the Meuse fortifications would continue to play a role as fulcrums for the field army, buying time for a guarantor force to make its presence felt. If operations proved overwhelming, the army, the monarchy, and the government were still to retreat northwards to Antwerp and await succour from the safety of the National Redoubt. The Meuse basin was not to become the axis of Belgium’s defensive strategy.29 While Beernaert desperately attempted to justify the expenditure as a barrier against both invasion and an increase to the establishment, sceptics questioned the sagacity and timing of the decision. Chief among them was the former Liberal Premier, Frère-Orban. In an infamous tirade in parliament and the press, the leader of the opposition branded the works as ‘dangerous, useless, and ineffectual’.30 Not only would their presence invite a likely coup de main, but there was also a real

32 Mario Draper possibility that their strength might result in a bombardment of the cities.31 As a Liège man, himself, Frère-Orban seized upon the prevailing mood of his constituents who would rather have seen an increase to the establishment than accept the restrictions and dangers of the new fortifications.32 Of course, this narrative played nicely into Liberal hands. Not only did it strike a nerve among their Catholic opponents, but it equally painted the Liberals as the defenders of the army and, by extension, the nation. The fact that Frère-Orban, a one-time advocate of the Meuse fortifications, had now become their greatest detractor could easily be glossed over. After all, Beernaert had produced a similar volte face concerning military expenditure since his days as a minister in the Jules Malou administration.33 As was invariably the case in nineteenth-century Belgium, the question of national defence was subordinated to vicious party politics. Catholic intransigence prevented Beernaert from introducing conscription, while opposition from the Liberals threatened to derail the Meuse fortifications project entirely. Brialmont and the army watched on helplessly from the sidelines, having demonstrated the indispensability and interrelation of both. In the end, enough cross-party support was mobilised in the ‘national interest’ to pass the Bill through both the Chamber of Representatives (by forty votes) and the Senate (by thirty-three votes) in June 1887.34 However, there would be no increase to the annual contingent. Construction began in 1888 and was completed in 1891 at the cost of 71.6 million francs.35 A further 19.5 million was provided for improvements to Antwerp and the field artillery between 1884 and 1890.36 Despite the turbulence of the military debates, Beernaert could at least point to some progress in the sphere of national defence by the time he left office in March 1894. The Franco-Prussian War’s legacy on Belgian strategic planning did not disappear entirely, though. In a speech on 28 March 1894, Brialmont reiterated the dangers emanating from both Germany and France. Both armies could still derive exceptional advantages from launching an attack along the Meuse. To this end, the country needed to prepare itself to make further sacrifices. Only through the introduction of conscription could Belgium truly make its neutrality felt. This was the duty of all neutrals – even guaranteed ones. While Switzerland had seemingly accepted this fact and taken steps to arm itself proportionately to its neighbours, Belgium remained unable to put more than 110,000 men into the field, being poorly organised and without an adequate reserve. To those looking across the Channel to England, Brialmont rightly preached caution. What was needed was a field army of 120,000 men plus a further 95,000 fortress troops to defend the Meuse. For it was there, and not Antwerp, that Belgian neutrality would be tested before independence itself would come under threat.37 The battle to introduce conscription in Belgium proved a long and arduous affair. Never politically expedient, the succession of Catholic governments from 1884 until the outbreak of war in 1914 made it all the more unlikely – despite strong sympathies among prominent individuals. As the turn of the century neared, Belgian politics became absorbed with social and political reform, resulting in the extension of the franchise in 1893. A system of plural voting rights for adult males based on financial and social standing increased the electorate from 135,000 to

The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality 33 1,370,687 and brought with it a perceptible shift in Belgium’s political dynamics. Not only did it allow for the Belgian Worker’s Party (the largest socialist party in Europe) to emerge as a political force at the expense of the Liberals, but it also provided an opportunity for the simmering Flemish question to come to the fore.38 Together, these issues distracted from the military necessities of the day. Despite Brialmont’s attempts in 1897 to ‘rouse the slumbering patriotism of the nation’ by presenting the King with a petition and by organising demonstrations in favour of conscription, no headway was made.39 In fact, the move towards voluntary recruitment in 1902 under the second Catholic ministry of Paul de Smet de Naeyer had the effect of weakening the field army yet further.40 The First Moroccan Crisis in 1905 rekindled the prospect of a European conflagration. Once again, Belgium was forced to consider its position as battlefield or barrier.41 Recent developments in military thinking, the arms race and lessons drawn from the Russo-Japanese War suggested that updates to both the field army and the fortification system were in order.42 Rather than capitulate on the question of conscription, de Smet de Naeyer redirected attention back to the National Redoubt at Antwerp as the cradle of Belgian independence and neutrality. Controversially, given repeated Catholic promises to rein in military expenditure, credits to the tune of 46.6 million francs were voted by the Chamber of Representatives to cover the cost of this latest expansion. Another ring of twenty-three forts at a distance of 15 to 20 kilometres from the city was added, extending the defensive perimeter to an astonishing 110 kilometres in length.43 Behind this bastion, flanked by two inundation zones, and with access to the sea, the Belgian Army and the nation could confidently await deliverance. The passing of Brialmont on 21 July 1903 did not dull the army’s desire for expansion. Alongside the augmentation of the Antwerp defences, new voices spoke up in favour of conscription. Foremost among them was the new Chief of the General Staff from 1905 to 1910, Georges Eugène Victor Ducarne. Much like Brialmont before him, Ducarne desired an army proportionate in strength to that of its neighbours – typically one approaching 10% of the male population.44 While steps were eventually taken towards this through the introduction of the one-son-perfamily form of tempered conscription in 1909, general service was not introduced until May 1913. Even then, it was projected that the field army would not mature to its full strength of 340,000 until 1925.45 Against this backdrop, and with the redevelopment work at Antwerp hindered by financial difficulties, successive observers on all sides still seriously questioned whether the Belgian Army was adequately prepared to stand up to the challenges of a future war.46 Attempts to match Belgium’s capabilities with its intentions dominated the realm of strategic planning in the decade preceding the First World War. From Kaiser Wilhelm II’s ill-judged attempt at bribery in 1904 through to the secret but non-binding Anglo-Belgian military conversations in 1906 and 1912, the desire to obtain an understanding with Brussels mattered as much as one’s own military capacity.47 German planners had all but accepted since the 1890s that a violation of Belgian neutrality would be necessary and made provisions accordingly.48 France, on the other hand, was far more circumspect. Reports continuously reached

34 Mario Draper Paris of pro-German sentiment in Belgium that was liable to see it join forces – or at the very least offer but token resistance – in the event of war.49 Burgeoning economic relations, particularly with regard to the redevelopments at Antwerp post-1906, only served to confirm the degree of ‘pacific penetration’ already in evidence as well as the suspected sympathy within the military.50 The result was perceptible confusion and paranoia in French strategic planning, which oscillated wildly between defensive and offensive options along its shared borders with both Germany and Belgium.51 Only its rapprochement with Britain through the Entente Cordiale provided any sort of assurance, though even this relationship would eventually prove restrictive when contemplating pre-emptive action into the neutralised zone.52 British confidence in Belgium’s attitude towards the Entente was predicated upon a historic relationship as well as recent secret staff conversations. In January 1906, Lieutenant-Colonel Nathaniel Walter Barnardiston, the British Military Attaché to Brussels, was authorised to make contact with Ducarne and discuss how best an Expeditionary Force could be deployed in defence of Belgian neutrality in the event of a German violation. Given the state of Belgian military reorganisation at the time, Ducarne was only too pleased to enter into discussions.53 Both sides agreed on the necessity to keep these conversations secret and unbinding for obvious reasons, though it was clear that mutual benefits could be derived through rapid intervention on the Meuse. To this end, detailed railway timetables were drawn up to move a British force from its ports of debarkation in northern France to the Belgian border – proposals that could equally be used as a basis for Britain’s subsequent W[ith] F[rance] plan.54 While this certainly did not commit Britain to Belgium, it highlighted a desire to develop options that might avoid subordinating a British Expeditionary Force to French command. More to the point, it seemingly confirmed Belgian intentions to, at the very least, attempt to uphold its neutrality – despite the inherent weaknesses of its army.55 The passing of the First Moroccan Crisis, however, did much to undermine the foundational work of 1906. As Britain became increasingly embroiled in the Entente Cordiale, not to mention the ‘Red Rubber’ campaign concerning King Leopold II’s exploitative rule in the Congo Free State, Belgian attitudes began to shift.56 Following Belgium’s official annexation of the Congo in 1908, Brussels appeared much more receptive to Germany’s swift recognition than Britain’s prolonged recriminations. Mutual royal visits between the Belgian and the German royal families in 1909 and 1910 did much to reanimate French concerns and even prompted the British to adopt, what Samuel Williamson has termed, a policy of ‘persuasion’ and ‘intimidation’ in its military interactions with the Belgian General Staff after 1911.57 This came to a head during the resumption of military conversations in the spring of 1912, during which the new British Military Attaché to Brussels, Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Bridges, intimated that Britain might feel compelled to deploy a force to Belgium without its consent.58 After all, if the Belgian Army were too weak to defend the decisive points on the Meuse, or if its government proved willing to sanction a German passage through its south-eastern provinces

The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality 35 en route to France, timely British intervention would be crucial to the outcome of the campaign. Unbeknownst to the Entente, Belgian diplomatic and military policy had evolved significantly since 1906. Not only had Belgium emerged as an imperial power of note, but improvements to its fortifications and the move towards conscription had changed the military landscape of the kingdom. Of course, the army always wanted more. Ducarne’s 1911 publications in Le Soir entitled ‘Are We Ready?’ are testament to this.59 Nevertheless, the army inherited by his successor as Chief of the General Staff, Harry Jungbluth, bore the green shoots of recovery. Consequently, Jungbluth was prepared to stand up to Entente pressures, reminding Bridges that Germany no longer posed the greatest threat by 1911. Consistent reports of French reconnaissance missions into Belgium were interpreted as a sign of intent.60 More than that, as Jungbluth pointed out, given Germany’s strategic and financial position, war would be ‘most impolitic for her. France, on the other hand, was richer than ever, and public opinion firm. The French press was a dangerous factor in the situation, and it must not be forgotten that a Frenchman was capable of anything’.61 Belgian resolve was hardened further by a November 1911 report written by the Political Director at the Belgian Foreign Ministry, Léon Arendt. Titled ‘In the Event of War, What Shall We Do?’ this document fundamentally altered Belgium’s conceptualisation of its neutrality ahead of the First World War.62 Rather than accept a strict reading of its duties as a neutral, Arendt advocated pragmatism. An invasion through Belgium’s Meuse corridor by one side or the other was a near certainty. If it came, the Belgian Army would move to meet its adversary on its borders – reflecting the current of aggressive active defence that had begun to emerge within certain quarters of the General Staff.63 However, the possibility of a simultaneous invasion was equally probable. Both Germany and France would undoubtedly seek to deny the other the strategic initiative. In this scenario, it was argued, the Belgian Army could not be expected to engage all comers and risk its destruction and the future security of the nation. Neutrality was but a principle that helped guaranteed independence – it was not in itself the ultimate object of Belgian policy. What made matters even more complicated was that Britain, unlike in 1870, could no longer be counted upon as a detached, uncommitted, benevolent power.64 Anglo-French rapprochement in recent years all but precluded a British intervention on Belgium’s behalf in the event of a Gallic invasion. If anything, the likelihood was that a British Expeditionary Force would be deployed in aid of the French – and perhaps pre-emptively at that. While an intervention might be conceived of as ‘assistance’, such action was now to be discouraged at all costs. As Arendt pessimistically reasoned, ‘The assistance of the other belligerent [Britain] will not, it must be feared, have any other effect than to extend the battlefield across our soil’.65 More worrying was the potential for the enemy (in this case, Germany) to utilise the build-up of guarantor forces on Belgium’s borders as a casus belli to invade anyway.66 Given these circumstances, it behoved Belgium to remain aloof in its diplomacy and commit to a reinterpretation of neutrality that primarily benefitted the guaranteed party as opposed to the guarantors.

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Arendt’s declaration that Belgium ‘[a]s a sovereign and independent state [had] a right and duty to organise its defences as it please[d], without foreign intervention’ ought not to come as a surprise.67 Decades of speculation and intrigue had fostered suspicion over a sense of security. Whereas governments of years gone by could readily point to the power of neutrality – enshrined in the 1839 Treaty of London – as insurance against a direct invasion that might threaten Belgian independence, seismic shifts in European geopolitics after 1870 compelled this deeply anti-militaristic country to recognise perceptibly new threats. The German Empire’s annexation of Alsace and Lorraine fundamentally altered the strategic paradigm of the late nineteenth century. Faced with an increasingly fortified mutual border, Belgium’s Meuse valley became the key route of invasion in any future Franco-German war. The prospect of becoming Europe’s battlefield had profound and far-reaching effects on Belgium’s domestic, foreign, and military policies. A transitory invasion that threatened neutrality as opposed to independence forced a reconsideration of the army’s defensive policy of central concentration. Rather than hole up in the National Redoubt at Antwerp and await succour by a guarantor power, the Belgian Army would likely be required to operate much nearer its frontiers. The fortified positions of Liège and Namur along the Meuse had always featured prominently in Belgian strategic planning, but their redevelopment (1888–91) dramatically increased their significance by the turn of the twentieth century. For it was here that Belgian neutrality would likely be tested. The road to military reform was beset by obstacles. Party politics routinely inflicted grievous blows to the conscriptionist lobby, whose preeminent members, such as General Henri-Alexis Brialmont, were at pains to point out the very real dangers facing the country. An armed neutrality – which meant both updated fortifications and a sizeable field army – was the only means of assuring Belgium’s future security. Having one without the other only invited interference by, and opportunity for, its guarantor powers as each sought to exploit the situation to their advantage. Only with the coming of conscription in 1909 and 1913 was the basis for a true deterrent established. By this point Germany had long since developed plans to invade via Belgium’s south-eastern provinces, while the Entente proved unable to offer suitable assurances that it would not. As August 1914 would show, despite belated attempts to confront the legacy of the Franco-Prussian War in Belgium, the neutral kingdom proved to be an irresistible military thoroughfare for the next great European clash of arms. Notes 1 H. Contamine, La Revanche, 1871–1914 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1957); V. Prott, ‘Réintégration pure et simple? Reinventing the Franco-German Border of Alsace-Lorraine, 1914–1918’, in V. Prott (ed.), The Politics of Self-Determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 56–60. 2 For more see, D. H. Thomas, The Guarantee of Belgian Independence and Neutrality in European Diplomacy, 1830’s-1930s (Kingston: RI, D. H. Thomas Publishing, 1983).

The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality 37 3 C. Bêchet, ‘Les perceurs de Sedan: Violation de frontière et réactions belges pendant la guerre de 1870–71’, Journal of Belgian History, 46:2 (2016), pp. 84–90. 4 C. Pearson, Mobilizing Nature: The Environmental History of War and Militarization in Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 66–67. 5 L. De Vos, Het Effectief van de Belgische Krijgsmacht en de Militiewetgeving, 1830– 1914 (Brussels: Koninklijk Legermuseum, 1985), pp. 34, 378–381. 6 L. De Vos and E. Bastin, ‘Du tirage au sort avec faculté de remplacement au service personnel: Le recrutement des conscrits en Belgique de 1830 à 1914, une question militaire et politique’, International Review of Military History, 86 (2006), p. 42. 7 M. Draper, The Belgian Army and Society from Independence to the Great War (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 101. 8 For more on anti-militarism in Belgium, see F. Lehouck, Het antimilitarism in België, 1830–1914 (Antwerp: Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V. Standaard-Boekhandel, 1958). 9 R. Boijen, ‘Het Leger als Smeltkroes van de Natie?’, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijde Geschiedenis, 3 (1997), pp. 55–70. 10 Draper, The Belgian Army, pp. 94–99. 11 D. H. Thomas, ‘The Use of the Scheldt in British Plans for the Defence of Belgian Neutrality, 1831–1914’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 41 (1963), pp. 562–567; D. H. Thomas, ‘Neutral Belgium’s Divulgence of Military Information to Its Guarantors in the Nineteenth Century’, Revue belge d’histoire militaire, 24:6 (1982), pp. 561–570. 12 J. Luvaas, ‘A Prussian Observer with Lee’, Military Affairs, 21:1 (1957), pp. 111–112; I. Munteanu, ‘Le général Brialmont et les fortifications de Bucarest (1882–1884)’, Museum Dynasticum, 31:2 (2019), pp. 39–50. 13 F. Chazal, Discours prononcés par M. le Lieutenant Général Baron Chazal, Ministre de la Guerre. Discussion du Projet d’Agrandissement Général d’Anvers (Brussels: Deltombe, 1959), pp. 12–13. 14 Draper, The Belgian Army, pp. 161–163. 15 G. Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2003), pp. 281–284; R. Tombs, ‘The Wars Against Paris’, in S. Förster and J. Nagler (eds.), On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 541–545. 16 Draper, The Belgian Army, p. 168. 17 Estimates suggest that just 72,613 of the 104,000 men expected reported for duty upon mobilisation, resulting in a 31% deficit. G. Hautecler, ‘L’armée belge de 1870 face à la crise de Sedan’, Revue international d’histoire Militaire, 20 (1959), p. 60. See also, Ministère de la Guerre, Procès-verbaux des séances de la commission instituée par arrêté royal du 18 avril 1871, pour étudier les questions relatives à l’organisation de l’armée, vol. I (Brussels: Gobbaerts, 1873); and H. A. Brialmont, Le service obligatoire par un colonel de l’armée (Brussels: Lesigne, 1871). 18 Draper, The Belgian Army, p. 171. 19 H. A. Brialmont, Situation militaire de la Belgique: Travaux de défense de la Meuse (Brussels: C. Muquardt, 1882), pp. 151–165. 20 Brialmont, Situation militaire de la Belgique, pp. 172–185. 21 D. Stevenson, ‘Fortifications and the European Balance before 1914’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 35:6 (2012), p. 845. 22 La Belgique Militaire, 19 September 1886, p. 360. 23 Draper, The Belgian Army, pp. 97–103. 24 C. Woest, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire contemporaine de la Belgique 1859–1894, vol. I (Brussels: Librairie Albert Dewit, 1927), pp. 358–359. 25 Stevenson, ‘Fortifications’, p. 831; J. E. Kaufmann and H. W. Kaufmann, The Forts and Fortifications of Europe 1815–1945. The Neutral States: The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2014), pp. 85–90. For the effects of German

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Mario Draper artillery on these forts in 1914, see L. De Vos, La Première Guerre Mondiale (Brainel’Alleud: J.M. Collet, 1997), p. 30. Service historique de la Défense [SHD], GR 7 N 1168, Captain Gentil de la Breuille, ‘Notes sur les fortifications de la Meuse’, 20 February 1889. Draper, The Belgian Army, pp. 172–173. L’Indépendence Belge, 18 February 1887 and 14 March 1887. SHD, GR 7 N 1168, Captain Petiton, ‘Note sur les nouveaux ouvrages de défense projetés en Belgique’, 20 December 1887, pp. 1–3. Plenum.be. Belgian Chamber of Representatives Debates, 18 February 1887, p. 3. La Meuse, 10 February 1887; La Belgique Militaire, 13 March 1887, pp. 340–343; 27 March 1887, pp. 402–410. Draper, The Belgian Army, p. 175. L’Indépendence Belge, 19 February 1887. Draper, The Belgian Army, p. 175. G. Schallich, ‘Quelques chiffres concernant le coût des forts “Brialmont” de Liège et de Namur’, Bulletin d’information du centre Liégeois d’histoire et d’archéologie militaires, 3:3 (1986), p. 38. É. Wanty, Le Milieu Militaire Belge de 1831 à 1914 (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1957), p. 176. SHD, GR 7 N 1168, ‘Discours du Général Brialmont sur la neutralité de la Belgique et la réorganisation de l’armée’, 28 March 1894. S. B. Clough, A History of the Flemish Movement in Belgium: A Study in Nationalism (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), pp. 135–136. For more on the emergence of the Flemish question, see B. De Wever, ‘The Case of the Dutch-Speaking Belgians in the Nineteenth Century’, in P. Broomans et al. (eds.), The Beloved Mothertongue: Ethnolinguistic Nationalism in Small Nations: Inventories and Reflections (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), pp. 49–61. Royal Archives [RA], Archives du Cabinet du Roi – Règne de Léopold II, 2182, Brialmont to King’s Secretary, 26 February 1897. King Leopold famously replied, ‘You are preaching to the converted. . . . I am, and shall remain, the vanguard of us patriots’. H. A. Brialmont, Solution de la question militaire en Belgique (Brussels: Guyot, 1901), pp. 17–18. In fact, King Leopold’s constitutional position as well as his debt to the Catholic Party over his personal ambitions in the Congo, prevented him from getting too involved. See V. Viaene, ‘King Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905’, Journal of Modern History, 80:4 (2008), pp. 741–790. Draper, The Belgian Army, pp. 108–111. D. Stevenson, ‘Battlefield or Barrier? Rearmament and Military Planning in Belgium, 1902–1914’, The International History Review, 29:3 (2007), pp. 473–507. Stevenson, ‘Fortifications’, p. 831. Draper, The Belgian Army, pp. 178–179. V. Ducarne, Supplément au bulletin de la défense nationale de janvier 1911: Conférence donnée le 29 novembre 1911 à la conférence du Jeune Barreau par le Lieutenant général Ducarne: La question militaire en Belgique (Brussels, 1911), p. 15. Draper, The Belgian Army, p. 180. A. Duchesne, ‘Appréciations françaises sur la valeur de l’armée belge et les perspectives de guerre de 1871 à 1914’, Carnet de la Fourragère, 14:3 (1961), pp. 174–208; J. Willequet, ‘Appréciations allemandes sur la valeur de l’armée belge et les perspectives de guerre avant 1914’, International Review of History, 20 (1959), pp. 635–639. On Kaiser Wilhelm II’s advances, see L. Van der Elst, ‘La préméditation de l’Allemagne’, La revue de Paris, 2 (1923), pp. 530–531. For the secret Anglo-Belgian staff conversations, see A. De Ridder, ‘Encore les conventions anglo-belges’, La Revue catholique des idées et des faits, 10:43 (1931), pp. 14–16; J. A. Wullus-Rudiger, La Belgique et l’équilibre Européen (Paris: Berger-Levault, 1935); M. Draper, ‘ “Are We Ready?”:

The legacy of the Franco-Prussian War on Belgian neutrality 39

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49 50

51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Belgium and the Entente’s Military Planning for a War Against Germany, 1906–1914’, The International History Review, 41:6 (2019), pp. 1216–1234. J. Steinberg, ‘A German Plan for the Invasion of Holland and Belgium, 1897’, in P. M. Kennedy (ed.), The War Plans of the Great Powers 1880–1914 (London: Urwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 160–162. See also R. Foley, Alfred von Schlieffen’s Military Writings (London: Frank Cass, 2012). SHD, GR 7 N 1168, Etat-Major de l’Armée, ‘Note sur l’attitude probable de la Belgique en cas de conflit entre la France et une autre puissance’, March 1901. Thomas, Guarantee of Belgian Independence, p. 441; Ministère des Affaires Étrangères belges [MAEb] CF 7, Le Ghait to De Favereau, 13 August 1906; MAEb CGB 6, 11516/11, de Lalaing to De Favereau, 16 November 1906; MAEb CF 7, 79-25/10 Baron Guillaume to Davignon, 25 October 1910; MAEb CF 7, 95-II/9, Baron Guillaume to Davignon, 21 September 1911. C. M. Andrew, ‘France and the German Menace’, in E. R. May (ed.), Knowing One’s Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 127–150; J. K. Tanenbaum, ‘French Estimates of Germany’s Operational War Plans’, in ibid., pp. 150–171; S. R. Williamson, ‘Joffre Reshapes French Strategy, 1911–1913’, in P. M. Kennedy (ed.), The War Plans of the Great Powers 1880–1914 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 133–154; D. Porch, ‘The Balance of Power Paradox’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 29:1 (2006), pp. 117–144. P. Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 41–45. F. Vandeale, ‘Les “conversations” anglo-belges d’avant guerre’, Revue Belges des livres, documents et archives de la guerre 1914–18, 8:1 (1932), p. 69. The National Archives, Kew [TNA], CAB17/69, ‘Our Position as Regards the Low Countries’, 8 April 1907. Draper, ‘Are We Ready?’, pp. 1220–1221. For more on the Red Rubber recriminations and its effects, see T. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912 (New York: Avon, 1991), pp. 586–595; G. Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo, 1885–1980, trans. Alice Cameron and Stephen Windross; revised by Kate Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 25–26. S. R. Williamson, The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 179. Draper, ‘Are We Ready?’, p. 1228; T. Bridges, Alarms and Excursions: Reminiscences of a Soldier (London: Longmans, 1938), pp. 62–63; MAEb, GBC 7, Léon van der Elst to Comte de Lalaing, 23 April 1912. Le Soir, 31 August; 1, 2, 3, 7, 21 September; 9, 12, 15 October; 1, 4, 9, 28, 29 November 1911. MAEb, CF 7, 72-28/9, Unsigned letter on behalf of General Hellebaut to General Guillaume, 26 September 1910. TNA, FO 371/1050, Military Attaché Report no. 16, 23 September 1911. MAEb, Divers 167, pp. 17–19, ‘Arendt Report: En cas de guerre, que ferons-nous?’, November 1911. SHD, 7 N 1157, Duruy to Messimy, 19 January 1912; É. Galet, Albert King of the Belgians in the Great War, trans. Major-General Sir E. Swinton (London: Putnam, 1931), pp. 4–6. J. E. Helmreich, ‘Belgian Concern over Neutrality and British Intentions, 1906–1914’, The Journal of Modern History, 36 (1964), p. 419. MAEb, Divers 167, pp. 17–19, ‘Arendt Report’, pp. 26–27. Draper, ‘Are We Ready?’, p. 1227. MAEb, Divers 167, pp. 17–19, ‘Arendt Report’, p. 2.

3

The Franco-Prussian War and the Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik Giorgio Ennas

Introduction ‘The present state of affairs causes us, as it does everyone else, all kinds of embarrassment; it seems to us to be full of extremely serious events. We, therefore, ardently wish the restoration of peace and order by our August Master’.1 For a long time, traditional historiography concerning the Eastern Question in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries did not include the involvement of the Ottoman Empire in the European conflicts of the nineteenth century, including the Franco-Prussian War. Indeed, the Ottoman imperial army was unable to match up to the growing influence and military might of the so-called European Great Powers. This effectively limited the influence of Ottoman sultans, ministers and diplomats in both internal and European affairs in the era of the Eastern Question (1774–1914).2 That said, diplomatic documents in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivileri (the Ottoman Prime Ministerial Archives), in part edited by Sinan Kuneralp, shed light not only on the Ottoman diplomatic involvement in the events of the ‘long’ nineteenth century but also, above all, on the influence that these events had on Ottoman policy and society, including the evolution of political, diplomatic and cultural ideas among the imperial elites.3 Despite the flourish of publications concerning the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, with classic works such as those of Michael Howard and Geoffrey Wawro, it is only recently that historiography concerning the conflict has begun to take into consideration the role and documents produced in the Ottoman Empire by its representatives, as in the case of the book written by Nicolas Bourguinat and Gilles Vogt.4 Thanks to the documents edited by Sinan Kuneralp, it is likely that in the near future, the Ottoman role in the conflict will be gradually deepened, helping us to observe the conflict from a ‘global’ perspective. At the end of the Franco-Prussian War, in February 1871, the Ottoman plenipotentiary minister in Berlin, Yanko Aristarchi Bey, reported that the events of the war had completely modified the European balance. In his reports, he also expressed his personal concern about eventual complications that might occur in the future due to this deep modification of the European and international order.5 For Ottoman diplomacy, this war represented a cultural turning-point, effectively accelerating the gradual adoption of Realpolitik as the official diplomatic doctrine DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-5

The Franco-Prussian War and Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik 41 of the Empire. For Mostafa Minawi, it was definitively sanctioned by the signature of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 and the General Act of Berlin in 1885.6 In fact, although Ottoman territories were not directly involved in this conflict, the war had a strong impact among the imperial diplomatic elites, especially from a doctrinal point of view. The Franco-Prussian War became a turning-point not only for Ottoman diplomacy but for other European diplomacy as well. For example, in the Italian case, despite the new Kingdom of Italy officially adopting the Metternichian guidelines of equilibrium and international peace in 1859–60, between the Third Italian War of Independence of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War, Italy gradually abandoned these principles in favour of Realpolitik.7 This transformation was supported by King Vittorio Emanuele II, part of the royal court and the Mazzinian circles close to the crown.8 In the Ottoman case, between the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15 and Aix-la-Chapelle of 1818, the Sublime Porte and the new ministry of foreign affairs, or hariciye nezâreti, adapted imperial foreign policy to the principles of the socalled Metternichian diplomacy.9 Therefore, its diplomats focused their efforts on the preservation of European equilibrium and the status quo. This adoption of European international law was strengthened during the Egypto-Ottoman wars of 1832–33, 1839–41 and with the Treaty of Paris of 1856, with the inclusion of the Ottoman Empire within the system of the Concert of Europe. The Ottoman leaders of the reformist movement, or Tanzimât, such as Hoca Mustafa Reşid Pasha, Mehmed Emin Âli Pasha and Keçecizade Mehmed Fuad Pasha, directly linked the preservation of the European status quo sanctioned in Vienna and Paris to the survival of the Empire.10 For this reason, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Ottoman ministers and diplomatic corps became deeply concerned by the general anxiety produced by the German victory, the French annihilation and the consequent reshaping of the ‘status quo established by the Treaty of Paris in 1856’.11 They were particularly concerned not only by the general political and social modifications produced in Europe and the possible escalation of the conflict but by the risk of the rise of nationalism and international anarchism as well. The origins of the conflict After the Congress of Paris of 1856, the Ottoman Empire came to play the role of an active member of the European diplomatic system. Its diplomatic agents, such as Kostaki Musurus Pasha in London and Rüstem Bey in Turin and Florence, were as much esteemed as other foreign diplomats in international diplomatic circles.12 These diplomats represented some of the most important supporters of European international law. Educated in Europe or in academies through the study of European international law and conscious of the importance of preserving international peace to protect the integrity of the Empire, they were concerned that European anxiety about the policies of Napoleon III might threaten the international equilibrium created in Paris in 1856.13 In particular, the sadrazam (grand vizier) and hariciye nâzırı (minister of foreign affairs), Emin Âli Pasha, described

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by the Marquis Léonel de Moustier as ‘the wisest and the greatest diplomat in Europe’, was conscious that the main risk for peace and equilibrium was Napoleon III’s ambition to create a new French empire that would rule over a new Europe of nationalities.14 Therefore, it is clear that from the perspective of the Sublime Porte, the main cause of the war was not the foreign policy conducted by Otto von Bismarck but rather the destabilising activities and the hegemonic ambitions of Napoleon III on the European continent.15 In early July 1870, the Ottoman ambassador in Paris, Mehmed Cemil Pasha, warned the Sublime Porte that the candidacy of another prince from the Hohenzollern family to the Spanish crown would be considered a ‘cause of war’ by the French imperial government.16 This information was confirmed by the Italian and Russian representatives, who described widespread support across France for the opening of hostilities with Prussia and underscored the possibility that an open conflict could increase the probability of a general conflict in Europe.17 In another dispatch, Cemil Pasha confirmed that even the other members of the Concert of Europe were giving their ‘good offices’ to avoid an eventual Franco-Prussian clash, ‘a war which it was feared would not be localised’.18 Some chancelleries, however, followed the idea that the final result would benefit the winner and automatically downsize the claims of the loser. As such, European equilibrium would self-regulate and renovate itself through the war.19 The doctrine of Realpolitik was rising. In his reply to Aristarchi Bey, Emin Âli Pasha, who had previously foreseen such a situation, expressed his displeasure for the failure of international diplomacy and dialogue. For the Ottoman minister, the Sublime Porte ‘could be one of the first states to suffer’ the terrible consequences of the conflict. Therefore, in his opinion, Ottoman diplomacy should add its voice to the other ‘friendly powers’ in the effort to decrease the international tension between the two rivals.20 Despite Ottoman opposition, Bismarck’s ambitions and the French efforts to impose influence over other European states between the 1850s and the 1860s produced a general antagonism towards the Second Empire. In the 1860s, several states adopted a general anti-French and pro-Prussian attitude. Even the Kingdom of Italy, which had benefitted from the adventurist foreign policy of Napoleon III during the Third Italian War of Independence of 1866, preferred an alliance with the Prussians against the Habsburgs, emancipating itself from French protection with Bismarck’s support.21 Not surprisingly, in that period, the Ottoman representative in Florence, Rüstem Bey, registered several hostile acts against the French ambassador in the Italian capital.22 This replacement of French influence with Prussian influence was mainly due to the fact that between 1856 and 1866, Prussian diplomacy under Bismarck had preferred to adopt a partially conservative attitude to international questions, which was appreciated by the Sublime Porte. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire stood in open contraposition to French interventionist attitudes, which would lead to the Crimean War.23 However, in the second half of the 1860s, the Prussian cabinet began to promote an openly expansionist policy against the German Confederacy, which culminated in the battles of Königgrätz and Sadowa, the creation of the North German Confederation and the Italian Third War of Independence.24

The Franco-Prussian War and Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik 43 In doing so, the Kingdom of Prussia, a member of the Concert of Europe, became a strong promoter of the renegotiation of international equilibrium and the principles of Realpolitik, according to which the status quo is automatically regulated by bellicose events. This doctrine was rejected by conservative powers, such as Great Britain, the Habsburg Empire and, with great determination, by the Ottoman Empire, which considered this doctrine to be dangerous for international peace and extremely detrimental to imperial interests. Therefore, the Sublime Porte preferred to ‘observe the strictest neutrality’.25 Sharing the Ottoman concerns about the international situation, the Italian minister of foreign affairs, Emilio Visconti Venosta, officially declared that ‘a close and constant surveillance’ would be fundamental to avoid the conflict.26 Tempting the Ottomans After the proclamation of the conflict, the Ottoman government prudently adopted a neutral attitude with other European states, as it had during the First and the Second Italian Wars of Independence, and used its influence to find an agreement and to support international peace and stability. While other powers, such as the Kingdom of Italy, either avoided involvement in the conflict or tried to take advantage of it, Ottoman diplomacy used the limited resources of its diplomatic network to support the creation of the League of Neutrals.27 In the imperial agents’ mind, this coalition could result not only in avoiding the conflict but also in influencing the two rivals to reach an agreement. Even if during the Third Italian War of Independence, the efforts of the neutral powers had not achieved any practical result, during the Franco-Prussian War, imperial diplomacy had tried to form a coalition with Italians, Austro-Hungarians and Russians to end the bloody conflict and avoid dangerous consequences for international peace and the Empire.28 Unfortunately for the Porte, the reports of its representative in Vienna, Haydar Efendi, demonstrated that any effort in this direction would hardly reach a definitive result.29 In his report from Brussels dated 20 July 1870, the chargé d’affaires Faustin Glavany Efendi confirmed that the chances of creating this coalition and exercising any kind of influence over the belligerents were very low.30 The only possibility for the Ottomans to stop an escalation was if the other European powers, such as Russia, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, chose not to take sides in the conflict. The only exception might have been in the cases of the Danish and Italian monarchies, which had strong interests in prolonging conflict and maybe even in forcing international intervention.31 For example, in the Italian case, Rüstem Bey confirmed from Florence that part of the Italian government hoped to solve the Roman question, while the French army was involved in the confrontation with the Prussians.32 Glavany Efendi described the same attitude for Danish public opinion, due to strong revanchism created in Danish society by the Prussian occupation of Schleswig and Holstein during the Second Danish-Prussian War (1864).33 Finally, he concluded his report writing that, at this point, the Franco-Prussian confrontation was probably inevitable. For Glavany Efendi, ‘all the world’ was ‘guilty’ of this conflict, whose victims

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would be justice, civilisation, the populations on either side of the Rhine and the moral and material prosperity of these populations.34 This conception of the war as a failure of international diplomacy clearly shows the permanence of the old Metternichian conceptions of peace, equilibrium and civilisation, which, at the beginning of the 1870s, still characterised the Ottoman diplomatic elites. Meanwhile, from Vienna, Haydar Efendi reported the efforts of different French and Austro-Hungarian agents to involve the Ottoman Empire in the conflict, taking the opportunity to reshape the status quo in the Balkans. For example, during a meeting, the Hungarian Prime Minister Count Gyula Andrássy asked Haydar Efendi to invite an Ottoman officer to Pest to negotiate an alliance against the Russians.35 In another telegram, Haydar Efendi reported on French attempts deliberately to provoke uprisings against King Carol I, forcing the Porte to occupy the territories of the Principalities, nominally under the suzerainty of the Porte. In the end, the dangerous plan was abandoned due to Austrian complaints that such a tactic could also provoke uprisings and Russian intervention in Transylvania.36 At the end of July 1870, the Ottoman ambassador in Vienna reported another of Andrássy’s attempts to involve the Porte in a separate alliance. For the AustroHungarian government, a ‘prompt agreement to guarantee the interests’ of both empires was needed to protect the status quo in the Balkans against the efforts of other powers, especially against the Russians who, led by their minister of foreign affairs, Prince Aleksander Mikhailovich Gorchakov, were renovating an expansionist agenda in the area.37 To obtain Ottoman support in the case of a conflict with Tsar Alexander II, Andrássy promised, in case of victory, territorial acquisitions on ‘the Asian side’ in exchange for military collaboration between the two empires.38 Haydar Efendi replied by underscoring that ‘even if it were proposed to us, we would refuse to commit ourselves to the European side, but that we would not give up even two inches of land at any price and that we wanted to maintain the status quo’.39 Once more, after a conversation with the French representative, the Ottoman ambassador reported the renovated activism of the French and Austro-Hungarian monarchies in their efforts to create an alliance that should include Italy, AustriaHungary and the Ottoman Empire. In particular, the French representative underscored how the Empire should absolutely join the alliance ‘without hesitation’. However, despite the efforts to involve the Sublime Porte in the conflict, Emin Âli Pasha was determined to preserve Ottoman neutrality. For this reason, the Ottoman statesman addressed dispatches to the representatives of Serbia and the Danuban Principalities in Constantinople and the Ottoman governors in the Balkans, reiterating the imperial determination to preserve ‘a perfect neutrality’ and ordering them to avoid every kind of public manifestation of hostility towards the fighting powers and any ‘innovation’ that would ‘provoke the susceptibility’ of one of the two countries involved in the conflict.40 From the Ottoman diplomatic documents, it is evident how, even at the beginning of the 1870s, Ottoman diplomacy was still trying to preserve its own integrity and the wider European equilibrium by defending its traditional neutrality in European conflicts. This was despite the belief of Glavany Efendi and others that

The Franco-Prussian War and Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik 45 the European war was showing the emptiness of the great principles of European civilisation.41 From this perspective, Emin Âli Pasha confirmed the Porte’s desire to avoid provoking any of the other powers.42 Despite the insistences of several European cabinets, Emin Âli Pasha, a veteran of Ottoman and European diplomacy, was determined to preserve the Ottoman neutrality that had been in place, albeit with certain geographically limited exceptions, since the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, even if Ottoman diplomats were undoubtedly concerned about the eventuality of a Europe-wide escalation, which might well have been the result of Danish and Habsburgian revanchism against Prussia, they were perfectly conscious that neutrality was also fundamental if the Empire wished to receive British support in the eventuality of a general European conflict.43 While in August 1870 Prussian victories started to tip the balance, the Ottomans focused their efforts on avoiding any kind of involvement in secret negotiations or international intervention and supporting a peaceful conclusion to the hostilities.44 Promoting peace While the Franco-Prussian War continued, the Anglo-Ottoman powers tried to involve the rest of the Concert of Europe in an informal neutrality agreement. In August 1870, Musurus Pasha reported with great interest the new Italian ‘obsession’ with a ‘separate agreement’ with Great Britain that could be extended towards other neutral powers as well, such as the Russians and the Ottomans.45 In a meeting with Musurus Pasha, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord George Granville, highlighted how an informal agreement among the neutral powers would be effective not only in preserving neutrality but in giving the neutral powers a significant means of coercion against possible pressures from the belligerent powers as well.46 For the Ottoman ambassador, this represented an interesting opportunity for the Porte to be included in an international coalition and, simultaneously, to strengthen its position as a neutral power.47 As had happened in numerous occasions throughout the 1860s, imperial diplomacy was once more looking for an opportunity to increase the involvement of the Ottoman Empire in the Concert of Europe in favour of international peace and for the preservation of the equilibrium. Therefore, on 22 August 1870, Emin Âli Pasha confirmed Ottoman support for the British proposal.48 The Ottoman diplomats continued to work for a peaceful conclusion of the conflict even if the news from Paris and Berlin continued to undermine their faith in the values of European civilisation. For example, from Berlin, Aristarchi Bey reported that, according to an article written in the Moniteur Prussien, in the battle of 18 August 1870, the French army had violated the Geneva Convention.49 A few days later, Cemil Pasha commented on the notes sent by Bismarck concerning French plans around the solution of the Eastern Question through partition and modification to the equilibrium.50 Despite the fact that the Ottomans were conscious of the propagandistic nature of this information, they nonetheless registered a general decline in the values of European civilisation that the Ottoman Empire had accepted with the Treaty of Paris of 1856 and the Geneva Convention of 1864–65.

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At the beginning of September 1870, the military conflict culminated with the Battle of Sedan and the surrender of Napoleon III.51 As Cemil Pasha wrote, the Sublime Porte was involved in both the negotiations with the Prussians and the French as with every other member of the League of Neutrals.52 In particular, Ottoman diplomacy focused its efforts on obtaining peace without humiliation, partition or modifications to the status quo. On 7 September 1870, Cemil Pasha reported his conversation with the new minister of foreign affairs, Jules Favre, one of the leaders of the French Government of National Defence.53 During this meeting, Cemil Pasha confirmed the Ottoman informal agreement with Britain and their involvement in the League of Neutrals to find a peaceful solution. The French minister expressed his satisfaction and, remembering past French support for the Empire during the Crimean War, hoped that imperial diplomacy could help re-establish peace in an honourable way for the French state. Despite Russian opposition to the mediation of neutral powers, Emin Âli Pasha confirmed Ottoman involvement in the diplomatic negotiations to the imperial representatives in Europe.54 Basing its programme on the recognition of German freedom and on the respect of French territorial integrity, the Sublime Porte officially proposed the re-establishment of the European status quo ante bellum.55 From Paris and Florence, Cemil Pasha and Rüstem Bey reported the favourable impression that Emin Âli Pasha’s document produced among the French and Italian governments, who were ready to support the Ottoman initiative, ‘with the humanitarian aim of stopping the bloodshed and to reach an honourable peace’.56 Simultaneously, however, the chargé d’affaires in Vienna, Etienne Chryssidi Efendi, reported that despite the official agreement with the Ottoman proposal, the Italian government had ordered its army to invade the Papal States and to not oppose the escape of Pope Pius IX.57 Once more, the diplomatic recklessness of European states became evident to Ottoman diplomats. For example, the Kingdom of Italy, whose government was pursuing a dual strategy, officially worked to avoid a possible escalation of the conflict while simultaneously trying unilaterally to complete its unification process, effectively modifying the equilibrium and the European status quo.58 Evidently, the Italian government, which since 1859–60 had simultaneously adopted both a conservative and a subversive diplomatic attitude, was having fewer problems than the Ottomans in adapting to the new international environment created by the Franco-Prussian War. By contrast, the Porte had some difficulties in modifying its own foreign policy and adapting it to the new international situation. For Emin Âli Pasha and other members of the Ottoman government, the chronic weakness of the imperial army in the nineteenth century made it not only difficult but also dangerous for the Porte to adopt the principles of Realpolitik as a diplomatic doctrine. For this reason, even if the situation had changed drastically from that of the first half of the century, in his opinion, the Ottoman government had no alternative but to observe a strict neutrality and preserve the equilibrium. In a confidential dispatch addressed to the new ambassador in Vienna, Khalil Bey, Emin Âli Pasha underscored the threat for international peace and for the Empire represented by the fact that the European

The Franco-Prussian War and Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik 47 cabinets, which officially supported the preservation of the equilibrium, were actually pursuing potentially destabilising agendas.59 This kind of international ‘schizophrenia’ was well represented by the fact that not only was a new rising national power like the Italian monarchy promoting destabilising policies but also a very conservative empire, such as Austria-Hungary, had secretly proposed an offensive-defensive alliance to the Ottomans against a possible generalised conflict in Europe. In Emin Âli Pasha’s opinion, this option was not only ‘premature’ but also ‘excessively dangerous’, as it could justify a Russian reaction.60 Moreover, the convocation of an international congress for the solution of the Franco-Prussian War could represent a threat for the Porte, even if it was the best option for imposing imperial ‘peace and order’.61 During these negotiations, at the end of September 1870, the Ottoman representative Khalil Bey reported a new meeting with Count Andrássy and his last attempts to involve the Ottomans in an offensive-defensive alliance. Andrássy claimed that in the previous meeting, Haydar Efendi had not understood his proposal. The Hungarian minister underscored that an eventual Austro-Hungarian-Ottoman alliance ‘should seek to avoid war’ and, simultaneously, should be set on the objective of ‘conquering a lasting peace’ in the case of international conflict.62 To guarantee a durable peace, in the case of victory, new frontiers should be rectified, leaving the entire Black Sea to the Ottomans, who would, therefore, retrieve all the Islamic territories which had been left to the Russians and promising the reconstitution of Poland. When Khalil Bey finally met the Austrian chancellor, Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust, the Ottoman representative insisted on hearing his opinion on the eventual reunion of a congress regarding the solution of the Franco-Prussian War and, more generally, the international situation. Despite the chancellor’s reticence regarding the validity of the Treaty of Paris, which in his opinion had already been violated several times during the 1860s, Khalil Bey remarked on the validity of the treaty, which sanctioned the European status quo, the neutrality of the Black Sea and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.63 Therefore, according to him, Great Powers such as Austria-Hungary, still bound by the Treaty, would have to preserve the integrity of the Empire from an eventual Russian invasion, even without a separate alliance, as confirmed by the British ambassador in Vienna. In any case, Khalil Efendi concluded by saying that, even if abandoned by its allies, the imperial government would defend its sovereign rights with determination. In this way, the Ottomans demonstrated themselves to be the last real supporters of the Metternichian principles of international equilibrium and peace, even when the other European Great Powers had already begun to abandon it. Blood and ruin In summary, by the end of September 1870, even if the possibility of adopting Realpolitik as an official diplomatic doctrine existed, the Sublime Porte led by Emin Âli Pasha refused to abandon the Parisian system based on the Metternichian

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principles of preservation of the European equilibrium and status quo. In fact, from the point of view of the imperial government, until that moment, the Treaty of Paris had successfully protected imperial integrity. Above all, the Sublime Porte was concerned that by entering into a separate alliance with another Great Power, the Empire would lose the guarantees offered by the Treaty of Paris and by its fundamental alliance with Britain, who, in that moment, was the main supporter of the Empire’s territorial integrity. Brought up during the numerous diplomatic twists and turns of European cabinets during the Egyptian wars, Emin Âli Pasha wrote to Khalil Bey that an alliance limited to the Habsburg monarchy would be ‘incomplete’, and the Ottoman statesman was persuaded that the imperial government would be abandoned by its ally ‘at the decisive moment’.64 The old Ottoman statesman, who between the 1850s and the 1860s faced numerous international crises, continued to believe that European international law and harmony within the Concert of Europe represented the best guarantee for the survival of the Empire and of the entire European continent as it was configured at that time. From this perspective, the Franco-Prussian War was most likely considered by Emin Âli Pasha as not only a threat to the integrity of the Empire but also an opportunity for the Sublime Porte to demonstrate its desire to belong to the Concert of Europe and, simultaneously, to play a role as a pillar of the international equilibrium. At the same time, however, the Ottomans risked missing the ‘train’ of the new alliance system created by the rise of Realpolitik. As the events of the RussoOttoman War of 1877–78 later proved, a separate alliance would probably be the greatest guarantee of peace and stability for the Empire. But, at the beginning of the 1870s, believing that the respect of the treaties and international balance were still the best guarantees of survival, the government led by Emin Âli Pasha once more confirmed Ottoman support to ‘the efforts of the other neutral powers to obtain . . . the restoration of peace’.65 At the beginning of 1871, despite the ending of the Franco-Prussian War, Aristarchi Bey was concerned about the consequences for the future international equilibrium. At the end of February, he confirmed to Emin Âli Pasha that the military events had completely modified ‘the nature of the European equilibrium’.66 For Aristarchi Bey, in the near future, ‘the European balance will dip to the German side’, due to the Prussian victory and German unification. Therefore, considering the possibility that the new German Empire would ‘not wish to abuse it [the international balance] in relation to the Orient’, the Ottoman diplomatic efforts should be refocused on ‘cultivating friendship with the Court and Cabinet of Berlin’.67 In March 1871, European public opinion was affected by the tragedy of the Paris Commune. As reported by Cemil Pasha, the Parisian insurgents did not recognise the authority of the government led by Adolphe Thiers, who was negotiating surrender with the Germans.68 The Parisian uprising and the efforts to create an autonomous municipality deeply concerned Ottoman diplomats in Europe, who were worried that the possible ‘contagion’ of insurgents’ socialist ideas ‘could bring assassination and brigandage’ to other states.69

The Franco-Prussian War and Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik 49 For Cemil Pasha, the events confirmed the idea that the international revolutionary party was ready to apply the ‘detestable’ ideas expressed during the Geneva Congress of 1867.70 Deeply worried by the possible spreading of a ‘revolutionary disease’ outside French borders, as had happened in 1830 and 1848, the Ottoman ambassador reported his efforts to avoid any contact with the representatives of the Commune, eager to ‘strengthen the fraternal relations which unite the people of Paris and the Turkish people’.71 The Ottoman diplomats, who were educated under the guidelines of a reactionary Metternichian doctrine, strongly opposed the socialist ideas of the Commune and considered it a new French revolution. Alliance with part of the French socialist movement was opposed by the imperial elites not only because of the difference in values between the two parties but also because such a relationship risked putting the Ottoman Empire in a very complex situation in Europe. Therefore, during the events of the Paris Commune, the Ottoman representatives in Europe, such as Glavany Efendi, generally described how the entire ‘civilised world’ was horrified by revolutionary events, such as the arson of the main Parisian monuments, libraries and artistic masterpieces.72 For them, these monuments represented all the European values that they had accepted since the first half of the nineteenth century and a patrimony of humanity (of Ottoman humanity as well), which represented the entirety of French history. For this reason, when on 1 June 1871, Cemil Pasha reported that the Parisian insurrection had been definitively repressed, covering the French capital in ‘blood and ruins’, he claimed that the city could finally ‘breathe’ because ‘the cause of order’ had triumphed at last.73 Once more, the Ottoman diplomatic elites demonstrated their adherence to the Metternichian values of international peace, equilibrium and belonging to the reactionary family of European civilisation. Conclusion Even if, for the Ottoman agents in Europe, the defeat of the Commune had apparently saved and restored civilisation, they still warned the Sublime Porte that the Franco-Prussian War had completely modified the European status quo and the international equilibrium. Since the European balance had tipped in favour of the new German Empire, Ottoman diplomacy focused its efforts on strengthening its relationship with the new actors: a rising German Empire and a revanchist French Republic. Even if the Ottomans had identified this modification to the equilibrium and adapted their foreign policy to the new situation, Emin Âli Pasha’s determination to preserve the established order and neutrality prevented imperial diplomacy from completing the process of taking up Realpolitik principles. This dualism between the desire to preserve equilibrium and the necessity to adopt the new guidelines of Realpolitik characterised Ottoman foreign policy until the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. At this point, the chapter of the Parisian system sanctioned in 1856 was definitively closed, even among the Ottomans, its last supporters.

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In conclusion, the main consequences of Napoleon III’s foreign policy were the defeat of the French Empire and the unification of the Italian and German national entities, which deeply modified the European status quo and equilibrium. In the meantime, the events of the Paris Commune persuaded Ottoman diplomats of the necessity to adopt and preserve a conservative political attitude against subversive movements to protect the international order and the security of the Empire. Ottoman diplomatic elites were deeply conscious that this modification to the equilibrium that occurred at the beginning of the 1870s represented an extremely dangerous threat to the imperial state. The higher probability of an international conflict in Europe definitively persuaded them of the transience of the European principles and international law. Undoubtedly, in spite of the efforts of Emin Âli Pasha and other diplomats, the Franco-Prussian War produced an acceleration in the adoption of Realpolitik as a diplomatic doctrine among the European and Ottoman diplomatic elites. This ultimately persuaded these elites of the imminence of a new European conflict and the approach of great danger to the Ottoman state. Notes 1 Emin Âli Pasha to Khalil Bey, 16 September 1870, dispatch (hereafter d.) 28582/193, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri, Hariciye Nezareti, Siyasi, (Ottoman Prime Minister Archives, Foreign Ministry, Political section, hereafter BOA, HR, SYS) Istanbul, edited by S. Kuneralp in S. Kuneralp (ed.), L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, I, Documents diplomatiques ottomans sur la Guerre franco-prussienne, la Commune de Paris et l’Internationale socialiste (Istanbul: Les Editions Isis, 2008) (hereafter ODD), p. 194. 2 On the Eastern Question see R. Mantran (ed.), Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989); H. İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire and Europe. The Ottoman Empire and Its Place in European History (Istanbul: Kronik, 2017); C. Finkel, Osman’s Dream. The History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2020). 3 Kuneralp, L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, I. S. Kuneralp (ed.), L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, II, Documents diplomatiques ottomans sur l’unification italienne (Istanbul: Les Editions Isis, 2009); S. Kuneralp (ed.), L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, IV, Documents diplomatiques ottomans sur les affaires de Pologne et la Russie (1861–1868) (Istanbul: Les Editions Isis, 2013); S. Kuneralp (ed.), L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, V, The Turco-Italian War 1911–1912 (Istanbul: Les Editions Isis, 2011). 4 M. Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (London: Routledge, 2021); G. Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War. The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); N. Bourguinat and G. Vogt, La guerre francoallemande de 1870. Une histoire globale (Paris: Flammarion, 2020). 5 Aristarchi Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 27 February 1871, confidential dispatch (from now onwards d. c.) 3158/41, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 338–339. Translated by the author from the original French into English. 6 M. Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa. Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 9. 7 C. M. Fiorentino, Il garbuglio diplomatico. L’Italia tra Francia e Prussia nella guerra del 1866 (Milano: Luni Editrice, 2021); see also Enciclopedia Treccani E-kindle (from now onwards ET), F. G. Orsini and G. Nicolosi, entry ‘La diplomazia’ (L’Unificazione, 2011), pos. 495. 8 G. Pierangelo, L’ombra del re. Vittorio Emanuele II e le politiche di corte (Carocci: Roma, 2011). 9 Kuneralp (ed.), L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, IV, p. 9.

The Franco-Prussian War and Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik 51 10 O. Ozavci, Dangerous Gifts. Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798– 1864 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 178–193. 11 Kuneralp (ed.), L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, I, p. 7. 12 Ibid., p. 11. 13 G. Ennas, ‘The Mediterranean Mirror. Italo-Ottoman Relations in an Age of Transition, 1856–1871’ (PhD dissertation, European University Institute, 2021); Kuneralp (ed.), L’Empire Ottoman et l’Europe, I, p. 7. 14 S. Kuneralp (ed.), Ottoman Diplomatic Documents on ‘The Eastern Question’, II, The Cretan Uprising 1866–1869 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2010), p. 15; Emin Âli Pasha to Aristarchi Bey, 18 August 1870, d. c., 28296/73, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 121–122. 15 See L. Chiala, Politica Segreta di Napoleone III e di Cavour in Italia e in Ungheria (1858–1861) (Torino-Roma: L. Roux and C. Editori, 1895). 16 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 8 July 1870, cyphered telegram (from now onwards c. t.) 6871/338, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 17. 17 Ibid. 18 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 9 July 1870, c. t. 6880/347, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 18. 19 Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War, p. 12. 20 Emin Âli Pasha to Cemil Pasha, 11 July 1870, c. t. 27934/279, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 19. 21 Fiorentino, Il Garbuglio, p. 364 and 521. 22 Rüstem Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 17 July 1870, c. t. 6569/126, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 27. 23 O. Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Penguin, 2011). 24 Fiorentino, Il Garbuglio, p. 130. 25 Emin Âli Pasha to the Ottoman ambassadors in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Florence and Saint Petersburg, 19 July 1870, telegram (from now onwards t.) 27999/19, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 30–31. 26 Rüstem Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 19 July 1870, t. without number (from now onwards w. n.), BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 31. 27 Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War, pp. 187–188. 28 Fiorentino, Il Garbuglio, p. 282. 29 Haydar Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 19 July 1870, t. 3028/201, BOA, HR, SYS ODD, p. 33. 30 Glavany Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 20 July 1870, n. 159, BOA, HR, SYS ODD, pp. 36–37. 31 Ibid. 32 Rüstem Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 22 July 1870, d. 6576/132, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 43–45. 33 Fiorentino, Il Garbuglio, pp. 122–123. 34 Glavany Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 20 July 1870, d. 159, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 36–37. 35 Haydar Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 22 July 1870, t. 3030/204, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 41–42. 36 Haydar Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 22 July 1870, t. 3033/205, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 42. 37 Haydar Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 26 July 1870, confidential t. 3040/210, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 58–59. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Emin Âli Pasha to the Agents of the Danuban Principalities and Serbia, 27 July 1870, circular dispatch (from now onwards c.d.) 28091/27 and 28092/13, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 60; Emin Âli Pasha to the Ottoman General Governors, 27 July 1870, c. d. BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 61.

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41 Glavany Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 28 July 1870, d. 160/99, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 68–69. 42 Emin Âli Pasha to Haydar Efendi, 29 July 1870, confidential d. BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 70. 43 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 5 August 1870, d. 6977/420, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 92–94; Musurus Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 6 August 1870, c. t. 4162/84, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 96–97. 44 Emin Âli Pasha to Rüstem Bey, 10 August 1870, d. 28213/104, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 108–109. 45 Musurus Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 18 August 1870, c. t. 4180/93, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 124–125. 46 Musurus Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 18 August 1870, confidential d. 4185/94, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 125–126. 47 Ibid. 48 Emin Âli Pasha to Musurus Pasha, 22 August 1870, t. 28352/162, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 132. 49 Aristarchi Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 26 August 1870, d. 2986/165, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 144–145. 50 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 26 August 1870, confidential d. 7057/478, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 143–144. 51 Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War, p. 228. 52 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 6 September 1870, c. t. 7093/504, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 163. 53 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 7 September 1870, c. t. 7099/507, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 168–169. 54 Carathéodory Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 7 September 1870, t. 162, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 169; Emin Âli Pasha to the representatives of the Sublime Porte in London, Vienna, Saint-Petersburg and Florence, 8 September 1870, confidential circular t. 28533/23, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 170. 55 Ibid. 56 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 10 September 1870, c. t. 7111/516, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 174; Rüstem Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 10 September 1870, confidential d. 6668/184, BOA, HR, SYS ODD, p. 175. 57 Chryssidi Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 13 September 1870, t. 3147/279, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 180. 58 Fiorentino, Il Garbuglio, p. 180. 59 Emin Âli Pasha to Khalil Bey, 16 September 1870, d. 28582/193, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 191–195. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Khalil Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 27 September 1870, confidential t. 3165/294, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 211–212. 63 Khalil Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 27 September 1870, t. 3166/295, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 212–213. 64 Ozavci, Dangerous Gifts, p. 158; Emin Âli Pasha to Khalil Bey, 29 September 1870, d. 28659/203, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 216–217. 65 Emin Âli Pasha to the Representatives of the Sublime Porte in Tours, Vienna, SaintPetersburg and Florence, 25 October 1870, t. 28782/25, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 254. 66 Aristarchi Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 27 February 1871, confidential d. 3158/41, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 338–339. 67 Ibid. 68 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 19 March 1871, c. t. 7139/3, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 353.

The Franco-Prussian War and Ottoman adoption of Realpolitik 53 69 Aristarchi Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 28 March 1871, d. 3185/51, BOA, HR, SYS ODD, pp. 356–357. 70 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 30 March 1871, d. 7148/9, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 358–360. As written by the new plenipotentiary minister in Florence, Fotiades Bey, after the First Socialist International in Geneva in 1864, the Swiss city became, for the Ottoman government, the centre of socialist subversive activities in the rest of Europe and in the Ottoman Empire. See Fotiades Bey to Emin Âli Pasha, 26 May 1871, confidential d. 6997/117, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, p. 425. 71 Pascal Grousset to Cemil Pasha, 5 April 1871, d. 7158/19, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 365–366. 72 Glavany Efendi to Emin Âli Pasha, 25 May 1871, d. 201/109, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 388–389. 73 Cemil Pasha to Emin Âli Pasha, 1 June 1871, d. 7194/54, BOA, HR, SYS, ODD, pp. 392–395.

4

Political discourses between militarism and pacifism in the  Ottoman Empire Uygar Aydemir

During the nineteenth century, two distinct political views emerged in the Ottoman Empire, which became more pronounced after the Franco-Prussian War. One group sought to maintain peace through diplomacy, while the other pursued gains through conflict and war. The proponents of peace believed that it was in the interest of all parties involved to resolve disputes through reconciliation and negotiation. They viewed the demands of war as destructive and sought to adopt a constructive approach in addressing issues of concern. They sought to prevent the clamour for war on the international stage through diplomatic means, believing that violence and warfare were antithetical to progress and that peaceful coexistence between nations was essential for achieving domestic and international success. Conversely, the war enthusiasts, spurred on by the rising tide of revolutions and nationalism, expressed their territorial ambitions through public demonstrations. In contrast to the pacifists, the proponents of war believed that territorial expansion and national pride could only be achieved through the use of force. Their beliefs were rooted in a nascent form of nationalism, which manifested itself in various ways, such as Ottomanism or Pan-Islamism.1 The first ideologues of Pan-Islamism in the early 1870s viewed it as a companion to Pan-Germanism and as a counterbalance to Pan-Slavism. Interestingly, the same milieu who propagated the idea of Pan-Islamism would later play a seminal role in the emergence of Turanism or Pan-Turkism.2 The overarching goal of both ideologies was to strengthen the Ottoman Empire and contain Russia’s influence in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. This chapter aims to explore the impact of the Franco-Prussian War on the Ottoman political arena and society in Istanbul. Specifically, it investigates the ways in which the Ottoman state and public dealt with the shift in the international power balance after the French defeat. The chapter begins by examining how Istanbul newspapers reported on the war, focusing on one newspaper, Basiret, that provides insightful analysis. The discussion then delves into how the coverage by that newspaper seems to have influenced the Muslim public sphere in Istanbul during the 1870s. During the period under consideration, Istanbul witnessed a notable upswing in war propaganda, which can be attributed to two factors. The first was the commentary and coverage of the Franco-Prussian War by anti-Russian authors, while the second was the outbreak of rebellions in the Balkans in 1875–76. However, DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-6

Political discourses between militarism and pacifism 55 there were some politicians in various levels of the government who advocated a calmer and more conciliatory approach. The competition between advocates of bellicism and pacifism was obviously not limited to the Ottoman Empire but was also evident in Russia. Following the examination of this rivalry in Russia, this chapter will scrutinise pacifist discourse, using Mahmud Nedim Pasha’s advocacy of pacifist diplomacy as an example, owing to his having served as the grand vizier in the Ottoman cabinet in 1871–72 and 1875–76. Ottoman perceptions of the Franco-Prussian War The Congress of Paris in 1856 following the Crimean War notably shaped the Eastern Question. Of particular relevance to this study are two articles in the Treaty of Paris signed at the conclusion of the Congress: the neutralisation of the Black Sea and the acceptance of the Ottoman Empire into the Concert of Europe.3 The former article prohibited any country from having an active shipyard or military ships sail in the Black Sea, which primarily targeted Russia since the Ottoman Empire maintained significant shipyards on the Bosphorus and Marmara Sea.4 The latter article led to the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire being guaranteed by European powers, particularly Britain and France, who were Ottoman allies in the Crimean War against Russia. The political landscape of the Ottoman Empire was significantly impacted by its entry into the Concert of Europe at the time.5 Therefore, it is no surprise that the Ottoman state, despite remaining neutral throughout the Franco-Prussian War, desired an outcome that would maintain the balance of power and favourable conditions that had been secured. The preference of the Ottoman State would be for the attainment of a French victory, failing which they would seek the reestablishment of the status quo ante bellum.6 The majority of newspapers in Istanbul echoed the Ottoman state’s perspective, with one notable exception, the Basiret newspaper, which sided with the Prussian cause from the outset. While other newspapers celebrated even minor French victories, Basiret was steadfast in its support of the Prussian cause, predicting their ultimate victory. This exceptional approach earned the recognition of Bismarck, who invited the newspaper’s owner to Berlin where he stayed for a month and met with Bismarck on multiple occasions after the war. In recognition of the newspaper’s support, the German government generously rewarded its owner with a brand new printing press.7 The rationale behind Basiret’s position regarding the Franco-Prussian War was not related to its proprietor but rather to the publication’s two writers, Mahmud Celaleddin Pasha and Hayreddin, who were originally from Poland.8 They were part of the wave of Polish and Hungarian migrants who settled in Turkey after the crushing of the 1848 revolutions. Konstanty Polkozic-Borzęcki was Mahmud Celaleddin’s birth name before he became Ottoman, and Hayreddin was the pen name used by Karol Karski. Regrettably, there is insufficient information concerning the biographical background of Karol Karski, unlike Mustafa Celâleddin Pasha who has garnered more attention in historical records. Konstanty Borzęcki (his birth name) was a

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prominent and noteworthy figure within the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. He was known for his military service, artistic talent and advocacy of Turkish ideals. Of Polish origin, he received his education in Warsaw, studying at both the School of Fine Arts and the School of Priests in Włocławek. In addition to his native Polish, he was fluent in several languages, including Russian, French, German and Latin. He participated in the Great Poland Uprising in 1848 and subsequently emigrated to Prussia and later Hungary, where he fought in the war against the Habsburgs. Following Hungary’s defeat, he relocated to the Ottoman Empire in 1849, converted to Islam and joined the military.9 During this time, the Ottoman Empire served as a refuge for Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries who were engaged in struggles against Russia or Austria.10 Throughout his career, Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha distinguished himself in numerous Ottoman battles, earning several wounds and rising to the rank of Major General. He also served as head of the cartography department at the General Staff of the Ottoman Army.11 It is noteworthy that Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha is also credited with having instigated the growth of Pan-Turkish ideals among the Young Turks, with his publication Les Turcs anciens et modernes in 1869, wherein he asserted that the Turks were in fact ancient Aryans.12 This work, which took the form of a practical report on what steps the state should take to ensure the survival and prosperity of the Ottoman Empire, was presented to Sultan Abdulaziz. In the book, he argued that Western civilization was the creation of the Turanian people and, therefore, the Turks. According to him, the Latin language and civilization were of Turkic origin.13 He stressed the need for Turkey to establish the imperative of European law and administration, rid its language of Persianisms and Arabisms and adopt a new alphabet.14 The position held by his book was seminal in the inception of Turkish nationalism, and it wielded significant influence on the nationalist movements in the early twentieth century, particularly on intellectuals such as Yusuf Akçura.15 While Mahmud Celaleddin’s impact on nationalism would become prominent in later times, at this stage, his and Karski’s joint efforts played a vital role in influencing public opinion towards Germany, as well as reinforcing negative views towards Russia. These writers actively participated in newspaper board meetings, influencing their peers and contributing to Basiret’s ultimate position on the Franco-Prussian War.16 They had a significant impact on shaping anti-Russian public sentiment through their writings in newspapers, which helped to establish a pro-German position. The essential tenor of Basiret’s perspective was encapsulated in a particular editorial which pointed out that Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism were ideologies that were spreading and gaining momentum throughout Europe. The former of these ideologies, claimed Basiret, posed a particularly grave threat to the Ottoman Empire and had been increasing in influence at an alarming rate. As such, it was crucial for both Austria and the Ottoman Empire to lend their support to Pan-Germanism in opposition to Pan-Slavism. Basiret stressed that only a great power could effectively eliminate another great power. In this context, the resurgence of the Pan-Germanic ideology would not be detrimental to either Austria or

Political discourses between militarism and pacifism 57 the Ottoman Empire. However, for the Germanic movement successfully to oppose Slavism, the notion of Pan-Islamism must be promoted. By inciting the Muslim populace residing under Russian rule against their oppressors, a revolution against Pan-Slavism could be kindled.17 This particular article is of notable interest as it constitutes one of the earliest instances in which the concept of Pan-Islamism was introduced, its emergence being almost a derivative of Pan-Germanism and serving as an essential opposition to Pan-Slavism. The works of the Polish migrants, who held a deep-seated antipathy towards Russia since the 1848 revolutions, together with the Turkish authors of Basiret, who favoured Prussia during and after the war, should be contextualised within this milieu. The noteworthy aspect of Basiret’s articles on the Franco-Prussian War was not their enthusiastic support for the Prussian cause but rather the ideological framework in which they presented the news and the diplomatic context to their readers. This perspective was influential in the ensuing years. Karol Karski, in particular, wrote about the war almost every day and produced thirty-seven analyses on its political and ideological ramifications.18 Ottoman public sentiment towards Russia was already inherently adversarial, owing to the two powers’ rivalry in the Balkans, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, which had engendered numerous armed conflicts over the previous two centuries. Recent Russian incursions into Central Asia, the historical homeland of the Turkic people, further intensified anti-Russian feeling among several political and social leaders of the region, who frequented the Ottoman capital seeking Ottoman support. These writings helped to cultivate a mounting pro-Islam and anti-Russian sentiment. Political discourses in Eastern Europe After analysing how the Franco-Prussian War contributed to the emergence of Pan-Islamist concepts in relation to the growing awareness of Pan-Slavism and the increase of anti-Russian sentiment, this chapter will now explore how Russia and the Ottoman Empire responded to the changing dynamics of the European diplomatic sphere during the 1870s. After the Franco-Prussian War, the balance of power in Europe had shifted, leaving a diplomatic void in Eastern Europe that France had previously filled. The Ottoman Empire and Russia were among the states that became involved in the power vacuum, each with their own interests and concerns. While the Ottoman Empire was undergoing a period of transition, with the decline of the old order and the emergence of new ideologies and political movements, the reaction of Russia was also complex. There was dissent in the Russian diplomatic body between the peace and war camps, each with its own views on how to deal with the diplomatic void. The peace camp, led by Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Gorchakov, believed that Russia should maintain its influence in the Balkans without provoking a confrontation with Europe, while the war camp, led by Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, advocated a more aggressive policy towards the Ottoman Empire.

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Russia between the peace and war camps Following the conclusion of the Crimean War, it appeared that the Russian Foreign Ministry was divided into two competing factions concerning the efforts to overcome the unfavourable conditions imposed by the Treaty of Paris. One of these factions aimed to rectify the situation through diplomatic means via the Concert of Europe. It is noteworthy that this faction was identified with the prominent statesman Gorchakov, who held the position of Chancellor of Foreign Affairs for the Russian Empire during the period spanning from the end of the Crimean War in 1856 until 1882, the year immediately prior to his passing.19 During his tenure as Chancellor of Foreign Affairs, Gorchakov held the belief that Russia had yet fully to modernise and fulfil its potential. Accordingly, he advocated for the country to utilise its available resources to bolster its domestic development before embarking on any aggressive foreign policies aimed at improving its standing in the international political arena. Gorchakov posited that domestic power was ‘today’s only real source for the political might of a state’ and that amplifying domestic power represented the most effective means of elevating a country’s status.20 Gorchakov espoused a policy that advocated the preservation of the established borders of European countries and opposed any unilateral action or unilateral attempts at altering the status quo. He believed that such changes should be attained through a European concord or agreement between powers. In the absence of such cooperation, any efforts made by Russia to assert its interests would result in substantial sacrifices and minimal rewards, a situation that he deemed untenable.21 In opposition to Gorchakov’s pacifist foreign policy approach, another faction emerged within the Russian Foreign Ministry that advocated a more aggressive and militaristic stance towards international relations. This group was focused on the objective of restoring Russia’s national prestige, which they believed had been tarnished by the unfavourable terms of the Treaty of Paris. The figurehead of this faction was Ignatyev, who had garnered significant support among the highranking generals of the Russian army.22 From the moment of his appointment as minister plenipotentiary to Istanbul in 1864, Ignatyev departed from Gorchakov’s diplomatic course and pursued more confrontational policies aimed at advancing Russian interests through forceful means.23 Ignatyev had a tripartite agenda with respect to the Ottoman Empire that informed his actions as minister plenipotentiary in Istanbul.24 His primary objective, which was the linchpin of his strategy, was to secure unrestricted access to the Straits for Russia. He envisioned two paths to achieve this: either through direct Russian control or by establishing an intermediary state that would be entirely subservient to Russian authority. To this end, Ignatyev sought to dismantle the European alliance that had been forged during the Crimean War, which served to counterbalance Russian influence in the region. In line with this aim, he also sought to nullify the provisions of the Treaty of Paris. His second objective was to bring an end to the collective supervision of the Ottoman Empire by the European powers. Finally, Ignatyev sought to consolidate the European Slavic peoples, who were

Political discourses between militarism and pacifism 59 predominantly under Habsburg or Ottoman rule, under Russian leadership to create a buffer zone against Germany. ‘The Austrian and Turkish Slavs must be our allies, the weapons of our policy against the Germans’, he wrote in his memoir.25 The marked reluctance of Britain to engage in major confrontations on the European continent with Russia, with whom it was already embroiled in Central Asia, and the surrender of France in early 1871 created a significant gap in diplomacy in Eastern Europe. As a consequence, this disturbance in the European balance of power presented an opportunity for the Russian statesman Gorchakov to pursue his ambitions. Capitalising on this void of political power, Gorchakov was successful in revising the articles of the Treaty of Paris which concerned the neutralisation of the Black Sea, receiving the consent of all European powers, including the Porte. Gorchakov’s successful policy of securing victories through diplomatic accord was undoubtedly a significant milestone. In the aftermath of the FrancoPrussian War, the reins of Russian policy in the Balkans were gradually taken over by Ignatyev, who began to exert increasing influence. Both Gorchakov’s and Ignatyev’s perspectives on Russian foreign policy were, without doubt, shaped by their respective backgrounds. Gorchakov, with his Western education, embodied Western ideals and culture within the Russian context, while Ignatyev, who owed his rise in the state hierarchy to his talent and close personal ties to his godfather, the Emperor, displayed a distinct style that sometimes deviated from Gorchakov’s instructions.26 Nevertheless, Ignatyev’s shrewdness and tactful manoeuvres would eventually yield a positive outcome for the Russian cause in the Balkans.27 The individuals he appointed to Russian consulates and missions in the Balkan cities, who shared his fervent Pan-Slavic beliefs, played a crucial role in promoting these ideas in the region during the insurgencies in 1875 and 1876, leading up to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.28 Bellicose activism in Istanbul As warmongering gained prominence in Russian policies in the Balkans after 1871, the Ottoman public sphere concurrently became increasingly immersed in warlike discourse. This discourse reached its zenith when the Herzegovina Uprising began in 1875. Herzegovina was an administrative division located in the province of Bosnia, inhabited by a population of 1.2 million Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Catholics, with 515,000 Orthodox Christians constituting the majority.29 Despite this, Muslims held a dominant position in social and economic spheres, as the landlords in the region were predominantly Muslim.30 The initial cause of the revolt was the issue of heavy taxation that burdened the Christian peasants who had lodged complaints about the system’s abuses. The circumstances were conducive to a new wave of Pan-Slavism movements in the Balkans.31 As violence escalated during the Herzegovina Uprising, the Great Powers of Europe convened in Berlin to address the matter. On 30 November 1875, a note was dispatched to the Ottoman government from German Chancellor Bismarck, Russian Chancellor Prince Gorchakov and Austrian Foreign Minister Count

60

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Andrássy. This note, known as the Count Andrássy Note, included proposals such as the discontinuation of tax farming and the equitable distribution of land to Bosnian Christians.32 The Ottoman government tentatively agreed to the points raised in the note with minor modifications by 11 February 1876.33 However, the rebels were dissatisfied with the response, and their rejection of the proposed changes signalled that the insurrection would continue. In fact, the April Uprising in Bulgaria erupted soon after. During the same period, the Ottoman Empire was beset by a financial crisis, which was exacerbated by their declaration of a moratorium at the end of 1875. As a result, they lacked the necessary resources effectively to quell the uprisings that had broken out, while the military’s presence in the region was minimal.34 This led to a situation in which the uprisings began to resemble a civil war, with local Muslim and Christian gangs engaging in violent conflict. The reporting of the events in Ottoman and European newspapers was heavily biased and differed significantly in their respective narratives.35 Medrese students in Istanbul observed the events of the uprisings with discretion. As many of them had relatives in the affected region, they received first-hand information about the situation.36 Upon reading the European newspapers, they became aware of the differing narratives and attributed it to Russian propaganda in Europe. Fuelled by anti-Russian and Pan-Islamist sentiment, the medrese students demanded that the Ottoman government take direct action against Russia, leading to the demonstrations on the streets of Istanbul, which came to be known as the Softa Incident. The Softa Incident of May 1876 was a three-day demonstration in Istanbul led by the city’s medrese students, who were known as softas. The medreses were prestigious institutions in the Ottoman education system, providing specialised training in Islamic knowledge and law. The Istanbul medreses, in particular, were renowned for their exceptional professors, students and curriculum. Thus, when 2000 medrese students gathered in the capital’s mosque yards and squares, chanting slogans that criticised the Empire’s recent political and economic failures and demanding a cabinet change, Sultan Abdülaziz recognised the significance of the oppositional movement.37 He responded to their demands by dismissing Grand Vizier Mahmud Nedim Pasha, who had become unpopular with the public due to his mild attitude towards Russia and close relationship with the Russian ambassador, General Ignatyev. Grand Vizier Mahmud Nedim, the grand vizier during the first two uprisings, had already been criticised for his mild attitude and appeasement policy towards Russia. He adopted a conciliatory stance and advocated for pacifying the insurgents by granting them concessions and soliciting Austrian and Russian intervention. He had embraced the Andrássy Note, which proposed significant improvements in the administration of the local populations, but when the insurgents rejected it, this led to a backlash against Mahmud Nedim and his policies. The Bulgarian uprising and the Softa Incident dealt the final blow to his government. Given the ongoing insurrections in the Balkans, relations with the Russian ambassador were especially sensitive in 1876, and any indication of cooperation

Political discourses between militarism and pacifism 61 was regarded as tantamount to open betrayal. Thus, the Softa Incident reflected the delicate political situation in the Ottoman Empire at the time, with oppositional sentiment stemming from issues of political and economic failure, as well as complicated international relations with Russia.38 The divergence in approach between Ottoman officials regarding the rebellions of 1875 and 1876 in Herzegovina, Montenegro and Bulgaria led to a clash of policies. In the Empire, there existed a faction of statecraft that prioritised avoiding war at all costs. Mahmud Nedim was a prominent representative of this cause. In contrast, Midhat Pasha and Hüseyin Avni Pasha were proponents of the war camp and believed that there was no alternative to military conflict with the Russians to end their demands. In 1876, the latter group joined forces with the Young Turks, a group comprising individuals involved in literary pursuits, journalism and activism.39 The Young Turks’ primary objective was to convert the Ottoman Empire into a constitutional monarchy with liberal inclinations through the implementation of a parliamentary system. The group sought to promote public space by publishing newspapers and literary works, seeing this as fundamental to their end. This coalition was instrumental in the Softa Incident and shared a close connection with the Ottoman crown prince.40 Subsequent to the Softa Incident in May 1876, Sultan Abdülaziz was dethroned and replaced with the aid of this war faction.41 Meanwhile, as the situation in the Balkans deteriorated, European powers stepped in and convened the Constantinople Conference in December 1876, coinciding with the adoption of the first Ottoman constitution. The Conference mandated the transfer of several regions, previously under direct Ottoman control, to the autonomous countries of Montenegro and Serbia.42 This resolution was, in fact, favourable to the Ottomans, but due to the anti-Russian and militarist sentiments of the government, the note was rejected. In the Russian capital, a belligerent discourse had also undeniably gained strength. According to the Turkish press, the Tsar’s statement that he could not let the matter go was attributed to the pressure he faced from the war advocates within his own empire.43 However, the Ottoman government still rejected the offer, on the grounds that yielding to foreign demands would jeopardise the Empire’s independence and unity, and consequently, the countries resorted to military action. However, the Ottoman Empire suffered severe political and humanitarian consequences due to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, which proved to be catastrophic. The conflict might have had a different outcome with alternate policies; however, the war proved to be fatal for the Ottomans and yielded little gain for the Russians in the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The pacifist critique of Ottoman militarism During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Mahmud Nedim, the grand vizier who had been dismissed after the Softa Incident, wrote an apologia to justify his position prior to the war.44 In his never-published work, he criticised the pro-war rhetoric that influenced public opinion in Istanbul, tracing its roots back to the Franco-Prussian War. His particular target was Ahmed Midhat, a former disciple

62  Uygar Aydemir of Midhat Pasha and a writer for the Prussian cause in Basiret newspaper during 1870–71. Mahmud Nedim’s apologia was a response to Ahmed Midhat’s recently published book, Üss-i İnkılap, which contained an account of the recent political developments.45 Mahmud Nedim found fault in Ahmed Midhat’s writing, which boasted that the Ottoman army could amass an 800,000-strong army and therefore need not fear war with the Russian Empire.46 The disastrous results of the ongoing Russo-Turkish War exposed this boast as a grave miscalculation and highlighted the unpreparedness of the Ottoman Empire for a large-scale conflict. Mahmud Nedim further criticised not only the numbers but also the warlike discourse of Ahmed Midhat and the revolutionary party, known as the Young Turks, in general. As per Mahmud Nedim, the Young Turks stood out for their proclivity towards destructive approaches rather than constructive methods in their social and political engagements. Nedim posits that the Young Turks’ animosity towards those with divergent opinions manifests as hatred. This, in turn, led the Young Turks to advocate war as the ultimate solution to issues involving ‘others’. Mahmud Nedim argued that the Young Turks’ ideology had a pernicious impact on the minds of the common people by sowing the seeds of subversion and disseminating false rumours aimed at inciting civil unrest. This, in turn, led to a state of social and political turmoil, wherein various segments of society, such as the softas, roughs and porters, expressed their willingness to engage in violent conflict. Their war cry, as reported by Nedim, was to fight their enemies and to eliminate them through holy war, with a desire to become either veterans or martyrs for their cause. Those who opposed this belligerent stance were viewed as adversaries, further exacerbating the already-charged environment.47 Throughout his manuscript, Mahmud Nedim repeatedly stressed that his opponents were in favour of destruction and chaos, while he had chosen a more peaceful and less difficult path. Nedim asserted that his political stance was bequeathed to him by Mustafa Reshid Pasha, a distinguished diplomat and statesman of the preceding generation.48 According to numerous scholars, Reshid Pasha had played a pivotal role in upholding the rule of law in the Ottoman Empire since the late 1830s and in securing the English and French alliance during the Crimean War. In addition, Reshid Pasha was instrumental in enabling the bureaucracy to operate independently of the palace’s influence.49 Given this influential background, Nedim’s claim that the foundation of his pacifist diplomacy during the 1870s was informed by Reshid Pasha is of great significance. Mahmud Nedim asserted that his political outlook, inspired by Reshid Pasha, emphasised the importance of avoiding conflict by utilising diplomacy and acting with caution and pacifism, taking into account the strength and capabilities of the Ottoman state. Instead of resorting to belligerent tactics, he believed the state had to seek to achieve diplomatic victories through moderation and building alliances with friends during times of crisis. It was essential, he stated, to reject unreasonable calls for confrontation and hostility and instead rely on the power of persuasion and negotiation to resolve conflicts.50

Political discourses between militarism and pacifism  63 Mahmud Nedim’s endorsement of the Andrássy Note exemplified his political perspective, as he juxtaposed the hypothetical consequences of implementing the Note against the tangible results of the Russo-Turkish War: Suppose that I had demonstrated deference to the Russian Embassy and had been misled by the persuasive rhetoric of Austria. Let us imagine that I had followed the precedent of previous Ottoman Pashas by adopting a strategy of circumventing conflict and prioritising the safeguarding of ­public ­welfare. . . . Suppose, for a moment, that I had adopted a pacifist approach and showed deference to the Russian Embassy, while being misled by the empty promises of Austria. If I had followed in the footsteps of the previous Ottoman Pashas, prioritising the protection of public welfare and avoiding conflict, the outcome would have been starkly different from the alternative approach taken by my warlike opponents. Their confrontational stance towards Russia, vilification of their character, and rejection of Austria’s pledges, ultimately resulted in the abandonment of Constantinople by the Great Powers’ ambassadors. My critics’ disregard for the consequences of their reckless actions and myopic outlook, ultimately led to the disastrous and devastating war that ensued, which could have been averted had a pacifist approach been adopted. It is with great regret that I reflect on the opportunities that were squandered and the incalculable human suffering that could have been prevented, had a wiser, more judicious course of action been pursued. When my failure to uphold the rights of the Sublime State, as a result of being duped by Russia and Austria, is contrasted with the current widespread destruction witnessed across the world, it becomes evident which course of action would have been more reasonable and prudent. . . . In short, the consequences of prioritising the preservation of the state’s integrity above all else have been catastrophic, leaving the people of Anatolia and Rumelia with nothing.51 Conclusion The Franco-Prussian War had a twofold effect on Ottoman politics. First, it engendered excitement, especially among Polish émigrés in Ottoman territories, due to the emergence of a unified Germany. Konstanty Borzęcki and Karol Karski, who had been residents in Turkey since 1848, harboured a strong animosity towards Russia and wrote polemically against Pan-Slavism. They contended that once the concept of Pan-Islamism had taken root among Muslims, its synergy with PanGermanism, the ideological motivation behind the Franco-Prussian War, would constitute the optimal bulwark against Russian westward and southward expansion. The Ottoman Empire’s public sphere was marked by a persistent bellicist rhetoric against Russia, which endured beyond the end of the Franco-Prussian War and was adopted by a number of prominent Ottoman intellectuals and statesmen.

64  Uygar Aydemir This bellicist rhetoric, which blended with decreasing tolerance and more general demands for belligerence in the public, gradually came to dominate the public discourse, culminating in a coup d’état in 1876 and ultimately giving rise to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Among some Ottoman statesmen, a pacifist rhetoric emerged that contrasted with the prevailing anti-Russian belligerence. During his tenure as Ottoman grand vizier in 1871–72 and 1875–76, Mahmud Nedim Pasha espoused the view that the most effective way to address the diplomatic vacuum left by France’s withdrawal from the Eastern European balance of power was to maintain cordial relations with Russia by satisfying the Tsar’s minor requests. The position adopted by Mahmud Nedim Pasha in favour of appeasement with Russia was met with strong opposition from his political opponents, eventually leading to his downfall. Subsequently, he authored an extensive political treatise, in which he offered a detailed justification of his position, in an attempt to set the record straight. Within this written discourse, a noteworthy aspect is Mahmud Nedim’s statement that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 could have been averted by adopting a pacifist approach to international relations. This assertion appears to be highly persuasive and challenging to dispute. In the end, this brutal conflict resulted in significant casualties for both sides, with limited gains for the victors. The Russian Tsar’s demand for the Ottomans to relinquish the town of Nikšić to Montenegro’s autonomous government appeared to be an easily negotiable issue on the surface. However, disregarding the rising proto-nationalist sentiment in Istanbul would ignore the significance placed on territory and hegemony, as seen in the representation of the Franco-Prussian War in the press. During the nineteenth century, nationalist ideologies elevated the status of land from being merely a source of wealth, as it had been in premodern times, to a more sacred status. Despite the destructive consequences of proto-nationalism, this sentiment was a recent development that Mahmud Nedim, a conservative statesman, may have had difficulty understanding and addressing fully. Notes 1 I describe it as a nascent form of nationalism, or more accurately, a proto-nationalism, since the ascendancy of Turkish nationalism did not attain considerable significance until half a century later. 2 Turan is a historical and cultural region in Central Asia, often associated with the Turkic peoples. Turanism promoted the idea of a shared cultural and political identity among Turkic peoples and called for their unification and independence from non-Turkic powers. 3 H. McKinnon Wood, ‘The Treaty of Paris and Turkey’s Status in International Law’, The American Journal of International Law, 37:2 (1943), p. 267. 4 W. Baumgart, The Peace of Paris, 1856: Studies in War, Diplomacy, and Peacemaking (Santa Barbara: Clio Press, 1981), pp. 191–194. 5 Ibid., pp. 189–191. 6 B. Ali Efendi, İstanbul’da Yarım Asırlık Vekayi-i Mühimme, ed. N. Sağlam (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 1997), p. 71. 7 Ibid., pp. 76–82.

Political discourses between militarism and pacifism 65 8 Ibid., pp. 70–71. 9 A. A. Urbanik and J. O. Baylen, ‘Polish Exiles and the Turkish Empire, 1830–1876’, The Polish Review, 26:3 (1981), p. 50. 10 For a survey of scholarly literature concerning the subject that employs primary sources, please refer to B. Nazır, Osmanlı’ya Sığınanlar: Macar ve Polonyalı Mülteciler (Istanbul: Yeditepe, 2016), pp. 11–13. 11 J. S. Latka, Lehistan’dan Gelen Şehit: Mustafa Celaleddin Paşa/Konstanty Borzecki (İstanbul: Boyut, 1987), pp. 19–23. 12 M. Djelaleddin, Les Turcs anciens et modernes, par Moustapha Djelaleddin (­Constantinople: Courrier d’Orient, 1869). 13 R. H. Davison, Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774–1923: The Impact of the West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 231. 14 A. Odabaşı, ‘Mustafa Celâlettin Paşa ve Eski ve Modern Türkler’, in Eski ve Modern Türkler (İstanbul: Kaynak, 2014), pp. 28–31. 15 Latka, Lehistan’dan Gelen Şehit, pp. 27–31. 16 Ali Efendi, İstanbul’da Yarım Asırlık Vekayi-i Mühimme, pp. 70–71. 17 İ. Yerlikaya, XIX. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Siyasi Hayatında Basiret Gazetesi ve Pancermenizm, Panislamizm, Panslavizm, Osmanlıcılık Fikirleri (Van: Yüzüncü Yıl Üniversitesi Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1994), p. 90. 18 Ç. Akuş, ‘İstanbul Gazetelerinde Sedan Muharebesi (1–2 Eylül 1870)’ (Unpublished MA thesis, Manisa Celal Bayar Üniversitesi, 2019), p. 100. The articles can be found on pp. 101–170. 19 D. Mackenzie Wallace, ‘Gorchakov’, in Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 246–247. 20 E. M. Primakov (ed.), Kant︠ ︡ sler A.M. Gorchakov: 200 Let so Dni︠ ︡ a Rozhdenii︠ ︡ a [Chancellor A. M. Gorchakov. 200th Anniversary of His Birth] (Moskva: Mezhdunar. otnoshenii︠a︡ , 1998), p. 334, cited in A. Melville and T. Shakleina (eds.), Russian Foreign Policy in Transition: Concepts and Realities (New York: CEU Press, 2005), p. 241. 21 Wallace, ‘Gorchakov’, p. 247. 22 A. Kılıç, ‘A Russian Machiavelli in the Ottoman Empire: Count Ignatiev Conquers İstanbul (1864–1875)’, in Ö. Turan (ed.), The Ottoman-Russian War of 1877–78 (Ankara: Middle East University, 2007), p. 5. 23 Ibid., p. 9, 11. 24 Ibid., p. 8. 25 A. Onou, ‘The Memoirs of Count N. Ignatyev’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 10:29 (1931), pp. 390. 26 Wallace, ‘Gorchakov’; ‘Death of Count Ignatieff’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 July 1908. 27 Kılıç, ‘A Russian Machiavelli’, p. 7, 11. 28 According to Kılıç, the most remarkable example is the name of Naiden Gerov, an individual of Bulgarian ethnicity who worked as the Russian consul in Plovdiv. See Kılıç, ‘A Russian Machiavelli’, p. 9. 29 M. Celaleddin Paşa, Mirat-ı Hakikat: Tarih-i Mahmud Celaleddin Paşa, vol. 1 (İstanbul: Matbaa-i Osmaniye, 1908), p. 45. 30 S. Akşin, ‘Siyasal Tarih’, in Türkiye Tarihi, vol. 3: Osmanlı Tarihi 1600–1908 (İstanbul: Cem Yayınevi, 1997), p. 149. 31 E. Z. Karal, Islahat Fermanı Devri (1861–1876), vol. 7, Osmanlı Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1995), pp. 72–75. 32 W. H. Dawson, ‘Forward Policy and Reaction 1874–1885’, in A. W. Ward and G. P. Gooch (eds.), The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783–1919, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1923), p. 97. 33 Karal, Islahat Fermanı Devr, p. 82. 34 TNA FO 424/39, Sir H. Elliot to the Earl of Derby, 11 August 1875, p. 40. See also Davison, Essays in Ottoman, pp. 306–307.

66  Uygar Aydemir 35 S. J. Shaw and E. K. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol. II: Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 162. 36 M. Paşa, Tabsıra-i İbret, ed. Ali Haydar Midhat (İstanbul: Hilal Matbaası, 1325), p. 162. 37 H. Yusuf Şehsuvaroğlu, Sultan Aziz: Hayatı, Hal’i, Ölümü (İstanbul: Milli Saraylar Daire Başkanlığı, 2011), p. 77. 38 TNA FO 424/41, Sir H. Elliot to the Earl of Derby, 25 May 1876. 39 Historians use the term ‘Young Ottomans’ to denote the first generation of Turkish intellectuals who emerged in the 1860s and the 1870s and demanded liberal political change, which distinguishes them from the second generation that emerged in the 1890s and beyond. However, in the sources analysed in this research, the term ‘Young Turks’ was commonly used to refer to the Young Ottomans. In order to maintain historical accuracy, it is my preference to employ this naming convention throughout this study. 40 E. Tevfik, Yeni Osmanlılar Tarihi, ed. Ziyad Ebüzziya, vol. 2 (İstanbul: Kervan Kitapçılık, 1973), p.  144; Â. Hüseyin Bey, Sultan II. Abdülhamid’in Sürgün Günleri, 1909–1918: Hususi Doktoru Âtıf Hüseyin Bey’in Hatıratı, ed. M. Metin Hülagü (İstanbul: Pan Yayıncılık, 2003), p. 247. 41 Karal, Islahat Fermanı Devri (1861–1876), p. 7, 109. 42 Y. Öztuna, Resimlerle 93 Harbi: 1877–78 Türk-Rus Savaşı (İstanbul: Hayat Yayınları, 1969), pp. 14–15. 43 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 44 M. Nedim Paşa, ‘Sadr-ı Esbak Mahmud Nedim Paşa’nın Üss-i İnkılab’a Müdafaanamesi’, Ali Emiri Collection, CD 905, Millet Manuscript Library (hereafter M. Nedim Paşa, ‘Müdafaaname’). 45 A. Midhat Efendi, Üss-i İnkılap: Kısm-ı Evvel. Kırım Muharebesi’nden Cülûs-i Hümayuna Kadar, vols. 1, 2 (İstanbul: Takvimhane-i Amire, 1294). 46 M. Nedim Paşa, ‘Müdafaaname’, fols 25v–26r. 47 M. Nedim Paşa, ‘Müdafaaname’, fols 111v–112v. 48 M. Nedim Paşa, ‘Müdafaaname’, fol. 64r. 49 E. J. Zürcher, ‘Res̲ h̲ īd Pas̲ h̲ a, Muṣṭafā’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2012), https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/reshid-pashamustafa-SIM_6278. 50 M. Nedim Paşa, ‘Müdafaaname’, fols 65r–65v. 51 M. Nedim Paşa, ‘Müdafaaname’, fols 69r–70r.

Part 2

Nationalism and race

5

The impact of the war on definitions of the nation in France and Germany Corentin Marion

In a famous lecture titled ‘What is a Nation?’ in 1882, Ernest Renan, the French philologist and theologian, offered a civic, voluntarist definition of a nation that would come to be canonised as a perfect encapsulation of the French model of nationhood: A nation . . . presupposes a past; it is summarised, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite.1 Renan’s notion of a ‘daily plebiscite’ came to be considered a fundamental principle of the French nation. A whole teleology sought to frame it as the blueprint for French politics, from the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and the Revolution to the 1889 nationality law establishing the principle of jus soli, which was taken as a symbol of legal openness to foreigners even though its true aim was to enlarge the number of conscripts.2 The German conception of the nation is often seen as incompatible with the French.3 It was essentialised in the terms of the Saxon philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Prussian poet Ernst Moritz Arndt. Fichte, in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), wrote of a Germanness marked by the language (Ursprache) and tradition of the original people (Urvolk). Arndt, in an 1813 song asking ‘What is the fatherland of the Germans?’ answered with ‘Wherever the German tongue can be heard’.4 In his pamphlet ‘What we demand from France’, written in August 1870, the Prussian conservative historian Heinrich von Treitschke, wrote: We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better than these unfortunates themselves what is good for the Alsatians. . . . Against their will we shall restore them to their true selves. The spirit of a people includes not only the generations that live alongside one another, but also those that live one after the other. Against the misguided will of those who live there, we invoke the will of those who were there before.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-8

70  Corentin Marion In fact, Renan’s well-known later position in favour of setting aside the past and appealing to the will of the individual stemmed from a discursive strategy that he had adopted in the same period as Treitschke’s pamphlet, the period of the FrancoPrussian War. In La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, published in late 1871, Renan discussed the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to the German Empire. He wrote that ‘the individuality of each nation is undoubtedly constituted by race, language, history and religion, but also by something much more tangible, by current consent, by the will of the different provinces of a state to live together’.6 Rather than an ‘ethnographic, archaeological politics’, he insisted that the present consent of the population was needed to determine a criterion of belonging and the delimitation of nations.7 Why, then, did Renan, and many French intellectuals along with him, prefer the will of individuals to belong together to the ‘ethnographic principle’ as a cornerstone of the nation? The answer lies in the Franco-Prussian War itself. The period 1870–71 was a major turning-point in many regards for both France and Germany. On the French side, the Second Empire came to an end, and the Third Republic was born. On the German side, the first German nation state, the Kaiserreich, was born. From a French point of view, defeat in the war was the symbol of an intellectual inferiority, one that produced, in the words of Claude Digeon, a ‘German crisis of French thought’.8 The country was rattled to the core of its identity, and some of the extant definitions of basic concepts (Grundbegriffe, to use Reinhart Koselleck’s terminology), such as that of the nation, suffered a ‘loss of plausibility’.9 Both France and Germany had to answer new questions raised by the war and its aftermath, shaping concepts of the nation on the two sides. These concepts were developed in dialogue and mutual reaction, a process that led to the invention of a French-German antagonism in the conception of a nation.10 France was in need of both reasons and a meaning for its defeat, as well as rhetorical and political means to counter the territorial claims of the German Empire. German intellectuals, for their part, had to justify those claims, often addressing an international public opinion that sided with the French Republic, which was seen as a victim after the Battle of Sedan. Here, the question of Alsace-Lorraine was particularly important. Although there had been German claims to these territories from 1840 onwards, Bismarck’s demands after Sedan came as a shock to French public opinion, leading Jules Favre to write: ‘we shall not give up an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses’.11 Basic categories like ‘us’ and ‘them’ were called into question, and the fate of Alsace-Lorraine pointed to a need for new definitions of the nation. Here, a concept of the nation is to be understood as a set of discourses on a constructed or imagined form of identity that defines a given collective of men and women as well as their criteria of belonging. This collective sees itself as the expression of a continuity through time and, in some cases, as transcending other forms of belonging (e.g., class, gender, generation) and any particular interests. It goes hand in hand with a vision of oneself and others that makes one’s nation exceptional and distinct from others. Despite its claim of internal communality, the nation is also exclusive, since it discriminates between an inside and an outside.12 But this exclusiveness may also operate within the nation, along the lines of race, gender and religion, for instance, despite the tendency to claim to

The impact of the war on definitions of the nation 71 transcend all other categories and forms of belonging. While claiming to represent the common nature of all of its members, the nation, and herein lies its paradoxical nature, nonetheless also distinguishes some members as more ‘national’ than others. During the war, and shortly after, there was a series of more or less direct exchanges on these entangled questions between French and German intellectuals. Together they constituted a sort of transnational publication series, beginning in the summer of 1870 and ending in late 1871. This series featured authors such as the liberal historian Theodor Mommsen from Schleswig, French ancient historian Fustel de Coulanges, Brittany-born Ernest Renan, liberal protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauss from Württemberg, Franco-Belgian art historian Alfred Michiels and Prussian conservative historian Heinrich von Sybel. It also included the Orientalist and philologist Joseph Derenbourg, who was German until 1843 and lived in Paris from 1841 onwards, and his close friend, the rabbi and theologian Abraham Geiger in Berlin. In the first part of this chapter, I will trace the genesis of these discussions. I will then reconstruct the lines of argument taken in the debates, focusing on the question of Alsace-Lorraine. In the conclusion, I will look at how these debates contributed to shaping a French-German antagonism around nationhood. A transnational discussion David F. Strauss and Ernest Renan both wrote a Life of Jesus, in 1835 (Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet) and 1863 (Vie de Jésus), respectively. The latter was deeply inspired by the former despite the two men’s difference in religious faith (Renan was Catholic and Strauss Protestant). Both explored the life of Jesus from a historical and philological perspective. Renan even described him as an ‘extraordinary man’ (not a divine being) in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1862, which led to his removal from his chair. Similarly, Strauss’s own Life of Jesus resulted in his being banned from teaching at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen after 1835. In 1870, the two theologians exchanged open letters on the Franco-Prussian War, published in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung and the Journal des débats. The connection between the two was not direct but was mediated from Switzerland by the translator and author Charles Ritter. Ritter trained as a theologian in Geneva but, like Renan, abandoned the priesthood and went to work as a private tutor in Stuttgart in 1862, where he became friends with Strauss.13 Returning to Switzerland, Ritter decided in 1868 to translate a series of Strauss’s texts into French and publish them as an anthology.14 He then spoke of them to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a well-known Parisian literary critic and member of the Académie Française. It was Sainte-Beuve who drew a comparison between some of Strauss’s work and that of Renan. Sainte-Beuve encouraged Ritter to translate the selected pieces and spoke to Renan about the project, urging him to recommend it to his publisher Lévy.15 Ritter initially considered Sainte-Beuve himself as a potential author for the preface of the book, but Sainte-Beuve quickly suggested Renan instead, who immediately accepted. Renan wrote to Ritter that he had never had direct contact with Strauss and explained that

72  Corentin Marion he regretted this fact.16 A few months later, however, Strauss had his last book, a biography of Voltaire, sent to Renan, and in his letter of thanks (now lost), Renan offered his correspondent some comments on the war. On 18 August, Strauss published an open letter to Renan in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung as a response to these comments. Strauss wrote to Ritter a few days later that ‘in response to a friendly letter from Renan, I felt inclined, on the occasion of his statement about the war, to reply to him in an open letter, which I would like him to receive kindly, as it is meant’.17 Ritter passed on this information to Renan, and on 28 August 1870, Renan wrote to Ritter that he had obtained the open letter. Renan’s reply to Strauss’s open letter was published on 16 September in the Journal des débats. Strauss’s reply took the form of a small pamphlet sold for the benefit of the German war wounded titled Krieg und Friede (War and Peace), which included Strauss’s first letter, Renan’s reply and Strauss’s last letter in 1870. Renan’s own final reply was published in 1871 in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, which reproduced his previous letter to Strauss along with a chapter titled ‘New letter to Mr. Strauss’.18 In it, Renan expressed regret at having responded so late to Strauss’s pamphlet and explained that the war had prevented him from responding. He had, in fact, remained in Paris during the siege, before fleeing in April during the Commune, first to Versailles and then to Sèvres.19 This intellectual encounter between Strauss and Renan is an interesting one. The two corresponded neither before 1870 nor after 1871 but were well aware of each other’s work and may have felt a sense of similarity based on a shared intellectual ethos as philosophers remaining ‘above the fray’, in Romain Rolland’s later words. In September 1871, the Viennese liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse published a private letter written by Joseph Derenbourg in Paris to his close friend Abraham Geiger in Berlin, along with a reply from Geiger. The editors wrote a short introduction framing the exchange as exemplary of the ‘attitudes now prevailing among the Germans and the French’ and Derenbourg in particular as exemplary of the French, accusing him of ‘resentment’ (Unmuth). Derenbourg first wrote an account of the barbarity of the Prussian troops and argued that Germany had done everything possible to provoke the ‘adventurist’ Napoleon III into declaring war. Geiger dismissed his friend’s comments as emotional and ‘utterances emitted in pain’. He also accused Derenbourg, himself German-born, of not being the right person to vilify Germany (described as the ‘body of the mother’) and German culture. Geiger’s reply also contested Derenbourg’s assertion that the Jews owed ‘any progress in the field of civic equality’ to France, arguing that it was only in Germany that they could reach ‘equal spiritual dignity and elevation’ (‘der gleichen geistigen Würdigkeit und Erhebung’), as well as genuine freedom of thought.20 The other discussions that will be analysed here were less direct. The remarks of Theodor Mommsen, for instance, were not even directly addressed to the French but to the Italians. Mommsen did not take a purely intellectual position but acted in the service of his state, seeking to have a political impact by trying to prevent Italy from helping France. Germany feared a generalisation of the conflict in two directions: first to the Habsburg Empire, which had been defeated by Prussia in 1866, and second to Italy, which France had helped to unify. But this generalisation did

The impact of the war on definitions of the nation  73 not come to pass. Mommsen’s pamphlet Agli Italiani (To the Italians), published in Italian in 1870, included several letters. One, written in Berlin on 23 July 1870, was first published in the Milanese newspaper La Perseveranza; another, to the editor of the Milanese newspaper Il Secolo, is undated but was included in the newspaper on 20 August 1870; and the last was an undated letter. In October 1870, French historian Fustel de Coulanges published a pamphlet of his own in reply to Mommsen. He signed it ‘M. Fustel de Coulanges, ancien professeur à Strasbourg’, emphasising his connection to a city that Mommsen cited several times, and that at the time was occupied by the Germans after a period under siege. Fustel accused Mommsen of having written ‘a veritable manifesto against our nation’, which he sought to defend: ‘You have set aside your historical studies to attack France; I set mine aside to answer you’.21 For his part, Franco-Belgian art historian Alfred Michiels published Les droits de la France sur l’Alsace et la Lorraine (The rights of France to Alsace and Lorraine) in Brussels in 1871. He denounced the ‘flood of pamphlets, volumes, and newspapers hostile to France’ that was ‘inundating Germany and overflowing into Europe’. He then expressed a wish ‘to bring the facts back into their true light, to plead before Europe a cause without defenders’. He accused Germans of making deceptive claims to Alsace and Lorraine and some English intellectuals (especially Thomas Carlyle and Lord Russell) of spreading those claims.22 Much like Mommsen, then, Michiels was moved to write on the subject by foreign public opinion. Heinrich von Sybel then published a pamphlet that was translated into French, Les droits de l’Allemagne sur l’Alsace et la Lorraine (The rights of Germany to Alsace and Lorraine) in February 1871, also in Brussels. Sybel observed that Michiels was not an unknown pamphleteer but was credited with some authority as a historian, and yet, he wrote, ‘one is struck at first sight, when reading Michiels’ text, by its complete nullity from a scientific point of view’.23 The question of Alsace-Lorraine The focus of these French-German debates lay on the justification of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. During the war, the German high command, and large sections of society in the German states, very quickly demanded the annexation of these territories. The intention of Bismarck and the German high command was to use them to create a cordon sanitaire between France and the German states, on grounds of the security threat posed by France. Bismarck saw Strasbourg as Germany’s ‘housekey’; any other justifications were, in his view, ‘professors’ ideas’ (Professorenideen).24 The commission in charge of drawing up the border considered various types of factors: strategic (along forts and topographical barriers), administrative (according to a logic of territorial administrability, only predominantly non-French-speaking territories were to be annexed) and geological (around Lorraine’s Minette reserves of iron ore in particular). The aforementioned professors used their ideas in the service of their nation, to justify this annexation ex post. To do so, they drew on a broad collection of arguments, from claims of a ‘racial’ and historical belonging of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany and its repressed

74  Corentin Marion Germanness (Deutschthum) to the idea of natural borders along the Vosges and the negative stance of the French on German unity. French intellectuals were led both by the annexation itself and by German scholars’ advocacy of claims of ancient and historical belonging, language and ‘race’ to adopt the opposite attitude, that of Renan and Fustel, emphasising the desire to belong as a fundamental criterion for membership in a nation. Germany’s failure to hold any plebiscites or referendums to evaluate the support of the population for the annexation implicitly supported this contrasting strategy. Some of the German disputants, especially Heinrich von Sybel, insisted on the idea that Alsace was mainly inhabited by German speakers, thus making it a German territory. To support this view, Sybel relied on a statistical study by Richard Böckh tracing a set of German-speaking territories in the neighbouring countries of the Zollverein, which he called the ‘Deutscher Sprachgebiet’ (German linguistic territory).25 The local population must be considered German, Sybel affirmed, since they had been speaking the same language as their German neighbours in Baden since the fifth century: The inhabitants are of the same race, not as the French from the other side of the Vosges, but as the people of Baden from the other side of the Rhine. . . . Thus the ‘form and the attributes of the soil’ just as much as language and race speak in favour of the political union of the Alsatians with Germany and against their union with France.26 Other authors argued that this annexation was a way to release a repressed or ‘ancient half-stifled Germanness’ (alte halb erstickte Deutschthum), in David Strauss’s words.27 Theodor Mommsen also argued that the German-speaking population of Alsace was repressed and that its nationality had been scorned. He criticised ‘the tyrannical intolerance of the French towards those with the impudence not to speak the language of civilisation par excellence, almost a crime of lèsenation’.28 According to Mommsen, the French government had been waging a ‘war against the German language’ that was also a war against ‘the religion, morality and civilisation of the country’, an idea he borrowed from an Alsatian clergyman cited in the work of Richard Böckh.29 Mommsen also cited Böckh’s work in support of the claim that ‘in Alsace today, apart from some little valleys in the Vosges belonging to the French race, the Alsatian population is still predominantly German’.30 Although in reality the number of Germanophones had been decreasing since the mid-nineteenth century, for Mommsen Alsace was still very much German, and the annexation was thus simply a matter of bringing Germans together, not of taking anything truly French. Mommsen’s aim was to show that the annexation was not a conquest but a ‘just and necessary’ claim. To this end, he recycled Böckh’s idea that the French had been occupying Alsace and trying to repress its Germanness ever since 1814.31 In Böckh’s words, ‘since that time we have seen the efforts of the French [des Franzosenthums] to break the spiritual unity of Alsace with Germany’.32 Through this argument, Mommsen was actually seeking to reassure Germany’s other neighbours, who

The impact of the war on definitions of the nation 75 saw the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine as a threat. The idea of French anti-­German politics in Alsace seemed to justify Germany’s action there in the name of the principle of nationalities. In response, Fustel de Coulanges argued that Mommsen understood this principle differently than the rest of Europe. For Fustel, the principle of nationalities could only be used to justify the disobedience of a population against a foreign invader, not to justify a state’s annexation of territories: You invoke the principle of nationality, but you understand it differently from all of Europe. According to you, this principle entitles a powerful state to seize a province by force, solely on the basis of the assertion that the province is occupied by the same race as the state. According to Europe and common sense, it merely entitles a province or a population not to obey a foreign master against its will.33 Fustel also argued that it could not be said that the Alsatians felt themselves to be German, since they had resisted the German siege and bombing of Strasbourg.34 The same idea was brought up by Joseph Derenbourg, who, in his letter to Geiger a year later, depicted the ‘soldiers’ fury and destructiveness’ and the massacres of the Prussian troops. Derenbourg also argued that Alsace was actually a province where ‘only Mucker [hypocrites] like to indulge in Prussian pietism’.35 Against the arguments of German intellectuals, most French authors argued that race and language could not be considered sufficient criteria for membership of a nation. Fustel argued that ‘men feel in their hearts that they are a people when they have a community of ideas, interests, affections, of memories and hope’, that is, what is ‘current and alive’, and not race or language, which he dismissed as ‘the remainder and the sign of a distant past’.36 Renan affirmed the same idea in 1882: Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers, nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral consciousness that we call a nation.37 But not all French authors subscribed to this subjective idea of the nation. Alfred Michiels, for example, wrote that ‘the principle of nationalities . . . is not an absolute principle; it combines with the principle of territory’, which he described in terms of the climate, the ‘attributes of the soil’ and local influences uniting otherwise different people.38 Michiels sought to justify the ‘rights of France’ with reference to the historical inclusion of Alsace-Lorraine in France, from a dynastic/ historical point of view. Renan, Michiels and Fustel also attempted a reductio ad absurdum of the racial argument based on the view that Prussia was actually of Slavic origin and thus itself not totally German.39 As the historian Michael Werner rightly pointed out in 1995: ‘By doing so, however, the French critics were drawn into the very logic and arguments that they wished to combat. Their denunciation of Prussia or its leaders as non-Germanic could then be turned back against the French accusers: was Alsace perhaps more German than Prussia?’40

76  Corentin Marion Another of the main questions raised by the fate of Alsace-Lorraine was that of borders. Which borders were legitimate? This had been a recurring debate in the French-German relationship, and the year 1870 posed this question anew. The semantics used by authors on both sides relied largely on the metaphor of the body. Renan, for example, in his first open letter to Strauss, wrote that ‘if one has the goal of destroying France, nothing could be better designed than such a plan; once mutilated, France would convulse and perish’.41 Strauss answered him, not without irony: I believe the body of the French people and the French state to be capable of a more tenacious vitality. And I must wonder all the more at your demonstration of such a lack of confidence in French nationality when I consider that it is only mainly German provinces whose separation threatens you. France, you tell us, would no longer be able to survive if its German provinces were to be taken away; its body would no longer be able to sustain itself if the inflow of German blood were to be cut off: I would not like to have made this confession if I were French.42 This metaphor of a damaged body, of blood, ‘convulsions’, or amputation, as when Renan wrote that ‘the removal or the atrophy of a limb makes the whole body suffer’ or Michiels of a ‘dissolution of the organs’, was also used on the German side.43 Heinrich von Sybel, for example, depicted Alsace-Lorraine as organically belonging to Germany and only artificially grafted onto France: ‘It was only with the Revolution that these last shreds would be torn from the body to which they had belonged for ten centuries, to be sutured to France, this time in the name of freedom and fraternity’.44 In addition to these corporeal metaphors, authors on both sides used geographical arguments. Michiels wrote, for example, that ‘from the point of view of strategy as well as geography, [Lorraine] is a dependency, a necessary complement to France’s territory’.45 Sybel responded with topological considerations: ‘In the social life of people, the river is not a means of isolation, but of communication, whereas mountains make all connections more difficult. . . . The Rhine border is an unnatural boundary’.46 Here again, while Michiels presented pseudo-historical and pseudo-­geographical arguments, Renan downplayed the influence of soil, race or language as criteria of belonging to a nation. And among German authors, there was also a divergence: while Sybel argued for the idea of mountains as the more ‘natural’ borders and therefore the only acceptable ones, Strauss defended the annexation on the basis of military and strategic arguments, not geographic ones. He argued that it was needed to protect the south German states against a future French invasion: You, south German states, have now helped to humiliate France, to remove great parts of her territory. You can take it as a certainty that she will remind you of this, that she will eventually seek to take revenge upon you. How could you resist her, if you do not unite yourselves firmly and completely with your north German brothers?47

The impact of the war on definitions of the nation 77 These differences in strategy on the part of Michiels and Strauss with regard to their respective fellow countrymen can easily be explained by their particular argumentative framings. Michiels sought to deny to Germany any possessive right to Alsace-Lorraine on pseudo-historical grounds, while Strauss in his open letters was addressing Renan as much as his fellow south Germans in pleading for a German unity that included the southern states. Conclusion ‘Our policy is the policy of the law of nations; yours is the policy of races: we believe that ours is the better one’, Renan wrote in his final letter to Strauss at the end of 1871. With this sentence, he stressed the incompatibility of the French and German criteria for national belonging and asserted the superiority of the French model of the nation.48 On the one hand, the will of the ‘people’; on the other hand, the uniting of the ‘race’, of an ethnic and linguistic entity. In the end, however, this opposition is not an ontological one but an adaptation to the available or recoverable (abrufbar in Koselleck’s terminology) senses of the nation, as well as discursive strategies in a particular argumentative context.49 Bismarck’s main motivations for the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine were strategic in nature, while intellectuals defended the undertaking using arguments based on these territories’ ostensible racial and linguistic belonging to Germany. Although some French intellectuals responded with historical and racial arguments of their own, most focused on arguments based on the will of the people, precisely because the Germans who claimed to be freeing the oppressed Germanic populations of Alsace and Lorraine had not actually consulted them on the matter. Interestingly enough, when Alsace and Lorraine were restored to France in 1918, the French authorities also did not find it necessary to conduct any such plebiscite.50 French intellectuals challenging the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine were in a difficult situation. They had to find new definitions for the nation and new explanatory schemes, first to face the event itself but more concretely to reject the annexation without inadvertently offering grounds for a reconsideration of the integration of Savoy and Nice into France in 1860. Hence their emphasis on the notion of the plebiscite, which had occurred in 1860 but not in 1870–71. Their discursive strategy was to criticise ‘a faith as absolute in the virtue of a race . . . as that professed by Mr von Bismarck and Mr von Moltke’.51 Renan repeatedly used a reductio ad absurdum to discredit his German interlocutor. In his final letter to Strauss, in December 1871, he wrote: Almost anywhere the ardent patriots of Germany claim a Germanic right, we might claim an earlier Celtic right, and before the Celtic period there were, we are told, the Allophylians, the Finns, the Lapps; and before the Lapps there were the cavemen; and before the cavemen there were the orangutans. With this philosophy of history, the only legitimate cause in the world would be the right of the orangutans, unjustly dispossessed by the perfidy of the civilised.52

78  Corentin Marion German intellectuals, on the other hand, had to find ex post reasons for the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. They stressed the Germanness of these territories but, at the same time, had to reassure neighbouring countries and international public opinion as to potential claims in their own lands (namely in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands). They thus emphasised the rights won by their victory over a power that had initiated a conflict with them and France’s negative role in the unification of Germany. Treitschke, for example, wrote in August 1870 that he could not believe ‘in the unconditional value of the popular vote’ but that these lands are ours by the right of the sword, and we want to dispose of them by virtue of a higher right, the right of the German nation, which cannot allow its lost sons to alienate themselves forever from the German Empire.53 This French-German opposition in the concept of the nation is thus actually the product of a constellation that arose out of the Franco-Prussian War. Intellectuals on both sides had to (re)write the concept of the nation in order to adapt to a given argumentative setting and to the context of current events. They did so in a transnational dialogue, between imitation and rejection, in reaction to each other, inventing an antagonism, like Renan with ‘his’ politics against ‘theirs’, ‘us’ against ‘them’. Yet, there is nothing more internationally shared than nationhood, and while each nationalism tends to stress its uniqueness and exceptionality, in doing so it obfuscates its own transnational character. Nations are not simply local, social, political, cultural and economic constructs. They are subject to discursive and semantic readjustments through exchange, re-appropriation, distancing, imitation or mutual rejection between countries, and as such they are themselves transnational constructions. Notes 1 E. Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’, in H. K. Bhaba (ed.), Nation and Narration, trans. M. Thom (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 19. I would like to thank Paul Reeve for his help with the English and Eleonora Marchioni for her help with the sources in Italian, as well as Christine Krüger for providing some of the sources. 2 See E. Fureix and F. Jarrige, La modernité désenchantée. Relire l’histoire du XIXe siècle français (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), pp. 220–221. 3 For a critical account of this idea, see R. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 4 See J. G. Fichte, ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation, 1808’, in J. G. Fichte (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965), pp. 259–504; E. M. Arndt, ‘Des Deutschen Vaterland’, in Kriegs-Gesänge für freie Deutsche. Als Taschenbuch zum Feldzuge (Altenburg, 1813), pp. 39–41. 5 H. von Treitschke, ‘Was fordern wir von Frankreich? [1870]’, in H. von Treitschke and K. M. Schiller (eds.), Aufsätze, Reden und Briefe, vol. 3 (Meersburg: Hendel, 1929), p. 454. ‘Wir Deutschen, wie wir Deutschland und Frankreich kennen, wissen besser, was den Elsässern frommt, als jene Unglücklichen selber. . . . Wir wollen ihnen wider ihren Willen ihr eigenes Selbst zurückgeben. Der Geist eines Volkes umfasst nicht bloß die nebeneinander, sondern auch die nacheinander lebenden Geschlechter. Wir berufen

The impact of the war on definitions of the nation 79 uns wider den missleiteten Willen derer, die da leben, auf den Willen derer, die da waren.’ 6 E Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (Paris: Lévy, 1871), p. 197. All translations are by the author unless stated otherwise. 7 Ibid., p. 197. 8 C. Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). 9 R. Koselleck et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1997); W. Steinmetz, ‘La sémantique historique. Problèmes théoriques et pratiques de recherche’, Passés Futurs, 5 (2019), https://www.politika.io/fr/notice/semantique-historique-problemestheoriques-pratiques-recherche. 10 This idea can be found in R. Brubaker’s analysis (in a more limited sense, since he speaks only of ‘ideological accentuation’), referring to Renan and Fustel de Coulanges but without a systematic account of their discussions. See Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p. 12. 11 J. Favre, ‘Circulaire adressée aux agents diplomatiques de la France’, 6 September 1870, La Contemporaine AFF 12118. 12 I proposed this definition in C. Marion, ‘1870 par le prisme de la nation. Échanges conceptuels franco-allemands en temps de guerre’, in N. Bourguinat, A. Dupont and G. Vogt (eds.), La guerre de 1870: Conflit européen, conflit global (Montrouge: Éditions du Bourg, 2020), p. 244; See R. Koselleck, F. Gschnitzer, B. Schönemann, K. F. Werner, ‘Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse’, in Koselleck et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 7, pp. 141–146. 13 See the biographical notice in CH BGE Ms. Fr. 2607. 14 D. F. Strauss, Essais d’histoire religieuse et mélanges littéraires (Paris: Lévy, 1872). 15 CH BGE Ms. Fr. 2601. 16 Letter from Renan to Ritter, 3 September 1869 and 11 March 1870, CH BGE Ms. Fr. 2601. 17 Letter from Strauss to Ritter, 21 August 1870, CH BGE Ms. Fr. 2608/04. 18 D. F. Strauss, ‘An Ernst Renan’, Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 August 1870, pp. 3657–3659; E. Renan, Journal des débats, 16 September 1870, p. 3; D. F. Strauss, Krieg und Friede: Zwei Briefe an Ernst Renan nebst dessen Antwort auf den ersten (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1870); Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle. 19 BNF NAF-11953. 20 J. Derenbourg and A. Geiger, ‘Ein Briefwechsel’, Neue Freie Presse, 19 September 1871, p. 4. 21 N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alsace est-elle allemande ou française? Réponse à M. Mommsen (Paris: Dentu, 1870), p. 3. 22 A. Michiels, Les droits de la France sur l’Alsace et la Lorraine (Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1871), pp. 5–6. 23 H. von Sybel, Les droits de l’Allemagne sur l’Alsace et la Lorraine. À propos d’un pamphlet publié récemment (Brussels: Devaux, 1871), p. 8. 24 Cited in W. Haubrichs, ‘Der Krieg der Professoren. Sprachhistorische und sprachpolitische Argumentation in der Auseinandersetzung im Elsaß-Lothringen zwischen 1870 und 1918’, in R. Marti (ed.), Sprachenpolitik in Grenzregionen (Saarbrücken: SDV, 1996), pp. 215–216. 25 R. Böckh, Der Deutschen Volkszahl und Sprachgebiet in den europäischen Staaten. Eine statistische Untersuchung (Berlin: J. Guttentag, 1869). 26 Sybel, Les droits de l’Allemagne, pp. 108–109. ‘Les habitants sont de même race, non pas que les Français d’au-delà les Vosges, mais que les Badois d’au-delà du Rhin. . . . Donc la ‘forme et les propriétés du sol’ non moins que la langue et la race parlent en faveur de l’union politique des Alsaciens avec l’Allemagne, et contre leur union avec la France.’

80  Corentin Marion 27 Strauss, Krieg und Friede, p. 58. 28 T. Mommsen, Agli Italiani (Florence: Stabilimento Civelli, 1870), p. 18: ‘la tirannica intolleranza de’ Francesi contro chi ha l’impudenza d’ignorare la lingua della civiltà per eccellenza, delitto poi quasi di lesa nazione . . .’. 29 Ibid., pp. 17–18: ‘che la guerra fatta dal governo alla lingua tedesca si faceva pure alla religione, alla moralità, alla civiltà del paese.’ See Böckh, Der Deutschen Volkszahl, p. 162. 30 Mommsen, Agli Italiani, p. 17. 31 France had actually occupied these territories since the second half of the sixteenth century, and its possession of them was reinforced by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), in which the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun were officially ceded to France. The year 1814 is the date of the Treaty of Paris, establishing the borders of France after Napoleon, including Alsace and Lorraine. 32 Böckh, Der Deutschen Volkszahl, p. 161. 33 Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alsace est-elle allemande, p. 6. 34 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 35 Derenbourg and Geiger, ‘Ein Briefwechsel’, p. 4. 36 Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alsace est-elle allemande, p. 10, 14. 37 Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, p. 34 (the translation by M. Thom has been slightly modified here). The original: ‘L’homme n’est esclave ni de sa race, ni de sa langue, ni de sa religion, ni du cours des fleuves, ni de la direction des chaînes de montagnes. Une grande agrégation d’hommes, saine d’esprit et chaude de cœur, crée une conscience morale qui s’appelle une nation.’ (E. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1882), p. 29). 38 Michiels, Les droits de la France, pp. 78–79. 39 On Renan’s highly ambiguous position on race and its reception up to today, see R. D. Priest, ‘Ernest Renan’s Race Problem’, Historical Journal, 58:1 (2015), pp. 309–330. 40 M. Werner, ‘La nation revisitée en 1870–1871. Visions et redéfinitions de la nation en France pendant le conflit franco-allemand’, Revue germanique internationale, 4 (1995), p. 192. 41 Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’, p. 3: ‘Si l’on a pour but de détruire la France, rien de mieux conçu qu’un tel plan; mutilée, la France entrerait en convulsions, et périrait.’ 42 Strauss, Krieg und Friede, pp. 54–55: ‘Da traue ich dem französischen Staats- und Volkskörper doch eine zähere Lebenskraft zu. Und um so mehr muß ich mich über solchen Mangel an Vertrauen auf die französische Nationalität bei Ihnen wundern, wenn ich erwäge, daß es ja nur wesentlich deutsche Provinzen sind, deren Lostrennung Sie bedroht. Frankreich soll nicht mehr bestehen können, wenn man ihm seine deutsche Provinzen nimmt; sein Körper soll sich nicht mehr erhalten können, wenn ihm der Zufluß deutschen Blutes abgeschnitten ist: ich möchte dieses Zugeständniß nicht gemacht haben, wenn ich Franzose wäre.’ 43 Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’, p. 3: ‘Si l’on a pour but de détruire la France, rien de mieux conçu qu’un tel plan; mutilée, la France entrerait en convulsions, et périrait.’; Renan, Journal des débats, art. cit., p. 3; Michiels, Les droits de la France, p. 24. 44 Sybel, Les droits de l’Allemagne, p. 77: ‘Il était réservé à la révolution d’arracher ces derniers lambeaux du corps auquel ils avaient appartenu pendant dix siècles, pour les souder à la France, cette fois au nom de la liberté et de la fraternité.’ 45 Michiels, Les droits de la France, p. 58. 46 Sybel, Les droits de l’Allemagne, p. 109: ‘Le fleuve est à la vie sociale des peuples, non pas un moyen d’isolement, mais une voie de communication, tandis que la montagne rend tous les rapports plus difficiles. .  .  . La frontière du Rhin est une limite contre nature.’

The impact of the war on definitions of the nation 81 47 Strauss, Krieg und Friede, p. 65: ‘Ihr habt jetzt mitgeholfen, ihr süddeutschen Staaten, Frankreich zu demüthigen, ihm schöne Länderstrecken abzunehmen. Daß es euch das gedenken, daß es gelegentlich Rache an euch zu nehmen suchen wird, dürfet ihr als gewiß betrachten. Wie wollet ihr ihm aber widerstehen, wenn ihr euch nicht fest und ganz mit euren norddeutschen Brüdern zusammenschließt?’ 48 Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle, p. 199: ‘Notre politique, c’est la politique du droit des nations; la vôtre, c’est la politique des races: nous croyons que la nôtre vaut mieux.’ 49 See W. Steinmetz, ‘Reinhart Koselleck’s metaphorical language: an application of historical semantics to one of its founding figures’, Geschichtstheorie am Werk, 24 ­January 2023, https://gtw.hypotheses.org/11421. 50 See E. Julien and M. König, Rivalités et interdépendances, 1870–1918 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Septentrion, 2018), pp. 232–333. 51 Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle, p. 191. 52 Ibid., p. 196. Renan seems to have borrowed the reference to the ‘Allophylians’ from the French biologist Armand de Quatrefages. 53 Von Treitschke, ‘Was fordern wir von Frankreich?’, p. 454.

6

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy of the Franco-Prussian War Guillaume Lancereau

In 1867, an intense controversy disturbed the quiet of the learned world. At first glance, the issue at stake may seem trivial: a year earlier, Célestin Hippeau, a historian specialising in the comparative study of education systems, had published a glossary of French poetry from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This, as well as the second volume published in 1872, received devastating criticism from the Revue critique d’histoire et de literature, a journal founded in 1866 by philologists convinced that history required proper and specific norms of scientific investigation. The first of them, Gaston Paris, declared that Hippeau’s glossary was careless, lacking in scientific method and overflowing with errors and arbitrary choices.1 In 1872, Paul Meyer, co-founder of the Revue critique, insisted that Hippeau’s second volume was already obsolete: it was fifty years behind the current standards of true historical science.2 In response, Hippeau unleashed his fury on his censors. In a letter to Gaston Paris, he castigated this much younger historian, pointing out that he was old enough to be Paris’s father and could not be treated in such a demeaning manner. Similarly, he wrote to Paul Meyer that his brutal and insolent criticism was not a way to address a colleague.3 More importantly, he added that the treatment he received was a result of his reviewers’ Germanophilia and recommended they seek instead ‘habits of urbanity and good society in the traditions of the French mind’.4 In another letter to Paul Meyer, he further claimed that his book would have been judged more favourably ‘if it had borne the name of a German author’.5 After this quarrel, Hippeau set out to publish a book on public instruction in Germany, in which he thundered against the Germanisation of French universities. He contrasted philology and bibliography, a school of vain erudition and pedantry, with the French conception of education, whose focus on ‘noble sentiments’ and the ‘elevation of the soul’ remained the sole appropriate propaedeutic for the formation of fully accomplished human beings and citizens.6 However, contrary to Hippeau’s assessment, Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer could hardly appear as blind idolaters of German methods, unconcerned about the fate of French historical writing. On the contrary, they explained that they were so critical of works like Hippeau’s glossary because they disgraced French historical science as a whole. Besides, a lexicon of medieval French was, in their eyes, a matter of national interest. They feared that a DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-9

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy  83 German author might soon take credit for this scholarly achievement if the French were not up to the task. This controversy highlights the tensions that the confrontation with German historical science had generated in French intellectual circles since the late Second Empire and, even more so, in the early years of the Third Republic. Departing from studies of historiographical nationalism, which focus on the historians’ contribution to nation-building or on the nationalist substrata of their choice of sources and subjects, this chapter puts emphasis on the schematic, caricatural and often contradictory perceptions of German scholarship that contributed to shaping the ‘modernised’ historical discipline after the Franco-Prussian War.7 Often described as the ‘German crisis in French thought’, this was indeed a time of obsessive rumination about the German advances that had made their victory possible.8 The impact of the Franco-Prussian War has been the subject of a large and growing literature illuminating its complex and competing memories, as well as its immediate impacts on the redefinition of the French nation.9 In the field of cultural production, the war provoked an aggiornamento of French university policies and intensified cultural transfers across the Rhine. Overwhelmed with astonishment at the defeat and imbued with scientism, the republican authorities implemented profound institutional and intellectual reforms. New scholarly institutions appeared, and universities generalised the experimentation of German-style seminars and encouraged students to spend time at German universities, while, in return, this metamorphosis prompted the conservative regions of the cultural field to denounce a disastrous process of intellectual acculturation.10 Yet, the historical discipline, particularly affected by these changes, shows that the consequence of the Franco-Prussian War was not so much an indiscriminate import of ‘German’ methods as an increased nationalisation of the ‘French’ historical science. Anxious to compete with Germany, French academics incorporated certain technical features, from philological knowledge to bibliographical mastery, which they associated with German scholarship. These appropriations went hand in hand with increasing efforts to reinvent a national tradition of historical writing. Just as philosophers, who were simultaneously striving to delineate a purely ‘French philosophy’, historians forged their tradition as a mirror of the German one.11 To support this dichotomy, they insisted on making historical writing a genuine science while anchoring it in the realm of the humanities.12 In contrast to the alleged narrowness, excessive technicality and lack of vision of their German counterparts, they overemphasised the literary value and clarity of style, synthetic ideas, inspired interpretations and moral intents of French scholarship. Yet, their adamant commitment to the most aristocratic values of historical writing did not shield them from the onslaught of the conservative and nationalist right, which, outraged at academia’s apparent ‘Germanophilia’, sought to reenact the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Even before 1870, actors of the French cultural field showed deep concern for foreign scholarly advances. The nineteenth century was no longer the age of Enlightenment when, confident about its cultural hegemony, France could ignore

84  Guillaume Lancereau the scientific and literary challenges of other European countries and completely ignore Germany.13 Keeping up with academic progress made abroad was becoming an obsession for French observers of the Western scientific field, especially since, in response to eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism and the French Revolution, Germany had strengthened its academic policy by generalising research seminars, disseminating technical conceptions of historical documents and encouraging the publication of sources able to support the cause of national unity.14 As exchanges across the Rhine intensified, French scholars perceived the advantages of the German organisation of knowledge in organic universities, as opposed to the isolated French facultés, and the extent of the German lead in specific fields, such as philology. The last years of the Second Empire precipitated the realisation of the ­German advances. As early as 1864, Ernest Renan recognised that German universities had fostered ‘the most valuable, adaptable, and diverse intellectual movement of which the human mind bears the memory’. While French scholarship remained mundane, rhetorical and chaotic, ‘Germany, with its doctors, created history’ in its true, scientific form.15 A few years later, commenting on the Austro-Prussian War, Renan added, ‘Some said it was the German elementary school teacher who won at Sadowa. Not at all; it was German science’.16 In 1869, historian and critic Alfred Mézières addressed the broad audience of the newspaper Le Temps on the weaknesses of the French conception of history, whose superficial and rhetorical features contrasted tragically with the scrupulousness and exactitude of German research: For several years, active minds have been trying to naturalise in France the rigorous procedures and precise methods of German science. . . . It will be to our advantage if this new current of mind rids us of the vague generalities, the oratorical pomposity, the superficial and paradoxical considerations, and the vain rhetoric which fill so many French works, where talent is not lacking, but where solid qualities are missing. . . . We still have much to do to cure ourselves of the extreme ease with which we decide questions without studying them, and of the deception which makes us give credence to light judgments as long as they are expressed in some spiritual form.17 In the decade that followed the defeat of 1870, collective concern for France’s scholarly stagnation became overwhelming. When he founded the Revue historique in 1876, Gabriel Monod could not but acknowledge the unparalleled German contribution to the historiographical progress of the present century. According to his diagnosis, this undisputable superiority stemmed from the concentration of German historical research in universities, whereas most French historians were still extra-academic writers from the worlds of law, church and literature.18 Monod’s verdict was not a death certificate for French scholarship but an exhortation to take up the challenge by learning more intensely from Germany. The newly founded Société de l’Enseignement Supérieur (1878) published a

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy 85 series of articles on the German university system in its Revue internationale de l’enseignement.19 Large cohorts of French students were sent to Germany to gather concrete proposals for university reform and acquire state-of-the-art scientific methods.20 There, they could not fail to recognise the discrepancy between the two systems. Gaston Paris described his return to France after a stay in Göttingen as a particularly ‘painful experience’ and explained that this shared feeling inspired a wide range of promising scholars to modernise the French university system.21 French universities created the rank of maître de conférences, partially modelled on the German Privatdozenten, while Monod campaigned to create the position of ‘research assistant’ that had enabled German scholars to undertake monumental editions of sources, such as the Annals of the Empire or the Chronicles of German Cities.22 The proponents of university reforms advocated the adoption of German-style seminars where students would be familiarised with the technical standards of documentary analysis. French scholars also sought to match the Germans in the publication of historical documents of national significance, in the tradition of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Commenting on the edition of Danton’s speeches, Alphonse Aulard, the main architect of the academisation of the history of the French Revolution, asked, ‘When it comes to editing the speeches of our greatest political orators, should we not show at least some of the infinite scrupulousness that German scholarship demonstrates when it weighs up every syllable of any Greek rhetorician?’23 Aside from its intellectual satisfactions and strategic purposes vis-à-vis German scholarship, this scientistic turn also sculpted a new social status. By embracing the idea of l’histoire-science, academic historians now possessed the ideal tool to distinguish their intellectual dignity from ‘amateurs’ who were still relying on literary schemes of historical composition and mobilising their imagination instead of analysing historical sources. In other words, endorsing these methods was critical to autonomising history as an academic field. The centrality and universality of the German model in reformed French academia should not, however, be overestimated. Franco-German historiographical exchanges, materialised in book reviews and translations, certainly blossomed at that time, but they never produced a sustainable platform for cross-border discussion.24 French officials’ concern for foreign university experiments also led to more nuanced conclusions. Over the years, the ritual ‘pilgrimage’ to Germany quickly turned into a forced exercise, even a ‘sacrifice’ for French students.25 More importantly, the true extent of France’s borrowing from German universities was reassessed in a way that underlined significant national amendments to the German ‘model’. French modernisers always defended themselves against the accusation of imitatio Germaniae. If the German example did serve as an inspiration for reforming French higher and secondary education, the ‘impossible German model’ proved too aristocratic for a republic that promoted an alternative, republican, secular and democratic model of scholarly persona.26 As far as the writing of history was concerned, another set of difficulties arose. There too, catching up with Germany, designated as the nation of historiographical

86  Guillaume Lancereau erudition par excellence, became a matter of national importance. In 1888, Ernest Denis, a historian specialising in the study of Bohemia, wondered: Are we going to continue to let ourselves be surpassed by foreigners? Is there not something humiliating, for example, that anyone who wants to study the relations of the French Revolution with Europe is reduced to consulting almost exclusively German books, that the very documents in our archives are published only by Germans?27 At the same time, the Franco-Prussian War had given a decisive impetus to the nationalisation of the masses and entrusted history with the mission of strengthening the country’s moral unity. For many writers, there was a seed of paradox in the idea that history must meet this mandate, while scientific history-writing drew its inspiration from foreign methods and, even more so, from German ones. To resolve this contradiction, a number of post-1870 French historians insisted that an autonomous and autochthonous tradition of erudition had existed in early modern France. Therefore, operations such as source criticism and the methodical collection and edition of historical documents were not a submissive imitation of German historical science but rather a return to the sources of French historiography, a way to reconcile the French with their distant heritage. In 1889, Gabriel Monod emphasised: There was no lack of timorous and routine minds to blame these new trends and to claim that France was going to lose its native qualities without acquiring those which it lacked, that German-style erudition was going to stifle our literary qualities, and that this infatuation with meticulous scholarship was the negation of our national traditions. They forgot that, if France is the country of Bossuet and Voltaire, it is also that of Du Cange, Mabillon, and Bréquigny.28 The dean of the Sorbonne, Alfred Croiset, raised a similar argument when he deplored that this tradition had been eclipsed, after centuries of ecclesiastic scholarship, when the Enlightenment gave birth to a new social type, the social type of the honnête homme, a man of the world, raised by the Jesuits, who has ideas about everything, does not seek recognition in any field, takes precedence over those who advance research, and easily passes for a pedant.29 Both observers cared to demonstrate that Third Republic scholars did not position themselves as students of their German victors but remained faithful to their own, true tradition. Another motive for French historians to distinguish their practice from German historical science was their conviction that the latter was not, and could not

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy 87 be, objective because of its inescapable nationalism. French historians confidently embraced the idea that their own attachment to their nation was a form of peaceful and universalist patriotism, whereas German nationalism was fuelled by expansionist ambitions and contempt or hatred of other countries.30 There is no denying that German historical writings were politically tied to a nationalist agenda, but French historians liked to exaggerate this trait. While claiming that nationalism as a political phenomenon was itself a by-product of German historical science, they contended that ‘historical pan-Germanism’ was one of the main obstacles to a proper comprehension of the past. In 1879, Ernest Lavisse, a specialist in Prussian history, claimed that German universities had voluntarily submitted to the arbitrary will of the Hohenzollerns.31 In the same year, a contributor to the Revue historique wrote about Heinrich von Sybel that ‘the objectivity he seeks and hopes to have achieved remains a Germanic objectivity’.32 Twenty years later, Antoine Guilland published an overview of The New Germany and Its Historians, whose first pages opened with the following statement: When one studies the history of the formation of German unity in the nineteenth century, one is struck by the considerable role played by historians. They were the champions of the national-liberal policy that triumphed after the victories of 1866 and 1870. They made this policy possible by preparing the nation with their lessons. . . . All the great political historians of nineteenth-century Germany – N ­ iebuhr, Dahlmann, Ranke, Waitz, Giesebrecht, Droysen, Häusser, Max Duncker, Sybel, Mommsen, and Treitschke – were supporters of the ‘Lesser Germany’ under Prussian hegemony. According to them, this was a simple historical necessity that followed from the lessons of the past. And they set out to prove it, either by recounting the history of Prussia and Germany, or by dealing with the history of other countries, because, for them, the national process obeying fixed laws is the same in all countries.33 This shared assumption was a straightforward consequence of the defeat of 1870. It replicated in a more sophisticated way Ernest Renan’s remarks on the responsibility of German science for the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War. As early as September 1872, Fustel de Coulanges had expressed this point of view in the most transparent terms: The German scholar has an ardour for research and a capacity for work which astonish the French. But do not believe that this ardour and this work are in the service of knowledge. Knowledge is not the goal here; it is the means. Beyond science, the German sees the fatherland; these learned men are learned because they are patriots. The interest of Germany is the ultimate end of these tireless researchers. It cannot be said that the true scientific spirit is lacking in Germany, but it is much rarer than is generally believed. Pure and disinterested science is an exception and is only poorly appreciated.34

88  Guillaume Lancereau Moreover, after Sedan and the annexation of Alsace and Moselle to the Reich, the French saw themselves as direct victims of the triumphant nationalism nurtured by German historians. They imagined German scholars as especially eager to undermine France, its history and, naturally, its territorial claims. This is what Ernest Lavisse had in mind when he declared in 1883: ‘We are being attacked by foreign science. It invades our national history and too often tries to dishonour it. Learned men deny us the right to live, while they glorify the merits and virtues of their fatherland’.35 This resentment explains the particular ferocity with which French historians fought the German re-evaluation of the history of the Rhenish regions annexed in 1871. Christian Pfister and Rodolphe Reuss, two Alsatian-born historians, systematically denounced the partiality of German historians who claimed that Alsatians and Mosellans were essentially of German origin. Furthermore, they granted French Alsatians greater objectivity in the study of these historical questions, if not a monopoly on objectivity. ‘Only an Alsatian’, Pfister wrote of one of Reuss’s books, ‘could speak with such high impartiality about seventeenth-century Alsace’.36 Armed with these polemical conceptions of their national scholarly tradition and their immunity to aggressive expansionism, French historians constructed a position allowing them to believe they owed very little to Germany and could outshine its scientific achievements, which were inextricably tainted with nationalist intentions. More importantly, they insisted that the methodological and documentary thoroughness of which Germany was so proud was not the highest value in the French market of historiographical craft. While acknowledging the necessity of bibliographical, documentary and critical practices to which they owed their intellectual authority over ‘amateur’ historians, they maintained a hierarchy in the historical discipline between works of strict erudition and those manifesting the allegedly French qualities of style, vision and general ideas. Louis Halphen perfectly synthesised these respective ambitions in 1923: ‘the proponents of German scholarship in France were at the same time those of our historians who best embodied the pure French spirit’.37 Hayden White has rightfully pointed out this ambivalence in the meta-discourse of historians. However, what he interpreted as ‘bad faith’, epitomising the systematic epistemological uncertainties of the discipline, could appear, instead, as strategic double talk or a double standard within the field.38 In this case, the empirical and documentary criteria of historical scholarship (the ‘German’ standards) were only ‘minimum demands’, the laws on which the scientific status of historiography depended, as opposed to the ‘optimum norms’, considered as French qualities and required only of an advanced minority, an aristocracy of the historiographical mind.39 This dichotomy strongly echoes the axiological operators of ‘brilliance’ versus ‘seriousness’ that Pierre Bourdieu has designated as epistemic categories of the French academic mind; more broadly, it amounts to a classical division between the inherited and the acquired, between capital and labour. What was expected of the French scholarly elite was indeed the harmonious synthesis of these two dispositions, which had been the ideal of historical writing since La Popelinière’s conceptualisation of ‘accomplished history’ in the sixteenth

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy 89 century.40 Historians had to guard against two symmetrical excesses: literary composition without method and pure erudition without ambition, which they, respectively, attributed to the French and German cultural traditions. Immoderate love for source collection and criticism could only lead to forgetting the very object of history: the interpretation of past events and the production of general ideas. Although he was one of the main advocates for the scientific turn in late-nineteenth-century historiography, eleven years after the French defeat, Charles Seignobos wrote: A collection of information about documents and their authors is not a science. Knowing all the texts and the precautions required to use them is not knowing what we can get out of them; it is not even knowing what we seek in them. And yet this is what the training in German seminars is limited to. Of the three operations necessary for history, they neglect the most important one; they can therefore only train half-historians.41 Seignobos’s judgement rehabilitated the synthetic disposition of the historian’s mind, as opposed to their analytic faculty, and encouraged scholars to apply their necessary technical mastery of past materials to the production of general conceptions about past societies. This research agenda exploring the tensions between synthesis and analysis, general and particular, international, national and local, was famously embraced by the Annales in the interwar years, but it had already taken shape at the turn of the century, especially in Henri Berr’s Revue de synthèse that firmly condemned the abuse of ‘erudition for the sake of erudition’.42 Meanwhile, the persistent appeal of synthesis provoked renewed criticism of the inability of strictly erudite scholars to prioritise sources and phenomena, their passion for trivial facts and their habit of publishing anything, ‘whether it is interesting or not, as long as it is ancient’.43 For Rodolphe Reuss, who frequently wrote the bibliographical section of the Revue historique devoted to Germany, the excessive accumulation of meaningless and unmanageable materials stood in the way of accomplished historiography: Any paper kept in the powdery bundles of an official facility does not, by itself, deserve to be offered to the public. This has been too much forgotten in recent years. . . . By dint of accumulating preparatory works on the history of an era, we make the task almost impossible for the writer who is willing to do well, but steps back in horror before the prodigious mass of materials he is obliged to browse, for fear of hearing a haughty critic declare that he is not up to the task.44 Critical book reviews were aimed primarily at the growing number of monographs focusing on issues of excessively local interest, whose proliferation resulted from an unprecedented faith in the cumulative purpose of knowledge. These local histories were nothing but vain erudition if they did not bring to light empirical contents

90  Guillaume Lancereau allowing for deeper and broader apprehension of the past, as argued Albert Mathiez, one of the authorities on revolutionary history: ‘Local history is merely an exercise for dilettantes and an object of pure curiosity if it does not nourish general history, that is, the history of the political and social movement’.45 At the same time, Third Republic historians showed deep concern for narrative and literary composition. While dismissing lyricist or epic influences in the writing of history, as men of science, they continued to place a high value on style, as men of letters. This conception of literary craftsmanship appears transparently in the reports on the history theses defended at the Sorbonne. Dean Alfred Croiset frequently castigated candidates he accused of engaging in ‘a sort of deliberate discoloration of form and style’.46 Likewise, book reviews published in historical journals showed little sympathy for historians who ‘let the sources speak for themselves and do not bother to arrange their narrative and expose it skilfully’.47 Such symptoms of excessive modesty would prevent these historical works from nurturing, as Rodolphe Reuss maintained in the Revue critique, ‘everything that makes history a true science and everything that makes a historical work a work of art’.48 In the minds of reviewers, these qualities remained intrinsically associated with the authentic ‘French genius’.49 Although historians were anything but willing to ‘Germanise’ French research, this is precisely what the conservative and nationalist right accused them of. As the controversy over Célestin Hippeau’s glossary revealed, campaigns against the supporters of university reform erupted in the late 1860s and in the immediate post-war period. In the following decade, this crusade was even more fierce in chastising any sign of ‘Germanisation’ as a threat to national culture. Surprisingly, one of their advocates was Albert Duruy, the son of the minister who had done so much to modernise French higher education. Between 1884 and 1886, Albert Duruy published a series of articles on ‘the reform of classical studies’ describing the abdication of the French cultural spheres to German ideas and the sinking of national classical culture: What is being prepared, in fact, under this disorderly movement of reforms and projects, is again and again the trial of French science and scholarship, of the old French spirit, by a school which, suffice it to say, is of German origin and tendencies. . . . I have already said what harm it has inflicted in this ­direction – its anti-national tendencies, its efforts to bend the sharp French genius under the yoke of a culture and pedantry imported from abroad.50 The Dreyfus Affair radicalised this critical trend, especially since it put the spotlight on the Dreyfusard historian Gabriel Monod. Not only was he the editor of the Revue historique, considered the vanguard of ‘Germanised’ historiography, but he also came from a Calvinist family, which made the right suspect him of intending to subjugate France to Germany through science and education. Diatribes against the social preponderance of the Monod and other Protestant families were at the heart of Charles Maurras’s theory of integral nationalism, targeting the various

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy 91 sectors of what he called the ‘anti-France’. Maurras denounced the influence of Gabriel Monod as a ‘German sentinel in the University’, insisting on the need to cultivate French qualities before seeking inspiration from foreign thinkers and to cherish one’s national literature instead of producing a mixed literature.51 Less xenophobic and more academically legitimate actors also expressed similar cultural and political viewpoints. In 1895, the philologist Paul Monceaux exploded in the Revue universitaire against the operation of intellectual sterilisation resulting from the recrudescence, in the French cultural field, of copycats of German scholars: We all know one of these scholars because today, for some reason, they abound in the land of Molière. And they speak loudly. We see them reaching every goal by the sole virtue of pedantry – the right to bore. They are believed to be conceited when they are, in fact, the most modest in the world: they never dare to have an idea of their own. They limit their ambition to knowing what Mr X of Bonn or Mr Z of Berlin thinks on this or that point. They do not form an opinion about a book until they have been told what learned Germany has decreed.52 The traditionalist and nationalist frond gradually tended to rally conservative forces against the university. It flourished on feelings of fin de siècle decadence and opened the way to a revival of anti-intellectualist attitudes and subjectivist or spiritualist critiques of republican ‘positivism’. The antagonism reached its peak in the 1910s, dividing into two distinct camps the proponents of the classical ideal of the honnête homme, based on an elitist conception of culture générale, and the partisans of a technical and specialised scientific ethos, breaking with the last remnants of eighteenth-century dilettantism.53 The former, led by the xenophobic league the Action Française, deplored that French youth had unlearned the art of writing, while, under the iron hand of academic demagogues, general culture was being erased in favour of technical scholarly procedures deemed incapable of raising the human spirit to its full dignity. In these ranks, the two most notable polemicists were Alfred de Tarde, son of the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and Henri Massis, who would later become one of the most prominent figures of the Action Française. The pair published a series of anonymous articles in the press under the pseudonym of Agathon and in 1911 collected them into a volume titled The Spirit of the New Sorbonne. These young reactionary authors rejected entirely the positive knowledge disseminated at the Sorbonne; in literature with Gustave Lanson, in sociology with Émile Durkheim and in history with Ernest Lavisse, Charles-Victor Langlois and Alphonse Aulard. Speaking for authentic French youth, Agathon demanded that higher education return to its tradition and focus, as formerly, on beautiful facts and essential events instead of wasting its time and forces with bibliography and documentary analysis, which could only weaken and stultify the youth, both intellectually and morally. As far as history was concerned, these polemicists contested the reign

92  Guillaume Lancereau of scientific methods and excessive specialisation in favour of imagination, taste and inspired synthesis. The underlying ideal was, once again, that of the honnête homme, drawing vivid impressions and aesthetic and moral feelings from great historical exempla and classical authors. Moreover, this systematic attack on the vital principles of academic historical scholarship embraced a nationalist rhetoric contrasting the French spirit, sensitive to clarity of ideas and purity of style, to German scholarship, whose disembodied and unambitious norms of historical writing had pervaded the French nation after the defeat and the following cultural abdication of the intellectual authorities before the victor. Massis and Tarde found hope, however, in the feeling that these changes no longer went unquestioned, for the French youth was determined to react: ‘For several years, there has been a growing spiritual reluctance to submit any longer to the constraint imposed by the masters of higher education, dazzled by Germanic science. It is a revival, a spontaneous outburst of the French spirit’.54 Agathon’s articles were not an isolated revolt of young reactionary intellectuals. It echoed earlier claims of nationalist polemicists and intensified the campaign against the Nouvelle Sorbonne. In 1910, the xenophobic journalist Gustave Théry exclaimed in the newspaper L’Œuvre that ‘the Jerries have taken the Sorbonne’, adding that their triumph was also that of the Jews and Freemasonry.55 More importantly, this discourse appealed not only to the radical right lining up against the republican and Dreyfusard Sorbonne but also to actors one would not suspect of hostility towards the university, such as André Lichtenberger. A former history student at the Sorbonne, where he defended a dissertation on the origins of socialism in eighteenth-century France, he engaged more actively in editorial and literary activities before embracing the anti-rationalist vitalism at the heart of the campaign against the Nouvelle Sorbonne. Collective denunciations of the pernicious ‘Germanic influence’ were in his eyes a legitimate reaction against ‘critical and supposedly scientific rationalism’. This reaction, he contended, emanated from a new generation, which, without denying the triumphs of the modern mind, refrains from denying the inheritances of the past. As it witnesses the internationalisation of the universe in so many respects, it wants to maintain and extend the French tradition with a renewed vigour.56 This systematic assault put the accused in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they had no interest in undermining the methodology on which their monopoly over the scientific writing of history depended. On the other hand, if they were not nationalists, they were patriots, intimately attached to the notion of ‘French science’. To overcome this impasse, they strove to undermine the diagnosis formulated by Agathon and his peers. According to Alphonse Aulard, one of the main defendants, his prosecutors were fighting against opponents who existed only in their imagination.57 He opposed the detractors of the New Sorbonne by asserting

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy  93 that republican higher education did not intend to suppress the national character of French culture but, on the contrary, to nourish its classical qualities: I would like to say, however, that while pushing for scientific research and publications, I have always tried to avoid pedantry. I have given students no advice that was not respectful of the muses; I have urged them to compose and write according to the French genius. If history is a science thanks to certain methods, it is also a work of art, and our books will only be effective, scientifically speaking, if they are skilfully composed as a work of art.58 Detractors and supporters of the New Sorbonne had indeed one thing in common: their secondary education and general cultural background, which led them to believe that there existed a true, pure French culture. They shared representation of its specific traits and virtues, such as clarity, literary craftsmanship and interpretative expertise. Although they drew radically opposite conclusions from this premise, they ultimately believed in the superior value of these features over the qualities they unanimously associated with German scholarship. The culturalist reflexes incorporated throughout the nineteenth century and crystallised during the early Third Republic explain why French scholars could so easily indulge in the most chauvinistic caricatures of their German counterparts during the First World War.59 While historians Alfred Croiset and Henri Hauser vied in portraying the ‘barbarism’ of German scholars and professors, their colleagues thundered unanimously against scientific pan-Germanism. At the beginning of the war, the Manifesto signed by ninety-three German academics provided a crucial impetus to French criticism aimed at the duality and treachery of their opponents. Maurice Vernes expressed a widespread opinion when he regretted: ‘We had become students of Germany, perhaps naively. We believed in the honesty and disinterestedness of their scholarship . . . when they were sharpening the dagger with which they wanted to strike us in the back’.60 For many intellectuals, one of the benefits of the war was the realisation that the French had to cultivate their native qualities instead of imitating the German ones: Maurras rejoiced in seeing this moment as a French renaissance, a national reconciliation of the nation with itself. In a collective inquiry launched in 1916 under the title The Germans and Science, where a zoologist offered a parodic ‘Natural History of the Doctus Bochensis’, the historian Salomon Reinach mobilised the categories forged by his predecessors over the past fifty years: ‘France prevails in the field of synthesis and large individual works; Germany in detailed and collective works. French science has more initiative; the German has more method’.61 In light of these excerpts, there can be no doubt that the way in which the genuine contrasts between existing national traditions were rhetorically and normatively accentuated to match the self-perceptions of scholars had profound and longlasting effects, far beyond the competing definitions of the historians’ craft. The First World War and preceding decades thus offer us the extraordinary privilege of

94  Guillaume Lancereau witnessing just how much can be done by a few poorly thought-out ideas, such as the idea that knowledge can be placed ‘within borders, under police protection’, while praising ‘protectionism not only for turnips and cotton cloth, but also for the productions of the mind’.62 Notes 1 G. Paris, ‘Review of Célestin Hippeau, Collection des poèmes français du XIIe et du XIIIe siècles’, Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature, 24 (1867), p. 374. 2 P. Meyer, ‘Review of Célestin Hippeau, Collection des poèmes français du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 33:1 (1872), p. 611. 3 Bibliothèque Nationale de France (thereafter BNF) NAF 24422, f. 108, Célestin Hippeau to Paul Meyer, 20 June 1867. 4 BNF NAF 24442, f. 418–419, Célestin Hippeau to Gaston Paris, 20 June 1867. 5 BNF NAF 24422, f. 111, Célestin Hippeau to Paul Meyer, 23 March 1873. 6 C. Hippeau, L’instruction publique en Allemagne (Paris: Didier, 1873), p. 265. 7 G. Lancereau, ‘For Science and Country: History-Writing, Nation-Building, and National Embeddedness in Third-Republic France, 1870–1914’, Modern Intellectual History, 20:1 (2023), pp. 88–115. 8 C. Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée française, 1870–1914 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). 9 M. Werner, ‘La nation revisitée en 1870–1871. Visions et redéfinitions de la nation en France pendant le conflit franco-allemand’, Revue germanique internationale 4 (1995), pp. 181–200; K. Varley, Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War of 1870–71 in French Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); J.-F. Lecaillon, Le souvenir de 1870, histoire d’une mémoire (Paris: Giovanangeli, 2011); S. Tison, Comment sortir de la guerre? Deuil, mémoire et traumatisme, 1870–1940 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011); P. Allorant, W. Badier and J. Garrigues (eds.), 1870, entre mémoires régionales et oubli national. Se souvenir de la guerre franco-prussienne (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019). 10 M. Espagne and M. Werner, ‘La construction d’une référence culturelle allemande en France: genèse et histoire (1750–1914)’, Annales, 42:4 (1987), pp. 969–992. 11 F. Worms, ‘Au-delà de l’histoire et du caractère: l’idée de philosophie française, la Première Guerre mondiale et le moment 1900’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 31 (2001), pp. 345–363. On the ‘national traditions’ in the humanities, see P. Wagner, ‘Varieties of Interpretations of Modernity: On National Traditions in Sociology and the Other Social Sciences’, in C. Charle, J. Schriewer and P. Wagner (eds.), Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities (Frankfort: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 27–51; J. Heilbron, ‘Repenser la question des traditions nationales en sciences sociales’, in G. Sapiro (ed.), L’espace intellectuel en Europe (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), pp. 301–317. 12 F. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Paris, Cambridge University Press, 1992). 13 H. Marquis, ‘Aux origines de la germanophobie. La vision de l’Allemand en France aux XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles’, Revue historique, 286:2 (1991), pp. 283–294. 14 H. W. Paul, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The French Scientists’ Image of German Science, 1840–1919 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1972). 15 E. Renan, ‘L’instruction supérieure en France. Son histoire et son avenir’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 49 (1864), p. 69. 16 E. Renan, Questions contemporaines (Paris: Michel-Lévy Frères, 1868), p. vi. 17 A. Mézières, ‘La critique littéraire et la critique philologique’, Le Temps, 23 ­November 1869, p. 3.

Historiographical nationalism as a legacy 95 18 G. Monod, ‘Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVIe siècle’, Revue historique, 1:1 (1876), pp. 27–28. 19 G. Weisz, ‘The Anatomy of University Reform, 1863–1914’, Historical Reflections, 7:2–3 (1980), pp. 363–379. 20 H. Barbey, Le voyage de la France en Allemagne de 1871 à 1914 (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1994). 21 G. Paris, Le haut enseignement historique et philologique en France (Paris: H. Welter Editeur, 1894), p. 10. 22 Archives Nationales (hereafter AN), F17 13617. 23 A. Aulard, ‘Du texte des discours de Danton’, La Révolution française, 2:5 (1882), p. 946. 24 C.-O. Carbonell, ‘La réception de l’historiographie allemande en France (1866–1885): le mythe du modèle importé’, in M. Espagne and M. Werner (eds.), Transferts, les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988), pp. 327–344. 25 W. Lepenies, Les trois cultures. Entre science et littérature, l’avènement de la sociologie (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990), pp. 70–72. 26 C. Charle, La République des Universitaires, 1870–1940 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 19–131. 27 ‘Mélanges’, La Révolution française, 14:2 (1888), p. 744. 28 G. Monod, ‘Les études historiques en France’, Revue internationale de l’enseignement, 18 (1889), p. 599. 29 AN, AJ16 4751, f. 42–48. 30 On the normative dimension of this patriotism/nationalism dichotomy, see R. Brubaker, ‘The Manichean Myth: Rethinking the Distinction between “Civic” and “Ethnic” Nationalism’, in H. Kriesi (ed.), Nation and National Identity: The European Experience in Perspective (Zurich: Purdue University Press, 1999), pp. 55–71. 31 E. Lavisse, ‘La fondation de l’Université de Berlin’, in Études sur l’histoire de Prusse (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1896), p. 344. 32 A. Sorel, ‘Review on Heinrich von Sybel, Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1789 bis 1800’, Revue historique, 10:2 (1879), p. 470. 33 A. Guilland, L’Allemagne nouvelle et ses historiens (Paris: Alcan, 1899), pp. 1–2. 34 N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, ‘De la manière d’écrire l’histoire en France et en Allemagne depuis cinquante ans’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 101 (1872), p. 246. 35 ‘Ouverture des conférences de lettres et philologie et d’histoire’, Revue internationale de l’enseignement, 6 (1883), pp. 1129–1154. 36 C. Pfister, ‘Review on Rodolphe Reuss, L’Alsace au XVIIe siècle’, Revue historique, 68:2 (1898), p. 384. 37 L. Halphen, ‘Les historiens français et la science allemande’, Scientia, 33 (1923), p. 337. 38 H. White, ‘The Burden of History’, History and Theory, 5:2 (1966), p. 112. 39 R. Torstendahl, ‘Historical Professionalism: A Changing Product of Communities within the Discipline’, Storia della storiografia, 56 (2009), p. 4. 40 G. Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970). 41 C. Seignobos, ‘L’enseignement de l’histoire dans les universités allemandes’, Revue internationale de l’enseignement, 1:1 (1881), p. 587. 42 H. Berr, ‘Au bout de dix ans’, Revue de synthèse historique, 31:1 (1910), p. 10. 43 AN F17 13402, report by the Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. 44 R. Reuss, ‘Bulletin historique. Allemagne’, Revue historique, 14:2 (1880), p. 381. Italics in original. 45 A. Mathiez, ‘Review on Léon Dutil, L’état économique du Languedoc à la fin de l’ancien régime’, Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature, 74 (1912), p. 197. 46 AN F17 13249, Report by the Dean Alfred Croiset on Paul Mautouchet’s dissertation (1901).

96  Guillaume Lancereau 47 A. Chuquet, ‘Review on Henri Wallon, Les représentants du peuple en mission’, Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature, 29 (1890), p. 98. 48 R. Reuss, ‘Review on Paul Frédéricq, L’enseignement supérieur de l’histoire’, Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature, 49 (1900), pp. 274–275. 49 L. Liard, L’Université de Paris (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1909), pp. 105–106. 50 A. Duruy, ‘La réforme des études classiques’, Revue des Deux Mondes (1885), pp, 354–355. 51 C. Maurras, Quand les Français ne s’aimaient pas (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1916), pp. 71–104. 52 P. Monceaux, ‘Du rôle de l’érudition dans l’enseignement secondaire’, Revue universitaire, 6:1 (1895), pp. 37–38. 53 C. Bompaire-Évesque, Un Débat sur l’Université au temps de la Troisième République. La lutte contre la Nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1988); G. Sapiro, ‘Défense et illustration de “l’honnête homme”. Les hommes de lettres contre la sociologie’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 153 (2003), pp. 11–27; S. Shurts, Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898– 2000 (­Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2017). 54 Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911), p. 8. 55 G. Théry, ‘Les Boches ont pris la Sorbonne’, Les Allemands chez nous (Paris: A L’Oeuvre, 1918), pp. 1–7. 56 A. Lichtenberger, ‘L’Idée d’une Renaissance Française’, L’Opinion, 25 (1911), pp. 782–783. 57 A. Aulard, ‘Réplique à un étudiant’, L’Action, 23 November 1910, p. 1. 58 ‘Vingt-cinquième anniversaire de la fondation de la chaire d’histoire de la Révolution’, La Révolution française, 60:4 (1911), p. 363. 59 M. Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 60 M. Vernes, ‘Pour l’indépendance de l’érudition française’, Revue internationale de l’enseignement, 71 (1917), p. 420. 61 S. Reinach, ‘La science caporalisée’, in Les Allemands et la Science (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1916), p. 336. 62 É. Reclus, L’évolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1898), p. 115.

7

Racist responses to the national calamity Maciej Górny

The Franco-Prussian War was widely believed to be something more than a military conflict. In the minds of many contemporaries, the victory, the defeat and the way of waging the war represented a deeper truth about the rivalling nations.1 The astonishing Prussian triumphs, the crisis of French leadership and the bitterness of the French resistance produced rich material for intellectuals eager to identify and analyse the national character of the belligerents. This chapter analyses one such intellectual venture, Jean-Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau’s pamphlet La race Prussienne. The anthropologist, traumatised by the collapse of the French state and especially by the German bombardment of Paris, published several studies postulating a non-Aryan (or non-Indo-Germanic) racial origin of Prussians in contrast to the French and to the other Germanic ethnic groups. His pamphlet won considerable popularity among the ascending French racists and was rejected by their German counterparts. It contributed, furthermore, to the development of a racial anthropology of Europe. Given the prominence (or, rather, notoriety) of La race Prussienne, it is surprising how little is known about the intellectual inspirations of Quatrefages. Following the bloody battle of Bazeilles, the capitulation at Sedan and the proclamation of the Third Republic, a juxtaposition between French civilisation and German barbarism emerged in French public discourse.2 The charge against Germany was raised in two major contexts: historical and biological. In the former, French authors claimed that ‘the sons of Attila’ had not yet acquired the manners of civilised men or that, as a result of political events, had regressed to their original uncouth customs. The second context drew on the latest findings of science. Germans were deemed a missing link in human evolution, an allemand-outang.3 Some French intellectuals felt compelled to ask how – if ever – the German barbarism observed in the war could be reconciled with their scientific and artistic achievements. The ‘mechanised’ conduct of the war convinced them that for Germans, science had become a tool for barbarism.4 Wartime mobilisation fuelled by the appalling stories of war atrocities did not fail to affect scholars. Markus Völkel describes the head-to-head clashes between historians – David Friedrich Strauß and Ernest Renan, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and Theodor Mommsen – which served as a point of reference for less DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-10

98  Maciej Górny prominent intellectuals in both nations.5 The transformation of Germany – its militarisation and, supposedly, perfect organisation – evoked both repulsion and approbation and even a desire to emulate the German model. This contradiction was evident in Renan’s appreciation of the racial energy of the Germans, inspired as they were by the desire for world domination. Even so, for him and for other French intellectuals, the adaptation of the German model of education and social service in post-1871 France seemed a means to rejuvenate the country.6 Ruthless efficiency and barbarism thus seemed to be two sides of the same coin. This association was exemplified in the way the war was conducted, particularly the bombardment of Paris. The struggle of intellectuals spread to learned societies in both countries. Heated debates took place concerning suggestions that scholars from Germany be expelled from the Académie Française. Louis Pasteur voiced his protest against the Prussian aggression by sending back the honorary diploma he had received from the university in Bonn.7 Commenting on the German-French intellectual conflicts, Rudolf Virchow, though usually not given to chauvinism, found that the activities of the francs-tireurs, the civil war and the recurring spy hysteria testified to the deplorable mental condition of the French. He was particularly discouraged by the involvement of scholars, many of whom he knew personally, in the chauvinist campaign.8 To his credit, he condemned the political involvement of both the French and the Germans, such as Alexander Ecker, the author of a Darwinian interpretation of the war.9 For Virchow, these men had failed in their duties as scholars.10 Of the scholars criticised by Virchow, one occupied a special position and not only because of his high rank and similar scholarly interests. Armand de Quatrefages, a French anthropologist and zoologist, was the co-founder of the Paris Anthropological Society (Société d’Anthropologie) and an unrelenting propagator of science, with membership in several French and foreign scholarly associations.11 He studied in Strasbourg, where he later lectured. From 1833 on, he practiced as a physician in Toulouse, where he founded the Journal de médicine et de chirurgie de Toulouse. After moving to Paris in 1840, he focused exclusively on studying problems of anthropology winning respect beyond France. A member of different academies of sciences and – after 1879 – of the Royal Society of London, he was also awarded membership of the Légion d’Honneur. Towards the end of his life, he presided over the Société de Géographie, of which he had been a member since 1856. Among the targets hit by the barrage was the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, which held rich anthropological collections. Quatrefages perceived this as a methodical plan in the destruction of the exceptional collections for the sole purpose of degrading French science. His reaction was swift and sharp. In the Revue des Deux Mondes and then in a separate pamphlet reproduced in English translation a few months later, he offered a study of the ‘Prussian race’.12 His findings amounted to the exclusion of Prussians from among the Aryan nations and their inclusion among the Finno-Turanian peoples (and thus – in accordance with the beliefs of the period – Mongolians).13 Quatrefages opened his study with assurances of his own scientific objectivity, stating the belief that ‘[e]very political subdivision, founded on ethnology,

Racist responses to the national calamity 99 immediately leads to absurdity’.14 Ironically, this was precisely his modus operandi. In the introduction, he analysed the outward appearance of representatives of the Turanian race; interestingly enough, the example provided was not the Prussians, who were the subject of the pamphlet, but Estonians. As is well known, stated the anthropologist, the latter spoke a non-Aryan language similar to Finnish. Even their physical appearance bore out this similarity: Summing up the descriptions given of them by different authors, one finds that these people are of middle height. Their bust is long; their legs short, and the region of the pelvis large in proportion to that of the shoulders. . . . The eyes . . . are generally deeply set; the nose, straight and but little rounded, is often too small for the width of the cheeks, and the space separating it from the mouth is too short.15 Having discussed the appearance of Estonians, the author moved on to Latvians, who, in contrast to their northern neighbours, did speak an Aryan tongue. However, in anthropological terms, they did not belong there and should be counted among ‘the group of races named by turn Tchudes, Mongolians, Turanians and North Ouralians’.16 These introductory steps were necessary to move on to the main topic of the pamphlet. Having thus established a solid backdrop for his considerations, Quatrefages invoked the observation of another member of the Anthropological Society, Charles Rochet, who described the appearance of Prussian soldiers from Pomerania.17 In the eyes of both Frenchmen, despite a slightly greater height from Latvians or Estonians, Pomeranians generally shared a far-reaching similarity to both nations.18 The lack of the right proportions of the body was portrayed as a result of the fact that Finns descended from the most primordial and thus the most primitive population of Europe: the palaeolithic hunters. The Finns were distinguished from the Aryan peoples by their physical appearance as well as psychology – being rather calm, bound to tradition, but also distrustful: Unhappily all the good in this picture is marred by a quality which seems to be thoroughly national. The Fin [sic] never pardons a real or supposed offence, avenges it on the first opportunity, and is not fastidious in his choice of means. Thus is explained the frequency of assassination in Finland amongst the peasants.19 Those Finnish features of the primordial inhabitants of Prussia were then supplemented with the worst attributes of the Slavs who conquered them: aggressiveness and a tendency to treason. Germans, who were the next to conquer Prussians, absorbed the old Prussian elites in particular, without ever changing their racial profile. In Quatrefages’s view, the last stratum partaking in this process brought the most benefits to Prussians. They were the French Huguenots, who predominated among the elites of the state and were the only culture-making stratum of the whole country.

100  Maciej Górny The fact that Quatrefages saw Prussians as a mixture of four nationalities and two races – the Finno-Turanian primordial Prussians and the Aryan Slavs, Germans and French – did not mean that their attributes constituted an amalgam of the psychological features of each of the types involved. Neither did he believe in ‘race betterment’ through the beneficial influences of Aryan Germans or French Huguenots. On the contrary: the two ‘primordial’ groups proved capable of dominating the newcomers: ‘The German and the Frenchman would naturally turn into a Slave or a Fin’.20 The phenomenon supposedly reached its most striking form in the case of the French, still bound to their former fatherland by the tongue they used but in racial terms already ‘Prussianised’: Men were to be found only too easily in all ranks of the Prussian population and army who spoke French purely and without a German accent. These had no difficulty in passing themselves off as Frenchmen, in slipping in everywhere, in surprising and betraying what it was most important for us to conceal, and in preaching undiscipline and insurrection. In truth, if Linnaeus had lived in our time, he would not have failed to inscribe the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the consequences which this act has brought upon France, in his ‘Nemesis divina’.21 The loss of Huguenot families was as tragic for them as it was for France. Quatrefages, himself a Protestant, lamented the event with particular bitterness. For France, it had brought defeat in 1871. For the descendants of the French Protestants, on the contrary, it meant the loss of racial maturity, which their brethren of the old country came to possess. Meanwhile, the Prussian race was still experiencing growing pains, taking form while locked in a state of barbarism. The relationship between the Prussian race and the Germans constitutes an interesting aspect of Quatrefages’s considerations. The French anthropologist concluded that Prussians were completely distinct from Germans in racial terms. This was, however, a truth almost no one was able to see. The fact that Germany accepted Prussian leadership was a misunderstanding, an ‘anthropological error’, since in reality, ‘Prussia is ethnologically distinct from the peoples she now rules over, through the plea of a (pretended) unity of race’.22 The conclusion of the French anthropologist’s work took the shape of an appeal to European public opinion. After France’s defeat, he wrote, dark clouds were gathering over Europe, as Prussian pan-Germanism was capable of rousing the spectre of Russian pan-Slavism: Will Russia look on during this triumph of Pan-Germanism without raising her voice in the name of Pan-Slavism? Will she not rather apply German doctrines in her turn, and to her own profit? In the possible conflicts caused by these pretensions, what will Prussia do? Will she turn her cannon against her formidable neighbour? Or will she invoking [sic] then the affinity of race, as she now invokes the affinity of language, rivet the bonds which already exist? Will the Slavo-Finnic races wish to reign altogether, over Germans and Latins? And would the world, thus shared, submit in silence?23

Racist responses to the national calamity 101 Quatrefages’s pamphlet met with a lively response both in his homeland and in the Reich. In France, he found a sizeable group of followers who were proving, like Louis Figuier, that the primordial Finnish cruelty had come back to life in contemporary Prussians.24 Racial theories became one of the more notorious strains of French nationalism.25 On the other hand, authorities in the Reich invoked similar arguments to stress the bonds between the annexed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and Germany.26 Adolf Bastian, a prominent anthropologist and ethnologist, engaged in a polemic with Quatrefages in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. He disputed the identification of ancient Prussians as a Turanian people on grounds of the former’s kinship with the Indo-Germanic Lithuanians. Furthermore, as a result of the Teutonic Knights’ conscious policy, Prussia had for hundreds of years drawn in settlers from all regions of Germany to the extent that they now represented the ethnic quintessence of the country. Moreover, Bastian claimed, like other Germanic peoples (and unlike ‘Latin-Celtic’ ones), Prussians were the forerunners of progress, having achieved scientific, cultural and economic supremacy. The French, on the other hand, consistently overstated their influence on the development of civilisation, claiming as their own discoveries and inventions made by others. Their civilisation was in decline, a fact repeatedly proved by their military aggressions and, quite recently, by the unthinkable barbarity of the Paris Commune.27 The pamphlet by Quatrefages proved to be a highly divisive and hotly disputed affair. But was it as original as the vividness of the German reactions seemed to indicate? It was not. The inspiration for La race Prussienne came from a rather unexpected direction.28 Quatrefages plagiarised whole fragments and let himself be inspired by many other parts of the rich oeuvre of Franciszek Duchiński, a Polish émigré in Paris. Franciszek Henryk Duchiński does not count among the best-known actors of the so-called Great Emigration.29 He was born in Ukraine to a family of petty nobility. His father died when he was young, and his mother Zofia (née Bojarska) followed in 1829. Duchiński attended a Basilian school run by the Greek-Catholic congregation of St  Basil in Humań (today Uman’) and later worked at a school for girls in Niemirów (today Nemyriv). In 1834, he moved to Kyiv where – by his own account not corroborated by any official documents – he entered the HistoryPhilology Faculty of the local university. For a time, he earned a living as a private tutor. Later he claimed to have been active in the clandestine student organisation. Whether this was true or not, Duchiński (who is the sole source of information on the Ukrainian chapter of his life) avoided persecution after the wave of arrests in the 1830s, and he remained in Kyiv until the mid-1840s. In 1846, he decided to leave the Russian empire and escaped to Turkey via Odessa and then moved to Paris, where he cooperated with the Polish émigré journals. He also served as an agent of the liberal-conservative wing of the Polish emigration directed from Paris. In 1848, he participated in propaganda activities for the Polish Legion in Italy and then served as a Polish representative to the Istanbul legation of the Hungarian insurrectionary government. Following the defeat of the Hungarian Uprising, he served as Prince Adam Czartoryski’s agent in the Balkan region while publishing

102  Maciej Górny his early amateur studies in the ethnography and anthropology of Russia and Ukraine. Relieved from duty on the eve of the Crimean War, Duchiński remained in the Balkans, publishing articles in the Journal de Constantinople. In 1855, he entered British service, officially to supervise railway workers but actually for the purpose of delivering propaganda speeches to British, French and Turkish soldiers. On his return to Paris in 1856, he found employment in the Polish School for Higher Learning. He was active in the Polish community of the French capital. At the same time, he gave public lectures for French audiences and published profusely. Invited to join the French Ethnographic Society, he rose to the position of vice-chairman in 1871. He also co-edited Actes de la Société d’Ethnographie and, in 1865, joined the Parisian Geographical Society.30 Early in the 1870s, after a short stay in Galicia, Germany and Austria, he became the curator at the Polish National Museum in Rapperswil. Several attempts to obtain a chair at the University in Kraków came to nothing, but Duchiński continued to publish in Polish and Ukrainian journals. In 1885, he celebrated the twenty-five years of his career as a scholar in L’viv. His death, a year after that of Quatrefages, was noted in the French Ethnographic Society’s newsletter, among other venues.31 In Polish historiography, Franciszek Duchiński remains a marginal figure. His ethnographic views are associated with Arthur de Gobineau’s theories and placed in the context of the liberal Russophobia of the mid-nineteenth century.32 The Ukrainian scholar Ivan L. Rudnytsky, however, offers a different assessment, acknowledging the role Duchiński played in the development of the Ukrainian national idea.33 Consequently, his racial theory belongs to the ideological arsenal of Ukrainian radical nationalism. In essence, the whole of it rested on the belief that Russians were of non-Slavic origin. Duchiński claimed that ‘it is a grave and sadly very common error to perceive relations between Slavic nations from a linguistic standpoint, based only on the analysis of select words’.34 He averred that ‘where ethnographic studies are impossible to carry out, logographical analysis . . . can be of help, but even that cannot provide foolproof data, as nations can change languages’.35 Anthropology, or ethnography, as Duchiński preferred to call his discipline, was a far more suitable method of investigation. According to Duchiński, the white race was divided into Aryans and Turanians. The former, comprising Slavs, Germans and Latins, inhabited Europe as far as the Dnieper river and were settled, farming and culture-making peoples. The latter, made up of Turks, Finns and Mongols, inhabited territories east and south of Ukraine and were still nomadic peoples or had retained nomadic characteristics under a thin veneer of civilisation. Duchiński explained: The features of the Aryan people reflect .  .  . their main pursuit: freedom. Bound to their fatherland, they love agriculture for its own sake and not for the trading opportunities it provides. Their provincial life is highly developed; their sense of individual self-reliance deeply inculcated; property rights are respected and family names greatly venerated. A deep love for their country

Racist responses to the national calamity  103 leads them to make the greatest sacrifices. Their emotional attitude is in harmony with their level-headedness, as they are blessed with perseverance and enormous creative powers, which they exhibit in a myriad of ways. . . . Women are held in great regard in their societies.36 Turanians, by contrast: [are] psychologically disposed . . . to passivity, and have displayed no originality of mind; their ability to imitate compensates for this shortcoming, blind fanaticism replacing religious fervour. . . . In Turanian society, which is based on military discipline, the woman ranks low, something that can be seen very clearly among the Turks, for example. . . . Centuries have passed. With the advance of civilisation, the last vestiges of nomadism have disappeared in Europe, and yet, the descendants of the old nomads still exhibit the proclivities of their forefathers.37 Duchiński was interested in one branch of the Turanian race in particular: the Muscovites. Their innermost racial character was essentially unchangeable. While Ruthenian (i.e., Ukrainian) influences were bound up with the civilising influence of the Kyiv Rus’, they were unable to transform the essential character of the Finno-Mongol nomads. This belief led Duchiński to formulate his unique views on Russia’s history. He disputed the Ural Mountains as a boundary between Europe and Asia, claiming that both sides of the range were populated by the same people. It was here where his favourite discipline offered counterarguments to established geographical truths. He also held that from the perspective of Muscovite history, the Tatar invasion, often perceived as a tragedy, should be treated as a blessing: The invasions of Mongols and Tatars did not lead to the separation of Moscow from the Rus’, as there had never been a bond of moral unity between the two . . . on the contrary, the invasions did a great service to the laws of race of the Muscovites by merging the peoples of Suzdal, Ves’, Merya, Murom, and Chuvash-Vietke (Viatka Tatars) with the Muscovites who settled beyond the Oka river as well as in Kazan, and were ruled by national khans. . . . Thus, the conquest of the Suzdal Muscovites by Genghis Khan was beneficial rather than harmful to them . . . since it served to engender laws of tribal purity which is craved even more forcefully by tribes of shepherds and tradesmen than by Indo-European nations.38 In Duchiński’s opinion, racial differences were permanent. While he claimed that he wished to see Moscow free and Catholic, he added that ‘even free and Catholic Russians differ from Indo-Europeans in the mission they have been entrusted to fulfil here on earth, and they will be different forever’.39 Even a Catholic Muscovite would remain a Muscovite forever.

104  Maciej Górny Claims of the Muscovites’ racial distinction were justified with the supposedly obvious differences in physical and characterological features between Muscovites, on the one hand, and Europeans and especially ‘true’ Ruthenians, on the other. Indo-European peoples, as Duchiński claimed in one of his works: are physically more refined, while the Turanian people constitute an unformed mass, raw, undeveloped meat. The head of a Turanian is indistinct from his neck, it has not yet fully set itself apart from the torso, and his legs barely sprout out from the loins. . . . The most striking feature of the Muscovite, the katsap [Ruskie], is neither his face nor head, but his neck! The neck is simply the essence of the Muscovite. . . . With the neck out of proportion to the head, and generally to the entire physiognomy, their noses are as upturned as to render the hair inside clearly visible.40 Therefore, it should not be surprising that ‘these two human types, the Muscovite and the Ruthenian, need only to cast a glance at each other to know that they have nothing in common’.41 According to Duchiński, the society of the Muscovites was repulsive and deeply immoral as well: ‘Generally in Moscow, and especially in relation to women, there is no other morality than that engendered by the criminal code, with police officers as its custodians’.42 The Kyiv-bred scholar compared Russian women to ‘emancipated Muslim women’, doubting their intellectual and legal autonomy and deploring their supposed ‘indifference to ownership of land, lack of any uplifting fables from the history of their own sex’.43 Moscow differed from Europe in almost everything: the density and type of population, the landscape, the climate and even skull measurements.44 He illustrated his arguments about the social pathologies of Tsarist Russia with statistical tables.45 In an article on the history of French ‘Turanism’, Marléne Laruelle with a certain degree of astonishment noted how a middle-school teacher had managed to impose his theories on a number of celebrated and prominent figures of French public life: Henri Martin, Albert Réville, August Vicquesnel, Charles de Steinbach, Casimir Delamarre, Édouard Talbot, Emmanuel Henri Victurnien marquise de Noailles, Élias Regnault and many others.46 As she observed, the ‘Turanian’ thesis became one of the centrepieces of French Russophobia in the 1860s.47 Clearly, the ‘politics of history’ pursued by the liberal-conservative faction of the Polish political emigration played an interesting, albeit secondary, role in the French reception of Duchiński’s work. The Kyivan scholar relied on the financial support of the Czartoryski family from time to time. Some of his numerous publications appeared thanks to subsidies received from the Treasury Office. The same support was offered as well to at least some of his supporters, including Elias Regnault.48 Duchiński himself placed great importance on maintaining contact with the international scholarly community. On the eve of the January Uprising of 1863, he unsuccessfully courted financial support for the ‘Revue, published in French and devoted to the dissemination of my principles’.49 All his efforts testified to his belief that science was the field where the Polish cause might gain considerable successes.50

Racist responses to the national calamity 105 There were several reasons for Duchiński’s influence on French authors dealing with past and present Eastern Europe. The first, and perhaps the most important, was Duchiński’s own attitude to the truths (or perhaps single truth) that he preached. He considered their dissemination both a quasi-religious duty and a patriotic contribution to the liberation of Ukraine. In his address to the Polish insurrectionary government of 1863, he explained: We are going to take part of the Muscovites’ power away from them by employing their own methods of fighting, that is: by exercising our right to name them, by having Muscovites be called Muscovites instead of allowing them names that they appropriated for themselves and used to legitimise their purported rights to a major part of Poland, Ruthenia.51 Motivated by his sense of mission, he was untroubled by questions of authorship or the originality of his French followers. From his perspective, plagiarism might have been the highest degree of esteem. The Polish ethnographer was apparently content with being an unnamed accomplice. His wife, the post-January Uprising émigré Seweryna Duchińska, reminisced about his willingness not only to inspire but even to co-author other people’s studies. Before the publication of Henri Martin’s major work on Poland and Russia, ‘the post office would deliver whole packets of pages every day to Rue Montparnasse, where the French historian lived’.52 The changes in the French school curriculum concerning ethnography and geography of Eastern Europe were preceded by a close cooperation between Duchiński and Casimir Delamarre.53 Duchiński provided the authors he befriended with statistical data and analyses that he had compiled, which – one may assume – they copied and published under their own names. The second reason for Duchiński’s unjustly low standing in French ‘Turanian’ works was his fear of a hostile reaction from the Russian authorities. His suspicion that he was being followed incidentally turned out to be true.54 Seweryna Duchińska stated that in 1865, an intervention of the Russian embassy forced her husband to stop speaking publicly, and he thereafter concentrated on writing out of necessity.55 The support of his principles was also said to have negatively affected the careers of his French friends.56 There are so many similarities between Quatrefages’s theory of Prussian racial specificity and Duchiński’s ‘truth’ that it seems reasonable to ask to what extent one of them influenced the other. Crucially in this context, Duchiński published his revelations – also in French – well before Quatrefages’s La race Prussienne appeared. The peak of his publication activity followed the failure of the January Uprising, and its contents bore signs of Duchiński’s grief and anger. The two authors knew each other personally. The Kyivan met his future wife in May 1864 while attending lectures delivered by the French anthropologist in the Paris botanical garden.57 Both men were members of the Geographical Society. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Duchiński and his wife were visiting a spa in Bohemia and were prevented from returning to Paris until March 1872 due to the ongoing war and the fear of increasing Russian influence in France. Their eventual return

106  Maciej Górny left a lasting mark on the memory of Seweryna Duchińska: ‘One evening, we went to a meeting of the Geographical Society. The scene we witnessed there was truly horrifying! Every scholar had aged by at least ten years. Quatrefages’ head was as grey as a pigeon’s back’.58 The Frenchman’s reaction was, in a way, a repetition of what had been experienced by Polish emigrants after the bitter failure of the 1863 uprising. La race Prussienne included several references to Duchiński’s works, particularly concerning the anthropological similarities between the Baltic nations and other ‘primordial’ inhabitants of Europe. Quatrefages quoted Duchiński’s opinion about the physical likeness between the Lithuanians and the Bretons. For the French anthropologist, this observation proved that the common features of both nationalities derived from a common Finnish component – combined with the Aryan traits of the Slavs in the case of Lithuanians and with the Aryan traits of Celts in the case of Bretons.59 However, fragments borrowed without being cited, and intriguing parallels are far more numerous. The point of departure for both authors was a theory popular in the nineteenth century that, based on certain remarks found in Tacitus’s Germania, identified the Finns (Fenni) as the primordial, savage population of Northern Europe antedating the advent of the Aryan people.60 In describing the physical traits of the Turanian race, both authors drew attention to the view that Turanians were not built proportionally. In producing his description of a ‘Muscovite’, Duchiński may have been thinking of a figure similar to Quatrefages’s ‘Estonian’, ‘Latvian’ or ‘Pomeranian’. Clear similarities can also be found in their psychological characterisations. Both Turanian tribes were said to be guided in their social life by a reverence for power and a desire for conquest. Differences were marginal and sometimes only superficial: While Duchiński claimed that the Muscovites were prone to renouncing their own traditions, Quatrefages argued that the Finns were deeply attached to theirs. However, a closer look at the two analyses reveals that the Polish scholar had taken note of the resilience of basic components of the Turanian psyche and culture, in spite of the ease with which the race opened itself to foreign (typically more developed) influences. His French colleague, in turn, observed in the two ‘autochthonous’ Prussian races a tendency to embrace foreign models and to follow them stubbornly.61 Both visions depended on the popular belief of the times that humankind was divided into ‘active’ and ‘passive’ races or, as stated in the works of Gustav Klemm, into ‘male’ and ‘female’ peoples.62 The most important, somewhat ‘practical’ conclusion to be drawn from the works of the two scholars concerns the mechanism of exclusion from the European family of nations. Both Quatrefages and Duchiński implemented the same procedure of separating racially foreign elements from those they considered racially related. Duchiński’s purpose was to maintain the separation of Ruthenia from Moscow. Quatrefages was extending a hand to the Aryan Germans of the west and the south. The similarities between the two racial theories abound. Enumerating them further would not contribute to the understanding of the two scholars. What seems more important is the background of their shared ways of thought. As shown before, Quatrefages’s rewriting of Duchiński’s texts was facilitated by their shared knowledge and cultural references. Clearly, the Frenchman’s pamphlet was not

Racist responses to the national calamity 107 original, but, in the hypothetical absence of Duchiński, it was not beyond any possibility for Quatrefages to independently arrive at similar conclusions. They both skilfully combined a political message with the semblance of academic rigour. Another no less important context of their racial theories is national defeat. While the lost war against Prussia shocked de Quatrefages, Duchiński’s activity culminated immediately before and during the January Uprising of 1863–64. In both cases these were the periods of frenetic political activity facing overwhelming violence. The French army and the Second Empire collapsed in the face of the Prussian force. The peaceful national revolution that started in 1861 on Warsaw streets and continued through two years of patriotic manifestations throughout the Kingdom of Poland and provinces of Western Russia faced brutal repressions.63 The outbreak of the armed uprising with no real chance for a military success was a predetermined defeat, the only hope of the insurgents being an international intervention.64 In the eyes of the enemies, both the French francs-tireurs and the Polish insurgents represented an unlawful way of waging a war and deserved the harshest reprisal. Finally, both Duchiński and Quatrefages shared a similar feeling of disappointment with the lack of European solidarity against what they perceived as alien intrusion into the racial composition of the continent that, according to them, should belong to the Aryans alone. Notes 1 K. Varley, Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War of 1870–71 in French Memory (­Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 171–172. 2 M. Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792–1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), pp. 224–225. 3 Ibid., pp. 225–228. 4 Ibid., p. 230. 5 M. Völkel, ‘Geschichte als Vergeltung. Zur Grundlegung des Revanchegedankens in der deutsch-französischen Historikerdiskussion von 1870–71’, Historische Zeitschrift, 257 (1993), pp. 63–107. 6 G.-L. Fink, ‘Der janusköpfige Nachbar. Das französische Deutschlandbild gestern und heute’, in D. Harth (ed.), Fiktion des Fremden. Erkundung kultureller Grenzen in Literatur und Publizistik (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), pp. 21–57, especially p. 43. 7 R. Virchow, ‘Nach dem Kriege’, Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin, 53:1 (1871), p. 19. 8 Ibid., p. 7. 9 Ibid., p. 10. 10 Ibid., p. 21. 11 For more on Quatrefages’s life, see D. Ferembach, ‘Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810–1892)’, International Journal of Anthropology 4 (1989), pp. 305–307. 12 A. de Quatrefages, ‘La race prusienne’, Revue des Deux Mondes 41:91 (1871), pp. 647–669. Further citations for: J.-L. A. de Quatrefages, The Prussian Race Ethnologically Considered. To which is Appended Some Account of the Bombardment of the Museum of Natural History, etc., by the Prussians in January 1871, trans. I. Innes (London: Virtue, 1872). 13 Cf., e.g., J. Comas, Racial Myths. The Race Question in Modern Science (Paris: UNESCO, 1958), pp. 42–48; L. Poliakov, Der arische Mythos. Zu den Quellen von Rassismus und Nationalismus, trans. M. Venjakob and H. Fliessbach (Hamburg: Europaverlag,

108  Maciej Górny 1993), pp. 295–297; L. Poliakov, C. Delacampagne and P. Girard, Über den Rassismus. Sechzehn Kapitel zur Anatomie, Geschichte und Deutung des Rassenwahns (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984); I. Hannaford, Race. The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), pp. 287–290; G. Ahlbrecht, Preußenbäume und Bagdadbahn. Deutschland im Blick der französischen Geo-Disziplinen (1821–2004) (Passau: Stutz, 2006); see also in older studies written from a racist perspective, e.g.: W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe. A Sociological Study (New York: Appleton & Co., 1899), pp. 219–221; W. Z. Ripley, ‘The Racial Geography of Europe’, Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly 52 (1898), pp. 49–56. 14 Quatrefages, The Prussian Race, p. 2. 15 Ibid., p. 19. 16 Ibid., p. 21. 17 C. Rochet, ‘Communication sur le type prussien’, Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1871), pp. 75–77, 188–196. 18 Quatrefages, The Prussian Race, p. 37. 19 Ibid., p. 61. 20 Ibid., p. 65. 21 Ibid., p. 59. 22 Ibid., p. 85. 23 Ibid., pp. 86–87. 24 L. Figuier, Tableau de la nature. Les races humaines (Paris: Hachette, 1872); cf. Poliakov, Der arische Mythos, p. 295. 25 Cf. S. Michl, Im Dienste des ‘Volkskörpers’. Deutsche und französische Ärzte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 60–63; Fink, ‘Der janusköpfige Nachbar’, pp. 21–56; H. Mehrkens, Statuswechsel: Kriegserfahrung und nationale Wahrnehmung im Deutsch-Französischen Krieg 1870/71 (Essen: Klartext, 2008), passim. For a detailed analysis of the racial current in French public discourse, see: C. Reynand Paligot, La République raciale. Paradigme racial et idéologie républicaine (1860–1930) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006). 26 W. Freund, ‘Disputierte Bevölkerung. Der gelehrte Streit um die Menschen an der deutsch-französischen Grenze’, in P. Krassnitzer and P. Overath (eds.), Bevölkerungsfragen. Prozesse des Wissenstransfers in Deutschland und Frankreich (1870–1939) (Köln: Böhlau, 2007), pp. 210–215. 27 Cf. C. Manias, ‘The Race Prussienne Controversy. Scientific Internationalism and the Nation’, Isis, 100 (2009), pp. 749–750. 28 For a detailed textual analysis, see M. Górny, ‘Five Great Armies Against Our Enemies: A Comparative Study in the History of Racism’, Kwartalnik Historyczny, CXXI (2014), special issue. 29 P. Kuligowski, ‘Mechanisms of Conceptual Change in the Discourse of Polish Political Emigration after the November Insurrection of 1830–1’, Acta Poloniae Historica, 122 (2021), pp. 109–134. 30 L. Kuk, ‘Zmiana nazwy katedry słowiańskiej Collège de France w roku 1868. Z dziejów stosunku Francji wobec tzw. kwestii słowiańskiej w XIX wieku’, in S. Kalembka (ed.), Publicyści późniejszego romantyzmu wobec rządów zaborczych i spraw narodowościowych na ziemiach dawnej Rzeczypospolitej (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 1998). 31 G. Barclay, ‘Rapport annuel fait à la Société d’Ethnographie sur ses travaux et sur les progrès des sciences ethnographiques pendant l’année 1893’, Bulletin de la Société d’Ethnographie, 35:76 (1893), pp. 123–124. 32 H. H. Hahn, Aussenpolitik in der Emigration. Die Exildiplomatie Adam Jerzy Czartoryskis 1830–1840 (München: Oldenbourg, 1978); E. Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France (c. 1740–1880) (Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag, 2006).

Racist responses to the national calamity 109 33 I. L. Rudnytsky, ‘Franciszek Duchiński and his Impact on Ukrainian Political Thought’, in P. L. Rudnytsky (ed.), Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: University of Toronto Press, 1987), pp. 187–202. 34 F. H. Duchiński, ‘O stosunkach Rusi z Polską i z Moskwą zwaną dzisiaj Rosją. O potrzebie dopełnień i zmian w naukowym wykładzie dziejów polskich. Przy otwarciu roku szkolnego Szkoły Wyższej Polskiej w Paryżu, przy bulwarze Mont Parnasse w dniu 7 XI 1857’, in F. H. Duchiński (ed.), Pisma, vol. 1 (Rapperswil: Muzeum ­Narodowe Polskie, 1902), p. 64. 35 F. H. Duchiński, ‘Part 2 Zasady dziejów Polski i innych krajów słowiańskich i Moskwy’, in F. H. Duchiński (ed.), Pisma, vol. 2 (Rapperswil: Muzeum Narodowe Polskie, 1902), p. 113. 36 F. H. Duchiński, ‘Pierwotne dzieje Polski’, in F. H. Duchiński (ed.), Pisma, vol. 3 (­Rapperswil: Muzeum Narodowe Polskie, 1902), pp. 15–16. 37 Duchiński, ‘Pierwotne dzieje Polski’, vol. 3, pp. 17–18. 38 F. H. Duchiński, ‘Part 3 Zasady dziejów Polski i innych krajów słowiańskich i Moskwy’, in F. H. Duchiński (ed.), Pisma, vol. 2 (Rapperswil: Muzeum Narodowe Polskie, 1902), p. 243. 39 F. H. Duchiński, Odezwa do ziomków Kijowianina Duchińskiego o potrzebie osobnego przeglądu poświęconego jedynie rozszerzaniu jego zasad historycznych i o otwarciu przez niego nowego kursu publicznego dnia 28 listopada roku b. w Cercle des Sociétés Savantes (Paris: Renou et Maulde, 1861), p. 3. 40 F. H. Duchiński, ‘Galeria obrazów polskich. Oddział pierwszy. Różnice ludów indoeuropejskich a turańskich pod względem fizjonomii i odzieży’, in F. H. Duchiński (ed.), Pisma, vol. 3 (Rapperswil: Muzeum Narodowe Polskie, 1902), pp. 212–214. 41 Duchiński, ‘Galeria’, p. 216. 42 F. H. Duchiński, Pomnik nowogrodzki. Periodyczne wyjaśnienia projektu rządu moskiewskiego, aby uroczyście obchodzić w następnym 1862 r., jakoby tysiąc–letnią rocznicę założenia dzisiejszego państwa moskiewskiego w Nowogrodzie, miewane publicznie (obecnie w Paryżu) (Paris: Renou et Maulde, 1861), p. 15. 43 Duchiński, Pomnik nowogrodzki, p. 17. 44 See, e.g., F. H. Duchiński (de Kiew), Peuples aryâs et tourans, agricultureurs et nomades. Nécessité des réformes dans l’exposition de l’histoire des peuples Aryâs-­ européens & Tourans, particulièrement des Slaves et des Moscovites (Paris: Klincksieck, 1864), p. XXX. 45 Cf. Duchiński (de Kiew), Peuples aryâs et tourans, pp. 82–90. 46 M. Laruelle, ‘La Question du “touranisme” des Russes. Contribution à une histoire des échanges intellectuels en Allemagne – France – Russie au Xie siècle’, Cahiers du Monde Russe 45:1–2 (2004), pp. 241–266. 47 Laruelle, ‘La Question du “touranisme” ’, p. 261. 48 See W. Czartoryski, Pamiętnik 1860–1864. Protokoły posiedzeń biura Hotelu Lambert cz. I i II. Entrevues politiques (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1980), p. 211, 218 and 296. 49 Duchiński, Odezwa do ziomków. 50 Ibid., p. 44. 51 F. H. Duchiński, Do Rządu Narodowego Powstańczego od będącego obecnie na służbie krajowej w Paryżu Kijowianina Duchińskiego przedstawienie (Paris: Renou et Maulde, 1863), p. 6. 52 S. Duchińska, Wspomnienia z 29cio-letniego pożycia z mężem moim 1864–1893 (Paris: Reiff, 1894), p. 27. 53 Duchińska, Wspomnienia, pp. 69–70. 54 See A. F. Grabski, Perspektywy przeszłości: Studia i szkice historiograficzne (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1983), p. 235. 55 Duchińska, Wspomnienia, p. 38.

110  Maciej Górny 56 Ibid., pp. 30–31. 57 See S. Duchińska’s account of the event in Duchińska, Wspomnienia, p. 16. 58 Ibid., p. 113. 59 Ibid., p. 35. 60 For more on nineteenth-century interpretations of the ethnogenesis of the Finns, see A. Halmesvirta, The British Conception of the Finnish ‘Race’, Nation and Culture, 1760– 1918 (Helsinki: SHS, 1990); A. Kemiläinen, Finns in the Shadow of the ‘Aryans’: Race Theories and Racism (Helsinki: SHS, 1998). 61 ‘The Fin [sic] or the Slave might ameliorate the conditions of his existence, change his religion, cultivate his mind, and raise his intelligence, but his fundamental nature must necessarily remain the same’; Quatrefages, The Prussian Race, p. 64. 62 G. Klemm, Cultur-Geschichte des christlichen Europas, vol. 2: Osteuropa (Leipzig: Teubner, 1852). 63 E. Niebielski, Nieprzejednani wrogowie Rosji. Duchowieństwo lubelskie i podlaskie w powstaniu 1863 roku i na zesłaniu (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2008); B. Petrozolin, Przed tą nocą (Warszawa: Pax, 1997). 64 S. Kieniewicz, Powstanie styczniowe (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1983); W. Caban and W. Śliwowska (eds.), Powstanie styczniowe 1863–1864. Walka i uczestnicy. Represje i wygnanie. Historiografia i tradycja (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Akademii Świętokrzyskiej im. Jana Kochanowskiego, 2005).

Part 3

Perceptions and memories

8

Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists in the Franco-Prussian War Nina Kreibig

It’s great. . . . You must see it to dare to write that, and I’m not afraid to say it. I feel that way every time, even with all the wars that came afterwards. . . . That it’s always a great spectacle too, and even if it’s a philosophical subject, you feel a deeply human desire to move towards the danger, to go where something is happening.1

In terms of observers of armed conflicts recording their emotions, French war correspondent Anne Nivat’s 2020 description of her experiences in the Second Chechen War (1999–2009) resembles those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are based on the awareness of being a witness to a historical event. In its 38th issue, the magazine Die Gartenlaube – one of the first German illustrated magazines to be published and distributed in large numbers since 1853 – author Otto von Corvin reported as a war correspondent from the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War. As he did, he also criticised the Schlachtenbummler (battlefield tourists), whom he encountered in various forms and whom he identified primarily as aristocrats and volunteer ambulance personnel of the Order of St John and the Order of Malta.2 This chapter is about the controversial term that became popular during and after the Franco-Prussian War. It aims to clarify when the term first appeared, whom it was used by and to whom it referred. It will also attempt to historically classify the phenomenon of battlefield strolling, taking into particular consideration the aspects of media history. The aim is thus to add a new dimension to research on the Franco-Prussian War, with a contribution that is a suggestion rather than a conclusive research statement. With the term Schlachtenbummler, the aspect of perceiving, of observing or even of curiosity appears to be decisive, so it is connected with the mostly negative connotation of uninvolved looking at battle events. However, this observation was by no means a new phenomenon that first appeared during the Franco-Prussian War. Previously, towards the end of the eighteenth century, a number of writers like Johann Wolfgang Goethe accompanied armies.3 But can these chroniclers of historical events be classified as battlefield tourists? And, if spectatorship as such was not new, the question is why was excitement about this behaviour articulated particularly in the Franco-Prussian War? Was there something new that explains the change? And if so, what exactly was that new element? DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-12

114  Nina Kreibig Etymology and definition Although focusing on a single term leads inevitably into the realm of conceptual history, my chapter aims to show that the analysis of the term Schlachtenbummler should go far beyond an ordinary history of the term. To begin with, the term is ambivalent as it brings together two words that are, at least from today’s perspective, in striking contrast. On the one hand, the first part of the word, Schlachten, refers not only to the activities of battle, to death and dying, to the suffering of fallen soldiers, possibly also of the civilians affected, but also to the virtues of honour, pride and patriotism postulated and correlated with the term ‘battle’, especially in the nineteenth century.4 On the other hand, the subjectivised verb of strolling (German: Bummler) brings into play the person of the observer or flâneur, which became relevant in the nineteenth century, referring to a person who lingers, walks slowly, looks and takes in with all their senses but always passively.5 Combined together, the terms incite irritation and even discomfort, because of the ideas associated with them and the seemingly obvious contradictions. And so it was for numerous civilian medical and military personnel or war correspondents of the nineteenth century who, in newspaper articles, letters and books, characterised and simultaneously criticised people identified as spectators of the war, as Schlachtenbummler.6 Only rarely did the people stigmatised in this way speak out themselves, either to explain their actions or to defend themselves because they felt they had been treated unfairly.7 Although there are numerous earlier reports that describe war spectators in detail, or which were written by people who attended a battle as more or less uninvolved spectators, the criticised and emotionally charged word Schlachtenbummler does not appear to have emerged until the late nineteenth century.8 The Franco-Prussian War is repeatedly cited as a starting-point.9 In this context, an entry in the German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm from 1871 is usually cited as a reference: Schlachtenbummler, m. arising in the more recent wars, used especially since 1870 for those who, under the pretext of nursing, went to the theatre of war to satisfy their curiosity or to devote themselves to the more amusing side of quarter and camp life.10 The reference to the ‘more recent wars’ allows for an initial chronological classification, in that the so-called German Wars of Unification, namely, the GermanDanish War of 1864, the German War of 1866 as well as the Franco-Prussian War, must be considered. In many cases, however, it is used as an analytical category with recourse to descriptions of battles in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, without being explicitly used in the corresponding sources.11 As early as 1896, Ludwig Pietsch, a German war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War, noted that the concept of strolling dated back to the days of the German Revolutions of 1848.12 Literary scholar Eckhardt Köhn arrived at a similar assessment, linking early on the flâneur with the political events in revolutionary Paris and Berlin of the first half of the nineteenth century.13

Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists 115 Pietsch was one of the first to analyse the term Schlachtenbummler.14 Despite the historical antecedents mentioned, he also dated its emergence to the period around 1870–71.15 In 1870, numerous emotionally charged articles in German-­ language newspapers reported on the battlefield tourists who visited the battlefields like ‘locusts’ or ‘crusaders’ and were quartered and fed by local people, as well as benefitting from the ‘love gifts’ (German: Liebesgaben) donated by the people for the soldiers.16 A reporter for Die Gartenlaube described these perceptions in 1870 thus: I saw there a count . . ., who belonged to the Johannites, ate and drank like three ordinary people and spread out for four. . . . Three quarters of these Knights of St John and Malta could have stayed at home. The gentlemen are only in the way.17 Schlachtenbummler – characterising a group of people Let us now consider more closely who was labelled a ‘battlefield tourist’. The use of the term for different groups of people is interesting, because a political connotation is recognisable in some cases. Two main groups were repeatedly targeted as battlefield spectators, war correspondents and volunteer ambulance men. For the war correspondents, who had increasingly appeared in the battlefields since the Crimean War, the term was devastating.18 Remarkably, the newspapers that relied on the reports of their correspondents also made polemical complaints about the battlefield tourists. Pietsch linked the emergence of the term to the increasing establishment of the daily press and illustrated magazines, who sent their correspondents to the battlefields. The problem for many of these journalists was that their newspapers did not provide them with appropriate identity papers to allow them to report from the front. Consequently, the correspondents had to find their own ways to get to the front and to be allowed to visit the battlefields, and that led to them being dubbed battlefield tourists.19 The second group, ambulance men of the Order of Malta and the Order of St John, had volunteered in ambulance columns under the banner of the International Red Cross, which had been founded just a few years earlier. They were accused of providing aid during the war and of having travelled to the battlefields idly, only out of curiosity. Two examples show that such complaints were also raised from among the ranks of volunteer nurses. The German volunteer nurse Marie Simon, who was on duty during the Franco-Prussian War, recorded this in her diary entry from 11 December 1870: What one has to suffer from the so-called Schlachtenbummler can hardly be described. . . . Who does not want to work cannot stay here. It would be very good if in future cases there were a draft in voluntary nursing as in the military; for mere good will is of no use; those who are not physically strong are only a burden. . . . The white bandage [of the International Red Cross] is used far too lavishly; it is given to anyone who brings a certificate from the

116  Nina Kreibig police. . . . Here in front of Paris it is exasperating how the tourists torment you; they demand accommodation and food.20 A similar comment appeared in Die Gartenlaube in 1871, in which, according to the newspaper’s editors, a nurse reported on her experience during the war: All the towns seem to have sent voluntary orderlies. . . . Our astonished eyes meet only soldiers of all branches of the armed forces and those bearing the red cross, who, like us, are waiting for the sign of departure. . . . A slim, brown-haired young man with a confident posture, dressed in impeccable costume [German: Schlachtenbummlercostüm], walks past us in a distinguished manner. Stunned, one of our companions, a blond pastor’s daughter, looks after him. ‘It’s really my brother’s barber’, she exclaims at last, laughing, ‘and the fat man next to him is our upholsterer; what do they want in the fight?’ Yes, what do they all want in the fight, the fragrant and well-coiffed masters in bright glacés and the young ladies in coquettish nurses’ costumes? How little they think of fulfilling their heavy duties is already shown by the loud laughter, the challenging looks and the whole tactless behaviour of this crowd of carer.21 The nurses here were describing what was often perceived as the impertinent and intrusive behaviour of people in the field of voluntary nursing during the FrancoPrussian War. Their qualifications and physical constitution were often criticised, and they were also accused of not intending to do the hard work of caring for soldiers. And something else is also evident here: in almost all sources, the classification of a person as a Schlachtenbummler is accompanied by not inconsiderable contempt. The accusations against both the volunteer ambulance workers and the journalists were closely related. Many people, including painter Heinrich Lang, obtained a Red Cross armband in order to accompany the military procession as civilians.22 This relates precisely to what Pietsch listed as necessary for journalists who had not received access papers from their newspapers to be allowed to go to the front and travel there with a military convoy. Another point of criticism is also worth noting: German volunteer ambulance man Carl Pietschker referred to the competitive situation between the wartime medical corps and the volunteer ambulance corps and posited that the wartime physicians might have allied themselves with the press against the innovative medical corps.23 Besides these two groups, there were also individual travellers who can best be described as uninvolved tourists, namely, private individuals whose presence near the battlefields during or after the fighting was due to curiosity or pleasure.24 Remarkably, but by no means surprisingly, military staff were exempt from such attribution, although there is considerable evidence that this group undertook

Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists 117 tourist ventures. For example, in letters to his parents, Friedrich Clauson von Kaas, second lieutenant of the Garde-Artillerie Brigade, wrote in detail about the places he visited in France during his military service in 1870, even asking his parents to send a Baedeker travel guide from home.25 Verbal attacks as a form of desperation or an intended weapon? When considering the groups of people who used the term, the initial technical, media and political conditions of the time must also be considered. These had changed, sometimes considerably, in the second half of the century. The media presence in the context of war reporting from the middle of the nineteenth century meant that bystanders received more comprehensive news from the battlefields than before.26 Die Gartenlaube, which served as entertainment in family circles, featured serialised stories and numerous pictures. The Franco-Prussian War was a common topic. How the wars were reported; the development of independent war correspondents since the Crimean War; photography as a testimony of events, especially during the American Civil War; and the expansion of newspapers from the second half of the century brought wars closer to those not directly affected by them.27 On the one hand, the media provided for swifter, more dramatic dissemination of news due to the introduction of telegraphy, which sent information home faster than ever before.28 On the other hand, however, ‘opinion-making’ assumed new dimensions, particularly in the context of the Red Cross volunteers, due to the negative press about voluntary nursing in the war.29 The information channels identified here as mass media developed in Germany after 1815 into a media landscape dominated by opinions, in which facts were less important. Despite temporary strong censorship, this ‘opinion press’ dominated until the 1880s and 1890s, with the presentation of facts gaining in importance only after that period.30 In his 1870 essay, intended as an apologia against the accusation of Schlachtbummelei, Pietschker conceded that many of the accusations were to an extent true but emphasised that the criticism of the volunteer ambulance columns was often a channelling of well-founded fears for the soldiers. The press portrayal of the battlefield tourists thus quickly reached the soldiers’ families, some of whom were far away, even as the war was still in progress. It facilitated the development of a culprit for institutional failures at the front, for the hunger and misery of the soldiers and, ultimately, also for the worries and fears of the relatives.31 Whether the accusations were appropriate or not played only a secondary role in the emotionalised accusation by the newspapers. The amorphous group of battlefield tourists beyond the battle lines was accused of being more of a burden than a help to the soldiers. Besides the new media, the possibility of accelerated travel through the expansion of the railways deserves attention. This affected not only information but also transport, which meant that interested people could travel relatively quickly to the areas surrounding the battlefields.32

118  Nina Kreibig Theoretical approach While it is clear that new infrastructures in voluntary medical care for soldiers, transport and media coverage were decisive for the increased participation and perception of volunteer medics in the Franco-Prussian War, whether other aspects also played a role remains to be clarified. How can the desire to be an eyewitness to battle be explained? Was it really only curiosity that motivated people to perform as battlefield tourists? At this point, the significance of changed perception should be considered. The proposition is that the use of new media in the nineteenth century led to a scepticism towards what the mass media offered as reality. One result of this assumed doubt about reality is manifested in the desire to become an indirect participant in important events. The ‘adventure’ of war in the form of a secured distanced participation in the battlefield was part of the (middle-class) world of imagination, which by no means ended at ‘unpleasant’ or ‘negative’ experiences, such as visiting so-called lunatic asylums, prisons or morgues.33 The sensory perception of watching has particular significance in this context, as is also expressed when philosopher Eva Schürmann speaks of seeing as an ‘instrument of orientation, information reception and interaction, while at the same time it represents a personality-specific and culturally variable form of individualised perception of reality’.34 The visual act is closely connected with a practice of personal imagining and judging.35 All this contributes significantly to forming an individual impression of the world. This desire for personal perception, which paradigmatically characterised the battlefield tourists, was virtually opposed to the development of the mass media in the nineteenth century, which assumed a counter-position to the necessity of personal observation. The aspect of curiosity, as well as the references to the new use of media, indicates the relevance of a changed perception and evaluation of information. This may also have prompted doubt about the facts presented and so provoked the desire to form one’s own opinion. The genesis of the panorama in the last third of the eighteenth century, the subsequent development of the diorama in the early nineteenth century, followed by photography from the mid-nineteenth century, generated new perspectives and perceptions of (apparent) participation in political or social events.36 What was understood as (self-experienced) reality or the clear demarcation of what was considered fiction increasingly disappeared. In this context, Susan Sontag wrote in 2003 that the understanding of conflicts for those who were not there in person is nowadays primarily shaped by photographs. The messages depicted thus become real, and photographs become unchallengeable witnesses to what happened.37 Even so, there is evidence that, already during the American Civil War, dead soldiers were sometimes placed in expressive poses by the photographers, thus altering the testifying photograph.38 What follows draws on the concept of reality in order to answer the question of what might have motivated the ‘battlefield tourists’ in the Franco-Prussian War to visit the battlefields. Although the focus is not on groups defamed as battlefield tourists but on individuals who followed genuine personal interests, differentiation is not always possible. One possible theoretical approach is to deal with philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of order of simulacra, abstract

Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists 119 systems of signs of our reality that are, at the same time, strongly connected with processes of reproductions. There are three epochs marked by specific orders. The simulacrum of the first order, characterised by the artificial imitation of the natural world, covers the epoch from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. In the simulacrum of the second order, in the age of the Industrial Revolution, serial production becomes the decisive aspect, while with the simulacrum of the third order, simulation determines our world today.39 My question largely deals with the change between the age of imitation and the age of production. With the onset of serial production in the Industrial Revolution, not only did the type of production processes change but so did the perception and meaning of the goods produced. In the simulacrum of the second order, reality is gradually lost, a circumstance that unsettles and frightens.40 Following Baudrillard, such a statement is not exaggerated because it means that reproduction calls into question the belief in what is conceived as reality. The perception of something real had to change; newspaper articles were reproduced identically in many cases through the serial production of photographs or through the practice of news publishing.41 When media sociologist Niklas Luhmann writes that what we know of and about the world ultimately comes from the mass media and that these cannot be trusted at all, because the constant suspicion of manipulation hovers over them, the full scope of the problem of perception becomes visible.42 What is understood as reality is co-constructed by what is reported about the events. The story that is told is first the story of those who report. The reader thus becomes not only a consumer of a specific narrative and possibly the political stance of the writer but also a buyer of the reality that is offered to them as the only true one. The event character is of particular importance in this context. When political scientist Holger Zapf asks what happens to events when they are transmitted to an audience through mass media, he arrives at the insight that the direct connection between event and mass media is severed: The event thus disappears, as it were, behind the information with which it necessarily accompanies the media, and which even virtually overtakes it itself. This imbalance creates the longing for an event, which comes to the surface in the; universal and pathetic delusion’ of the masses in the face of so-called major events.43 An event, according to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, is a ‘radical turning point’, unrecognised in its relevance, that brings about something new.44 This newness is a traumatic experience that is not compatible with previous ways of perception.45 However, the turning-point is not the war but the changed perception that had already taken place as a social process, which led to some people travelling to the theatres of war, beyond pure curiosity or the desire to help, to form their own picture of the situation. Here, these spectators can be understood as seekers of selfexperienced truth at a time when belief in the information presented was wavering. While philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes that the stroller

120  Nina Kreibig or flâneur erases the boundaries of appearance and reality because he imagines people’s lives from an impersonal distance, this is precisely not the case here.46 Here it was less about the fates of individuals than about the verification of what was determined as reality by the media and society. Generally speaking, none of the prototypes appear to fit the description of the battlefield tourists that Bauman offers as a successor to the pilgrim.47 According to my interpretation, what the Schlachtenbummler was looking for comes closest to what Bauman writes about the pilgrim: seeking a truth that they cannot reach.48 Of course, this is but one facet of the reasons that led to the pronounced curiosity about suffering and death during the Franco-Prussian War. However, in view of the primarily negative connotation associated with the term ‘battlefield tourists’, this interpretative approach significantly expands the spectrum of explanatory options. Conclusion From this, it is clear that the battlefield tourist can also be seen from a perspective of social change. They can be interpreted as a seeker of truth that can be grasped with the senses. This connects them with the flâneur: both move through their surroundings without any direct contact with what is happening around them. But while the flâneur is time-independent and Bauman’s tourist is partly nostalgically focused on the past, the battlefield or event tourist may be seeking entertainment and knowledge at the same time. Their participation focuses on the past, the present and the future.49 It is not really possible to differentiate how pronounced the different aspects are in each case. According to this reading, the Schlachtenbummler can be understood as a product of their time. The different social processes that overlapped in the course of the nineteenth century thus perhaps did not produce an entirely new type of tourist but a new understanding that was integrated into already-known forms of the tourist or comparable groups of people. Notes 1 French original, German subtitles: Es ist großartig. . . . Man muss es gesehen haben, um sich zu trauen, das zu schreiben, und ich scheue mich nicht, das auszusprechen. Ich empfinde es jedes Mal so, auch bei allen Kriegen, die danach kamen. . . . Dass es immer auch ein großartiges Schauspiel ist und selbst wenn es ein philosophisches Thema ist, man verspürt ein zutiefst menschliches Verlangen, sich auf die Gefahr zuzubewegen, dort hinzugehen, wo etwas passiert. Translation of an interview passage by the French war correspondent Anne Nivat with philosopher and host of the television programme Arte Philosophie, Raphaël Enthoven Nivat talks about her experiences in the Second Chechen War and about her role as an observer of wars in general, cf. Arte Philosophie, ‘Der Mensch als Zuschauer’, host: Raphaël Enthoven, guests: Christian Ruby and Anne Nivat, broadcast on 22 February 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjcoRlbq50. On the concept of the ‘beautiful’ in the context of war, see S. Myrivilis, ‘The Beauty of the Battlefield’, in S. Faulks and J. Hensgen (eds.), The Vintage Book of War Stories (London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 49–54; S. Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 75–76, 97.

Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists 121 2 O. von Corvin, ‘Schlachtenbummler’, Die Gartenlaube: Illustrirtes Familienblatt, 38 (1870), p. 627, http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno-plus?aid=gfl&datum=18700138 &query=((text:Schlachtenbummler))&ref=anno-search&seite=19. 3 Wilfried von Bredow describes the observer of the Battle of Valmy in the autumn of 1792, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as ‘a kind of battlefield tourist avant la lettre’ (‘eine Art Schlachtenbummler avant la lettre’), cf. Wilfried von Bredow, ‘Goethe in Valmy’, in J. Kunisch and H. Münckler (eds.), Die Wiedergeburt des Krieges aus dem Geist der Revolution. Studien zum bellizistischen Diskurs des ausgehenden 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1999), p. 121. 4 K. McAleer, Dueling. The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 107–108. 5 In the flâneur of the nineteenth century, Weidmann recognises a predecessor of the twentieth-century tourist. The former is characterised by ambivalence, since it only emerges as the appeal of strolling is lost with the development of the big city, cf. Heiner Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel. Die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (München: Fink, 1992), p. 75; Andreas Braun, Tempo, Tempo! Eine Kunstund Kulturgeschichte der Geschwindigkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Anabas, 2001), p. 46. 6 The nurse Marie Simon (1824–77), who had already worked as a nurse in the German War of 1866, complained in her memoirs about the Franco-Prussian War about the ‘battlefield tourists’ (Schlachtenbummler) who were to be found in the ranks of the Red Cross and who appeared more as tourists than nurse. M. Simon, Meine Erfahrungen auf dem Gebiete der freiwilligen Krankenpflege im Deutsch-Französischen Kriege 1870–71. Briefe und Tagebuchblätter (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1872), p. 197. 7 For example, the ‘platoon leader in the mobile Johannitercolonne at the headquarters of the III Army’ (German: ‘Zugführer bei der mobilen Johannitercolonne im Hauptquartier der III. Armee’). In the Franco-Prussian War, Carl Pietschker published an apologia of voluntary nursing in the face of the numerous media accusations as early as 1870. C. Pietschker, Auf dem Siegeszuge von Berlin nach Paris. Nebst einem Anhang: Das rothe Kreuz und die ‘Schlachtenbummler’ (Cöthen: Schettler, 1870), pp. 166–177. 8 Gräf and Pröve also refer to Goethe in Valmy and provide an anecdote from 1813 concerning the Battle of Großbeeren: H. T. Gräf and R. Pröve, Wege ins Ungewisse. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Reisens 1500–1800 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001), pp. 40–41; M. Füssel, ‘Auf der Suche nach Erinnerung. Zur Intermedialität des Schlachtengedenkens an den Siebenjährigen Krieg im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, in H. Carl and U. Planert (eds.), Militärische Erinnerungskulturen vom 14. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. Träger – Medien – Deutungskonkurrenzen, (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2012), pp. 192–193. R. Hachtmann, Tourismus-Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2007), p. 58. 9 Füssel, ‘Suche’, p. 192. 10 Original: Schlachtenbummler, m. in den neueren kriegen aufgekommen, besonders seit 1870 für diejenigen gebraucht, die unter dem vorwande der krankenpflege sich nach dem kriegsschauplatze begaben, ihre neugierde zu büszen oder sich der lustigeren seite des quartier- und lagerlebens zu widmen [sic]. ‘Schlachtenbummler’, in M. Heyne et al., Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 9 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1899 [1984]), p. 241. 11 R. Pröve, ‘Schlachtenbummler im 18. Jahrhundert. Typologische Wahrnehmungsmuster von Militär und Krieg in Reise-Selbstzeugnissen’, in H. Peitsch (ed.), Reisen um 1800 (München: Meidenbauer, 2012), p. 93; Pröve, ‘Schlachtenbummler’, pp. 93–105; M. von Poschinger, Kaiser Friedrich. In neuer quellenmäßiger Darstellung, vol. 1 (Berlin: Schröder, 1899), p. 416. 12 L. Pietsch, ‘Kriegskorrespondenten und Zeichner’, in J. V. Pflugk-Hartung (ed.), Krieg und Sieg 1870–71. Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: Schall & Grund, 1896), pp. 296, 298–299.

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13 E. Köhn, Straßenrausch. Flanerie und kleine Form. Versuch zur Literaturgeschichte des Flaneurs bis 1933 (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1989), pp. 36, 87–93. 14 Pietsch, ‘Kriegskorrespondenten’, p. 293. 15 Ibid., p. 293. 16 W. Menzel, Geschichte des Französischen Kriegs von 1870/71, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Krabbe, 1871), pp. 167–168; ‘Zum Kriege. Aus Berlin’, Tagespost, Graz, 16 September 1870, http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=gpt&datum=18700916&qu ery=%22schlachtenbummler%22&ref=anno-search&seite=9; ‘Genf. 1. September’, Neue Freie Presse, 4 September 1870, pp. 3–4, http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/ anno?aid=nfp&datum=18700904&seite=4&zoom=43&query=%22schlachtenbummler %22&ref=anno-search. 17 Original: Ich sah dort einen Grafen . . ., der sich zu den Johannitern hielt, wie drei gewöhnliche Menschen aß und trank und für vier sich breit machte. Drei Viertel dieser Johanniter und Malteser hätten ruhig zu Hause bleiben können. Die Herren sind nur im Wege. (‘Schlachtenbummler’, Die Gartenlaube: illustrirtes Familienblatt, 38 (1870), p. 627). 18 For example, as a correspondent for the Neue Preußische Zeitung, Theodor Fontane reported from the battlefields of the German-Danish War of 1864. In the subsequent German War of 1866 and the German-French War of 1870–71, Fontane collected material for his war books. J. Pacholski, Das ganze Schlachtfeld – ein zauberhaftes Schauspiel. Theodor Fontane als Kriegsberichterstatter (Wrocław/Görlitz: Neisse, 2005), pp. 27–28. 19 Pietsch, ‘Kriegskorrespondenten’, pp. 296, 298–299. 20 Original: Was man von den sogenannten Schlachtenbummlern zu leiden hat, läßt sich kaum beschreiben. . . . Was nicht arbeiten will, kann hier nicht bleiben. Es wäre sehr gut, wenn in künftigen Fällen in der freiwilligen Krankenpflege eine Aushebung wie beim Militär vorgenommen würde; denn der reine gute Wille nützt nichts; wer körperlich nicht kräftig ist, ist nur eine Last. . . . Man geht viel zu verschwenderisch mit der weißen Binde um; man gibt sie einem jeden, der von der Polizei ein Zeugniß bringt. . . . Hier vor Paris ist es zum Verzweifeln, wie einen die Touristen quälen; sie verlangen Quartier und Verpflegung. Simon, ‘Erfahrungen’, p. 197. Author’s emphasis. 21 Original: Alle Städte scheinen freiwillige Pfleger gesandt. . . . Unsere staunenden Blicke begegnen außer Militär aller Waffengattungen nur Trägern des rothen Kreuzes, die Alle, gleich uns, auf das Zeichen der Abfahrt harren. . . . Ein schlanker braunlediger junger Mann mit siegesgewisser Haltung, in untadelhaftem Schlachtenbummlercostüm schreitet vornehm grüßend an uns vorüber. Verblüfft schaut eine unserer Begleiterinnen, eine blonde Pfarrerstochter, ihm nach: ‘Es ist wahrhaftig meines Bruders Barbier’, ruft sie endlich lachend aus, ‘und der Dicke neben ihm unser Tapezierer, was wollen die im Felde?’ Ja, was wollen sie Alle im Felde, die duftenden und wohlfrisirten Herrchen in hellen Glacés und die jungen Damen in coquetten Pflegercostüm? Wie wenig sie an die Erfüllung ihrer schweren Pflichten denken, zeigt schon jetzt das laute Lachen, die herausfordernden Blicke und das ganze tactlose Benehmen dieser Pflegerschaar. ‘Erinnerungen aus dem heiligen Kriege/Aus den Aufzeichnungen einer Pflegerin. I., Die Gartenlaube. Illustrirtes Familienblatt, 29:8 (1871), p. 488. 22 H. Lang, Erinnerungen eines Schlachtenbummlers im Feldzug 1870/71, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1915), p. 16, 18. 23 Pietschker, Siegeszuge, p. 176. 24 In this context, Walton refers to the ‘battlefield tourism’ after the Battle of Waterloo. J. K. Walton, ‘War and Tourism: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in R. Butler and W. Suntikul (eds.), Tourism and War (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 70; in this context, Hachtmann refers to the proximity in terms of content to the concept of revolutionary and sensational tourism, Hachtmann, Tourismus-Geschichte, pp. 52–55, 57.

Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists 123 25 This also becomes clear in the 39th letter of 17 October 1870 from ‘St. Germain en Laye . . . Pavillon de Henri IV à la terasse’, in which von Kaas reports: ‘There are already many English people here in St. Germain as spectators of the siege. I myself am also travelling only with Opera glasses and Bädecker [sic]’. Original: ‘Es sind hier in St. Germain schon viele Engländer als Zuschauer der Belagerung. Ich selbst reise auch nur mit Operngucker u. Bädecker [sic]’. ‘ “Fritz Korrespondenz” während des Krieges 1870’, in F. C. von Kaas (ed.), ‘Potsdam ist geschlagen’. Briefe aus dem Deutsch-Französischen Krieg 1870/71 (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2016), p. 108. The term Schlachtenbummler is mentioned by Kaas only once in his letters, by no means in a pejorative context but rather as a neutral description for an interested spectator, cf. letter no. 71 to parents, from Gonesse, 14 December 1870, pp. 144–145. 26 Although a distinctive war reporting can already be noted for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jürgen Wilke points out that with the nineteenth century, a ‘change in media presentation methods’ (‘Wandel der medialen Präsentationsweisen’) and at the same time a changed ‘conduct of war and reality of war’ (‘Kriegsführung und Kriegswirklichkeit’) can be stated. J. Wilke, ‘Krieg als Medienereignis. Zur Geschichte seiner Vermittlung in der Neuzeit’, in H.-P. Preußer (ed.), Krieg in den Medien (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 92–93; T. Dominikowski, ‘Massenmedien und Massenkrieg. Historische Annäherungen an eine unfriedliche Symbiose’, in M. Löffelholz (ed.), Krieg als Medienereignis II. Krisenkommunikation im 21. Jahrhundert, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004), pp. 64–65. 27 B. von Dewitz shows the development of photographic journalism, beginning with the partly critical documentation by the special correspondent of the London Times, William Howard Russell, and the photographer James Robertson in the Crimean War up to the German Wars of Unification of 1864, 1866 and 1870–71. B. von Dewitz, ‘Ich begreife nicht, wo die Photographen bleiben!’ Zur Photografie von Kriegen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in B. von Dewitz and R. Scotti (eds.), Alles Wahrheit! Alles Lüge! Photographie und Wirklichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Sammlung Robert Lebeck. Exhibition Catalogue for the Exhibition of the Same Name by the Agfa Foto-Historama in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum/Museum Ludwig, Cologne for the Museums of the City of Cologne, 30 November 1996 to 2 February 1997 (Amsterdam/Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), pp. 211–240; U. Daniel, ‘Der Krimkrieg 1853–1856 und die Entstehungskontexte medialer Kriegsberichterstattung’, in U. Daniel (ed.), Augenzeugen. Kriegsberichterstattung vom 18. zum 21. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), p. 49. Sontag, Regarding, p. 31, 51, 70. Wilke, ‘Krieg als Medienereignis’, pp. 93–94; E. Dörfler and W. Pensold, Die Macht der Nachricht. Die Geschichte der Nachrichtenagenturen in Österreich, ed. Wolfgang Vyslozil (Wien: Molden, 2001); M. Homberg, Reporter-Streifzüge. Metropolitane Nachrichtenkultur und die Wahrnehmung der Welt 1870–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 263–211; M. Krammer, ‘Was gibt’s denn Neues’, in U. Storch and Wien Museum (eds.), Zauber der Ferne. Imaginäre Reisen im 19. Jahrhunderte, 352nd exhibition of the Wien Museum, 4 December 2008 to 29 March 2009 (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2008), p. 50. 28 P. Osten, ‘ “Die Stimme von Solferino” – Telegrafie und Militärberichterstattung. Eine Presseschau’, in W. U. Eckart and P. Osten (eds.), Schlachtschrecken – Konventionen. Das Rote Kreuz und die Erfindung der Menschlichkeit im Kriege (Freiburg: Centaurus, 2011), pp. 175–195; Krammer, ‘Neues’, p. 50. 29 On the history of the International Red Cross, cf. W. U. Eckart and P. Osten, ‘Die Erfindung der Menschlichkeit im Kriege? Eine Einleitung’, in W. U. Eckart and P. Osten (eds.), Schlachtschrecken – Konventionen. Das Rote Kreuz und die Erfindung der Menschlichkeit im Kriege (Freiburg: Centaurus, 2011), pp. 7–16; D. Riesenberger, Das Deutsche Rote Kreuz. Eine Geschichte 1864–1990 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002). Pietschker, Siegeszuge, pp. 166–177. Fesser points out that many of the volunteer paramedics

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turned out to be of little help in the field, G. Fesser, Sedan 1870. Ein unheilvoller Sieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019), p. 93; see T. Arand, 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Osburg, 2019), pp. 164–165. G. Bentele, Objektivität und Glaubwürdigkeit: Medienrealität rekonstruiert, ed. S. Wehmeier, H. Nothhaft and R. Seidenglanz (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), pp. 86–87. Pietschker, Siegeszuge, p. 168. On the relevance of the railway in this context, cf. W. Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), p. 35; J. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: C.H. Beck, 2011), pp. 1020–1023; Hachtmann, Tourismus-Geschichte, pp. 71–74. Kaschuba emphasises that ‘[w]ith the Enlightenment . . . travel is declared to be the fundamental bourgeois motif of experience and education; it now means the obligation to experience the world in the literal sense’. Original: ‘[m]it der Aufklärung . . . das Reisen zum tragenden bürgerlichen Erfahrungs- und Bildungsmotiv erklärt [wird], es meint nun die Verpflichtung zur Welt-Erfahrung im buchstäblichen Sinn’. W. Kaschuba, ‘Aufbruch in die Welt der Moderne. Bürgerliches Reisen nach 1800’, in K. Beyrer (ed.), Zeit der Postkutschen. Drei Jahrhunderte Reisen 1600–1900, catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at the German Postal Museum, Frankfurt am Main (20.10.1992– 10.01.1993) (Karlsruhe: Braun, 1992), p. 225; Hachtmann, Tourismus-Geschichte, pp. 13, 48–52. H. Zimmermann, ‘Irrenanstalten, Zuchthäuser und Gefängnisse’, in H. Bausinger, K. Beyrer and G. Korff (eds.), Reisekultur. Von den Pilgerfahrten zum modernen Tourismus (München: C.H. Beck, 1991), pp. 207–213; J. Weber, ‘Wallfahrten nach Paris. Reiseberichte deutscher Revolutionstouristen von 1789 bis 1802’, in H. Bausinger, K. Beyrer and G. Korff (eds.), Reisekultur. Von den Pilgerfahrten zum modernen Tourismus, München 1991 (München: Beck, 1991), pp. 179–186; Kaschuba, ‘Aufbruch’, p. 234. Original: ‘Mittel der Orientierung, Informationsaufnahme und Interaktion [spricht], während es zugleich eine persönlichkeitsspezifische und kulturell variable Form individualierter [sic] Wirklichkeitsauffassung darstellt.’ Eva Schürmann, ‘Sehen als performative Praxis’, in G. Schweppenhäuser (ed.), Handbuch der Medienphilosophie (Darmstadt: WBG, 2018), p. 230. Schürmann, ‘Sehen’, p. 230. U. Storch, ‘Zauber der Ferne. Imaginäre Reisen im 19. Jahrhunderte’, in U. Storch and Wien Museum (eds.), Zauber der Ferne, pp. 16–19. In the context of panoramas too, the focus of interest was by no means only on views of cities or landscapes but also on the depiction of catastrophes and, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century, war scenes. S. Mattl, ‘Städtereisen – Von der Imagination zur Simulation’, in Ibid., p. 38, 40; Mattl, ‘Städtereisen’, p. 38, 40. Sontag, Regarding, p. 21, 52. Ibid., p. 53. J. Baudrillard, Symbolic exchange and death, trans. I. H. Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993), p. 50. Ibid., p. 54, 84, note 1. On the loss of reality and mass media, cf. H. Zapf, Jenseits der Simulation – Das radikale Denken Jean Baudrillards als politische Theorie (Berlin: Lit, 2010), p. 127. N. Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. K. C. Stanford (California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 1. Zapf, Simulation, pp. 195–196. Original: Das Ereignis verschwindet also gleichsam hinter der Information, mit der es medial notwendig einhergeht, und die es selbst sogar

Uninvolved and fascinated battlefield tourists 125

44 45 46 47 48 49

geradezu überholt. Dieses Ungleichgewicht schafft die Sehnsucht nach einem Ereignis, die in dem; universellen und pathetischen Wahn’ der Masse angesichts so genannter Großereignisse . . . an die Oberfläche kommt. Zapf, Simulation, p. 197. S. Žižek, Event. Philosophy in Transit (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 179. Ibid., p. 78. Z. Bauman, Life in Fragments: essays in postmodern morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 92. Ibid., pp. 92–99. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., pp. 92–93, 97.

9

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler on the battlefields of 1870–71 Tobias Arand

Introduction In many respects, the war of 1870–71 points to the coming enormous catastrophes of the twentieth century: it was an industrialised, large-scale war between peoples who were increasingly incited to nationalism by the mass media in the course of the events. For its planning and execution, the financial, economic and infrastructural resources of both countries were largely seized.1 Through modern means of communication such as telegraphy, it was possible not only to intervene in the battle from the command level almost in real time, even far away from the fighting, but also to report quickly back home.2 Not just the military but also the civilian ‘home front’ was ideologically and materially involved in the war.3 But when whole peoples, and no longer just the ‘professionals’ as in the days of pre-national cabinet wars, were involved in war, it was important to offer these peoples interpretations of dying and killing after victory or defeat. The memory of this war was ultimately kept alive in both countries in a clearly manipulative way and instrumentalised for the preparation of new wars as the Hamburg military historian and expert on the war of 1870–71 Michael Epkenhans writes, ‘Giving meaning was the goal – in the German Reich as well as in France’.4 In the first German monograph about the 1870–71 war for nearly fifty years, I argued more sharply: The official culture of remembrance after 1871 did not allow for a confrontation with the losses and traumas of the survivors, the invalids as well as the warriors who remained at least physically unharmed, which would have been appropriate to the mourning and the seriousness of the events. . . . This official culture of remembrance, repeated a thousand times, was taken up, implemented, and thus passed on by the educated and petty bourgeoisie, the state-supporting local honchos as well as the warrior associations at the local level. Over beer, song, and greasy food, war memories were cultivated that propagated a ‘murderer’s cold-bloodedness with a good conscience’ as a model, as Nietzsche put it in 1878.5 But it was not only the official culture of remembrance that shaped the image of the war. Thousands of memorial books by former combatants, published in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-13

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler 127 initial years after 1871 and then again for the 25th anniversary of the war in 1895, also kept the memory alive.6 In masculine-coded language, they also adopted the affirmative narrative of the nation-state becoming a nation on the battlefield despite all the descriptions of suffering. Cathérine Pfauth says about the emergence of the nation-state on the battlefield: Sometimes, however, wars are also the birthplaces of an actual nation-state on a formal level. The ‘inner’ foundation of the nation-state in the sense of belonging to a nation, however, often only takes place retrospectively after the formal foundation through the memory of those wars that were constitutive for the creation of the nation-state.7 The joy with which the German veterans of 1870–71 received this ‘inner nationalisation’ is exemplified by the closing words of the memoirs of the Bavarian veteran Florian Kühnhauser: ‘true soldiers’ blood rolls in our veins, and we are proud to have taken part in these bloody battles and glorious victories, as co-founders of the mighty German Empire’.8 It is, however, the same Kühnhauser who also wrote, ‘to describe all the horror images in their naked reality, I can’t find the words’.9 Despite such Nachdenklichkeitsspuren (traces of reflection), a strong identification with the war and the founding of the Reich nevertheless predominates in the memoir books as their result.10 Nation-building However, the roots of this affirmative culture of remembrance, which did not omit the horrors of war but placed them in a context of the higher national cause whose greatness came precisely through these horrors, lie at least in part in the work of an often overlooked group of war participants: journalists, writers and artists. After all, something else was modern in this war. Even during the fighting, the later image of the war was consciously influenced by what we would call today ‘embedded journalism’ and ‘embedded artists’, whose reports, paintings and books shaped the mood at home and abroad, as well as the later culture of remembrance. They belonged to a group of people who will be referred to as Schlachtenbummler.11 The German and not easily translated term Schlachtenbummler refers to non-combatant and non-uniformed companions of the troops who accompanied the combatants, sharing the dangers to a certain extent but above all producing affirmative images of history in the literal sense of the word, as officially required. Even though the Schlachtenbummler were not combatants in the warlike sense, they nevertheless made an important contribution to the mental victory of the German cause from the point of view of the German military leadership, which was explicitly interested in nationalistic reporting. The phenomenon of the Schlachtenbummler has been largely overlooked in research on the war of 1870–71. The Essen researcher Frank Becker devoted himself to the correspondents on the battlefields, but the fascinating world of the artists and literati in the factual reporting of the German army as

128  Tobias Arand well as its later consequences as memory and perception guides has not yet been systematically studied.12 The correspondents consolidated national consciousness at home as Frank Becker writes: The media profited from war coverage and nationalism, but also contributed to fuelling it. War reporting and nationalism were, as it were, mutually exacerbated. . . . The Prussian-German army acted as the administrator of the national interest, and the adoption of the perspective of its soldiers, made possible by intensive communication between front and home, also made the media consumer at home part of this project.13 Nonetheless, a group of Schlachtenbummler who were a nuisance to the troops must also be mentioned. They were curious people who not only satisfied their curiosity but also often brought so-called Liebesgaben (gifts of love) from home to the front and thus helped to alleviate the serious supply shortages on the German side in France. From this, however, they then derived the right to accompany and observe the events, from a safe distance, of course. These Schlachtenbummler were not only often high aristocrats but also wealthy civilians. The army’s opinion of this group, unlike that of the first two, was clearly negative. For example, the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, leader of the 3rd German Army, was annoyed by the many high-ranking Schlachtenbummler who showed up in increasing numbers at his headquarters. Uninvited journalists were turned away, as were English surgeons who hoped to find interesting objects of study on the battlefields. English lords who did not observe etiquette were only reluctantly tolerated as the Crown Prince wrote in his diary on 9 August 1870: ‘Lord Ronald Leveson Gower, despite our repeated hints that there was no room for him with us . . . demands rations for himself and his horses, but has not yet allowed anyone to be introduced to him’.14 But unlike Lord Gower, the Crown Prince welcomed useful select journalists such as ‘Mr Skinner, correspondent for the Daily News and Mr Landels, draughtsman for the Times’, whom he mentioned in his diary entry of 6 August 1870.15 Bronsart von Schellendorf, a senior officer in the Prussian general staff, was also unequivocal to men like Lord Gower. He did not want to be bothered with ‘superfluous persons’, that is to say, Schlachtenbummler, ‘who threaten to nip at our heels’.16 The Hofschranzen (court henchmen) who accompanied the king into the field and thus to the general staff excited his ‘disgust’ and were a ‘country nuisance’ to him.17 For him, many of the ruler’s courtly entourage were ‘fastidious, insolent and incomprehensible in the highest degree’.18 Hans von Kretschman, a major in the general staff of the III Army Corps of the 2nd German Army, wrote to his wife Jenny about this kind of Schlachtenbummler during the siege of Metz in both anger and derision: Such a person puts a bandage and some charpie in his left trouser pocket, brings it as a gift of love and now wants to be received, entertained, quartered, fed; and does so with an air of impressment, as if he were the main

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler 129 person. . . . Now think, one is sitting in the middle of work or must go to the outposts and such a man comes complaining that he has no washbasin, – we all have none, – that really breaks one’s patience. We try to scare them away now; an officer must lead the love knights to the outposts, to where a grenade comes every time the tip of a nose is seen. It is supposed to be great fun, when the shooting starts they want to turn back immediately, and when they go home they talk terribly bravely; what will they say in Berlin!19 In his irony, however, the major also overlooked the fact that many of the battlefield supporters also accomplished useful things, as must be clearly stated: ‘the package these civilians brought for the soldiers are of enormous importance to morale outside Metz in face of bad weather, food shortages, and disease’.20 But let us now take a look at three representatives of the group of journalists and artists, namely, the British-Irish journalist William Howard Russell, the writer and draughtsman Ludwig Pietsch and the later famous painter Anton von Werner.21 William Howard Russell In the context of the German governments’ attempt to assert media sovereignty over the war, the strict control of the numerous war correspondents must also be noted. Only war correspondents who had access to the battlefields and who managed to obtain situation assessments from leading military officers could issue reports that aroused interest at home. The constant hunt for passes signed and stamped by officers, permitting entry into military areas and crossing of front lines, was part of the daily business of war correspondents. For the military authorities, issuing or refusing them was a means of repressive control. At the same time, the correspondents were also dependent on help from the military if they wanted to telegraph their reports to the editorial offices at home or send them by messenger. However, access to the battlefields, interviews and help in sending reports was granted to war correspondents only whose loyalty the military believed they could rely on. From the German point of view, not only compatriots but also, under certain circumstances, foreigners could be important helpers in the sense of affirmative reporting – if they were properly controlled. The forty-nine-year-old Russell, an experienced war correspondent for the Times, a bearded man of great authority in the British newspaper market, had the honour of travelling with and reporting on the staff of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. The Prussian Prime Minister and Chancellor of the North German Confederation, Otto von Bismarck, personally lobbied for Russell, recognising the importance of a well-meaning press abroad in times of war. On 29 July, Russell received his written permission to work as a war correspondent, as he later remembered: ‘The contents specify that I, the correspondent of the Times, have permission to proceed with the Army, and to obtain leave from any general commanding to be attached to his quarters’.22

130  Tobias Arand Russell managed to stay in the company of the 3rd German Army throughout the campaign. During the Battle of Sedan, he watched the action from a hill. He was plagued by a guilty conscience: It is not a pleasant thing to be a mere spectator of such scenes. There is something cold-blooded in standing with a glass to your eye, seeing men blown to pieces, or dragging their shattered bodies to places of safety, or writhing on the ground too far for help, even if you could render it.23 Later, Russell climbed the hill of Frénois, from where the King, Bismarck, Moltke and many more officers and battle-goers watched the fighting. The reporter was surprised to see how the onlookers behaved. Some sat on the grass reading letters, whereas others commented on each dramatic and deadly scene like visitors to a play. The deaths of real people in a battle that was taking place before their eyes seemed to be an almost abstract act that barely touched them. Comments flew back and forth about what was happening, Bismarck laughed. Russell remarked dryly: ‘Never may man see battle in these long-range days in such ease and safety’.24 The reporter described the scene on the hill of Frénois with delicate irony and at the same time gave a hint that he was by no means the only ‘embedded journalist’: Moltke, when not looking through the glass or at the map, stood in a curious musing attitude, with his right hand to the side of his face, elbow resting on the left hand crossed towards his hip. Count Bismarck stood rather apart, smoking a good deal, and chatting occasionally with a short, thick-set, soldierly-looking man in the undress uniform of a United States ­Lieutenant-General – Sheridan, with whom was the correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette.25 Russell also described how his presence was by no means joyfully tolerated by all but that he was accepted primarily because of his useful function in their own ranks. When a shell almost hit King Wilhelm, Russell was blamed: This caused an immediate commotion: Whether I was the unlucky cause of the notice taken of us by the French or not I cannot say, but certainly the looks of several of the entourage seemed to imply that I was a criminal of no ordinary magnitude.26 On the following two days, Russell visited the battlefield. What Russell saw impressed even this experienced reporter: With many years’ experience of the work of war, I had never seen the like before – never beheld death in such horrible shapes – because the dead had on their faces the expression of terror – mental and bodily agony such as I never should have thought it possible for mortal clay to retain after the spirit had fled through the hideous portals fashioned by the iron hand of artillery.

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler  131 There were human hands detached from the arms and hanging up in the trees; feet and legs lying far apart from the bodies to which they belonged.27 For the hard-nosed Russell, Sedan was the rock bottom of his reporting career: ‘I do not remember ever having a ride through more horrible sights, or ever experiencing such loathing and disgust. The smells were vile. It was a true vulture land’.28 On 5 September 1870, Russell took a train to Ostend in Belgium and a ship to London. In London, he wrote an article for his newspaper about the battle, which appeared in the country’s leading papers. Russell, who, as a ‘battlefield journalist’, primarily pursued his profession, also described the competition between the writers in the Crown Prince’s entourage. In times of mass media, the fastest news, the earliest report won: ‘An English officer, who had seen the smoke of the battle from the Belgian frontier, or its vicinity, had sent a letter, giving his impressions, to the Times. The Pall Mall contained a narrative by a close observer’.29 Russell, however, was self-confident and professional enough to point out the advantages of his proximity to the German army leadership. In his view, this was the only way the reports could be investigative: But still there was no one who, like myself, had seen the course of the battle on the south side of the Meuse from the beginning of the Bavarian attack at Bazeilles to the extreme left of the Crown Prince’s Army.30 On 9 September, Russell was back in Sedan, where the stench of decaying animal carcasses reminded him again of the terrible reality of war after the brief respite in London and the almost unreal days of peace far from the front lines. Wounded men lay everywhere, and bloated horses decomposed in the ditches: ‘Every sense was outraged’.31 Russell continued to accompany the staff of the 3rd Army. With the Crown Prince he visited the battlefield of Sceaux – the site of a battle during the encirclement of Paris. Depressed and sarcastically musing, Russell trotted along with his horse after the Crown Prince’s staff towards Versailles: To be obliged to direct my horse carefully through the turnip-fields outside Paris lest he should trample on a dead Frenchman causes me some natural dégout. Why will not people stay at home, and not go out of their own country to kill each other? It is all along of that French mania for ‘La Gloire’, and that passion for making exoteric ‘promenades militaires’, that the sedate German is now taking calm cold comfort in tramping along, as we see him, on the road to Versailles, meditating on what the French did at Berlin long ago and in the Palatinate before that, and concocting noble vengeances for what the ancestors of his fallen foes did to his grandfather, if not to his grandmother.32 Russell would later witness the Kaiser’s proclamation in Versailles as well as the entry of the victorious Germans into Paris and be able to report on both events promptly to the readers of the Times. For all his criticism of details of the conduct of the war, his reports for the paper remained sympathetic to the German side. A good foreign press was important throughout the war, and Russell did what

132  Tobias Arand the Germans hoped he would do. He travelled back to London but then returned to Paris as the Commune uprising began there. In recognition of his work in the slipstream of the German Crown Prince, Russell received the somewhat dubious honour, from an English point of view, of an Iron Cross on a white ‘non-combatant ribbon’. In 1895, the journalist was raised to the peerage and died in 1907 as the world’s leading war reporter at the age of eighty-five. Ludwig Pietsch Ludwig Pietsch was a travel writer, painter and Berlin ‘socialite’. At the outbreak of war, he decided on his own initiative to travel to the front line to write and paint. He was already planning a possible sales success of an illustrated war book. He struggled to make his way to the Palatinate as a civilian in military transport trains of the Berlin Guard units. On 5 August, Pietsch learned that there had been a battle near the border the day before. He made his way by train to the destroyed railway station in Wissembourg, which had been so heavily fought over the day before. Destroyed houses were provisionally set up as military hospitals and only equally provisionally marked as such with charcoal labels. Bodies of Turcos which had not yet been recovered were lying around everywhere. Even so, pits were already being dug for mass graves. Pietsch pulled out his drawing pencil and portrayed the corpses. However, he had to hurry: ‘the death bearers finish sooner than I do and ruthlessly carry the, oh so calm! models ruthlessly out of my sight’.33 Pietsch proudly read the Vossische Zeitung, which reported on him and his journey to the front line. It was a sign of the speed with which news could already be transmitted home in 1870. On 6 August, Pietsch heard about the fighting near Woerth. With luck, he managed to take the train from Wissembourg to Sulz, where the headquarters of the 3rd Army was located. There he met colleagues from the art and literature scene who followed the noise of war. Pietsch discussed the latest developments with Gustav Freytag, the author of a famous German novel Soll und Haben, and the well-known battle painters Georg Bleibtreu and Emil Hünten, both of whom were in the entourage of the Crown Prince’s headquarters. In the following days, Pietsch roamed the battlefield in search of worthwhile subjects. The field of the dead at Woerth seemed magically to attract the painters and writers who had hurried there from Germany on arduous journeys. There they found the motifs ‘in natura’ with which they later hoped to promote the fame of the German military and their own careers. Walking up the heights of Frœschwiller, a ‘swamp of blood and brains and guts’, Pietsch was torn between professional fascination and human horror.34 The higher Pietsch climbed the hills, the more his horror grew: ‘At the last height, only the butchery raged en masse. Any description would palliate and any apt description would make the reader nauseous’.35 Nevertheless, Pietsch was a painter and now saw the motifs, albeit differently than in Wissembourg, with a guilty conscience: And the sun laughed so freshly and cheerfully on all the atrocity and – the most shameful thing! – Some groups were so deliciously picturesque, such

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler  133 as where the shell tore the tree and the three Zouaves apart at the same time, that one could not and did not want to stop drawing.36 Elsewhere on the battlefield, which after several days of heat and rain now presumably stank unbearably, he encountered a group of dead whose destroyed bodies had hardly anything human left in them: ‘Here, for example, a group: smashing into the middle of a section, the bursting projectile has destroyed ten men at once, torn away this one’s legs, that one’s half head, that one’s torso – sprayed is the only word for it’.37 Pietsch already glimpsed the abysmal visions of horror of the First World War, of Verdun, the Flanders Fields or the Somme. Soon after, Pietsch left Woerth. The Crown Prince himself had arranged a seat for him in a comfortable carriage. ‘Breakfast chats with the Crown Prince’ were now part of the artist’s daily routine. The many Schlachtenbummler who travelled through France with the Crown Prince’s staff met one another again and again. Many of them were already acquainted with one another. On 14 August, for example, Russell and Pietsch met, which was worth an entry in Pietsch’s diary: ‘I came close to a stocky, broadshouldered gentleman with sharp black eyes and a white moustache in a grey tourist suit, whom I soon recognised as my old travelling companion from the Nile, the great Times correspondent Mr Russell’.38 On another occasion, they both sat down to dinner at the table of the Crown Prince, who was always anxious to provide ‘travelling companions’ like Pietsch and Russell with useful information and thus influence the external presentation of the war. Unlike the increasingly disillusioned British war reporter, however, Pietsch went into a patriotic furore as he walked across the battlefield at Sceaux in September and faced the fact that Paris was completely surrounded. As if he were referring to Russell’s resigned mockery, Pietsch escalated into national fantasies that showed only too clearly what a succession of slights many German supporters of unification must have felt the chequered history of relations with France to be. Although Pietsch also regretted the destruction of the war, especially of some places around Paris, the thrill of victory was stronger: And yet – how great and glorious to see them again just like this, in the midst of our victorious people, which has finally found itself again after so many centuries and is smashing the power and greatness of its eternal harassers and insolent oppressors into shards before my eyes.39 It was also easy for the euphoric non-combatant Pietsch to look at the casualties associated with the successes: What lies at the bottom of individual fates. Next June, the centifolias in Fontenay les Roses will bloom as lush and fragrant as ever; the fresh lawns on the corpse fields of our heroes will be resplendent with swells and ‘the soil will bear them again, as it has borne them from time immemorial’.40

134  Tobias Arand When one’s own life is not threatened by battle, Goethe’s Faust can easily be quoted! Here Pietsch showed himself to be the typical representative of the Schreibtischtäter (desk warrior) who joyfully accompanies the dying of others with sublime texts. Patriotic intellectuals like Pietsch would wreak intellectual havoc throughout Europe in the decades leading up to the First World War. Like Russell, Pietsch remained in Paris until the Germans invaded. In March 1871, he travelled back to Berlin. He had his war diary published in 1871. For decades to come, Pietsch would entertain in the Berlin salons, where he made the acquaintance of painters and literary figures, including Theodor Fontane. Still a womaniser and a refined spirit in his old age, Pietsch died in Berlin in 1911 at the age of eighty-seven. Anton von Werner Of course, only those painters from whom the army command expected propagandistically usable images were allowed to be a burden on the complex military apparatus. For many sober and efficient military men, such as Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf, however, men like von Werner were a nuisance. They had no idea about soldiering, liked to wallow in misplaced heroic pathos, stood in the way and consumed resources. The fact that it was not only journalists and authors but also painters like von Werner would contribute decisively to the glorification of the slaughter in France after 1870–71 and thus shape the image of the war for entire generations was not always important to the strategists on the ground, in contrast to the leaders at the highest level. Anton von Werner was a young, ambitious painter from Frankfurt an der Oder. He studied at the Karlsruhe Art Academy and, after several stays in Paris, was also well acquainted with French art. Through a poet friend, von Werner made the acquaintance of the Grand Duke of Baden, Friedrich, who encouraged his talent. Von Werner’s speciality was history paintings, which depicted particularly impressive historical events, mostly of positively transfigured German Middle Ages or successful battles, and were a particularly popular genre among the nationally minded middle classes. The painting style of these pictures was almost photorealistic; their claim was the reproduction of the past as it supposedly ‘really’ was. Dramatic lighting, idealising or even demonising character drawings, the dramatisation of events and aestheticisation of human bodies were characteristics of academic history painting. Since the German military leadership finally recognised the value of a culture of remembrance during the war and therefore tolerated troublesome contemporaries such as Pietsch or Russell, it is no surprise that von Werner also received an invitation to the front. Von Werner wanted to produce a painting titled Moltke before Paris, which the Schleswig-Holstein Art Association had ordered from him. With this commission, he justified a request to be allowed to travel to Versailles. With the help of the Grand Duke of Baden, the request was successful. In mid-October, he departed from Karlsruhe. The onward journey to Versailles, where the German army command had been since the beginning of the siege of Paris, took eight days. On 26 October, von Werner finally reached Versailles.

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler  135 In Versailles, von Werner quickly made the acquaintance of all the important people on the Grand General Staff and met Bismarck and the Crown Prince. He also met Georg Bleibtreu, who had set up a studio in Versailles. The artist made portrait sketches of many of the German military officers. But he was mainly in Versailles because of his commission to paint Moltke before Paris. Anton von Werner made ink drawings for the Moltke painting at Bleibtreu’s studio in the Palace of Versailles. It was there, on 8 November, that he received a visit from the Chief of the General Staff. In his later memoirs, von Werner described Moltke entirely in terms of the later hero worship, which exaggerated the Chief of the General Staff to the point of mystique and in which he, as a painter, had his own share: I saw the great commander for the first time in the vicinity and when he entered in his fine, noiseless manner, greeting me with an amiable handshake, he gave me the impression . . . of a distinguished officer of obliging manners and informal bearing.41 In Bleibtreu’s studios, the artist now repeatedly met not only other battlefield enthusiasts, such as Ludwig Pietsch, but also the Crown Prince and generals for a chat over coffee or wine. In the course of November, von Werner made studies of horses, and Moltke sat for his portrait. Gradually, the still young artist began to feel bored with the situation outside Paris. In December, believing he had completed all the preparatory work for his Moltke painting, he travelled back to Karlsruhe, where new commissions were already waiting for him. Von Werner was busily working on Moltke before Paris when, on 15 January, during a break from painting while skating on the frozen Karlsruhe shooting meadow, he received a momentous telegram. The Crown Prince’s marshal, August Graf zu Eulenburg, informed the painter: ‘H.K.H. the Crown Prince sends you word that you would experience something worthy of your brush here if you could arrive before 18 January’.42 That same day von Werner bought himself a travelling fur coat and travelled by train via Strasbourg to Lagny, where he arrived on 17 January. He travelled on to Versailles in a stagecoach, with a Bavarian hunter sitting on the roof to repel any francs-tireurs. He had no idea what event worthy of his ‘brush’ the Crown Prince might have meant. After a few hours’ sleep, the painter got himself a tailcoat and visited the Crown Prince in his villa ‘Les Ombrages’ in the early morning of 18 January. There he received a telling message: ‘By order of His Royal Highness the Crown Prince, the bearer of these lines, Mr v. Werner, is admitted to the festivities at the palace this morning’.43 As the painter entered the palace for the celebration of the Emperor’s Proclamation, he still had no idea what would take place that would be ‘worthy of his brush’. He passed through the Peace Hall which led to the Hall of Mirrors and was filled with officers from all branches of the armed forces. Then he entered the Hall of Mirrors and was amazed at the 600 to 800 people he met there. After von Werner, quite the connoisseur, had admired Charles Le Brun’s ceiling paintings, he immediately began to record all his impressions with a pencil. After the end of the

136  Tobias Arand service by the court preacher Rogge, von Werner was led to a convenient place in order to have the main event well in front of his eyes. In between, an officer hissed indignantly, ‘What is the “civilian” doing here?’44 The actual act, which Werner was supposed to paint and make famous, disappointed Werner’s eye so permanently that he wrote in his memoirs: ‘And now the great historical event, which signified the achievement of the war, proceeded in the most pompous manner and with extraordinary brevity’.45 Now the painter finally realised what he had been ordered to do at Versailles. Von Werner quickly drew all his impressions again, and once more he only noticed the events in excerpts: And I turned my most rapt attention to him, first of all, of course, to his outward picturesque appearance, noted the most necessary things in all haste, saw that King Wilhelm spoke something and that Count Bismarck read out something longer in a wooden voice, but did not hear what it meant, and only awoke from my absorption when the Grand Duke of Baden stepped next to King Wilhelm and shouted into the hall in a loud voice: ‘His Majesty, Emperor Wilhelm the Victorious, Long May He Live!’46 In the evening, von Werner attended a tea party at the Crown Prince’s villa. The painter had made all the necessary sketches to paint his later famous pictures of the Emperor’s Proclamation. Soon after, he travelled home again and began to paint. He created several versions of the image of the ‘Emperor’s Proclamation’, of which the so-called Friedrichsruher version of 1885, in particular, perpetuated a pro-Prussian and affirmative narrative of the event that is still immensely effective today. The picture with Bismarck in a radiant white uniform in the centre of the picture, the emperor standing dignified on an estrade, the mainly Prussian military joyfully cheering at his feet is a falsification of history that von Werner, who was so disappointed on 18 January 1871, laid at the feet of the Hohenzollerns entirely in the spirit of the official pro-Prussian politics of remembrance. For Anton von Werner, the war of 1870–71 was the great turning-point in his life. With the commission from the Crown Prince and the contacts he made in Versailles, the still young artist developed over the next decades into the leading German painter of historicism. Anton von Werner died in Berlin in 1915 at the age of seventy-two. As the most influential representative of an anti-modern artistic style and as a representative of so-called Wilhelminism, von Werner’s academic and highly patriotic painting experienced general rejection for decades after 1945. The source value of his paintings for the reconstruction of a past artistic conception and social mood has only recently been more strongly recognised once again. Conclusion If one looks at the result of the work of the ‘embedded’ journalists, painters and writers from the point of view of the officially desired culture of remembrance, it was extremely successful. In countless publications of the decades after the war,

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler  137 the historical images created during the fighting were echoed in words and pictures. Even today, the anecdotal images and stories continue to shape a romanticised image of this cruel and industrial war. As shown, the atrocities of war are not concealed, but the embedding of the descriptions in a national narrative of success ultimately made them appear as necessities in the achievement of a higher goal: German unification. The role played in this by the friendly support of these Schlachtenbummler by the official German authorities was shown by Russell’s generally pro-German reports. The motivation by nationalism and the desire for revenge were shown by Pietsch’s reports. Even today, no German history textbook or television documentary about 1870–71 is without Anton Werner’s famous painting Kaiserproklamation, and until recently, this monarchist image celebrating German Unification under Prussian leadership was still naively used in textbooks as an image of a supposedly glorious celebration.47 The hand of the Great General Staff, which deliberately relied on bringing along willing civilian helpers to make its war ‘remembered more beautifully’, was thus still at work in German classrooms. It is only in recent times that a way of looking at things that no longer misleads the pupils has begun to emerge. Historical images by journalists, writers or artists always outlive their creators and rarely for the benefit of those born later. Notes 1 T. Arand, 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen (Hamburg: Osburg, 2018), p. 132; F. Hagemann, ‘Moltke – Kriegsbild und Führungsdenken’, in G. Bauer, K. Protte and A. Wagner (eds.), Krieg, Macht, Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand (Dresden: Sandstein, 2020), p. 273 ff. 2 Arand, 1870/71, p. 80. 3 Ibid., p.  167ff; M. Epkenhans, Die Reichsgründung 1870/71 (München: C.H. Beck, 2020), p. 64ff. 4 Original: ‘Sinngebung war das Ziel . . . – im Deutschen Reich ebenso wie in Frankreich’. Arand, 1870/71, p. 647ff; M. Epkenhans, ‘Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg in der Erinnerung’, in Bauer, Protte and Wagner, Krieg, Macht, Nation, p. 248ff. 5 Original: Die offizielle Erinnerungskultur nach 1871 ermöglichte keine Auseinandersetzung mit den Verlusten und den Traumata der Hinterbliebenen, der Invaliden wie der zumindest körperlich unversehrt gebliebenen Krieger, die der Trauer und dem Ernst des Geschehens angemessen gewesen wäre. . . . Diese offizielle, so tausendfach wiederholte Erinnerungskultur wurde vom Bildungs- und Kleinbürgertum, den staatstragenden Ortshonoratioren sowie von den Kriegervereinen auf lokaler Ebene aufgegriffen, umgesetzt und damit weitergegeben.   Bei Bier, Gesang und fetten Speisen wurden Kriegserinnerungen gepflegt, die eine, wie Friedrich Nietzsche es 1878 formulierte, ‘Mörder-Kaltblütigkeit mit gutem Gewissen’ als Vorbild propagierten. Arand, 1870/71, p. 647, 649. 6 T. Arand, ‘ “.  .  . dazu find ich keine Wrote” – Der Blick auf den Krieg von 1870/71 in Erinnerungsbüchern deutscher Veteranen’, in W. Mährle (ed.), In Nation im Siegesrausch. Württemberg und die Gründung des Deutschen Reichs 1870/71 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2020), pp. 85–98. 7 C. Pfauth, ‘An important battleground in the contest for children’s hearts and minds’: Australian and German Nation Building out of the Spirit of War and the Role of School’,

138  Tobias Arand in A. Dorrer and T. Petraschka (eds.), Der Erste Weltkrieg: Erinnerungskulturen in Deutschland und Australien, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022), p. 164. 8 Original: ‘rollt doch echtes Soldatenblut in unseren Adern, und wir sind stolz darauf, teilgenommen zu haben an diesen so blutigen Kämpfen und glorreichen Siegen, als Mitbegründer des so mächtigen deutschen Reichs’. F. Kühnhauser, Kriegs-Erinnerungen eines Soldaten des königlich-bayerischen Infanterie-Leib-Regiments (Partenkirchen: Self-Published, 1895), p. 245; Arand, ‘ “. . . dazu find ich keine Wrote” ’, p. 94. 9 Original: ‘all die Schreckenbilder in ihrer nackten Wirklichkeit zu schildern, dazu find ich keine Worte’. Kühnhauser, Kriegs-Erinnerungen, p. 74. 10 Arand, ‘ “. . . dazu find ich keine Wrote” ’, p. 89. 11 A term that, for example, the most important German author of ‘Bürgerlicher Realismus’ (bourgeois realism) and military writer Theodor Fontange liked to use ironically and even pejoratively. H. Ohff, Theodor Fontane. Leben und Werk (München: Piper 1995), p. 325. For Fontane in the war from 1870–71, see T. Arand, ‘Rogerowski oder Rasumowsky? Überlegungen zur nationalen “Meistererzählung” in Fontanes “Kriegsgefangen” ’, Fontane-Blätter, 105 (2018), pp.  61–86. The term also found its way into the Deutsches Wörterbuch German dictionary by the Brothers Grimm: Schlachtenbummler . . . in den neueren Kriegen aufgekommen, besonders seit 1870 für diejenigen gebraucht, die unter dem Vorwande der Krankenpflege sich nach dem Kriegsschauplatze begaben, ihre Neugierde zu büszen oder sich der lustigeren Seite des Quartier- und Lagerlebens zu widmen. Translation: Schlachtenbummler . . . emerged in the more recent wars, and has been used especially since 1870 for those who, under the pretext of caring for the sick, went to the theatre of war to satisfy their curiosity or to devote themselves to the more amusing side of life in the quarters and camps Wörterbuch, p. 241.   Here, however, we assume a broader and not merely pejorative term. Today, the term is used in German to claim more or less peaceful football supporters. 12 F. Becker, Bilder von Krieg und Nation. Die Einigungskriege in der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit Deutschlands 1864–1913 (München: Oldenbourg 2001); F. Becker, ‘Deutschland im Krieg von 1870/71. Oder die mediale Inszenierung von Wirklichkeit’, in U. Daniel (ed.), Augenzeugen. Kriegsberichterstattung vom 18. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert (Göttigen: Wallstein, 2007), pp. 68–86; F. Becker, ‘Nachrichten vom Kriegsschauplatz’, in Bauer, Protte and Wagner, Krieg, Macht, Nation, pp. 300–311. Approaches in Arand, ‘Rogerowski oder Rasumowsky’ in the biographies of Theodor Fontane, Heinrich Lang, William Howard Russell and Anton von Werner. 13 Original: Die Medien profitierten von Kriegsberichterstattung und Nationalismus, aber trugen auch ihrerseits dazu bei, ihn anzufachen. Kriegsberichterstattung und Nationalismus schaukelten sich gleichsam wechselseitig hoch. . . . Die preußischdeutsche Armee trat als Sachwalterin des Nationalinteresses auf, und die Übernahme der Perspektive ihrer Soldaten, die durch intensive Kommunikation zwischen Front und Heimat möglich wurde, machte auch den Medienkonsumenten daheim zu einem Teil dieses Projekts. Becker, ‘Nachrichten vom Kriegsschauplatz’, p. 311. 14 Original: ‘Lord Ronald Leveson Gower, trotz unserer wiederholten Andeutungen, daß kein Platz für ihn bei uns sei . . . – er verlangt Verpflegung für sich und seine Pferde, hat sich aber bisher niemandem vorstellen lassen’. H. O. Meisner (ed.), Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71 (Berlin, Leipzig: Koehler, 1926), p. 49; Fig. 2, Anton von Werner, Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelms erweist dem getöteten französischen General Abel Douay die letzte Ehre, 1889, Arand, ‘Rogerowski oder Rasumowsky’, p. 232. 15 Ibid.

Journalists, artists and writers as Schlachtenbummler  139 16 P. Rassow (ed.), Bronsart von Schellendorf. Geheimes Kriegstagebuch 1870–1871 (Bonn: Athenäum, 1954), p. 36. 17 Ibid. 18 Original: ‘anspruchsvoll, frech und unverständig im höchsten Maße’. Rassow, Bronsart von Schellendorf, pp. 36–37. 19 Original: So einer steckt sich in die linke Hosentasche eine Bandage und etwas Charpie, bringt das als Liebesgabe und will nun empfangen, unterhalten, einquartiert, verpflegt werden; und zwar mit einem Empressement, als ob er die Hauptperson waere. . . . Nun denke Dir, man sitzt mitten in der Arbeit oder muß zu den Vorposten und so ein Mann kommt klagen, er habe kein Waschbecken, – wir alle haben keins, – da reißt einem wirklich die Geduld. Wir probieren, sie jetzt weg zu aengstigen; ein Offizier muß die Liebesritter zu den Vorposten fuehren und zwar dahin, wo jedesmal, wenn auch nur eine Nasenspitze zu sehen ist, eine Granate kommt. Es soll hoechst spaßhaft sein, wenn das Schießen anfaengt, dann wollen sie gleich wieder umkehren und wenn sie nach Hause gehen, dann sprechen sie furchtbar tapfer; was moegen die in Berlin erzaehlen! L. Braun (ed.), Kriegsbriefe aus den Jahren 1870/71 von Hans von Kretschman (Berlin: Meyer, Jessen 1911), p. 130. 20 C. Pfauth, T. Arand and J. Alexander, Glory & Defeat. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 Week by Week (Berlin: Real Time History, 2022), p. 111; Fig. 3, Major von Kretschman, Arand, 1870/71, p. 277. 21 The following remarks, in a revised and abbreviated form, refer in large part to the relevant chapters in Arand, 1870/71 and the short summary by Pfauth, Arand and Alexander, Glory & Defeat, p. 111. 22 W. H. Russell, My Diary During the Last Great War (London: Routledge, 1874), p. 35. 23 Ibid., p. 189. 24 Ibid., p. 196. 25 Ibid., p.  191; (Fig. 5, Carl Steffeck, General Reille übergibt König Wilhelm auf dem Schlachtfeld von Sedan das Schreiben Napoleons III, 1884, Arand, 1870/71, p. 377). 26 Russell, My Diary, p. 190. 27 Ibid., p. 222. 28 Ibid., p. 235. 29 Ibid., p. 244. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 254. 32 Ibid., p. 297f. 33 Original: ‘die Todtenträger werden eher fertig als ich und tragen mir die, ach so ruhigen! Modelle rücksichtslos aus den Augen’. L. Pietsch, Von Berlin bis Paris. Kriegsbilder (1870–1871) (Berlin: Janke, 1871), p. 18. 34 Ibid., p. 31. 35 Original: ‘Auf der letzten Höhe hat nur noch die Metzgerei in Masse gewüthet. Jede Schilderung erlahmt und jede treffende würde dem Leser übel machen’. Ibid. 36 Original: Und die Sonne lachte so frisch und heiter auf all’ die Scheußlichkeit und – das Schändlichste! – einzelne Gruppen waren wieder doch so köstlich malerisch hingeschleudert, wie zum Beispiel dort, wo die Granate den Baum und die drei Zouaven zugleich zerrissen hat, – daß man das Zeichnen nicht lassen konnte und mochte. Ibid. 37 Original: ‘Hier zum Beispiel eine Gruppe: mitten in eine Section einschlagend, hat das berstende Geschoß zehn Mann auf einmal zerstiebt, diesem die Beine, jenem den halben Kopf, dem den Rumpfweggerissen – zersprüht ist das einzige Wort dafür’. Pietsch, Von Berlin bis Paris, p. 34.

140  Tobias Arand 38 Original: ‘gelangte ich in die Nähe eines untersetzten breitschultrigen Herrn mit scharfen schwarzen Augen und weißem Schnurrbart in grauem Touristen-Costüm, den ich bald als meinen alten Reisegenossen vom Nil, den großen Times-Correspondenten Mr. Russell erkannte’. Ibid., p. 62. 39 Original: Und doch – wie groß und herrlich, sie gerade so wiederzusehen, inmitten unseres siegenden Volkes, das endlich nach so vielen Jahrhunderten sich selbst wiedergefunden und die Macht und die Größe seiner ewigen Schädiger und unverschämten Bedränger vor meinen Augen in Scherben schlägt. Ibid., p. 182f. 40 Original: Was liegt am Einzelschicksal, das dabei zu Grunde geht. Nächsten Juni blühen die Centifolien in Fontenay les Roses so üppig und duftend wie je; schwellend prangt der frische Rasen auf den Leichenfeldern unserer Helden und ›der Boden zeugt sie wieder, wie von je er sie gezeugt. Ibid., p. 183. 41 Original: Ich sah den großen Feldherrn zum ersten Male in der Nähe und da machte er mir, als er in seiner feinen, geräuschlosen Weise eintrat, mit liebenswürdigem Händedruck mich begrüßend, doch den Eindruck . . . eines vornehmen Offiziers von verbindlichen Umgangsformen und ungezwungener Haltung. A. von Werner, Erlebnisse und Eindrücke 1870–1890 (Berlin: Mittler, 1913), p. 20. 42 Original: ‘S. K. H. der Kronprinz läßt Ihnen sagen, daß Sie hier Etwas Ihres Pinsels Würdiges erleben würden, wenn Sie vor dem 18. Januar hier eintreffen könnten’. Ibid., p. 30. 43 Original: ‘Auf Befehl Seiner Königlichen Hoheit des Kronprinzen ist der Träger dieser Zeilen, Herr v. Werner, heute vormittag zu der Festlichkeit im Schloß zugelassen’. Ibid., p. 31. 44 Ibid., p. 33. 45 Original: ‘Und nun ging in prunklosester Weise und außerordentlicher Kürze das große historische Ereignis vor sich, das die Errungenschaft des Krieges bedeutete’. Ibid. 46 Original: und ich wandte ihm meine gespannteste Aufmerksamkeit zu, zunächst natürlich seiner äußeren malerischen Erscheinung, notierte in aller Eile das Nötigste, sah, daß König Wilhelm etwas sprach und daß Graf Bismarck mit hölzerner Stimme etwas Längeres vorlas, hörte aber nicht, was es bedeutete, und erwachte aus meiner Vertiefung erst, als der Großherzog von Baden neben König Wilhelm trat und mit lauter Stimme in den Saal hineinrief: ‚ Seine Majestät, Kaiser Wilhelm der Siegreiche, Er lebe hoch!. Ibid., p. 33f. 47 T. Arand and C. Pfauth, ‘Kaiser(trauer)spiel – Anmerkungen zu einem TV-Dokudrama und seinen begleitenden Unterrichtsmaterialien’, Geschichte für heute, 3:15 (2022), p. 49 f.

10 Map representations of the war of 1870–71 in German school textbooks Carolin Hestler

Introduction1 The character of the battles of 1870–71 as an early industrialised war, transmitted with the help of modern communication technology such as telegraphy, meant that daily newspapers were able to report on the course of the war almost in real time.2 Events on the battlefields no longer seemed distant but could be experienced almost directly albeit ‘second hand’. It is, therefore, not surprising that people on the ‘home front’ wanted to trace the course of the war, locate battlefields, think through war campaigns and finally locate graves in order to understand what the newspapers were reporting. During, but especially after the end of, the war, this need led to a veritable flood of mapped battle and war depictions, the likes of which had never been seen before. From postcards, battlefield guides, regimental histories, journalistic war reports, veterans’ memoirs, newspapers and history lessons, it was no longer possible to imagine battles and troop movements of the ‘War of Unification’ without maps.3 School wall maps and maps in textbooks, in particular, are a hitherto largely neglected source genre whose influence on the collective historical consciousness of the growing generation should not be underestimated.4 If we take into account that maps, like other sources, cannot be regarded as objective representations of reality but rather as intentional interpretations of the past, they can offer us statements today about their time of creation or about the view of past events held by the actors who shaped the historical image of the time of their creation. Using an example from 1943, we will now show how later map representations of the war of 1870–71 were shaped by their time of origin and how representational techniques were deliberately used to shape, not to say manipulate, the ideas of the map audiences. Maps as intentional interpretations of the past Before this example is explained in more detail, some basic thoughts on dealing with historical maps are necessary, because the following explanations are based on a constructivist understanding of maps, which sees all maps as shaped by intention and perspective.5 The mapmaker makes conscious decisions when creating DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-14

142  Carolin Hestler their works in order to achieve an intended effect on the viewer. Since people, subjects with their own perspectives, create maps and since these maps have to capture the complex three-dimensionality on the two-dimensionality of a sheet of paper or a school canvas, maps can neither be objective nor actually represent the past. They are always an interpretation. The authors must therefore decide what they want to represent and how these elements should be presented. Inevitably, this results in blanks or accentuations. For example, the topology on a map that wants to depict military campaigns of the war of 1870–71 can be quite relevant because it allows the movement of troops in space to be shown without distraction by superfluous details. In the depiction of such troop movements, however, the soldier as an individual is not of interest, which is why he is absorbed into a deindividualised amorphous mass called ‘army’ or ‘regiment’ on such map images. If the map author wants to point out territorial losses or gains, they may forego the depiction of topography and instead enter the national borders, which are ultimately only visible in the logic of map depictions. In this case too, the cartographer must decide which type of line to use or even whether to colour or hatch individual areas differently.6 Depending on the map element chosen, the statements of maps on an identical historical event can thus differ significantly. The contexts and procedures of cartography explained here naturally also apply to the production of history textbook maps.7 One could even say that they are especially relevant for textbook maps, since schoolchildren have long been a particularly important target group in the context of one-sided nation-state identity formation. Let us take a closer look at these connections in the following using the example of maps depicting the war of 1870–71. Due to its importance in collective national consciousness until the eradication of the Versailles ‘Treaty of Shame’ in 1940, according to the National Socialist view, every secondary school textbook from 1919 onwards contained at least one map dealing with the war against France.8 The map entitled ‘Die Gründung des Deutschen Reichs und Bismarck’ (The Foundation of the German Empire and Bismarck) from 1927 is intended to emphasise the territorial border gains achieved for the German Empire in the wars of unification.9 Hatching and apparently oversized lines for state borders illustrate this intention. If the map author wishes to convey the successful military tactics of German generals, as on the map ‘The Battles for Metz on 14, 16 and 18 August 1870’ from 1925, the positions of different units of troops are marked.10 The chronologically later demarcations are irrelevant to the intention, just like a view of the overall course of the war.11 Both aspects are therefore missing here, especially since the concentration on the battles around Metz requires only a local map section and the subject is exclusively the concrete course of the fighting. The map ‘Der Abwehrkampf gegen Frankreich: Gründung des 2. deutschen Reiches’ (The Defensive Struggle against France: Foundation of the 2nd German Reich) at a time of developing Nazi school policy in 1934, however, places the war of 1870–71 in a larger context through its title.12 Topographical elements, such as rivers or mountain ranges, are used to legitimise the drawing of nation-state

Map representations of the war of 1870–71  143 borders, especially the cession of Alsace and parts of Lorraine. Thus, the Vosges Mountains, prominently marked here, were considered by German geopoliticians to be the legitimate western border of the German Empire. The representatives of the so-called Wasserscheidenprinzip (watershed principle) justified this on the grounds that the Black Forest and the Vosges had been one continuous mountain range in early prehistoric times, before the Rhine cut through it.13 On the other hand, French geopoliticians as well as political leaders since Louis XIV argued that the Rhine should be the natural upper limit of France. With the help of topographical elements as well as the map title, the war of 1870–71 is presented here as the reaction of France’s aggressive expansionist ambitions in the seventeenth century, portrayed as illegitimate and implied in the map title.14 These three examples show how diverse the representations and the associated intentions surrounding the cartography of the war of 1870–71 were. For all their diversity, however, they are all characterised by a one-sided or manipulative intention with regard to the depiction of German greatness and ‘heroic deeds’.15 Historical maps as sources show us through their methods of representation how people of the past thought about a historical topic. Maps in history textbooks also show us how students should think about certain topics. They contain the goals that curricula set for historical education. At the same time, they also allow textbook authors leeway to convey their ideas. This also applies to map representations of the war of 1870–71 in textbooks written after 1918. The First World War meant not only the end of the Empire but also the beginning of a republic that tolerated and even actively demanded pluralistic views in schools for the first time in German history.16 According to the Association of History Teachers (Verband der Geschichtslehrer) in 1920, the task of teaching history should explicitly include educating students to ‘independent political thinking’ and ‘rejecting all one-sided party-political endeavours’.17 This demand for plurality had a direct impact on the presentation of historical topics in history textbooks. A much wider range of interpretations than during the time of the Empire, which defined its identity largely through the memory of the wars of unification, could be discerned.18 In their maps of the war of 1870–71, national-conservative textbook authors such as Arnold Reimann and Karl Wehrhan emphasised the legitimacy of the war and the territorial gains it entailed.19 This was despite the fact that the cessions were by no means uncontroversial from the point of view of many German contemporaries. Among social democratic authors, such as Siegfried Kawerau, the war was hardly acknowledged by maps.20 Pro-republican authors, who were clearly underrepresented among textbook authors, as Wolfgang Jacobmeyer points out, printed the results of the war together with the other wars of unification on a map or showed only war courses.21 New borders, on the other hand, were shown as thin or even only dotted. Thus, their maps of the 1870–71 war can be interpreted as less implicitly revisionist.22 One map that stands out from others because of its presentation is titled ‘Victoriously into France’.23 It was published by Crüwell-Verlag in the history textbook series Die ewige Straße, volume 4, for secondary schools in 1943.24 At first glance, it is distinguished, on the one hand, by the figurative representations in the

144  Carolin Hestler upper-right margin. On the other hand, it contains not only a title but also a detailed subtitle, which once again explains to the viewer what he or she already sees on the map and thus unmistakably anticipates the desired interpretation. A plurality of possible interpretations is to be prevented. In view of the year in which the map was created, this finding is not at all surprising. For while the maps discussed so far came from the Weimar Republic, this map was published in accordance with National Socialist guidelines and curricula. History lessons as ‘ideology lessons’ The pluralistic spectrum of different map representations unsurprisingly changed in the years after the National Socialists came to power. A totalitarian ideology does not tolerate plurality, and it is precisely the field of historical interpretations that is essential for the establishment of dictatorships. In the case of history textbooks, however, one cannot speak of a direct influence of ideology on the representation of the National Socialist era. In secondary schools, for example, it took seven years before new curricula and guidelines for history lessons were published.25 Accordingly, there was no class that went through the entire school life with National Socialist history textbooks.26 Nevertheless, National Socialist ideology had a partial influence on historical learning even before the widespread use of new textbooks. The textbooks of the Weimar Republic continued to be used in the absence of new textbooks, but there were deletions in later editions, new supplements were inserted or maps and texts were slightly modified.27 There was no coherent National Socialist historiography on which the curricula could have been based until the end of the dictatorship. Topics such as the significance of Charlemagne were repeatedly reinterpreted according to contemporary viewpoints. This made it difficult to produce new textbooks. Without precise content specifications, producing a textbook was too high an entrepreneurial risk for a publisher. Since 1934, the Reich Ministry of Education under Bernhard Rust had been responsible for the approval of textbooks such as the one examined here. In 1937, the responsibility changed and with it the main focus of the approval. The Reichsstelle für das deutsche Schul und Unterrichtsschrifttum, which was assigned to the Parteiamtliche Prüfungskommission zum Schutze des NS-Schrifttums, was now responsible. It was now mainly a matter of the ideological review of textbooks.28 The fact that the textbook Die ewige Straße (The Eternal Road), in which the map was published, was not published until 1943 thus shows the ideological uncertainties that arose for publishers in the production of textbooks. At the same time, it is also a sign that the National Socialists assigned a subordinate role to schools. With regard to education of the youth in the spirit of National Socialism, primary emphasis was placed on extracurricular ideological education in the Hitler Youth, and school was pushed into the background. It was seen by the ideologists as difficult to control and potentially ideologically unreliable. While the textbooks could be controlled by the approval authorities, it was mainly the teachers who aroused the suspicion of the Nazi leadership. Whether they actually conveyed the

Map representations of the war of 1870–71 145 contents of the textbook in the ‘National Socialist spirit’ remained outside National Socialist control.29 History lessons in particular, about which the ‘Führer’ was particularly enthusiastic because of the teacher he had admired in his secondary school days, became part of the political ‘education of the people’ and thus served exclusively to convey National Socialist ideology.30 This included, among other things, a teleological view of history, that is to say the supposed realisation that the Third Reich was the culmination of centuries of development and that Adolf Hitler had completed the ‘unfinished works’ of his predecessors.31 The Franco-Prussian War was also embedded in this context. The incorporation of Alsace and parts of Lorraine as ‘original German territories’ into the Reich and the unification of the states of the former German Confederation under a ‘Führer’, in this case the Prussian king and German emperor, were explicitly presented as historical necessities. However, the Reich thus created was considered incomplete in the understanding of the period between 1933 and 1945 because it did not include all supposed Germans, namely, Austrians or German-speaking inhabitants of the eastern border areas. The map image as an expression of National Socialist ideology In the map ‘Siegreich nach Frankreich’ (‘Victoriously into France’), which has already been mentioned, several central points of National Socialist historical policy become visible, of which the pupils should be convinced. National Socialism as the ‘finisher’ of German unity

At first glance, it appears that German unification is not the subject of this map. There are no new imperial borders marked in bold or new territories particularly highlighted on it. And yet, there is a graphic device that subtly addresses the subject: the most striking element is the iconographic signatures in the form of soldiers in the upper-right corner.32 These pictorial symbols are not necessary for understanding the map. The inscription or a legend would have sufficed. On closer inspection, however, it is noticeable that the lower soldier differs from the others in his headgear and uniform. With his caterpillar helmet, he is recognisable as a Bavarian soldier. Even without a deeper knowledge of the composition of the German armies, the viewer is given the impression that regiments from several German states fought the battles shown together. The fact that the depiction does not reflect the actual composition of the three German armies is unimportant for the intention of the map. Bavarian units did indeed fight in the Third Army but not exclusively; in addition to Prussian troops, there were Württemberg and Baden troops led by the Prussian Crown Prince Friederich Wilhelm. Another graphic device that emphasises the importance of the war for later German unification is the lack of marking of national borders on the territory of the later German Empire. Omitting such details may mean that they are unimportant to the main message of the map. However, it would have been scientifically correct to continue to enter the Länder, since they continued to exist in the Reich both at

146  Carolin Hestler the time of the war and beyond it, whose federal character is thus concealed. In the case of both identified elements, it is not a matter of a correct, differentiated consideration of historical events, entirely in the spirit of National Socialist thinking. Rather, the focus is on a striking statement that indoctrinates young people on every page of the book. The Wehrmacht in the tradition of ‘glorious’ victories of the past

If one considers the year 1943 as the time of the book’s creation, the focus on the military success of the German troops seems quite stringent from the point of view of the authors or the publisher. The emphasis on past military successes was part of the self-confidence of society at the time.33 They were thus also synonymous with the promise of military success in the present and the future: the generals of the present are equated with the ‘glorious’ Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Prussian General Staff during the Wars of Unification and the aforementioned Prussian Crown Prince. The ‘famous right turn of the 3rd Army’ of August 1870, to remain in the diction of the map legend, promises similarly ‘ingenious’ incursions by the military leadership whose ‘genius’ in 1943 may have been doubtful for many Germans after the catastrophe of Stalingrad. For the young map readers, it should perhaps be reassuring that the French had already been decisively defeated in the past. ‘Victoriously into France’ could thus at the same time be a headline of the present war albeit one that was already fragile in 1943. This discrepancy can also be explained by the fact that several years lie between the writing of a manuscript and the publication of a textbook. This emphasis on military success is underlined by the choice of words in the subtitle. Military superiority is expressed through the use of adjectives such as ‘famous’ or ‘victorious’, thus elevating it to the status of the mythical and legendary. More effective than texts, however, are images that suggest a supposedly fixed truth to the viewer and whose emotional as well as cognitive overwhelming power is usually greater. The pictorial elements of the map clearly show the supposed military superiority. In addition to the soldiers as representatives of the armies, troop movements are drawn in the form of parallel lines. German troops seem to have criss-crossed almost the entire area shown. This dominance is supported by the detail of the map. It seems as if all of France was occupied. What is neglected, however, is that the area depicted is only a small section of the much larger country. There do not seem to have been any battles along the path of the soldiers. Rather, the lines appear to be a complete ‘march through’ of German troops. This effect is achieved by the complete absence of dates of battles or abstract signatures such as crossed swords, as seen on the maps already discussed. This makes it clear that what is crucial for effect and message is precisely what is concealed, namely, the enemy. French armies, their soldiers or lines of movement are deliberately not recorded.34 The war is thus interpreted as an effortless ‘walk’, and the fact that soldiers on both sides lost their lives is deliberately pushed into the background. Concealment, as already mentioned, is a common, quite legitimate means of making the complexity of three-dimensional reality representable at all in the

Map representations of the war of 1870–71 147 two-dimensional map sheet. Extreme simplifications are used, especially in propaganda cartography, to make deliberate falsifications.35 The complete blanking out of the enemy can certainly be placed in this category. And the deliberate selection of the map section can also be seen as one of these ‘falsifications’, since it has the effect of only depicting part of the war. The second half of the war with the French offensive with battles on the Loire or the Somme in northern France or on the Swiss border is concealed by the selected map section. This correlates with the policy of history already pursued in the Empire. The establishment of Sedan Day as a public holiday concluded the war in the consciousness at this early stage. The battles in the months after Sedan, which involved heavy losses and were by no means always ‘glorious’, were hardly a topic in the culture of remembrance.36 And so the map shows that National Socialist memory of historical events was not reinvented but built on already-given narrative traditions. The ‘Führer State’ as the high point and end point of German historical development

The National Socialists saw themselves as the completers of German history. What Bismarck and Wilhelm I began and Hindenburg sought to defend, Hitler completed in the Third Reich with the so-called bringing home of all Germans. This statement can be seen as central to the teaching of history under National Socialism and is also found on this map. Maps do not show what we see in reality, but they interpret reality. In doing so, they can even make the invisible supposedly visible. This becomes particularly clear in the case of border issues. Here, too, there are different possibilities of representation, depending on the intended message. Thick, bold, black lines show secure, unchanging boundary lines, seemingly manifested forever. Dotted or broken lines suggest a certain permeability and changeability. And so one sees borders on this map that, as here, are put up for discussion by militaries and armies. The map does not want to anticipate further historical developments, so the borders of the German Empire are not yet marked. For the viewers present in 1943, however, even this border was ‘debatable’. Alsace and Lorraine were politically firmly annexed to the Reich. From the point of view of contemporaries and map viewers, Hitler was in the process of fulfilling his supposed mission from his forefathers, in whose line he saw himself. With the victory against France in 1940, he had declared the borders of Versailles and thus those of before 1870 obsolete. For the map viewer, these borders already appeared insignificant in 1870–71 due to their dotted representation. Pupils thus clearly identified them in 1943 as a relic of the past that was no longer relevant to them. Change of perspective Using the map ‘Victoriously into France’, it was possible to show how the nationalist image of history was translated into map representations. But how was the war then presented in French history textbooks? The war of 1870–71 was tainted with

148  Carolin Hestler a sense of defeat and shame in Third Republic France far beyond the nineteenth century. In many history textbooks, the war was not even highlighted by a map. The book Nouveau cours d’histoire does show a map but remains vague in its presentation. If the German map was accused of ‘extreme simplification’ and ‘deliberate falsification’, the same applies to the map ‘Les champs de bataille de la guerre francoallemande’.37 Although dates of battles are mentioned, own and foreign troops are completely missing. German troops are not mentioned, because their marching routes would have made the encirclement of the capital, which ended in the triumphant march across the Champs-Elysées, visible. And France’s own troops, some of which were disintegrating and mostly in retreat, at least in the first phase of the war, are also concealed. Such a depiction would have been unthinkable for the French self-image. It remains to be said, then, that maps, however objective they may appear to us, are always an expression of how the time of their creation thought about this past subject. This is true not only for historical maps of past events but also for today’s scientific historical maps which, although more committed to scientific standards, nevertheless have to set emphases, conceal details, group or simplify. For even today there is the problem that the complexity and abundance of data of three-dimensional reality cannot possibly be represented on a two-dimensional data sheet. Notes 1 This text will also appear in revised form in 2024 in a German-French-language conference volume edited by Frank Becker and Tobias Arand. 2 T. Arand, 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen (Hamburg: Osburg, 2018), p. 171f; C. Pfauth, T. Arand and J. Alexander, Glory & Defeat: The Story of the Franco-Prussian War Week by Week: Companion Book (Berlin: Real Time History, 2022), p. 65. 3 T. Arand, ‘ “.  .  . dazu find ich keine Wrote” – Der Blick auf den Krieg von 1870/71 in Erinnerungsbüchern deutscher Veteranen’, in W. Mährle (ed.), In Nation im Siegesrausch. Württemberg und die Gründung des Deutschen Reichs 1870/71 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2020), pp. 85–98. 4 One of the few works on this is C. Hestler, ‘Karten in Geschichtsschulbüchern als Medien der Geschichtskultur. Eine Untersuchung historischer Geschichtsschulbuchkarten der preußischen Mittelschule für den Zeitraum von 1918–1945 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des deutsch-französischen Grenzraums von der Völkerwanderung bis ins 18. Jahrhundert’, unpublished PhD dissertation, PH Ludwigsburg, 2017. https://phbl-opus. phlb.de/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/512/file/Disseration_Hestler_2017_FINAL.pdf. 5 M. Monmonier, Eins zu einer Million. Die Tricks und Lügen der Kartographen (Basel: BirkhSuser, 1996), p. 49; Hestler, ‘Karten in Geschichtsschulbüchern’, pp. 36–38. 6 N. Schobesberger, Propagandakartographie. Die Verwendung von Karten als Mittel für Werbung und politische Meinungsbildung (Wien: Diplomarbeit, 2010), p. 81; Hestler, ‘Karten in Geschichtsschulbüchern’, pp. 36–38. 7 A striking example of the effect of colouring is shown in a map from a 1939 German textbook entitled ‘The World War’, where the Central Powers are shown in ‘innocent’ white, while almost all the rest of the ‘enemy’ world is shown in black, T. Arand and C. Stetter, Heimat und Welt. Unterrichtsideen 3. Geschichte (Braunschweig: Westermann,

Map representations of the war of 1870–71 149 2012), p.  80. More examples in C. Hestler, ‘Von “Völkerzügen” zur “indogermanischen Landnahme”. Der Darstellungswandel der “Völkerwanderung” auf historischen Geschichtskarten in Schulbüchern für die Mittelschule zwischen 1919 und 1945’, in P. Geiss and K. Vössing (eds.), Die Völkerwanderung. Mythos – Forschung – Vermittlung (Bonn: Bonn University Press 2021) p. 260f. 8 On the historical culture of the war of 1870–71 and its declining historical-cultural significance after the First World War, see T. Arand, ‘Ein zunehmend vergessener Krieg – Die Entwicklung der Erinnerung an den Deutsch-Französischen Krieg 1870/71’, in T. Arand (ed.), Der großartigste Krieg, der je geführt worden. Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges 1870/71 (Münster: Zfl-Verlaqg, 2008), pp. 9–36. 9 W. Kröller and A. Herrmann, Pinnows Geschichtsbuch für Mittelschulen Teil IV (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927), p.  34. View map at: https://www.ph-ludwigsburg.de/fileadmin/ phlb/hochschule/fakultaet1/sozialwissenschaften/geschichte/Personen/hestler/bild01_ lit.jpg. 10 View map at: https://www.ph-ludwigsburg.de/fileadmin/phlb/hochschule/fakultaet1/ sozialwissenschaften/geschichte/Personen/hestler/bild02_lit.jpg. 11 K. Wehrhan, Lehrbuch der Erdkunde und Geschichte für Mittelschulen (Frankfurt: Moritz Diesterweg, 1926), p. 87. 12 View map at: https://www.ph-ludwigsburg.de/fileadmin/phlb/hochschule/fakultaet1/ sozialwissenschaften/geschichte/Personen/hestler/bild03_lit.jpg.   On the teaching of history during the National Socialist era, see T. Arand, ‘(.  .  .) Ziel, der deutschen Jugend und darüber hinaus dem deutschen Volk ein einheitliches Geschichtsbild zu schaffen – Die Rolle des “Reichssachbearbeiters Geschichte im NSLB” Moritz Edelmann im Prozeß der Gleichschaltung des Geschichtsunterrichts im NS-Staat’, in W. Hasberg and M. Seidenfuß (eds.), Geschichtsdidaktiker im Griff des Nationalsozialismus (Münster: Lit-Verlag 2005). pp. 273–288; Hestler, ‘Karten in Geschichtsschulbüchern’, p. 133ff. 13 On the connection between geopolitics and history textbook maps, see Hestler, ‘Von “Völkerzügen” ’, pp. 256–257. 14 F. Braun and A. Hillen-Ziegfeld, Geopolitischer Atlas zur deutschen Geschichte (Dresden: Ehlermann, 1934), map XXVIII, p. 31. 15 On the fundamental significance of the ‘wars of unification’ in German history teaching until 1945, see T. Arand, ‘ “Der Befreiungskrieg gegen die französische Bevormundung.” Die Darstellung der “Einigungskriege” in den Schulgeschichtsbüchern vom Kaiserreich bis 1945’, in A. Brait und T. Hirschmüller (eds.), Die Kriege des langen 19. Jahrhunderts in Geschichtsschulbüchern (Innsbruck: Innsbruch University Press, 2022), pp. 69–86. 16 B. Völkel, ‘Soziologisch oder sozialistisch? Wie soll der neue Geschichtsunterricht in der Weimarer Republik aussehen?’, in W. Hasberg and M. Seidenfuß (eds.), Geschichtsdidaktiker im Griff des Nationalsozialismus (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2005), pp. 57–70. 17 Original: ‘selbstständigem politischen Denken’, ‘alle einseitig parteipolitischen Bestrebungen abzuweisen’. N. N. ‘Mitteilungen vom Verbande deutscher Geschichtslehrer’, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 10 (1920), pp. 43–44. 18 Arand, 1870/71, p. 647ff. 19 Many years of membership in the DNVP; A. Blänsdorf, ‘Lehrwerke für Geschichtsunterricht an Höheren Schulen 1933–1945. Autoren und Verlage unter den Bedingungen des Nationalsozialismus’, in H. Lehmann and O. G. Oexle (eds.), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2004), p. 349; Wehrhan, Lehrbuch der Erdkunde. 20 S. Kawerau, Denkschrift über die deutschen Geschichts- und Lesebücher vor allem seit 1923 (Berlin: Hencel, 1927), p. 37; Völkel, ‘Soziologisch oder sozialistisch’. 21 W. Jacobmeyer, Das deutsche Schulgeschichtsbuch 1700–1945. Die erste Epoche seiner Gattungsgeschichte im Spiegel der Vorworte, vols. 1–3 (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2011), p. 207.

150  Carolin Hestler 22 C. Hestler, ‘Der Versailler Vertrag. Friedensvertrag oder “Wehrlosmachung Deutschlands”? Eine Analyse von Propagandakarten in Geschichtsschulbüchern 1932–1943’, Geschichte lernen, 181: 31 (2018). pp. 52–57. 23 View map at: https://www.ph-ludwigsburg.de/fileadmin/phlb/hochschule/fakultaet1/ sozialwissenschaften/geschichte/Personen/hestler/bild04_lit.jpg. 24 W. vom Hofe, P. Seifert and A. Heinen, Die ewige Straße IV. Geschichte unseres Volkes (Dortmund: Crüwll 1943), p. 15. 25 Amtsblatt des Reichs – und preußischen Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung und der Unterrichtsverwaltungen der anderen Länder Heft, 14:6 (1940), p. 10. 26 J. Weiß, ‘Zur nationalsozialistischen Einflußnahme auf Schulgeschichtsbücher’, Zeitschrift des Georg-Eckert-Instituts für internationale Schulbuchforschung, 3 (1981), p. 121. 27 N. N. ‘Mitteilungen vom Verbande’, p. 53. 28 M. Sauer, ‘Zwischen Negativkontrolle und staatlichem Monopol. Zur Geschichte von Schulbuchzulassung und – einführung’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 49 (1998), p. 155; Hestler, ‘Karten in Geschichtsschulbüchern’, p. 133ff. 29 D. Klagges, Geschichtsunterricht als nationalpolitische Erziehung (Frankfurt am Main: Moritz Diesterweg, 1938); C. Schwarz, ‘ “Objektiv ist, wer deutsch ist” – Dietrich Klagges‚ Geschichte als nationalpolitische Erziehung’, in W. Hasberg and M. Seidenfuß (eds.), Geschichtsdidaktiker im Griff des Nationalsozialismus (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2005), pp. 145–164. 30 A. Hitler, Mein Kampf. Zwei Bände in einem Band (München: Eher, 1940), p. 12. 31 M. Edelmann, ‘Geschichtsunterricht und politische Willensbildung’, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 24 (1924), pp.  76–77; to Edelmann’s classification compare, Arand, ‘(.  .  .) Ziel, der deutschen Jugend’; T. Arand and M. Edelmann, ‘Der “Gleichschalter” des Geschichtsunterrichts’, Geschichte, Politik und ihre Didaktik, 34:3–4 (2006), pp. 242–246;   T. Arand, ‘Die Alte Geschichte und ihre Rolle im nationalsozialistischen ­Geschichtsunterricht – Das Beispiel der Schulbuchreihe “Volkwerden der Deutschen” ’, Geschichte für heute, 2 (2009), pp.  40–54; T. Arand, ‘ “Kampf um Lebensraum und Freiheit” – Die “Völkerwanderung” und ihre Rolle in Moritz Edelmanns nationalsozialistischer Geschichtsschulbuchreihe “Volkwerden der Deutschen” ’, in P. Geiss and K. Vössing (eds.), Die Völkerwanderung. Mythos – Forschung – Vermittlung (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2021), pp. 273–288. 32 C. Böttcher, ‘Die Karte’, in H.-J. Pandel and G. Schneider (eds.), Handbuch Medien im Geschichtsunterricht (Schwalbach: Wochenschau, 1999), p. 198. 33 Such coincidences between the military situation and representations of history in history text books can also be found for the National Socialist period with other historical objects; for example, the ‘Völkerwanderung’, see Arand, ‘Kampf um Lebensraum’, p. 280. 34 Arand and Stetter, Heimat und Welt, p. 8, demonstrates the same phenomenon on a school wall map from 1919 on the First World War. 35 Monmonier, Eins zu einer Million, p. 78; Schobesberger, Propagandakartographie, p. 43. 36 Arand, 1870/71, p. 647ff. 37 View map at: https://www.ph-ludwigsburg.de/fileadmin/phlb/hochschule/fakultaet1/ sozialwissenschaften/geschichte/Personen/hestler/bild05_lit.jpg. A. Huby, Nouveau Cours d’histoire. Histoire contemporaine après 1789. Classe de 3e A et 8 (Paris: Delagrave, 1940), p. 286.

Part 4

Cultural representations

11 Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier

Professors of literature should stay away from wars.1 Gaston Paris who had been teaching medieval literature at the Collège de France since 1866 was indeed convinced that the study of ancient texts requires the severity and calm of a serene retreat, far from the fury of the world. Yet, in December 1870, when France was invaded by Prussia, the French capital having bravely resisted the enemy’s siege for several months, Gaston Paris, distraught by the conflict, delivered a lecture in which medieval texts suddenly resonated strongly with the tragic situation in France.2 The medievalist began by stating that a nation’s character is expressed through its national literature. He then commented on La Chanson de Roland in the light of this statement and later events. According to him, this eleventh-century epic poem, which relates the story of a noble defeat and a dazzling revenge, depicts the character of a brave and heroic people ready to die to defend its ‘douce France’, whose love inspires their most glorious actions. Galvanised by this ‘voix mâle et héroïque’ coming from the Middle Ages, the contemporaries of the Sedan disaster, ‘fils de ceux qui sont morts à Roncevaux et de ceux qui les ont vengés’, will prove themselves worthy of the warlike virtues of their ancestors: they will fight, and they will win.3 A month after this lecture, France capitulated, displacing a heroic and chivalric ideal transmitted by nearly a thousand years of literature. Despite this national disaster, some of the most prominent literary critics confidently declared that at least literature remained unmoved by the defeat. In this respect, Ferdinand Brunetière stated in 1889 that la guerre de France [de 1870–71] n’a pas plus interrompu ni modifié le cours de l’évolution littéraire que jadis la Révolution et les guerres de l’Empire n’ont empêché les écrivains d’alors, les Delille ou les Morellet, les Ducis et les Lemercier, combien d’autres encore, de se retrouver au lendemain de Friedland ou de Wagram, tout ce qu’ils étaient à la veille de la convocation des États-Généraux.4 With these words, the critic solemnly proclaimed that the course of history could not change the course of literature: in his opinion, the war of 1870–71 was indeed a literary non-event. In 1905, reflecting in La Nouvelle Revue on fiction in DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-16

154  Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the literary and art critic and sometime poet and novelist Gustave Kahn proposed the same idea: ‘il est assez curieux que la guerre de 1870 qui fut cause d’une telle submersion des salons sous des flots de peinture militaire, influa beaucoup moins sur la littérature’.5 If we rely on Brunetière’s and Kahn’s declarations, it may seem that the Franco-Prussian War, often described as the ‘forgotten war’, was also forgotten by French literature.6 These proclamations concerning the indifference of literature obviously raise several questions. Indeed, the Franco-Prussian War is commonly described as a turning-point in the political history of Europe and its nations, and it therefore seems quite difficult to imagine that it made absolutely no impression on the inspiration of French writers. Contrary to early-twenty-first-century French readers’ memory, for whom only a few stories echo this conflict, many works of fiction borrowed their narrative material from the 1870 war.7 Widely read before the First World War, they failed, however, to imprint their stories and characters on French minds.8 As is often the case after the landmark events of the nineteenth century, writers who had to change their mode of representation found themselves confronted with an aesthetic, ideological and moral conflict that seemed irresolvable.9 How to express a painful page of French history when many would like to repress the memory of this defeat and thus not have to question the heroic character of the French nation and the failure to defeat the enemy? Caught between the duty to remember and the imperative of silence, many writers thus looked for a narrative formula that would tell the story of their defeat without diminishing the French roman national; one that would turn the page on the Second Empire while preparing future generations for the next chapter of the Republic.10 In what follows, I aim to demonstrate that the search for a novelistic language which would be able to express the experience of war in 1870–71 led many writers to renounce the epic: thus, the fiction of defeat became a defeat of fiction. Unable to rewrite the epic of Roland and the glorious tale of French revenge, many writers left the battlefield, and the effects produced by its spectacular setting sought their heroes elsewhere. When French writers experienced difficulties in turning battlefield action into fiction, they chose to put the narrative focus of their writing in the simple setting of a familial interior, where the heart of France beat. This change of setting consequently reshaped the narrative forms and imagery of war: Ulysses and young warriors abandoned, it was now the difficult battles of Penelope and of old men that embodied the heroism of the conflict. Encouraging a private and internalised vision of the battle scene, 1870–71 marks a turning-point in the history of representations of war. By analysing fiction in which battles essentially take place in the hearts of the characters, I will suggest that this sentimental and figurative interpretation of war aimed at the souls of French citizens and thereby struck a responsive chord. Modern war and the hero of yesteryear In their recent study, Nicolas Bourguinat and Gilles Vogt recall that, along with the Crimean War, the Second Italian War of Independence and the American Civil

Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat 155 War, the Franco-Prussian War is commonly described as one of the first ‘modern wars’, ‘du fait de l’augmentation de la puissance de feu des fusils’.11 In 1870, the use of the Krupp gun, which ironically had fascinated Parisians at the Exposition Universelle of 1867, disrupted the conduct of the French campaign and the movement of French forces, frequently forcing them to retreat under heavy enemy fire. According to Gabriel Garrote, many military historians attribute French losses to this crucial change in the war’s modus operandi, which put the French military model in crisis: les progrès techniques de l’armement portatif et de l’artillerie assoient la supériorité du feu sur le choc. À la force morale et aux vagues d’assauts successives, il convient de substituer une posture défensive, que le rechargement et le tir couchés favorisent, et de chercher à s’exposer le moins possible. Ce mode opératoire est toutefois incompatible avec la furia francese qui anime le corps des officiers, comme avec les règlements et instructions en vigueur au sein de l’armée, qui ne reflètent pas les évolutions de l’armement.12 However, the defensive postures adopted during the Franco-Prussian War hindered not only the strategy of the French army but also the deployment of the literary imagination. Indeed, in French epics such as La Chanson de Roland, the soldier is usually portrayed as an offensive fighter, courageously going to the front, even when the action seems hopeless. The modern military strategy used by Moltke, therefore, put an end to the myth of the French soldier, celebrated from medieval times onwards for fighting with heart and soul in defence of his honour and soil. Mainly shaped by medieval fiction, the ethos of this chivalrous and noblehearted character filled the French imagination of wars for a long time. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, narratives of the French Revolutionary Wars strengthened even more the fable of the passionate French way of war, as Denis de Rougemont summarises: The Battle of Valmy was a victory of passion over ‘exact science’. It was to the cry of ‘Long live the Nation!’ that the Sans-culottes repulsed an allied army still bent on conducting operations on ‘classic’ lines. It will be recalled that Goethe, after witnessing the battle, said: ‘On this field and on this day a new era begins in the history of the world’. To this famous pronouncement Foch adds: ‘Truly enough a new era had begun, the era of national wars that are fought under no restraints whatever, because a nation throws all its resources into the struggle, because the aim of these wars is not to safeguard some dynastic claim, but to defeat or propagate philosophical ideas and intangible advantages, because these wars are staked upon feelings and passions, elemental forces never enlisted before’.13 In addition to the literary exaltation of the victories of the Napoleonic army, the expansion of historical fiction contributed to perpetuating the legend of a furia francese, winning over hearts as well as winning in battle. In contrast with others’

156  Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier impassive military strategies, the sentimental French art of war was consequently romanticised by historians and novelists like Jules Michelet or Alexandre Dumas père, whose bold and reckless characters in Les Trois Mousquetaires or La SanFelice regularly fight with panache rather than with their mind. In changing the course of warfare, the Franco-Prussian War not only transformed the portrait of the war hero but also altered the ideal of epic poetics which had greatly contributed to the writing of the French roman national. Thus, the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War also led France to relinquish an ideal: the valiant and chivalrous heart of the nation suddenly stopped beating. If, as the Comte de Gasparin explained, ‘la guerre comme on est en train de la faire ne conserve plus rien de chevaleresque et de courtois’, then what was left of France?14 Moreover, the Comte de Gasparin’s observation expressed a feeling that commonly recurs in the war fiction of 1870–71. Thus, in Marie-Louise Gagneur’s novel Chair à canon, the narrator states that France only loses battles because of unexpected modifications in the rules of fighting: ‘jusque-là la guerre avait été un art. Elle devenait une science. Le soldat français, confiant dans cet héroïsme qui lui avait valu tant de victoires, ne comprenait rien à cette nouvelle tactique. Sa bravoure impuissante!’.15 First published in 1872, this successful novel relates the wartime experience of a young aristocrat, Camille de Reumont, whose fiancé, Georges Milher, embodies the familiar qualities and virtues of the French soldier: loyalty, passion and devotion. As brave as Roland or the legendary good knight Bayard, ‘chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’, Milher undeniably behaves like the ancient heroes of old wars.16 Passionately embracing France’s cause, he bravely goes back into the battlefield despite being wounded. Allegorising France, this ‘nation chevaleresque, héroïque quelquefois jusqu’à la folie’, Georges Milher will die in exemplary fashion under the cruel torture of the enemy, causing the death of the woman he loves.17 With them falls ‘l’âme de la France’, ‘cette sublime blessée qui, sanglante, écrasée, râlant, se relevait toujours, et toujours ardente à la lutte, se hâtait d’essuyer ses blessures pour s’élancer à de nouveaux combats’, before expiring.18 George Milher and Camille de Reumont emphasise by their deaths the impossibility of fictionalising the Franco-Prussian War as French writers used to do: no one will come to save them; no one will come to avenge them. ‘Le mécanicien est tout. Le héros est supprimé’.19 Written in despair from Florence in December 1870, this sentence by Jules Michelet summarises French public opinion of the late nineteenth century. Yet, by symbolising the triumph of science over passion, the German victory led irrevocably to a crisis of both idealism and narrative description. Inspired by the depictions of Napoleonic battlefields provided by Stendhal, Victor Hugo and by the translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 1879, French writers experienced difficulties in reshaping both the characters and poetics of war stories. On reading novels taking place during the Franco-­Prussian War, it thus appears that only a few actually describe the battlefield. Firstly, for writers who joined the front such as Maupassant, Huysmans or Albert Delpit, the experience of defeat was nothing like the heroic and exalted scenes performed by previous fictional characters. Their own adventures seemed to be a tale of mud and hunger, of cold rain and long waiting. As Edmond de Goncourt observed, framing

Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat 157 war was also problematic for writers who had not witnessed any combat, who were then forced to reenact the assault by default.20 To quote Odile Roynette, the use of modern weapons marked a significant ‘turning point’ in the representation and aesthetics of the conflict.21 Examining the diary of Léon Lefort, a physician who treated the wounded during the war, Roynette highlights the transformation of the theatre of war. Lefort appears to be haunted by the violence of images he has seen: J’ai encore devant les yeux le corps mutilé d’un des nôtres, coupé au niveau de la ceinture par un obus qui probablement éclata en tombant sur ce soldat couché au sol, car il ne restait que le bassin avec les deux membres inférieurs, et l’on ne retrouvait d’autres vestiges du malheureux ainsi foudroyé que des débris d’intestins gisant dans la poussière à quelques pieds de ce lambeau de cadavre. Chevaux éventrés, débris informes d’êtres humains, couvraient le sol de l’avenue. Depuis juin 1848, où cette fois j’étais combattant, j’avais vu quelques champs de bataille; comme chirurgien j’étais depuis vingt-quatre ans habitué au contact de la mort, mais ici le spectacle était épouvantable.22 The vision of bodies reduced to pieces goes against the literary motif and the ‘scène à faire’ of the brave hero’s agony and death, which represents the pathetic and aesthetic climax of war stories. With the defeat of 1871, a certain way of representing war and nations disappeared, symbolically ending with the death of Alexandre Dumas, master of the historical and national novel, in December 1870. Searching for a novelistic formula that could encapsulate modern warfare, in Chair à canon, Gagneur boldly opts for a raw expression that defies the classic ‘règles de bienséance’ as well as the prejudices against her gender. In her novel, blood, disassembled bodies and scattered limbs are not hidden from the reader’s view. Could the defeat of 1871 therefore have invented a new novelistic aesthetic, which we might call naturalism? Zola seems to draw such a conclusion: What we must confess is that in 1870 we were beaten by science. Undoubtedly we were thrown into a war for which we were unprepared by the imbecility of the Empire. But is it not true that under more disadvantageous circumstances France formerly was not conquered, when she lacked everything, even troops and money? It is evident, then, that at that time the old-fashioned French culture, her gay way of fighting, her fine dare-devil spirit, were sufficient to assure her victory. In 1870, on the contrary, we were crushed under the military method of a more phlegmatic people, less brave than we; we were overwhelmed by an army manoeuvred by logical rules; we were disbanded by an application of the scientific formula to the art of war, without speaking of a more powerful artillery than our own, of a better equipped army, of a better disciplined one, and a more intelligent knowledge of the art of warfare. Again, I repeat, in spite of these disasters, from which we are still suffering, the true patriotism is to see that new times have come upon us, and to accept the scientific formula instead of dreaming of some

158  Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier mythical return into the literary quagmires of the ideal. Scientific principles conquered us; let us employ science if we would conquer others. Great commanders using sonorous words are not to be regretted if it so happens that sonorous words cannot bring about victory.23 The other side of war The question therefore remains: How could the Franco-Prussian War be fictionalised while it appears that writers struggled to assimilate aesthetically modern techniques of warfare which constrained their imagination? In response to this poetic impediment, which often led them to abandon the depiction of battle scenes and to adopt a different narrative focus, numerous writers chose to represent the armed conflict of 1870–71 from the home front. Beyond the battlefield, the French people indeed had to face the consequences of the German invasion. The representation of the face-to-face confrontation of French families with enemies who requisitioned their homes provided writers with the heroism they needed to write war stories. No longer singing the glorious epic of ‘arms and the man’, many writers told the everyday story of ordinary people as they faced the troubles of war.24 By changing the scale of the conflict narrative, they then shaped a familial epic with which readers might identify. In 1873, Francis Charmes, the literary critic for the Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires, explained this identification process. ‘La famille qu’on met sous nos yeux devient bientôt la nôtre’, he suggested after reading Lucie Boissonnas’s Une famille pendant la guerre (1873), et, comme le sort de toutes les familles françaises a été à peu près le même pendant la guerre de 1870–1871, il suffit de nous raconter ce que l’une d’elles a fait et a souffert pour nous rappeler ce que nous avons souffert nous-mêmes et pour raviver de pénibles mais de précieux souvenirs.25 In many works of fiction set during the Franco-Prussian War, the family is less used as a plotline than as a narrative structure. Adopting such a familial focus allows writers not only to consider inter-generational and intra-generational relationships during the war but also to explore on another level the concept of private space and time during war. The motif of separated family members who struggle to communicate during the armed conflict and the topos of grief over the loss of fathers, husbands, sons, fiancés and brothers far from home change the perception of war-torn and occupied France and offer a much more sensitive and private perspective.26 By integrating an intimate view, these works of fiction then recall an even more forgotten war: the combat experience of civilians who, beyond the battlefield of 1870–71, silently fight a kind of ‘outre-guerre’, as Annette Becker calls the occupation of France and Belgium during the First World War.27 The novels of the writing duo Erckmann-Chatrian are representative of this literary genre. Mostly set in annexed Alsace-Lorraine, the patriotic works of

Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat 159 Erckmann-Chatrian depict the violence of the Franco-Prussian War to the French reader, focusing on families living in the annexed territories who are forced to choose between going into exile or becoming German. For Gustave Kahn, the success of Erckmann-Chatrian’s novels in the late nineteenth century demonstrates the potency of this literary composition of war, which encapsulates civilian trauma in 1870–71: Longtemps, le livre sur la guerre fut obligatoirement fanfarant. . . . C’est dans le roman d’Erckmann-Chatrian que la guerre apparaît complète. . . . Ce n’est qu’avec Erckmann-Chatrian, qu’apparaît dans le roman militaire, le peuple foulé par l’invasion, que des tableautins bien tracés montrent le pays où l’on pense au troupier transporté au hasard des luttes à tous les coins de l’Europe, que le soldat nous est montré non comme une unité héroïque, poltronne ou machinale, mais comme un homme tenant à tort à un milieu, n’étant nullement soldat de carrière et présent malgré lui, parmi les fusillades.28 Erckmann-Chatrian’s Le Brigadier Frédéric exemplifies Kahn’s observation. Published in 1874, it tells the moving story of a forest ranger in Alsace, whose peaceful life with his daughter, Marie-Rose, and his mother-in-law, Anne, is suddenly disrupted by the invasion and by the subsequent Prussian annexation. Refusing to submit to the Prussians, Frédéric decides to quit his job and to leave their home, so there begins a litany of troubles. To punish his insubordination, the Prussians first confiscate his cows and brutalise his daughter, a fact which she hides from her father. Then, as Phalsbourg falls into German hands, Anne and Marie-Rose fall ill and soon pass away. In Le Brigadier Frédéric, all the family characters will thus die of a sudden heart disease. Called to grandmother Anne’s side, the doctor Semperlin, physician and therapist, makes a diagnosis that expressly links the symptoms of the old woman with the heart-breaking grief of war and the homesickness she endures: La pauvre femme est malade, non seulement à cause de sa grande vieillesse, mais principalement à cause des chagrins qui la minent. Elle a quelque chose au cœur, c’est ce qui la fait tousser. Prenez garde de la chagriner, cachez-lui vos misères . . . Faites-lui bonne mine . . . Dites-lui que vous avez bonne espérance . . . Quand elle vous regarde, souriez-lui . . . Si elle est inquiète, dites-lui que ce n’est rien . . . Ne laissez entrer personne, de crainte qu’on ne lui apprenne de mauvaises nouvelles, c’est le meilleur remède que je puisse indiquer.29 As in Daudet’s ‘Le Siège de Berlin’ (1872), where the grandfather character suffers from a similar disease, keeping the grandmother away from news from the front appears to be the only medicine for her psychosomatic illness. An observer and reader of the symptoms of war, Semperlin explains more than once the terms of this metaphorical disease: ‘nous aussi, n’est-ce pas, père Frédéric, nous sommes bien

160  Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier malades?. . .’, says the doctor to Frédéric, ‘oui, terriblement malades. Notre cœur se déchire, chaque pensée nous tue’.30 Following her grandmother’s death, MarieRose will also die of a broken heart, suffering from the loss of her fiancé during the war. Echoing the poignant motif of death and the maiden, Marie-Rose’s end then offers a view symmetrical to the picture of the falling war hero. On the other side of the battlefield, in the privacy of their homes, women are also dying from the war, at least in the family fictions of 1870–71. In Le Banni (1882), the sequel to Le Brigadier Frédéric, back in his village, Frederic will die of heart failure too, unable to bear the sight of a stranger in his house. While the use of allegory can be expected to embody the woes of the nation, the recurrence in such fiction of characters dying of a heart failure is more intriguing. Of course, the heart of one man personifies the nation’s heart. But this image is also inspired by the memory of a particularly tragic event that happened during the Franco-Prussian War. On the night of 1 March 1871, as Émile Küss, the Mayor of Strasbourg, came to Bordeaux to advocate the attachment of Alsace-Lorraine to France and learned that these territories had just been ceded to the Germans, he suddenly died of a heart attack. Le Monde illustré wrote in his honour: ‘Victime vaincue de son attachement à la patrie française, ce grand citoyen honnête homme succombait au désespoir’.31 Immediately sublimated by the newspapers, this dramatic event, which resonated with the exemplary deaths of antiquity, made a great impression on contemporaries and thereby encouraged the wider representation of defeat by the death of a character succumbing to a heart attack. In numerous works of fiction of 1870–71, which were widely read at the end of the nineteenth century, the Franco-Prussian War is transposed into the heart of a family and into the hearts of its characters, thus enabling authors to internalise the conflict. Following the emergence of the psychological novel, literature of this kind turns into a laboratory of cases of conscience and patriotism, which are supposed to edify future generations and prepare them for revenge.32 Françoise’s choice In wartime, whom would you save? Your father or your lover? In Zola’s ‘L’attaque du moulin’, set in Lorraine a few days after the declaration of war, the young heroine with the patriotic name Françoise has two hours to make her choice. A  few moments earlier, after a short battle against the French, the Prussians invade her father’s mill and arrest her fiancé. Yet, Dominique has escaped, and the Prussians are now looking for him, convinced that he killed their sentry in his escape. Suspecting Françoise of having helped him, the enemies give her an ultimatum: if in two hours the fugitive has not surrendered, they will shoot her father. In wartime, who will Françoise save? Her father or her lover? Caught between the filial love that she feels for her father and the marital bliss that awaits her with Dominique, Françoise hesitates, thinking of the past, dreaming of the future. By a cruel irony of the narrative, the young woman does not have to choose in the end: Dominique, who has surrendered, is shot by the Germans, while her father dies from a stray bullet during

Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat 161 the battle that the French are waging to conquer the mill. Only Françoise survives the event, without having to decide who she will let die and who she will let live.33 Before Sophie’s choice, Françoise’s choice is thereby discredited: who can believe that one has a choice in wartime? Zola seems to be mocking the reader who, on reading Françoise’s story, has asked themself who they would have saved. However, despite the irony of Zola’s short story, much of the war fiction of 1870–71 is precisely composed of this kind of moral issue: following the pattern of Racine’s and Corneille’s tragedies, their dilemmas stem from conflicts that inextricably set heart against heart. To resolve this dilemma obviously requires sublime and heroic sacrifices. As we saw earlier, the defeat of 1870–71 led to the defeat of a certain narrative of manhood: the failure of the French soldiers of 1870 precipitated the crisis of an old French epic and national figure, which had been revived by the Napoleonic victories of the early nineteenth century. Since Napoleonic epic lyricism was now barely readable, several authors who were looking for alternatives to this literary and moral crisis imagined another way of telling war stories. Along the lines of the Bildungsroman and the plot of the failed marriage, this sentimental literary genre depicted the patriotic growth of a woman who would have to give up her dearest relationships in order to become ‘une bonne Française’. Thus, according to the gender division expected in the nineteenth century, while men engaged their bodies on the battlefield, the battle of female characters was essentially fought within their hearts. In the war fiction of 1870–71, the sentimental terms of this female dilemma are often identical and follow a familiar narrative thread: a woman, married or engaged to a German, finds herself torn by the war between her feelings for her husband or fiancé (conjugal love) and her affection towards France (patriotic love). Following this narrative line, Camille de Reumont, the heroine of Chair à canon (1872) with the Cornelian name, hesitates to support her sister’s marriage to Albrecht de Rosenthal; Valentine Dercery, the heroine of Une Parisienne sous la foudre (1871), renounces Ludwig von Lamdberg, the man she loves; Marthe Ellangé, the heroine of Les Frontières du cœur (1912), no longer knows how to love her husband Otto Rudheimer. Published in 1912, when rumours of a new conflict between France and Germany were spreading, Victor Margueritte’s Les Frontières du cœur is a perfect example of the use that writers make of this patriotic-sentimental literary genre: in this novelistic model, private issues serve not only to represent and dramatise the conflict but also to prepare contemporaries for the war to come. In Les Frontières du cœur, Marthe Ellangé who marries Otto Rudheimer, a German doctor living in Hesse at the end of the Second Empire, seems at first to be indifferent to the conflict that sets her husband against her brothers. Visiting her parents, Marthe, then pregnant, watches from Amiens the successive defeats of France; the death of her brother Jacques, killed in action; the amputation of her other brother’s arm following the battle of Villers-Bretonneux; and the illness and death of her grandfather, who suffers from a stroke after the fall of the Second Empire. In the face of the misfortunes of her country, symbolised by the suffering of her family, Marthe starts to feel hatred towards Otto rather than love, and she reveals, in the

162  Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier expected denouement of this type of story, her ‘true French soul’. As she explains to her husband: Je ne puis concevoir la possibilité de vivre sous votre toit . . . et tout mon être, à l’idée de coucher dans votre lit, se soulève . . . Ce qui nous unissait est mort. Il ne reste que ce qui nous séparait, oui, sans que nous l’ayons su . . . Oh! je lis dans vos yeux. Vous me jugez inconstante, ingrate, légère, – une vraie Française! Hélas! non, je suis la même. Seulement, l’amour enveloppait notre vie, comme un voile . . . La guerre l’a déchiré . . . Il n’y a plus en face l’un de l’autre que deux êtres d’une race différente, et entre eux, tout ce qui divise: habitudes, usages, sentiments, pensées, cette lente formation qui vient de bien plus loin que l’enfance et que nos parents tenaient des leurs, le contraste de nos éducations, l’antagonisme de nos religions et de nos nationalités, les mille nuances qui font que nous étions et que nous nous retrouvons étrangers l’un à l’autre. . . . Vous êtes, à mes yeux, l’Ennemi. Vous êtes l’Allemagne que j’exècre, de toute ma rage de vaincue et de toute mon âme française!34 Thus, unable to live with Otto after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, Marthe finally obtains a divorce: their son would grow up torn between France and Germany. The reader response to Les Frontières du cœur and the debates that followed testify to the didactic aims of this patriotic-sentimental literary genre, which was intended to influence French women in their love affairs and conduct. As is often the case with Victor Margueritte’s novels, literature is thus perceived less as an end than as a means, aiming to educate and edify readers about social and moral issues and, in this instance, problems of sentimental geopolitics. A few days after the publication of Les Frontières du cœur, Victor Margueritte published an important article in Femina, a successful women’s magazine, in which he summarised his heroine’s dilemma in captivating terms: Qui l’emportera, de la patrie ou de l’amour? Ce conflit a été celui d’hier. . . . . Et ce conflit peut être celui de demain . . . Voilà en quoi ce livre pose, il me semble, un problème auquel toutes les femmes et toutes les mères réfléchiront . . . Que penseraient, dans un cas analogue, – le plus affreux des cas de conscience qui puisse se poser à un cœur de femme, – les femmes d’aujourd’hui?35 Attracted by this patriotic cas de conscience, the newspaper’s editors chose to investigate the issue further, proposing to its 1912 readers to answer the following question: En général une Française peut-elle épouser, même en temps de paix, un homme appartenant à une nation ennemie latente de son pays? Et en particulier, individuellement même, si vous aviez été mariée à un Allemand, auriez-vous pu après la défaite de la France en 1870, continuer à aimer votre mari? Comment auriez-vous résolu le conflit de sentiments qui n’aurait pu manquer de s’élever en vous à ce moment?36

Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat  163 The responses varied, some agreeing with Victor Margueritte’s character while others drawing on their private lives to argue that patriotic and marital love could peacefully coexist. These French women’s choices would soon be put to the test in a new war. Derived from the defeat of 1870–71 and from the failure of a male and epic representation of war, the patriotic-sentimental narrative tone was very successful in the early twentieth century, as Maurice Barrès’s Colette Baudoche (1909) demonstrates. In this novel, a young woman from Lorraine refuses to marry a German, as she remembers the Franco-Prussian War. After 1914, however, the figure of the war heroine caught up in sentimental dilemmas tended to fade away. The protest against a patriotic lyricism which encourages people to sacrifice body and heart to the fatherland, as well as changes in social mores, made this kind of patriotic and sentimental littérature à thèse effectively unreadable. An editor of L’Humanité in 1922 argued: Les Frontières du Cœur, comme ça date et comme c’est faux. Un ménage, Français et Allemande [sic], désuni par les différences de culture et par l’orgueil national de chaque époux. Et ces avatars amènent à conclure que l’amour ne peut franchir le poteau bariolé d’une frontière. Ah laissez-moi rire!37 For a long time, however, this narrative thread imposed its imprint on the French imagination, as shown in Vercors’s Le Silence de la mer (1942). Yet, inspired by the motif of the impossible union of the German and the French woman, Vercors reenergises in his novel the model provided by the fiction of 1870–71: the young girl’s private struggle will remain silent. Forced to host a German who gradually becomes aware of the madness of war, the young Frenchwoman resists the enemy and her inclination by her silence. War without glory How to tell a war story without heroes and without heroism? Many French writers asked this question in the aftermath of the 1870–71 defeat, dumbfounded by the modern warfare of the Germans. In a few months, the Franco-Prussian War had annihilated an ideal that had existed for centuries: the image of the French soldier as a valiant and chivalrous man who goes to war as one goes to love. Leaving the battlefield behind, writers tried to find the heroes of their fiction in the actions of civilians, in the intimacy of families and in the hearts of women. Few, like Zola in La Débâcle, linked the defeat of 1870–71 to the arrogant legend of the Frenchman with the unconquerable arm. It would take until the First World War for writers to find a novelistic formula and language capable of describing the ravages and absurdities of modern warfare. Unlike the writers of the late nineteenth century, the authors of the first half of the twentieth century reclaimed a battlefield devoid of heroism in order to depict the defeat of a warrior ethos derived from the stories of Roland, Bayard and the

164  Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier Napoleonic Wars. As Denis Pernot analyses in the introduction to his edition of Barbusse’s Le Feu, the Poilu then becomes the war anti-hero par excellence: le combattant de la Grande Guerre ne saurait être représenté que sous les aspects, qui n’ont rien d’héroïques, d’un actant passif qui reçoit des ordres et n’en donne pas, qui les exécute sans les comprendre, sans chercher à les comprendre ou sans pouvoir les comprendre, sous les aspects d’un rustre ou d’un vilain qui se heurte à des barrières de feu, à des tonnerres de détonations, à des pluies de métal.38 Indeed, this character is fully separated from the brave and intrepid soldier of past literature. The literary crisis of wartime heroism began in France with the defeat of 1870–71 and continued after the experience of the Second World War. In Le Bouquet published in 1944, Henri Calet singularly denounces the ideological function of the literary figure of the war hero, which is used by political and military leaders to send men to their deaths. ‘C’est les belles phrases qui font les beaux soldats’, believes the naive Adrien Gaydamour, who has assured before the beginning of the war that a French soldier must ‘mourir, combattre ou périr’.39 Adrien Gaydamour, an everyday character whose life is without grandeur, is no hero: before being invited ‘à entrer dans un conflit mondial’ and being taken prisoner, he led ‘une existence des plus ordinaires’.40 Yet, according to Calet and others, the war is a story of ordinary people sent to their deaths, ‘une histoire répandue par le monde à des millions d’exemplaires’.41 By deconstructing a literary myth already dented by the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, Calet’s approach tends therefore to prove that unhappy indeed are the land and the literature that are in need of heroes.42 Notes 1 I am grateful to the European Union for their support towards my Marie SkłodowskaCurie Action postdoctoral research project, ‘The Family at War in French Culture, 1870–1914’. 2 On Gaston Paris, see H. U. Gumbrecht, ‘Gaston Paris en 1871’, in M. Zink (ed.), Le Moyen Âge de Gaston Paris (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004), pp. 69–80. 3 G. Paris, ‘La Chanson de Roland et la nationalité française’, in Poésie et Moyen Âge: leçons et lectures (Paris: Hachette, 1895), p. 118. 4 F. Brunetière, ‘Le mouvement littéraire au XIXe siècle’, Revue des Deux-Mondes (15 October 1889), p. 909. 5 G. Kahn, ‘La littérature et la guerre’, La Nouvelle Revue (1905), p. 262. 6 The loss of collective memory of 1870–71 is all the more remarkable given that this conflict is a well-known turning-point in the constitution of a ‘French literary nation’. Indeed, the defeat determines the formation of a national literary patrimony as well as a certain intellectual community. Driven by E. Renan’s La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), French Republicans sought to build a literary and cultured nation, in order to enhance national sentiment, and thus prepare the young generation’s minds for ‘la revanche’. See A.-M. Thiesse, La Fabrique de l’écrivain national, entre littérature et politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2019) and C. Charle, La République des universitaires, 1870–1940 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994).

Losing the war and losing heart in the fiction of the defeat 165 7 In the French reader’s memory of the early twentieth century, there were only a few books which were immediately associated with this conflict: Alphonse Daudet’s Les Contes du Lundi (1873), Les Soirées de Médan, a famous collection of short stories signed by a group of Naturalist writers in 1880 and Émile Zola’s La Débâcle (1892). These books undeniably overshadow other narratives produced by this conflict. 8 Although forgotten today, numerous works of fiction attempted, more or less successfully, to depict the experience of the Franco-Prussian War during the entre-deux-guerres as Léon Daudet called the period from 1870 to 1914. Better-known writers such as Anatole France, Victor Margueritte and Erckmann-Chatrian, as well as less well-known authors such as Marie-Louise Gagneur, Zénaïde Fleuriot, Ludovic Halévy and Albert Delpit, all set fiction during this conflict. 9 Analysing the repression that follows the ‘social genocide’ of the French revolutionary days of June 1848, Dolph Oehler establishes the ways in which French literature desperately tried to resist this oblivion as well as the reasons behind its failure. D. Oehler, Ein Höllensturz der Alten Welt: zur Selbsterforschung der Moderne nach dem Juni 1848 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 7. 10 ‘Y penser toujours, n’en parler jamais’, stated Gambetta. 11 N. Bourguinat and G. Vogt, La Guerre franco-allemande de 1870, une histoire globale (Paris: Flammarion, 2020), p. 112. 12 G. Garrote, ‘Les origines de la débâcle de 1870’, Inflexions, 46 (2021) p. 163. 13 D. Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. M. Belgion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 261. 14 A. de Gasparin, La France: nos fautes, nos périls, notre avenir (Paris: Michel-Lévy frères, 1873), p. 257. 15 M. L. Gagneur, Chair à canon (Paris: Dentu, 1872), p. 122. 16 On the legend of Bayard, see S. Gal, Bayard: histoires croisées du chevalier (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2007). 17 Gagneur, Chair à canon, p. 75. 18 Ibid., p. 447, 448. 19 J. Michelet, La France devant l’Europe (Bordeaux: Charles Lévy, 1871), p. 47. 20 As Edmond de Goncourt writes about Zola’s La Débâcle in his Journal: Oui, je le répète, je crois que si moi, si Zola, nous avions vu la guerre – et la guerre avec l’intention de la peindre dans un bouquin –, nous aurions pu faire un livre original, un livre neuf. Mais sans l’avoir vue, on ne peut faire qu’un volume intéressant, mais ressemblant à tous ceux qui ont été fabriqués avant vous sur le même sujet.   E. J. de Goncourt, Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol. 3 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), p. 728. 21 O. Roynette, ‘Blessés et soignants face à la violence du combat en 1870–1871: un tournant sensible?’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 60 (2020), p. 145. 22 Ibid., p. 145. 23 E. Zola, ‘To the Young People of France’, in B. M. Sherman (trans.), The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (New York: Cassel, 1893), p. 99. 24 The first verse of the Aeneid (‘Of arms and the man I sing’) sums up the literary purpose of the epic. 25 L. Boissonnas, Une famille pendant la guerre (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1873), p. 3. 26 The search by parents for their son who has gone to the front and is not heard from again is a common feature of war stories. This topos also echoes a reality, for example, the experience of painter Frédéric Bazille’s father during the Franco-Prussian War: Sitôt prévenu de la blessure de Frédéric, Gaston Bazille, le père de l’artiste, se mit en chemin. Il ignorait alors que celle-ci avait été mortelle. Patiemment, il mena son enquête de Gien à Bellegarde, dans une zone totalement désorganisée par les combats récents et où régnait la plus grande confusion. Parvenu à Beaune-la-Rolande,

166  Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier il réussit à se faire guider jusqu’à la fosse qui renfermait la dépouille de son enfant. ‘Mon fils tué . . . à 29 ans! Au seuil de sa vie’, lança douloureusement Gaston Bazille devant le corps inerte. Symboliquement, il coupa un brin de genévrier à proximité, afin de la planter sur la terrasse de la maison familiale de Méric.   See P. Mariot, ‘Une symphonie inachevée: Frédéric Bazille et la guerre de 1870’, in H. Michel (ed.), Frédéric Bazille, la jeunesse de l’impressionnisme (Paris: Flammarion, 2016), p. 196. 27 Quoting a primary teacher about her experience of the First World War, Annette Becker thus explains the concept of ‘outre-guerre’: Si au début de la guerre on nous avait dit ce que ces trois années nous apporteraient de souffrances de toutes sortes, nous nous serions écriés que jamais nous ne résisterions, que la terre nous renfermerait dans son sein avant qu’elles ne soient écoulées. Et pourtant nous voilà! Mais combien affaiblis, changés, vieillis. . . . Ah! guerre maudite! On ferait tourner des usines avec les larmes et le sang que tu as fait répandre sur notre misérable terre.’ ‘Outre-guerre’. Construit à partir d’ ‘outrenoir’, expression empruntée au peintre Pierre Soulages, le terme pourrait s’appliquer à ces champs de ‘bataille’ habités par des civils, ces lieux d’expérimentation d’une violence inconnue, tels que les décrit cette institutrice d’un village du Pas-de-Calais. Entre 1914 et 1918, exactions, atrocités, déportations et massacres de civils accompagnent la radicalisation des combats. Les habitants avaient d’abord connu les dévastations des affrontements armés pendant la guerre de mouvement; quand ils sont restés prisonniers de l’avance des troupes, les invasions se muent alors en occupation.   See A. Becker, Les Cicatrices rouge: 14–18, France et Belgique occupées (Paris: Fayard, 2010), p. 9. 28 Kahn, ‘La littérature et la guerre’, pp. 261–262. 29 Erckmann Chatrian, Le Brigadier Frédéric: histoire d’un Français chassé par les Allemands (Paris: Hetzel, 1874), p. 195. 30 Ibid., 197. 31 M. V., ‘Les obsèques de M. Kuss’, Le Monde illustré (11 March 1871), p. 160. 32 Around the turn of the century, the concept of the ‘psychological novel’ was associated with writers often overlooked today who were deemed to be of landmark significance at the time, such as Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, Anatole France and Édouard Rod. 33 On the relationships between literature and such ethical dilemmas, see Frédérique Leichter-Flack, Le Laboratoire des cas de conscience (Paris: Alma, 2012). 34 V. Margueritte, Les Frontières du cœur (Paris: Flammarion, 1912), p. 77. 35 V. Margueritte, ‘Une enquête de Femina. Les Frontières du cœur’, Femina (1 March 1912), p. 267. 36 Ibid. 37 ‘Pleb’, ‘À travers les livres. Les Frontières du cœur’, L’Humanité, 22 August 1922, p. 3. 38 H. Barbusse, Le Feu. Journal d’une escouade, ed. D. Pernot (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), p. 22. 39 H. Calet, Le Bouquet (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 11. 40 H. Calet, ‘Prière d’insérer’, in Le Bouquet (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). 41 Ibid. 42 This famous and much discussed line is found in Brecht’s play Leben des Galilei (1939): ‘Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat’ (‘Unhappy the land that needs heroes’).

12 The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain Katherine Ashley

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had an enormous impact on the French literary world, where it was experienced both as a turning-point linked to the development of the Naturalist movement and as an apocalyptic political and cultural transformation from which a new mal du siècle developed alongside tentative Republican optimism. Because of literary and cross-cultural connections between authors and intellectuals, the effects of this were felt beyond France. This is especially true in Britain, which was France’s main literary rival and the most powerful neutral nation during the war. In the second half of the nineteenth century, British writers were increasingly looking for literary, artistic and intellectual models in France; that they were affected by the 1870–1871 conflict is reflected in their own letters and journals, as well as in their creative works. Despite this acute interest in France and its culture, there was little post-war appetite for the literary revanchism or extreme expressions of French nationalism that infiltrated many French literary works of the period, and there was limited engagement in Britain with respect to French texts whose generic status was unstable. There was a preference for more tempered literary responses, which meant that the connection between the war and the changes in the French literary field might not have been appreciated. I. The official British position on the Franco-Prussian War was that neutrality was Britain’s ‘duty’.1 It goes without saying that this stance was unpopular abroad, where it was criticised by French journalists despite their own role in escalating events.2 William Webster has shown that satirical newspapers, particularly Le Charivari in France, were critical of Britain’s ‘culpable inactivity’.3 Meanwhile, the German paper Kladderadatsch accused Britain of ‘hypocrisy and selfishness’ for ‘making substantial profits from selling ordnance to France while avoiding costly involvement by proclaiming military neutrality’.4 This neutrality was also misunderstood by French authors such as George Sand, who ‘could not forbear a cry of astonishment at the neutral nations, insensibles à l’égorgement d’une civilisation comme la nôtre’.5 Neutrality was not synonymous with disinterest.6 Satirical journals like Punch presented the war as ‘a conflict between two villains’.7 Newspapers and magazines DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-17

168  Katherine Ashley teemed with articles on subjects like ‘The Future of France’.8 The Athenaeum published ‘Ballon Monté’ reports with news from Paris, and the Contemporary Review contained regular lengthy articles.9 However, while The Athenaeum’s ‘books received’ lists included French and German pamphlets, the books reviewed were mostly British accounts of the invasion, presumably for reasons of perceived objectivity and reader interest.10 This was largely true of other publications as well. Official neutrality was complicated by the cultural networks connecting British authors and intellectuals to France. Neutrality is unsustainable when one’s friends and colleagues are potentially unsafe, and there was hardly a British author without ties to France, either from having lived and travelled there or from having developed close friendships with French intellectuals. This is equally true of British publishers of French books. Members of the Vizetelly publishing family wrote and published non-fiction on the war of 1870–71: Henry Vizetelly edited a two-volume history called Paris in Peril (1882); Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, who was close to Zola and chaperoned him during his English exile, wrote a series of books in the early twentieth century related to the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, including My Days of Adventure: The Fall of France, 1870–71 (1914) and My Adventures in the Commune, Paris, 1871 (1914). Benefits and subscriptions were also organised by authors, performers and publishers to provide relief for victims of the war. Drury Lane Theatre held ‘relief-benefit’ performances of French plays (in French and English) to raise money for ‘French prisoners in Germany’.11 Robert Browning is reported to have sold the poem ‘Hervé Riel’ to Cornhill magazine ‘for 100£ and presented the money to the Fund for the Relief of the Distress prevailing in Paris’.12 London publishers organised a Paris Booksellers Relief Committee to raise money to support their Parisian colleagues through shipments of food.13 France was a literary point of reference for many British writers and critics during the second half of the nineteenth century. The war surfaced in their private writings and provided rich subject matter for poetry, novels and essays. Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, wrote of his anguish as ‘the tide of invasion swept over France’.14 Stevenson was in the Hebrides in the summer of 1870 but explained in ‘Memoirs of an Islet’ that all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were roaring for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit in my isle . . . and think upon the war, and the loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men’s wounds, and the weariness of their marching.15 George Eliot, whose intellectual sympathies were more Prussian than Stevenson’s, was similarly affected, particularly since she had spent the summer of 1870 travelling in Germany and France. Eliot confessed that ‘[w]e think of hardly anything but the War, and spend a great portion of our day reading about it’.16 Such was the war’s impact on Eliot that it contributed to the development of Middlemarch’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, onto whom Eliot ‘projected . . . a version of her own dilemma of being torn between necessary detachment and a felt need to

The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain 169 engage with historical events, with a world of hardship and suffering’.17 By contrast, Thomas Carlyle, an avowed Germanophile who favoured the unification of Germany, played a decisive role in ‘preserving British neutrality’. Carlyle’s ‘The Latter Stage of the French-German War, 1870–1871’, originally published in The Times on 18 November 1870, brought to a close his series of historical studies of France’s revolutions by situating the contemporary conflict in a broader historical context.18 Magazines like Cornhill contained multiple literary accounts of the war.19 Poets such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and George Meredith wrote about France’s decline and fall. Swinburne’s ‘Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic’ (1870) is dedicated to Victor Hugo but is a fervid, flag-waving and embarrassingly hortatory affair, with an exaggeration that borders on the bathetic. George Meredith’s more moving ‘France, 1870’ gives a less affected sense of the esteem in which French culture was held and seems to reflect a view expressed by Alphonse Daudet: ‘Ils tirent sur Paris, les misérables! C’est l’intelligence du monde entier qu’ils visent’.20 Meredith presents France as a suffering mother – the mother of pride, delicacy, luxury, heroes, honour, glory and reason – who has disappeared. There is a clear sense of a cultural beacon having been extinguished by cold military might: We look for her that sunlike stood Upon the forehead of our day, An orb of nations, radiating food For body and for mind alway. Where is the Shape of glad array; The nervous hands, the front of steel, The clarion tongue? Where is the bold proud face? We see a vacant place; We hear an iron heel.21 The influence of the war on British literature lasted beyond 1870–71. G.A. Henty’s A Woman of the Commune (1895) portrays an aspiring English artist who studies painting in Paris, only to get caught in the siege and Commune. Thomas Hardy’s ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ’ (1915), about the First World War, has its origins in his reading at the time of the Battle of Rezonville-Gravelotte in August 1870.22 Cultural connections meant that official neutrality was at odds with the private inclinations of many British authors. II. Unsurprisingly, the events of 1870–71 were cataclysmic within French literary circles. As The Athenaeum’s Paris correspondent reported, ‘the disasters of 1870 and the prospects of 1871 have naturally called forth a flood of poetry and prose’.23 For some authors, especially of the older generation, the invasion forced a reassessment of pre-1870 political opinions and a difficult readjustment of worldviews, as

170  Katherine Ashley in the example of Flaubert trying to enlist in the National Guard. As Michel Mohrt comments: ‘chez . . . Taine, Renan, Flaubert, il faut distinguer l’écrivain d’avant 1870 et l’écrivain d’après 1870’.24 For others, the defeat was considered proof of France’s decadence and decline under the Second Empire and contributed to the development of ‘une idéologie revancharde visant à surmonter l’humiliation subie à Sedan’.25 For the emerging generation, particularly those associated with Naturalism, the fall of France was a turning-point that could bring about literary renewal, but there was a danger of being left rudderless. As Paul Bourget explains in his seminal study of decadence, the defeat was like a poison condemning his generation to an intellectual sickness from which few would escape: la nouvelle génération a grandi parmi des tragédies sociales inconnues de celle qui la précédait. Nous sommes entrés dans la vie par cette terrible année de la guerre et de la Commune, et cette année terrible n’a pas mutilé que la carte de notre pays, elle n’a pas incendié que les monuments de notre capitale; quelque chose nous en est demeuré, à tous, comme un premier empoisonnement qui nous a laissés plus dépourvus, plus incapables de résister à la maladie intellectuelle où il nous a fallu grandir.26 Few authors who lived through the invasion and siege remained silent on what they had witnessed and experienced. The British reception of first-hand French accounts varied depending on the reputation of the author and the generic stability of the text in question, for when French novelists or poets were writing in the immediacy of the invasion, siege or Commune, it was often difficult to determine how to interpret the text since the lines between fiction and non-fiction became blurred. Historians and journalists grappled with the political, social and cultural instability rocking France, and these accounts were more likely to reach British readers than chronicles written by novelists, especially if the author had already established a name. Likely because of his pre-existing reputation as an eminent historian, Jules Michelet’s La France devant l’Europe (1871) was quickly translated into English as France before Europe (complete with a note of thanks from Michelet to the unnamed translator).27 In announcing the publication, The Athenaeum remarked disapprovingly that ‘amongst many noble pages on France, there are severe attacks on Russia and Prussia, in which the author has allowed his natural prejudices full scope’ – prejudices that were presumably excused because of Michelet’s stature within European intellectual circles.28 Another established historian and philosopher whose work was well received was Ernest Renan, whose La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France was positively reviewed by the Fortnightly Review in 1874.29 Prior to this, Matthew Arnold wrote favourably about Renan’s book in The Academy, although he challenged the French to take the defeat as an opportunity to reassess their assumptions about ‘the intellectual value of France to the world’.30 Francisque Sarcey, a critic for Le Temps and Le Gaulois who served in the National Guard, collected his writings in Le Siège de Paris: impressions et souvenirs (Lachaud, 1871). This book had a British connection: it was dedicated to the Parisbased British art collector, Richard Wallace, in thanks for his efforts to alleviate

The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain 171 hardship during the siege. While specifying that the book offers impressions of the siege as it was lived, Sarcey is careful to underscore his political neutrality: ce livre n’est pas un livre de parti. Quelles que soient les opinions politiques de l’auteur, il a tâché d’être juste pour tout le monde, et de ne toucher à aucune des questions irritantes qui partagent en ce moment les esprits, et que l’avenir seul peut résoudre.31 That the book was a success is proven by the fact that, in addition to the initial edition, it was also published by the Scottish publisher Nelson in Paris in 1871, only to appear in a Blackie’s Modern French Texts edition in 1895.32 The volume’s German translation was announced in The Athenaeum, where its English translation was equally the subject of a brief, positive review.33 Accounts by less prominent figures with no immediate ties to Britain were not translated: Maxime du Camp’s Les Convulsions de Paris was not translated until 1940, and Paul de Saint-Victor’s articles, compiled in the volume Barbares et bandits: la Prusse et la Commune, have never appeared in English, despite the fact that Paul Bourget described him to English readers as having ‘the most brilliant’ style of all French journalists.34 In first-hand accounts by novelists, there is a tension between recording private recollections the better to process the calamitous invasion, capitulation and ensuing civil war and a desire to document events objectively so as to establish the historical record. This generic ambiguity likely prevented certain works from being translated, even if they were well received by British critics who read French. George Sand kept a private journal – Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre (1870–71) – that was written with publication in mind. The journal was lauded by Matthew Arnold for the way in which it consistently depicts the French peasantry as incarnating an essential, timeless aspect of French culture and for its engagement with égalité as a fundamental French value.35 According to David A. Powell, Journal d’un voyageur ‘displays [Sand’s] very real need to position herself on a parallel with the state of France’s current instability in the midst of the Franco-Prussian war’, attests to her ‘uncertain[ty] about her political ideals’ and ‘encompasses the political and moral state of France in 1871’.36 At the same time, it contains elements of fiction, including imagined conversations with ‘Jacques Bonhomme’, and it seems to have been written with different readers in mind. As Powell notes, ‘Sand’s text blurs the distinction between document and fiction as well as the distinction between public and private, between mimesis and introspection’.37 Despite Sand’s considerable reputation and the fact that many of her novels had already been translated, her Journal d’un voyageur was not released in English. A similar tension between mimesis and introspection is evident in Sedan, ou Les Charniers by Belgian author Camille Lemonnier. Sedan is one of the most striking French-language accounts of the war and is based on three days spent in and around Sedan two days after Napoleon III surrendered. Such was its visceral, clinical description of the atrocities that the book was described by Joris-Karl Huysmans as ‘le plus terrifiant pamphlet qu’on ait jamais écrit contre la guerre’.38 Its power derives from its focus on the aftermath of a single battle. By largely isolating Sedan

172  Katherine Ashley from broader military and political contexts, Lemonnier brings into relief the emotional and physical destruction wrought by the battle. Remarkably, although it has been translated into German, it has never been translated into English.39 One reason that Sedan may have passed under the British radar is that it was serialised and published in Belgium.40 There may also be generic issues at play, since the text’s status is ambiguous: written as a ‘témoignage’, its narration switches between the first person ‘je’ and the third person ‘l’auteur’. As the narrator explains: L’auteur de ces lignes tient particulièrement à leur garder le caractère de notes, et il ne veut ni philosopher, ni conjecturer, ni inventer. Il raconte ce qu’il a vu et il le raconte comme il l’a vu, le plus simplement qu’il peut et sans exagération.41 Sedan is simultaneously a guidebook (‘Marchez cependant: vous verrez bientôt à votre droite’) and a private journal where one man’s shock at the carnage and waste of life is recorded (‘vingt ans! l’âge où l’on aime! où les bois sont en fleurs! où l’on effleuille les marguerites! Celle-là donna sa vie’).42 Lemonnier’s reputation may also have affected the book’s reception in Britain, because it was not until he later came to be associated with Émile Zola that he gained wider literary renown. III. Poetry is the genre in which revanchist sentiment and romanticisation of the war are most prominent. Paul Déroulède’s persistent, even perversely patriotic poems are an example. Déroulède was a founder of the Ligue des Patriotes, and in collections like Chants du soldat (1872) and Nouveaux chants du soldat (1875), he idealises soldiers’ deaths and portrays the French defeat as heroic. ‘Vive la France!’, the opening poem of Chants du soldat, sets the tone by criticising those who criticised France, by speaking directly to France and the French and by calling for revenge to quench the hatred born of defeat. This is a far cry from the cosmopolitanism typically associated with the end of the nineteenth century or from the neutrality and balance appreciated by British critics vis-à-vis first-hand accounts of the war: Non, France, ne crois pas ceux qui te disent lâche Ceux qui veulent nier ton âme et ses efforts . . . Oui, Français, c’est un sang vivace que le vôtre! Les tombes de vos fils sont pleines de héros; Mais sur le sol sanglant où le vainqueur se vautre, Tous vos fils, ô Français! Ne sont pas aux tombeaux. Et la revanche doit venir, lente peut-être, Mais en tout cas fatale, et terrible à coup sûr; La haine est déjà née, et la force va naître: C’est au faucheur à voir si le champ n’est pas mûr.43

The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain  173 As a general proposition, in an era where the novel dominated the market, poetry seldom found its way to a mass readership abroad. Revanchism did nothing to improve the situation. Although Déroulède’s poems set the benchmark for poetic vengeance, went through multiple French editions, and were ‘couronné’ by the Académie Française, they were not translated.44 Conversely, his memoirs of the war, 1870-Feuilles de route (1907), in which he displays his self-declared ‘partialité jalouse pour la Patrie’, was translated.45 This difference in translation history reflects a lack of appetite on the part of the British for expressions of extreme – even violent – nationalism in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War; it also belies a growing interest in a possible Franco-Prussian reckoning prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Revanchism is also expressed in the works of many Parnasse poets of the 1860s–70s, some of whom ‘intensified [it] almost to the point of mania’.46 This was not well received, for it was felt that patriotism had displaced poetry. The Academy stated that ‘the war and the revolution were misfortunes’ for François Coppée because his war poems were ‘fuller of patriotism than of poetry’ and ‘struck a feeble and unworthy note’.47 George Saintsbury’s review of Théodore de Banville’s Idylles prussiennes contains similar complaints, along with the broader comment that the poetical merits of the vast volume of verse poured forth in France during 1870–1871 are as a rule but small. Helpless rage is unfortunately apt to be undignified, and no Prometheus has yet appeared in France as an exception to the rule. Few if any French poets have resisted the temptation to console themselves for perpetual, not to say disgraceful, disaster by extravagant self-laudation.48 This is connected to what Swinburne refers to as ‘two points of frequent and fruitless debate between critics of the higher kind. The first, whether poetry and politics are irreconcilable or not; the second, whether art should prefer to deal with things immediate or with things remote’.49 While the answer to the first question would seem to be a resounding ‘yes’ in the context of Déroulède or the war poetry of the Parnassians, Swinburne was asking the question – and answering in the negative – in the context of Victor Hugo’s L’Année terrible, perhaps the most well-known work to emerge from the rubble of 1870–71. By this point, Victor Hugo was the old man of French literature and had only recently returned to France from exile. His Franco-Prussian War poetry was well received in France and Britain partially for this reason and also because it was perceived to express a heartfelt if sometimes over-exuberant patriotism while refraining from taking sides in the internal political dramas affecting France. In the Contemporary Review, Edward Dowden applauded the ‘freedom of the poet from party spirit’ in L’Année terrible, stating that Hugo ‘is a Frenchman throughout; not a man of the Commune, nor a man of Versailles’.50 Poems from L’Année terrible were published in L’Univers and Le Rappel in 1872, but The Athenaeum printed one of its poems, ‘Dans le cirque’, in a Ballon Monté report in January 1871. In introducing

174  Katherine Ashley the poem, The Athenaeum remarked that Hugo, hitherto a ‘quiet spectator of the siege of Paris’, had sent forth to the nations a valuable lesson in the form of an allegory – lines which will be read from one end of the civilised world to the other, and call up bitter sighs in the bosoms of all who lament to see rational beings destroying each other for the glory, or profit, or amusement of this or that monarch.51 The poem’s universality was perceived to transcend the particular historical moment from which it stemmed. L’Année terrible was published by Michel Lévy in 1872. In 1873, selections in English were published in London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation.52 There, Hugo’s poems were prefaced with a short explanation from the translator: In the following short extracts no attempt has been made to reproduce in English any of those passionate outbursts of angry patriotism which escape from the great poet in L’Année Terrible. The fierce music of most of the detached poems included under that title is, however, interrupted from time to time by a sweet strain of tender domestic love or sorrow. It is the echo of this, which (with M. Victor Hugo’s most kind permission) I  have endeavoured to give. . . . By no stretch of the imagination is L’Année terrible ‘light and amusing literature’. London Society presented a carefully curated version of the collection, translating only four poems: ‘To Little Jeanne’, ‘To a Child, Ill During the Siege’, ‘Mourning’ and ‘To His Orphan Grandchildren’. These poems focus not on violence, terror or ‘angry patriotism’ but on the domestic repercussions of historic events. The magazine favoured the lyrical over the patriotic, preferring poems that deal with the loss of a son rather than the loss of a province, a city, a political system or a worldview, and references to the invasion, the siege and the Commune are conspicuously absent. The Hugo presented by London Society foreshadows the Hugo of L’Art d’être grand-père (1877) rather than calling back to the more political Hugo of Les Châtiments (1853). Immediately after the peace, compassion and balance – not critique and vitriol – were wanted from poets. When poems from L’Année terrible were next translated, in 1888, a more war-centric version of the collection was presented. Perhaps enough time had elapsed for British readers to deal with Hugo’s ‘angry patriotism’? Although two of the poems had also appeared in London Society – ‘The Sick Child’ and ‘O Charles, I feel thee near’ – the remaining poems are devoid of the familial perspective and focus on the political, the military and the conflict. Carrington translated ‘The Terrible Year’, ‘Sedan’, ‘Paris Slandered’, ‘Capitulation’, ‘Before the Conclusion of the Treaty’, ‘The Struggle’, ‘In the Circus’, ‘To Those Who Talk About Fraternity’, ‘Past Participle of the Verb Tropchoir’ (with its magnificent play on words that mocks General Trochu) and ‘On a Barricade’.53 Distance makes the poems more palatable in translation, even though they were written in the heat of the conflict.

The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain 175 IV. The events of 1870–71 were formative in the development of the worldview of the emerging generation of French novelists, but this is not necessarily reflected in their reception in Britain. Whereas Paul Bourget emphasised his generation’s inability to cope with the calamity, Émile Zola explicitly tied the evolution of Naturalist literature to the French defeat. In ‘Lettre à la jeunesse’ (1879), Zola equates the aesthetics of Romanticism with romantic notions of patriotism and advises young writers that if they want to recover from the defeat of 1870–71, they will need to adopt a Naturalist aesthetic based on the scientific study of the truth. However, when British critics reviewed La Débâcle, his war novel, one of the things they praised was that it was not ‘disfigured’ by the ‘particular form of naturalism’ with which Zola is typically associated.54 The connection between Naturalism and the war was left unexplored. Zola positioned Naturalism as a phoenix rising from the ruins and carrying France forward on its wings. He does this in his own work by structuring the ­Rougon-Macquart series around the rise and fall of the Second Empire and by making the Franco-Prussian War the focus of La Débâcle, the penultimate novel in the series. Written twenty years after the events it describes, La Débâcle benefits from the distance that earlier books could not – the Emperor was portrayed with ‘pity’ rather than ‘scorn’; Zola was ‘very merciful’.55 La Débâcle is not an eyewitness account, but in Naturalist terms, Zola used ‘documents humains’ – he did tremendous amounts of research when writing the novel – to create a ‘document humain’. The novel deals with Sedan and the Commune, symbolically closes the Rougon-Macquart series and is a highly accurate literary depiction of the FrancoPrussian War. The Academy – with a nod to the excessive emotion expressed by writers during wartime – called La Débâcle ‘an overwhelming argument against war: a more damning and conclusive arraignment than any poetical or philosophical tirade that has ever been penned’.56 The Athenaeum predicted that it would become the ‘text-book for the crucial disaster of the année terrible’.57 Shortly after La Débâcle (1892) was published, Ernest Vizitelly translated it as The Downfall: A Story of the Horrors of War. It was serialised in the Weekly Times and Echo (London) and published by Chatto and Windus in a version that contains lengthy comments on the novel by Zola.58 Such was the success of La Débâcle that it has eclipsed other works of FrancoPrussian War fiction in the comparative literary-historical record. Alphonse Daudet’s Robert Helmont: journal d’un solitaire (1873) is one such novel. Although Daudet is associated with the Naturalist movement, the tone of Robert Helmont is entirely different from La Débâcle: sadness reigns, accompanied by a faith in the permanence of provincial, pastoral France, whose spirit is kept alive through a provincial doctor, a peasant who takes it upon himself to kill wayward Prussians, and the titular Robert, an artist. Robert hears the siege of Paris from afar, but the slowness of provincial life endures. Daudet described Robert Helmont as lacking in typical novelistic traits: ‘pas de roman, d’intérêt ramené et soutenu; seulement des paysages, la mélancolie de nos palais d’été envahis’.59 It is partially based on his own experience: Daudet broke his leg in July 1870 and spent six weeks as an

176  Katherine Ashley invalid before enlisting. On returning to his country home after the war, he met a peasant who had spent the entire siege alone as a ‘vieux Robinson’, living an ‘existence de fourmi au ras de terre au milieu du bouleversement d’un monde’.60 Robert Helmont is presented as this man’s journal. While it merges Daudet’s and the peasant’s experiences, unlike Sand’s Journal d’un voyageur and Lemonnier’s Sedan, there is little generic ambiguity. Daudet claimed that the novel was met ‘sans aucun succès’, but it was translated. Laura Ensor’s translation – Robert Helmont: Diary of a Recluse, 1870–1871 – was published in 1888 and then reprinted in 1892, likely to coincide with the publication of La Débâcle. Daudet also wrote Contes du lundi while the siege was underway. The Contes du lundi stories appeared in Le Soir and L’Évenement beginning in February 1871 and were collected in a volume by Alphonse Lemerre in 1873.61 The collection was praised in France: rather than being bâcl[é] hâtivement pour être l[u] hâtivement’, ‘le vrai mérite d’Alphonse Daudet a été d’écrire pour le journal comme il eût écrit pour le livre’.62 Daudet’s contes presented brief tragedies with charm and tenderness, patriotic snippets of the disastrous war.63 The stories portray ordinary French citizens as patriotic heroes defending their country where official forces had failed. It is revanchist in tone and full of irony but missing both the bile of authors like Déroulède and the grisly realism of works like Sedan. Daudet was popular in British intellectual circles; it has been suggested that ‘of all the Naturalists [he] was the most kindly received in England’, largely because he was perceived to be the least ‘Naturalist’ of the Naturalists.64 Despite the success of the collection in France, where it was praised by Zola,65 extracts in translation were only published in English in 1903.66 At some point before 1911, two stories – ‘La Dernière classe’ and ‘L’Enfant espion’ – were published in a Blackie’s Little French Classics edition: the stories were in French, but the book contained notes in English, comprehension questions in French and a glossary.67 Another edition was published in French by the London-based publisher Williams and Norgate in 1892, in a collection called ‘Army Stories’ in which French and German war fiction was published in the original language.68 Despite its success in France, Contes du lundi was not translated more fully until 1950.69 Apart from La Débâcle, the most significant French work of fiction from a literary historical perspective is Les Soirées de Médan, which contains five stories (by Zola, Guy de Maupassant, J.K. Huysmans, Henry Céard and Paul Alexis) and functions as a trenchant denunciation of the war and an assertion of common Naturalist aims. The publication history of Les Soirées de Médan clearly demonstrates that collective Naturalist literary identity is built upon a critique of the events of 1870–71, but the reception of the individual stories and the collection reveals that this literary-historical significance was undervalued in Britain. Despite the hype that surrounded the volume in France, to date, Les Soirées de Médan has not been translated into English, even though British interest in French literature, and the Franco-Prussian War, was marked. That Les Soirées de Médan is, like Contes du lundi, another untranslated short story collection suggests that generic issues affected its translation and reception. Indeed, Léon Bloy’s untranslated 1893 collection Sueur de sang can be added to the list – although in that case, the extremism

The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain 177 of Bloy’s nationalism, which even his publisher warned could make Sueur de sang appear ‘un livre excessif’, was likely the primary impediment.70 Les Soirées de Médan was not completely ignored in Britain. The Academy announced its publication shortly after it appeared (and reprinted its article in July 1880). Readers were informed of the publication of a ‘volume of novelettes by M. Zola and his friends, Les Soirées de Médan (Charpentier). Médan is the little village in the environs of Paris where M. Zola has a country house’. This announcement was reprinted more or less verbatim in papers the length of Britain. These papers left out the second part of The Academy notice, however, which states that ‘[t]he authors of this work proposed to give exact sketches of various scenes from the last war’.71 This is a curious omission given that the article was penned by Paul Bourget, who was aware of the book’s status as an anti-war Naturalist manifesto. The literary-historical connection was lost. There is a caveat: although the collection has never been translated, three of its stories have been. In other words, as with Contes du lundi, it is the collection, not the stories, that is missing from the canon of translated works. The opening story, Zola’s ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’, was first translated in 1882 in the United States; Maupassant’s ‘Boule de Suif’, widely acknowledged as his masterpiece, appeared in 1887; Huysmans’s ‘Sac au dos’ was translated in 1917. To this day, even these stories are only available in author-specific volumes or in generic short story collections. An early example is the collection The Attack on the Mill and Other Sketches of War, which was edited by Edmund Gosse; he only mentions Les Soirées de Médan to dismiss the texts not written by Zola and Maupassant.72 Although ‘The Attack on the Mill’ was positively reviewed when it appeared in this edition, it was positively reviewed because of what it was not: critics praised ‘the reticence of the literary treatment’ of the war, calling it ‘the best thing M. Zola has ever written’ because it ‘has none of the qualities which are associated with the epithet “naturalistic” ’ and has ‘not the attractions which the true Zolaite loveth’.73 Publishing ‘The Attack on the Mill’ without the other Médan stories decontextualises it from a literary-historical perspective. It becomes an account of the horrors of war (in general), rather than an account of the Franco-Prussian War (in particular) – a phenomenon also seen elsewhere. This is a critical difference, because of the five Médan stories, ‘L’Attaque du moulin’ is the least topical and serves as an ironic counterpoint to the four stories that follow, and that do make the connection between Naturalism and the Franco-Prussian War explicit. As I have argued elsewhere, the experience of reading these three stories as stand-alone texts is . . . n­ ecessarily different from the experience of reading them as part of a collection, where the force of their joint attack on French political, cultural and literary values and on the French defeat is stronger.74 This decontextualisation is taken to an extreme in the earliest translation of ‘L’Attaque du Moulin’, which loses all significance as an anti-war commentary. In the original, the French officer’s ironic final cry of ‘Victoire! Victoire!’ is juxtaposed

178  Katherine Ashley with the death of the two male protagonists, one of whom dies from a spiteful Prussian bullet, and the other from a stray French one. The translation, called ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ rather than ‘The Attack on the Mill’, revises the ending such that all irony is missing: both men survive. The happily-ever-after conclusion only (barely) works because the tale is severed from all historical specificity.75 Overall, British authors and critics who followed the war and French culture closely could do so without the need to read in translation, and fewer works of French war literature were translated than might be expected. Despite artistic affinities, the books dealing with the war that were translated tended to eschew excessive patriotism and generic experimentation in favour of the ideologically more neutral. Insofar as this is the case, the translations that were available do not reflect the transformations taking place within French literature as a direct result of the Franco-Prussian War. One consequence is that many significant books went untranslated until much later, notably the third volume of Jules Vallès’s Jacques Vingtras trilogy, L’Insurgé: 1871 (1886) and decadent novels by relatively well-known authors like Octave Mirbeau, whose Sébastien Roch (1890) and, in particular, Le Calvaire (1886) deal with the war.76 Adopting a comparative approach to the cultural history of the FrancoPrussian War and examining the reception of French war literature in Britain provide insight into the tensions between national literary and historical war discourses and the desire on the part of artists and intellectuals to develop cross-cultural understanding. It also flags important gaps in the comparative literary-historical record. Seeing more works translated would enable historians – literary, political, cultural – to better understand the lived and subsequently fictionalised experiences of French authorscum-soldiers and the full panoply of reactions that the war elicited. Notes 1 ‘From the Archives, 20 July 1870: The Franco-Prussian War is Declared’, Guardian, 20 July 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/jul/20/archive-1870-francoprussian-war. 2 Michel Morht comments: ‘si les responsabilités du désastre furent nombreuses, les journalistes, à coup sûr, doivent en supporter une large part. . . . La guerre de 1870, c’est la guerre des journalistes et c’est aussi la guerre de Paris’ (‘While many things were responsible for the disaster, journalists certainly bear a large share of the responsibility. . . . The war of 1870 was the journalists’ war and Paris’s war’). M. Mohrt, 1870: Les intellectuels devant la défaite [1942] (Paris: Le Capucin, 2004), p. 29. 3 W. Webster, ‘Satirical Journals and Neutrality in the Franco-Prussian War’, MLR, 110:2 (2015), p. 320. 4 Ibid., p. 323. 5 ‘Unmoved by the slaughter of a civilisation like ours’. Quoted in M. Arnold, ‘George Sand’, Fortnightly Review, 1 June 1877, p. 777. 6 ‘France and Germany’, Fortnightly Review, 1 August 1870, pp. 367–376. The review supports the establishment of a French Republic. 7 Webster, ‘Satirical Journals and Neutrality’, p. 326. 8 E. de Laveleye, ‘The Future of France’, Fortnightly Review (1 December  1870), pp. 615–630.

The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain 179 9 For example, G.W.Y., ‘Paris and the War (par Ballon Monté) – Paris, Dec. 30, 1870’, 14 January 1871, pp. 49–50, rails against Le Gaulois and the hostile anti-British stance of French journalists. 10 See the pamphlets it shares with its readers in ‘Literary Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 4 February 1871, pp. 145–146. Short reviews of French political and military souvenirs, brochures and pamphlets were published in ‘Literary Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 8 April 1871, pp. 435–436 and 15 April 1871, pp. 465–466. 11 ‘Dramatic Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 4 February 1871, p. 153. 12 ‘Literary Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 11 February 1871, p. 177. 13 Longman received a letter of thanks for a shipment of food that was sent to Hachette headquarters. The letter, from Charles Noble, is printed in ‘The Paris Booksellers’ Relief Committee’, The Athenaeum, 4 March 1871, p. 273. 14 R. L. Stevenson, ‘Fontainebleau [1884]’, in Further Memories, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala ed, 35 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1923–4), p. 113. 15 R. L. Stevenson, ‘Memoirs of an Islet’, in Memories and Portraits, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala ed, 35 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1923–4), XXIX, pp. 63–64. See also his letter to the Cornhill editor James Payn, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. B. A. Booth and E. Mehew, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994–5 [11 August 1894]), VIII, p. 347. 16 G. Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. G. S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), V, p. 114. 17 J. Rignall, ‘Middlemarch and the Franco-Prussian War’, The George Eliot Review, 46 (2015), pp. 38–45 (p. 41), https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger/670. 18 C. Heyrendt, ‘ “A Rain of Balderdash”: Thomas Carlyle and Victorian Attitudes Toward the Franco-Prussian War’, Carlyle Studies Annual, 22 (2006), p. 248. 19 For example: ‘A Week in Paris’, Cornhill, April 1871, pp. 475–489; ‘Fleur de lys: A Story of the Late War’, Cornhill, May 1871, pp. 294–321. 20 ‘They’re firing on Paris, the wretches! The wisdom of the whole world is their target’. A. Daudet, Robert Helmont: journal d’un solitaire [1873] (Paris: Dentu, 1891), p. 83. 21 Fortnightly Review, 1 January 1871, pp. 86–94. 22 R. Ebbatson, ‘A Note on “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’ ”: A  Source’, The Thomas Hardy Journal, 15:2 (1999), p. 85. 23 G.W.Y., ‘Paris and the War (par Ballon Monté) – Paris, Jan. 5, 1871’, The Athenaeum, 21 January 1871, p. 80. 24 ‘In Taine, Renan and Flaubert, one must distinguish between the pre-1870 writer and the post-1870 writer’. Mohrt, 1870: Les intellectuels, p. 15. 25 ‘A revanchist ideology directed at overcoming the humiliation suffered at Sedan’. A. Lorig, ‘1870 et la représentation littéraire d’une Nation française meurtrie’, Revue de littérature comparée, 372 (2019), p. 409. 26 The new generation grew up amid societal tragedies unknown to the previous generation. We came into life in this terrible year of the war and the Commune, and this terrible year didn’t just mutilate the map of our country, didn’t just set fire to the monuments of our capital; something remained within us all, like an original poison that left us more destitute, more incapable of resisting the intellectual disease in which we had to grow up. P. Bourget, ‘Avant-propos de 1885’, in Essais de psychologie contemporaine: études littéraires, ed. A. Guyaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 440. 27 J. Michelet, France Before Europe (London, 1871) and (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871). 28 ‘Literary Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 18 February 1871, p. 211. 29 J. Mazzini, ‘M Renan and France’, Fortnightly Review, February 1874, pp. 153–174. 30 M. Arnold, ‘General Literature: La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France’, The Academy, 15 February 1872, p. 63.

180  Katherine Ashley 31 ‘This book isn’t about taking sides. Whatever the author’s political opinions, he has attempted to be fair towards everybody, and to not touch on any of the irritating questions that are currently dividing minds, and that only time will resolve’. F. Sarcey, Le Siège de Paris (Paris: Lachaud, 1871), p. 4. 32 F. Sarcey, Le Siège de Paris, ed. F. B. Kirkman (Edinburgh: Blackie’s Modern French Texts, 1895). 33 ‘Literary Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 1 April 1871, p. 403. ‘Our Literary Table’ [review of Paris During the Siege, translated from the French of Francisque Sarcey (Chapman & Hall)]’, The Athenaeum, 6 May 1871, p. 559. 34 M. du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1878); M. du Camp, Paris After the Prussians, trans. P. A. Wilkins (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1940). This is a translation of Les Prisons pendant la Commune, the first volume of Les Convulsions de Paris. P. de Saint-Victor, Barbares et bandits: la Prusse et la Commune (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1871). P. Bourget, ‘Paris Letter’, The Academy, 31 July 1880, p. 80. 35 M. Arnold, ‘George Sand’, Fortnightly Review, 1 June 1877, p. 779. 36 D. A. Powell, ‘Disease, Democracy, and Diary: George Sand’s Diary of a Traveller During the War’, A/B:Auto/Biography Studies, 11:1 (1996), p. 82. 37 Ibid., p. 85. 38 ‘The most terrifying anti-war tract that has ever been written’. J.-K. Huysmans, ‘Camille Lemonnier’, L’Artiste, 4 August 1878. 39 C. Lemonnier, Aus den Tagen von Sedan (les Charniers), trans. B. von Suttner (Berlin: Juncker, 1911). 40 It was serialised in Nouvelles du jour, published in Brussels by C. Muquardt in 1871 and reprinted with an introduction by Léon Claudel (Paris: Lemerre, 1881). 41 The author of these lines wants them to retain the character of notes, and he doesn’t want to philosophise, speculate or invent. He states what he’s seen and describes it as he saw it, as simply as he can and without exaggeration.   C. Lemonnier, Sedan, ou les Charniers [1871], ed. S. Thorel-Cailleteau (Tournai: Labor, 2000), p. 29. 42 ‘Yet, walk: soon you will see on your right . . .’; ‘Twenty years old! The age for loving! When the woods are in bloom! The age when we pluck petals from daisies, saying “he loves me, he loves me not”. That woman there gave her life’. Lemonnier, Sedan, pp. 15, 72–73. 43 The first two lines admonish the French ‘not to believe those who call you cowardly/ those who want to deny your soul and your efforts’. The next stanza tells the French that their bloodline endures, that the ‘tombs of your sons are full of heroes/but on the bloody soil where the victor revels/all your sons, O Frenchmen! have not met their death’. The poem continues: ‘revenge must come, slowly perhaps/but in any case fatal, and undoubtedly terrible; the hatred has already awakened, and the strength will grow: it is for the reaper to know when the field is ripe’. ‘Vive la France!’, Chants du soldat [1872] (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1885), pp. 4–6. 44 Chants du soldat – Prix Montyon (1873); Chants du soldat. Chants du paysan – Prix Jean Reynaud (1894). 45 P. Déroulède, 1870-Feuilles de route: des bois de Verrières à la Forteresse de Breslau (Paris: Juven, 1907), p. ix. In English translation: R. H. Pardoe (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913). 46 A. Schaffer, ‘Parnassian Poetry on the Franco-Prussian War’, PMLA, 47:4 (1932), pp. 1178, 1170. 47 F. Wedmore, ‘General Literature: Les Humbles’, The Academy, 15 January 1873, p. 21. 48 G. Saintsbury, ‘General Literature: Idylles prussiennes’, The Academy, 1 July  1873, p.  241. Schaffer observes: ‘[I]f the Parnassians had confined themselves to the composition of poetry on the Franco-Prussian War, they might have enjoyed, in their day, a

The reception of French 1870–71 war literature in Britain 181 popularity comparable to that of political demagogues, but they would now be deservedly unknown’. Schaffer, ‘Parnassian Poetry’, pp. 1191–1192. 49 A. C. Swinburne, ‘Victor Hugo: L’Année terrible’, Fortnightly Review, 1 ­September 1872, pp. 243–267. 50 E. Dowden, ‘The Poetry of Victor Hugo’, The Contemporary Review, July 1873, p. 197. 51 G.W.Y., ‘Paris and the War (par Ballon Monté) – Paris, Jan. 17, 1871’, The Athenaeum, 28 January 1871, p. 113. 52 M. Tucker (trans.), ‘Extracts from Victor Hugo’s L’Année terrible’, London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation (August 1873), pp. 139–143. 53 V. Hugo, Translations from the Poems of Victor Hugo, trans. H. Carrington (New York: White and Allen, 1888), pp.  223–240. Selections from L’Année terrible subsequently appeared in English with two American publishers: V. Hugo, Poems in Three Volumes (Boston: Este and Lauriat, 1892); V. Hugo, The Poems of Victor Hugo (New York: Collier, 1901). 54 ‘La Débâcle’, The Athenaeum, 27 August 1892, p. 279. 55 Ibid., p. 279. 56 ‘New Novels’, The Academy, 12 November 1892, p. 432. 57 ‘La Débâcle’, p. 278. 58 See É. Zola, La Débâcle, trans. E. Dorday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xvii, note 8. É. Zola, The Downfall: A Story of the Horrors of War, trans. E. A. Vizitelly (London: Chatto and Windus, 1892), pp. v–xi. There was also an American edition: É. Zola, The Downfall/La Débâcle (The Smash-Up), trans. E. P. Robins (New York: Cassell, 1892). 59 ‘No novel, no sustained interest to come back to; only landscapes, the melancholy of our summer palaces that have been overrun’. Daudet, Robert Helmont, p. 12. 60 ‘Life of an ant staying close to the ground in the midst of the upheaval of the world’. Daudet, Robert Helmont, pp. 8–10. 61 A. Daudet, Contes du lundi [1873], ed. L. Nucera (Paris: Livre de poche, 2016), pp. 258–259. 62 ‘Hastily botched together to be hastily read’; ‘Alphonse Daudet’s real merit is to have written for a newspaper as he would have written for a book’. É. Drumont, ‘Les Livres: Les Amoureuses’, Le Bien public, 13 April 1873, p. 3. 63 Em. Des Essarts, ‘Alphonse Daudet: Contes du lundi’, Le Bien public, 3 April 1873, p. 2. 64 A. R. Favreau, ‘British Criticism of Daudet, 1872–97’, PMLA, 52:2 (1937), p. 528. See also C. R. Decher, ‘Zola’s Literary Reputation in England’, PMLA, 49:4 (1934), p. 1149. 65 É. Zola, ‘Causerie littéraire’, 1 April 1873, ‘Livres d’aujourd’hui et demain’, in H. Mitterrand (ed.), Oeuvres complètes 10 (Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, 1966), pp. 983–986. 66 W. P. Trent, Alphonse Daudet: An Introduction. Selections from ‘Lettres de mon moulin’ and ‘Contes du lundi’, trans. G. B. Ives (New York: Putnam’s, 1903). 67 A. Daudet, La Dernière classe, etc., ed. H. W. Preston (London: Blackie and Son, n.d.). Preston died in 1911. 68 A. Daudet, Contes militaires (taken chiefly from ‘Contes du lundi’), ed. J. T. W. Perowne (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892). 69 A. Daudet, Contes du lundi, trans. P. Forbes (London: Harrap and Co, 1950). 70 ‘Avis de l’éditeur’, L. Blot, Sueur de sang [1893] (Paris: George Crès, 1914), p. 11. The book is also described as a ‘che[f]-d’œuvre de véhémence et de style’. 71 P. Bourget, ‘Paris Letter’, The Academy, 31 July 1880, p. 81. 72 The Attack on the Mill and Other Sketches of War, ed. E. Gosse (London: Heinemann, 1892). 73 ‘Our Library Table’, The Athenaeum, 1 October 1892, p. 449; ‘New Novels’, The Academy, 15 October 1892, p. 332. 74 K. Ashley, ‘Les Soirées de Médan, the Franco-Prussian War and Naturalist Group Identity’, Literature & History, 31:1 (2022), p. 13.

182  Katherine Ashley 75 The first translation was The Mysteries of Marseilles and The Miller’s Daughter, trans. G. D. Cox (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1882). M. Bancroft Jones discusses the changes in ‘L’Attaque du Moulin in American translation’, Modern Language Notes, 57:3 (1942), pp. 207–208. 76 J. Vallès, The Insurrectionist, trans. S. Petrey (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971). J. Vallès, Sébastien Roch, trans. N. Simborowski (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2000); J. Vallès, Le Calvaire, trans. C. Donogher (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1995).

13 The war of 1870–71 as a digital event on Twitter and YouTube Cathérine Pfauth

Introduction When protesters climbed the steps to the Reichstag building in Berlin on 29 August 2020, this so-called storm was accompanied by numerous posters and flags – flags in the colours black-white-red.1 Newspapers all over Germany ran front pages with headlines like ‘Reich war flags at the Bundestag’ or presented content such as ‘Right-wing radicals storm the stairs of the Bundestag with black-white-red Reich flags’, clearly implying the relation of the colours to the Third Reich. In today’s Germany, right-wing extremists, conspiracy theorists and so-called Reichsbürger (‘Reich citizens’) use the symbols of the German Empire with antistate intentions and in the certain confidence that they can do so in a historically uneducated environment that does not know how to defend itself out of ignorance. The press coverage of those days in August thus repeatedly confused the flag of the North German Confederation, which became the imperial flag on 1 January 1871, with the Reichskriegsflagge (‘Imperial war flag’) and thus not only demonstrated very little historical education but also did a disservice to democracy with this sloppiness. So it is that a little more than 150 years after the founding of the Reich, hardly any German can explain the origin of the colours ‘black-white-red’ – nor, incidentally, of the colours ‘black-red-gold’, as surveys among students prove. Only a few are familiar with the terms ‘Franco-Prussian War’ or ‘War of Imperial Unification’. People, for example in Stuttgart, live in streets named Wörth and Champigny and eat ice cream under the likeness of Otto von Bismarck at Bismarck squares. They walk past large memorials, have drinks next to Emperor Wilhelm I at Karl-square in the summer or take photos after a civil wedding ceremony at the town hall, where in the background happens to be a memorial plaque to those citizens of Stuttgart-Vaihingen who died in the fighting during the war of 1870–71, as was the case of my parents over thirty years ago and is still the case today. The war of 1870–71 as a digital event Over 150  years have passed since the Franco-Prussian War, a conflict in which countless soldiers of both French and German origin perished or sustained injuries. In an effort to prevent historical amnesia and to cultivate greater understanding of DOI: 10.4324/9781003336792-18

184  Cathérine Pfauth the events and importance of this significant episode in Franco-German history, two digital initiatives emerged. These initiatives sought to counterbalance the narrative espoused by extremist right-wing factions and anti-constitutionalists who seek to lay claim to the supreme emblem of German democracy under the banner of the black-white-red flag. Their aim was to rekindle awareness of the FrancoPrussian War among German and international society at large. The popularity of science communication in digital formats is increasingly prevalent not only in the domain of history.2 Whether on YouTube or Twitter (now known as X), 85% of teenagers and young adults in Germany use the internet not just for targeted learning but also for acquiring knowledge in an engaging manner.3 In principle, this development is to be welcomed, as it frees science from the now too narrow corset of ‘classic’ educational media, such as books, school lessons or lectures, and expands the possibilities of knowledge transfer both in terms of the type of media and, above all, in terms of their reach. For example, 35,000 subscribers used the ‘Glory & Defeat’ channel on the Franco-Prussian War, with 10% of followers watching the films directly after they were released. Each episode was viewed an average of 40,000 times a month, and in total, the videos were viewed two million times from July 2021 to January 2022.4 These are figures that any historian can only dream of if they restrict themselves to the medium of books. Already the Twitter project, ‘Heute vor 150 Jahren – @Krieg7071’ (Today 150 years ago – @Krieg7071), which was carried out together with students from two German universities on the Franco-Prussian War in 2020 and 2021, reached over 3400 followers worldwide with its 4000 tweets and thus had a completely unexpected impact.5 ‘Heute vor 150 Jahren – @Krieg7071’ The extensive reach of digital science communication carries a significant responsibility. In the subsequent discussion, I examine how to uphold this responsibility. Specifically, I  analyse two projects, the aforementioned Twitter project and the YouTube channel ‘Glory & Defeat’, both of which were overseen by Tobias Arand and myself.6 The channel’s conception was informed by valuable insights gleaned from the Twitter project, for which we wrote the English-language scripts. ‘Welcome – Bienvenue! Today begins the “journey” into the war of 70–71. Follow contemporaries on the battlefields, in the military hospitals and muddy trenches. Read what soldiers, monarchs, nurses, painters reporters, actresses experience during the bloody months’.7 With this tweet, the Twitter account began on 1 July 2020, re-tweeting the Franco-Prussian War. The followers were immersed in the individual experiences of forty participants of the war against the backdrop of a broader narrative of political manoeuvres, military confrontations and sombre statistics. This personalised approach brought the human aspect of the war closer to the followers while also acknowledging the principle of multi-perspectivity that is crucial in German history education, by incorporating the diverse national, social and gender identities of the actors. The project featured not only the voices of

The war of 1870–71 as a digital event on Twitter and YouTube 185 well-known figures such as Otto von Bismarck, King Wilhelm I, Paul von Hindenburg or Emperor Napoleon III but also those of lesser-known participants. Soldiers and officers from France, Prussia or Bavaria shared their daily experiences of war, while medical personnel, military doctors and deaconesses provided insights into the months spanning from July 1870 to May 1871. Furthermore, civilians, including the British journalist William Howard Russell and so-called battlefield enthusiasts such as the writer Ludwig Pietsch, the painter Anton von Werner or Pastor Karl Klein, author of the renowned ‘Fröschweiler Chronik’, the actress Sarah Bernhardt or the diarist Edmond de Goncourt also shared their perspectives on this conflict, which is now referred to as the vergessener Krieg (forgotten war).8 The project involved the participation of thirty-two students who endeavoured, through daily tweets, to re-establish the events and significance of the Franco-­ Prussian War in the context of the Geschichtsbewusstsein der Gesellschaft (society’s historical consciousness), as described by Karl-Ernst Jeismann.9 The followers, in turn, were able to trace the temporal dimension of the conflict through the accuracy of the tweets that were posted daily. Drawing from contemporary sources and current secondary literature, over 4000 tweets were produced by the students by the end of May 2021, culminating with the suppression of the Paris Commune in the semaine sanglante.10 The success of the project was evident from the significant media coverage that it received, including radio reports and articles in major national newspapers such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Welt.11 The strong response from followers, which mainly consisted of queries about details, literature and sources or requests for further explanations, also spoke for the great opportunities that a project like ‘@Krieg7071’ offers. Through the ‘lived’ multi-perspectivity of the project, the followers came into contact with aspects of the war that they had previously only dimly perceived or had not even considered. For instance, the abandonment of the burial of the fallen by the civilian population of the surrounding villages, over which a battle had previously passed, surprised many of the followers. The tweets, which largely comprised quotations from sources, often appeared alien to contemporary readers both linguistically and intellectually, offering followers a unique experience of alterity.12 In the process of crafting tweets, the participating students were able to refine their academic abilities. They were required to decipher handwritten letters, interpret diary entries written in German Kurrent script and peruse contemporary newspaper articles or book contributions inscribed in Fraktur letters. The project provided the students with a noticeable added value at a didactic level of history. The constructed character of history as an expression about the past could be comprehended particularly well in a project like @Krieg7071, in which the students had to create their own small narratives in an act of reconstruction.13 As the project was confined to Twitter’s special requirement of limiting tweets to 280 characters, the important principle of didactic reduction could also be practiced.14 It was unavoidable that the tweets conveyed historical images, which are inflexible and unquestioned concepts of the past.15 However, the historische

186  Cathérine Pfauth Imaginationsfähigkeit (historical imagination), an important category of German history didactics, was also deliberately stimulated here by provoking historische Vorstellungsbilder (historical images) in the recipients.16 Simultaneously, the project aimed to raise awareness among the recipients of their own historical images, encouraging reflection and the possibility of modification. Specific tweets, such as those addressing the creation of famous paintings depicting war, were included to foster these processes. For example, there was a chain of tweets that dealt with the creation of the painting Moltke with his staff in front of Paris by Anton von Werner (1873). Initially, the painting was included in the tweet for the purpose of illustration, as is often the case in school textbooks. We could have left the tweet as it was, and it would probably have impressed upon the followers a historical image of the event that corresponds to the painting. However, instead of this, a thread that touched on source criticism was created immediately to reflect on this emerging historical image. The very idea that there was a commission behind such a painting, meaning that it was not the painter’s decision to create this scene in this precise manner but rather someone else’s, is foreign to many. As soon as this is understood, it stimulates initial thoughts that, in the best-case scenario, can also be applied to other products of Geschichtskultur (historical culture), another essential term in German history didactics.17 Moreover, knowledge of the painting’s creation process takes away some of the scene’s ‘impact’. For instance, if we examine the painting, we see Moltke seated on his horse, appearing quite heroic. However, if we juxtapose it with a photograph of Moltke seated on half a wooden horse, it diminishes the heroic atmosphere. As this image is hard to forget, it will hopefully remain in the viewer’s mind when encountering the big painting of Moltke in front of Paris. This photograph was taken by Anton von Werner specifically for this painting at Versailles. It is important to remember that the purpose of this type of historical representation was not only to facilitate historical thought processes but also to entertain audiences. It was ultimately part of historical culture, even if it did not follow traditional historical representation. The project created a new narrative of a 150-yearold war; documented long-forgotten sources, representations and products of historical culture; interpreted them from a contemporary perspective; and secured the knowledge of these products as long as Twitter exists. The Twitter project served as a component of public history and aimed to enable historical thinking processes while primarily entertaining audiences.18 To achieve this, historical representations must be designed in a way that ‘the complex historical contexts are presented in a way that is both understandable and interesting or entertaining and vivid, so that they can be consumed in a relatively short time and without much prior knowledge’.19 The success of the ‘@Krieg7071’ project in achieving this goal has been highlighted by Die Welt newspaper, which called it, perhaps somewhat euphorically, ‘one of the best projects for illustrating historical processes, not only in German-language Twitter but possibly worldwide’.20. Overall, the project demonstrates that Twitter can be a stimulus for constructive

The war of 1870–71 as a digital event on Twitter and YouTube 187 engagement with submerged historical issues, ‘provided that people do not only use it to snarl at each other’.21 The war on YouTube22 Inspired by the success of the ‘@Krieg7071’ Twitter project, Tobias Arand and I were approached by a German production company that sought to launch a YouTube channel featuring weekly episodes spaced at intervals of 151 years, following the same approach as the daily principle of the Twitter project. The aim was to produce ten-minute-long episodes that would provide sources and explanations, presented by a moderator and illustrated by contemporary footage. We decided to lend our scientific expertise to the project and to write the texts and thus partnered with Real Time History, a company based in Berlin. For nearly a year, the ‘Glory & Defeat’ channel broadcast thirty-four episodes in 2022. The texts have since been compiled into a publication.23 All the episodes can now be viewed on YouTube, either individually or as a complete, over s­ ix-hour-long documentary, marking the longest film production ever made on the FrancoPrussian War.24 As previously stated, the responsibility of producers of ‘digital historical culture’ is immense. They have the potential to reach a wide audience of individuals who may be historically educated but lack methodological training. This responsibility was already a consideration with Twitter, which has a large reach, but grew even greater with the use of YouTube. Films have the ability to be even more persuasive than Twitter due to their use of visuals, sound and argumentation, which can be overwhelming and lead to disinformation. In contrast to exact sciences such as physics or mathematics, history as a purely interpretive reconstruction of the past is characterised by a wide scope for interpretation, leaving it open to political abuse. When watching history videos, viewers are presented with a story told by a supposed expert, which they must rely on as being conscientiously constructed. Unfortunately, laypeople interested in history are typically unable to verify the accuracy of the information presented to them. In addition, the fact that the story told is ultimately only ‘one’ story is often lost on many followers. Other reputable stories told from different perspectives or with different questions can stand on an equal footing, but this fact is often only consciously acknowledged by a few individuals. Understanding the YouTube platform as a form of gemeinschaftlicher Geschichtskultur (participatory historical culture) that offers practically everyone the chance to educate themselves and others is associated not only with an opportunity but often also with a risk which must not be underestimated.25 Particularly in the field of history, YouTube offers not only quality content but also a wealth of nonsensical, unscientific and dangerous videos. The disastrous consequences of being lied to in a totalitarian sense through ‘false’ stories about the past could be observed during the writing of this text in Ukraine, where Russia’s perspective has labelled it as a place that supposedly needs to be ‘liberated’ from ‘Nazis’.

188  Cathérine Pfauth When writing the scripts, several aspects were therefore of great importance for us from the beginning: • Serious production conditions: The production company Real Time History sees itself as a platform for popular but, at the same time, academically based science communication, which at no point sacrifices professionalism for the sake of posterity or pure effect.26 The films were always made in a non-authoritarian exchange, but in the end, the researcher’s word was always decisive. • Reducing complexity while maintaining scientific standards: Of course, narration on YouTube in a format of ten minutes a week follows different narrative patterns than in a thick and ponderous book. Here, complexity must be radically condensed without completely losing sight of connections and nuances. The films have to be comprehensible if they do not want to lose the users and scare them away. Also, the mixing of an audio and a visual narrative level tends to be more manipulative and emotionalising than any book narrative. These genrespecific peculiarities of the form of storytelling chosen here are not a problem as long as the producers are aware of these interrelationships, and they proceed in a reflective serious manner while still serving the medium in its specificity. This is what everyone involved in the production process of the films has sincerely tried to do. Scientific standards that had to be upheld were not only serious research but also conscientious transparency and mutual quality control. It was important to us as the authors of the basic scripts of ‘Glory & Defeat’, for example, that the literature used and the sources (the two must always be separated) were named in the credits and that even in the case of direct quotations, omissions and the locations of the quotations in the videos themselves were made clear to audiences. • Strict adherence to professionalism: For the videos of ‘Glory & Defeat’, only serious reference books and selected contemporary sources were used. However, professionalism also includes the consideration of different perspectives of contemporaries and the presentation of controversy in the retrospective assessment of the events as we just tried to do in the Twitter project. An attempt was made to take into account all important forms of possible perspectivity: social status, gender, nationality, functionality in the context of the war, religion, language, spatial and temporal proximity to the narrated events and age. Where it was selectively possible, different interpretations of the events were also mentioned. We tried to implement the principles of the Twitter project here as well, taking into account the different genre requirements of the two digital media forms. • ‘Clean’ storytelling on several levels: A war is a complex event. Millions of people move with different intentions in a large space that they, as individuals, often do not have an overview of. Thus, in narrating a war, the view from ‘above’ is always necessary, while, at the same time, one must not neglect the view from ‘below’. From above, the events of the war had to be narrated on a tactical and strategic level and placed in the political context, which was always changing from week to week. From below, the fates, opinions and feelings of those

The war of 1870–71 as a digital event on Twitter and YouTube 189 directly involved were narrated, adding the aura of the human to the ‘abstract’ events of war history. In selecting the voices, it was very important to maintain the concept of ‘multi-perspectivity’ that has already been hinted at. • Explaining the ‘big thing’ through the ‘small things’: A special feature of ‘Glory & Defeat’ were the bonus episodes made available to paying followers. They consisted of short additional videos in which people and contexts were presented, and also objects could be explained. The further reduction of this format to a maximum of three minutes forced an even more condensed narrative but above all a concentration on only one aspect. The special concern of these bonus films was to explain or at least deepen the larger contexts through small aspects but to also point a ray of light to long forgotten details. The bonus episode on the ‘pea sausage’, for example, made it possible to give users an impression of the importance of the food issue in the war while at the same time hinting at the connections between the economy and the military. • Attention to memory and the just-quoted term ‘historical culture’. One aspect that is hardly presentable in a format that tries to tell an event in a weekly rhythm and in such a time-sensitive way is that which happens when the narrated event has ended in time. Wars are directly temporal events, but they also live on in individual and collective memorial culture.27 In a few bonus episodes, this culture of memory could be addressed with regard to German and French battle painting, but events, object history and persons dominated the bonus episodes very much overall. However, since it was important to the authors also to address the aspect of memories expressed in forms of historical culture such as ‘monuments’, they were given the opportunity to present selected aspects of this with so-called shorts on YouTube. These one-minute shorts were particularly dedicated to German monument practice since 1871. Conclusion From our perspective as the authors of the initial scripts, Tobias Arand and I viewed ‘Glory & Defeat’ as a laboratory experiment that had already commenced with the ‘@Krieg7071’ Twitter project. Our aim was to determine whether widely used yet controversial communication channels like YouTube or Twitter were appropriate for conveying engaging and yet intellectually rigorous historical narratives. As it stands today, we can confidently say that they are indeed appropriate, provided that academics and producers can come to an agreement on objectives, terms and narrative forms of expression through a thoughtful process that preserves academic standards. This holds true for all digital media platforms, although production conditions can vary significantly between simple tweets on Twitter and complex films on YouTube. While the former can be shared by anyone online, the latter demands a greater degree of skill and intentionality. It is important to acknowledge that combating the misuse of history in contemporary digital media cannot be fully addressed by projects such as ours. History is one of the most powerful tools to manipulate people and can be used to sow hatred or to destroy democratic systems. The number of unscrupulous actors who have

190  Cathérine Pfauth employed historical narratives for their own criminal purposes throughout history is vast and varied, including infamous figures such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Milosević, Trump and Putin. Unfortunately, the laws of the internet provide today’s enemies of freedom, liberalism and democracy with unprecedented power, against which historical enlightenment may remain defenceless. That being said, it is crucial that university students are made aware of the issues surrounding historical narration on the internet through projects such as @ Krieg7071 and are exposed to examples of ‘good’ practice. Historians like us also must be willing to step outside the academic confines of our field and demonstrate how historical narratives can be approached with scientific rigour and ethical responsibility in projects such as ‘Glory & Defeat’. We cannot afford to cede the digital space to nationalists, Reich citizens, conspiracy theorists or other enemies of democracy and the constitution. Currently, the war for democracy and freedom is being fought not only in places like Ukraine but also on social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube. While we cannot guarantee victory in this struggle, it is our duty to do everything in our power to promote accurate, thoughtful and ethical historical narration in the digital realm. Notes 1 The chapter is a heavily revised compilation of the papers by Pfauth/Dellwing, Pfauth and Pfauth/Arand as well as the manuscripts of the conference. The text will also appear in revised form in 2024 in a German-French-language conference volume edited by Frank Becker and Tobias Arand. 2 T. Arand and P. Scholz (eds.), Digitalisierte Geschichte in der Schule (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider, 2021). 3 C. Bunnenberg and S. Nils (eds.), Geschichte auf YouTube. Neue Herausforderungen für Geschichtsvermittlung und historische Bildung (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019), p. 9. 4 Numbers according to Florian Wittig, Real Time History, Berlin. 5 C. Pfauth and A.-C. Dellwing, ‘Heute vor 150 Jahren – @Krieg7071 – ein Twitterprojekt zum Deutsch-Französischen Krieg 1870/71’, https://guerre1870.hypotheses. org/2069. 6 Glory & Defeat, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWZz-lHCu-M. 7 Tweet by @Krieg7071, 1 July 2020. 8 T. Arand and C. Bunnenberg (eds.), Karl Klein. Die Fröschweiler Chronik. Kriegs- und Friedensbilder aus dem Jahr 1870 (Hamburg: Osburg, 2021); T. Arand, ‘Ein zunehmend vergessener Krieg – Die Entwicklung der Erinnerung an den Deutsch-­Französischen Krieg 1870/71’, in T. Arand (ed.), Der großartigste Krieg, der je geführt worden. Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges 1870/71 (Münster: Zfl-Verlaqg, 2008), pp. 9–36. 9 K.-E. Jeismann, ‘Geschichtsbewußtsein als zentrale Kategorie der Geschichtsdidaktik’, in G. Schneider (ed.), Geschichtsbewußtsein und historisch-politisches Lernen, (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus 1988), pp. 1–24. 10 See in particular T. Arand, 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen (Hamburg: Osburg, 2018). 11 G. Seibt, ‘Der Krieg von 1870 “live” auf Twitter’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2 September 2020. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geschichte-1871-krieg-deutschland-frankreich-sedan-1.4985188; M. Heine, ‘Twittern wie 1870/71’, Die Welt, 30 October 2020. https://

The war of 1870–71 as a digital event on Twitter and YouTube 191 www.welt.de/kultur/article218991660/Heute-vor-150-Jahren-Wie-der-Krieg-1870–71wirklich-war-erfaehrt-man-nur-hier.html. 12 M. Buchsteiner, T. Lorenz and T. Must, Unterschätzte Prinzipien im Geschichtsunterricht: Personalisierung/Personifizierung und Alterität/Fremdverstehen (Nordersted: Books on Demand, 2017). 13 W. Schreiber, ‘Ein kategoriales Strukturmodell des Geschichtsbewusstseins respektive des Umgangs mit Geschichte’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtsdidaktik 2 (2003), pp. 10–27. 14 M. Lehner, Didaktische Reduktion (Stuttgart: UTB Haupt, 2020). 15 M. Demantowsky, ‘Geschichtsbild’, in U. Mayer, H.-J. Pandel, G. Schneider and B. Schönemann (eds.), Wörterbuch Geschichtsdidaktik (Berlin: Wochenschau, 2014), pp. 70–71. 16 V. Oswalt, ‘Imagination im historischen Lernen’, in M. Barricelli and M. Lücke (eds.), Handbuch Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts, vol. 1 (Schwalbach: Wochenschau, 2012), pp. 121–135; M. Lücke and I. Zündorf, Einführung in die Public History 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2018). 17 H.-J. Pandel, ‘Geschichtskultur’, in U. Mayer, H.-J. Pandel, G. Schneider and B. Schönemann (eds.), Wörterbuch Geschichtsdidaktik (Berlin: Wochenschau, 2014), pp. 74–75. 18 Lücke and Irmgard, Einführung, p. 25. 19 Ibid., p. 27. 20 Heine, ‘Twittern wie 1870/71’. 21 Ibid. 22 C. Pfauth and T. Arand, ‘The Franco-Prussian War on Youtube. Remarks from an Academic Perspective’, in C. Pfauth, T. Arand and J. Alexander (eds.), Glory & Defeat: The Story of the Franco-Prussian War Week by Week: Companion Book (Berlin: Real Time History, 2022), pp. 10–13. 23 Pfauth, Arand and Alexander, Glory & Defeat. 24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWZz-lHCu-M (last view 6 January 2023). 25 C. Bunnenberg and N. Steffen (eds.), Geschichte auf YouTube. Neue Herausforderungen für Geschichtsvermittlung und historische Bildung (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019). 26 F. Wittig, ‘Digital Story Telling auf YouTube – Werkstattbericht von ‚The Great War’, in Geschichte auf YouTube. Neue Herausforderungen für Geschichtsvermittlung und historische Bildung (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2019), pp. 177–192. 27 T. Arand and C. Bunnenberg, ‘ “Schlacht bei Wörth’ oder ‘Bataille de Reichshoffen”? Die Erinnerung an den 6. August 1870 zwischen lokaler Denkmallandschaft und nationalen Deutungen’, in M. Füssel und M. Sikora (eds.), Kulturgeschichte der Schlacht (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014), pp. 183–204.

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Index

Âli Pasha, Mehmen Emin 41, 42, 44 – 48 Alsace-Lorraine 2, 27 – 29, 36, 70, 73, 75 – 78, 88, 101, 143, 145, 147, 148, 160 American Civil War 117, 118, 154 Andrássy, Gyula 44, 47, 60, 63 Austria-Hungary 43, 44, 47, 56 Austro-Prussian War (1866) 16, 18, 19, 20, 30, 72, 114 Barrès, Maurice 163 Beernaert, Auguste 30, 31, 32 Belgium 6, 8, 27 – 39, 158, 172 Beust, Friedrich Ferdinand von 47 Bismarck, Otto von 2, 4, 6, 7, 27, 42, 55, 59, 70, 71, 77, 129, 130, 135, 142, 147, 183, 185 Black Sea 7, 47, 55, 57, 59 Brialmont, Lieutenant-General Henri Alexis 28 – 32, 36 Britain 43, 45, 55, 59, 167 – 178 Carlyle, Thomas 169 Chassepot rifle 4 Crimean War 5, 46, 58, 62, 102, 115, 117, 154 Daudet, Alphonse 159, 169, 175, 176 De Neuville, Alphonse 7 Déroulède, Paul 172 – 173 Detaille, Edouard 7 Digeon, Claude 70 Disraeli, Benjamin 7 Duchiński, Franciszek Henryk 101 – 104, 106, 107 Eliot, George 168 Erckmann-Chatrian 158 – 159 European balance of power 7, 40 – 49, 54, 57

Favre, Jules 2, 6, 46, 70 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 69 First World War 3, 7, 35, 93, 133, 143, 154, 158, 163, 169 francs-tireurs 6, 98, 107 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis 71, 73, 75, 87, 97 Gagneur, Marie-Louise 156 – 157 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 6 Geneva Convention (1864) 13, 45 German Empire 49, 50, 63, 70, 72, 73, 143, 145, 147, 183 Gorchakov, Alexander 44, 57, 58, 59 Government of National Defence 4, 46 Habsburg Empire 43, 48, 59, 72 Hippeau, Célestin 82 Hitler, Adolf 145, 147 Howard, Michael 40 Hugo, Victor 156, 169, 173, 174 Italy 6, 40 – 43, 46, 47, 50, 72, 101 Krupp breech-loading guns 19, 155 Krupp cannon 4 Lavisse, Ernest 87, 88, 91 Margueritte, Victor 161 – 162 Maupassant, Guy de 156, 176, 177 Maurras, Charles 90 – 91, 93 Meyer, Paul 82 Michelet, Jules 156, 170 Moltke, Helmut von 2, 4, 77, 130, 134, 135, 146, 155, 186 Mommsen, Theodor 71 – 73, 75, 87, 97 Monod, Gabriel 84 – 86, 90 – 91 Moroccan Crisis (1905) 33, 34

Index 195 Napoleon III 2, 4, 27, 41, 42, 46, 50, 72, 171, 185 Napoleonic Wars 4, 5, 7, 155 – 156, 161, 164 nationalism 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 41, 54, 56, 64, 69 – 81, 82 – 96, 101, 102, 126, 128, 137, 167, 173, 177 Nazi regime 142, 144 – 147 Nedim Pasha, Mahmud 55, 61 – 64 non-combatants 1 Ottoman Empire 7, 8, 40 – 53, 54 – 64 Pan-Germanism 54, 56, 57, 63, 87, 93, 99, 100 pan-Islamism 54 – 64 pan-Slavism 54, 57, 59, 99, 100 Paris Commune 49, 50, 72, 101, 132, 168 – 169, 173 – 175, 185 Paris, Gaston 82, 85, 153 people’s war 1, 4 Pietsch, Ludwig 114 – 116, 129, 132 – 134, 135, 185 Poland 6, 47, 55, 56, 105, 107 Pope Pius IX 46 public opinion 1, 5 Quatrefages, Jean-Louis Armand de 97 – 101, 106, 107 race 7, 8, 9, 70, 74 – 77, 97 – 110 Realpolitik 7, 40 – 53

Red Cross 5, 6, 115 – 117 Renan, Ernest 69, 70 – 72, 75 – 78, 84, 87, 97, 98, 170 revanche 27, 154, 160, 170, 172, 173 Russell, William Howard 16, 19, 22, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 137, 185 Russia 7, 44, 45, 46, 56 – 62, 64, 102, 103, 107, 170, 187 Russo-Japanese War 33 Russo-Turkish War (1878) 8, 49, 59, 61 – 64 Sand, George 167, 171, 173, 176 Sarcay, Francisque 170 – 171 Seignobos, Charles 89 siege of Paris 6, 72, 134, 153, 175 – 176 Third Republic 70, 83, 86, 90, 93, 97, 148 total war 4 Treaty of Frankfurt 3 Treaty of Paris (1856) 7, 41, 45, 47 – 48, 55, 58, 59 Treitschke, Heinrich von 69, 70, 78, 87 war correspondents 117, 128 – 130 Weimar Republic 144 Werner, Anton von 129, 134 – 136, 185, 186 Wilhelm I 4, 130, 147, 185 Zola, Emile 157, 160 – 161, 163, 168, 172, 175, 176, 177 zouaves 19, 133