8.2- The Franco-Prussian War

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Episode 8.2, The Franco-Prussian War. So last week, we said hello to the Second French Empire. And I hope you didn't get too attached, because this week we are going to say goodbye to the Second French Empire. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 simultaneously led to the collapse of the French Empire and the Declaration of the German Empire.

But more importantly for the story of this series of the Revolutions podcast, the Paris Commune of 1871 grew directly out of the cataclysmic disasters that resulted from the Prussians blowing the French out of the water in 1870. Today, we will explain why the war started and take it through the Battle of Sedan. Next week, we will focus on Paris, do a more detailed look at what the city looked like at the end of the empire, and carry the Franco-Prussian War on to its conclusion.

which involved the traumatic siege of Paris. But before we get going, I do want to remind you that Revolutions Podcast Fundraiser.com is open and live. Right now, you can come get t-shirts. You can come get new History of Rome material. You can help take some of my library books off my hands as I attempt to move to Paris.

Everything has started out great, and I hope everything continues to be great. So RevolutionsPodcastFundraiser.com now through June the 9th, 2018. Thank you guys very, very much. So to explain the Franco-Prussian War.

we need to dive back into the larger story of German unification, a story that we covered in a lot of detail during our series on 1848. During that series, we traced the growth of German nationalism and the attempt by the German liberals of the Frankfurt Parliament to forge a united Germany. But of course, that project failed, as the liberals in Frankfurt alienated the radical left,

and then got bulldozed by the conservative right. Well, after the failures of 1848, the driver of German unification passed from liberal speechmaking to Prussian war-making. and specifically, the driver of German unification was now Otto von Bismarck. Now, we introduced the rising young conservative Bismarck as he helped the king of Prussia exploit the new styles of democratic politics to strengthen the power of the conservatives in Prussia.

A pragmatic politician, Bismarck always wanted to swim with the currents of history, not try to erect a dam against them. Bismarck spent the 1850s assigned to various diplomatic posts, but in September of 1862, he was made Minister-President of Prussia. elevating him to a position of power that would see him be the dominant force not just in German politics, but European politics for the whole next generation. One of the great masters of Realpolitik,

Bismarck came to power with a notion to do what the liberals of 1848 had failed to do, unify Germany. Shortly after becoming minister-president, Bismarck delivered his famous speech where he said that the position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power. And then he went on to say, Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favorable moment, which has already come and gone several times.

Since the treaties of Vienna, our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided. That was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849. But... by iron and blood. So it's pretty clear that from the get-go, Bismarck was restarting the project of German unification. But one thing we cannot overlook

is the fact that Bismarck cannot be counted among the romantic German nationalists. He was a Prussian patriot, and he wanted to exalt Prussia. and he now believed that the best way to make Prussia strong was to make it the leader of a unified Germany. So, he spent the whole rest of the 1860s trying to make Prussia the leader of a unified Germany. So...

To explain the eventual Franco-Prussian War that comes in 1870, where do we need to begin? Wow, where else would we start but the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein? Now remember, the whole crisis over the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein had erupted in 1848 because the new king of Denmark was childless. And as soon as he died, there was going to be a succession crisis, because while Denmark had abandoned Salic law and allowed succession through the female line, the Duchy of Holstein had not.

So, German nationalists saw this as the perfect opportunity to break the duchies away from Denmark and bring it into their new unified Germany. This had led to a shooting war starting up in 1848 that we called the First Schleswig-Holstein War. Now that war wrapped up with an uneasy armistice as the other European powers objected to Prussian intervention.

But then after the revolutions of 1848-1849 had died out, nobody really wanted to get back into it. Okay, so let's fast forward to November of 1863. The king who was childless died. And that succession crisis that everybody was so worried about was now at hand. Attention had already been ratcheting up because Denmark and its allies in Schleswig had been working on a new constitution that would bring Schleswig, but not Holstein, into closer union with Denmark.

the new constitution, called the November constitution, was already written and just awaiting the king's signature when the king died. His heir, the new king of Denmark, came to power signed the Constitution, and sent Germans everywhere into a tizzy. Bismarck saw all of this as a golden opportunity to advance Prussian interests.

And in January of 1864, he issued an ultimatum to Denmark to abandon the November Constitution within 48 hours or face a war. Now, the idea here was not to get the Danes to abandon the November Constitution. The plan was to provoke a war that would allow Prussia to peel off the duchies from Denmark permanently, which is exactly what happened. Now, we're not going to worry about the ins and outs of the subsequent campaign in the Second Schleswig-Holstein War.

But instead, we're going to focus on the fact that Bismarck's diplomacy had brought Austria along onto the Prussian side, and together, those two great German powers invaded the duchies, and between February and March 1864, push the Danes back to Denmark. Then in August of 1864, the king of Denmark determined that he could not stand against the combined might of the Prussians and Austrians.

And since no other European power seemed willing to turn his plight into a cause for a general European war, so the king gave up. Prussia and Austria took joint possession of Schleswig-Holstein. So.

The Second Schleswig-Holstein War was also the first of the three wars of German unification. It would peel off the duchies permanently from Denmark and bring Austria and Prussia into a collision course that would lead to the second of the three wars of German unification, the Austro-Prussian War. Now, it is sometimes difficult to go back through history and pick out what was actually a carefully laid out plan

What were opportunistic moves in the midst of fluid circumstances? And what was a series of accidents that later memory and reflection assigned a pattern to an otherwise random sequence of events? Especially when the participants themselves can't agree on what was what, and a guy like Bismarck has every reason to make it look like he was a puppet master who was carefully orchestrating everything, like 15 moves in advance.

So some of what happened next was planned, some of it was improvised opportunism, and some was accidental luck, which, you know, kind of explains most of human history. My point though... is that Bismarck's vision of a Prussian-dominated Germany required Austria's exclusion from Germany, and Bismarck worked hard over the next couple years to set up the conditions by which Austria would be permanently excluded from Germany.

And the most important thing to do would be to isolate Austria diplomatically to ensure that the other European powers did not come to their aid, and by the spring of 1866, Bismarck had largely succeeded in that goal. The British had indicated that they had no direct stake or interest in a conflict between Prussia and Austria, and so they were sure to stay neutral. The Russians Bismarck had cultivated carefully in the aftermath of the Crimean War.

And he had mostly brought the Tsar around to the idea that Prussia was the one friend Russia could count on, now that the British and French and Austrians had shown themselves to be the enemies of Russia. As for the new Kingdom of Italy... Bismarck secured not just their neutrality, but their active participation. In April of 1866, Italy and Prussia signed a treaty that said that if Prussia and Austria went to war at some point in the

that Italy would join Prussia and attack Austria's southern flank. Their reward would be the annexation of long-coveted Venetia. Meanwhile, back in October of 1865, the Emperor Napoleon III had personally promised Bismarck that France would stay neutral in the conflict, and though there were vague indications that France might be rewarded for said neutrality,

nothing was officially committed to paper. With Austria now isolated from all other potential allies, All the Habsburgs had left were the smaller German states, who were now getting thoroughly alarmed that Bismarck's plan was clearly to wipe out all their kingdoms and duchies and principalities and turn them into mere provinces of Prussia.

So it's not that Austria didn't have any allies, just not any allies that could actually help them win the war. Okay, so with his enemy isolated, all Bismarck needed was an appropriate casus belli. And he found it in an obscure spat over the joint administration of Schleswig and Holstein.

Now, let us not worry about the details, but the upshot is that in May of 1866, Prussia and Austria met for a tent summit that was mostly about the Prussians making any attempt at a peaceful reconciliation impossible. With both sides surreptitiously moving troops towards their frontiers, Austria decided to take the diplomatic dispute to the federal diet of the German Confederation. And that is when Bismarck pounced.

He said Austria taking the dispute to the German Confederation violated the terms of the treaty they had all signed. Then he went even further and unilaterally declared that the German Confederation was hereby dissolved. Now, this was, of course, incredibly provocative, and it created the rising anger from the smaller German states that it was intended to create, and it led Austria right into a declaration of war.

That declaration came on June the 14th, 1866, beginning what we call the Austro-Prussian War, the second of the three wars of German unification. So the Austro-Prussian War was also further proof that the world had entered into the era of modern industrial warfare. That new era had been hinted at in the Crimean War.

It had been brought to fuller maturity during the American Civil War, and it was now being expressed on the European continent. These were conflicts that were mobilized by railroads, communicated by telegraphs. fought with long-range rifles, proto-machine guns, and much superior artillery. Factories were now producing the weapons and supplies of war in mass quantities, and Prussia was at the forefront of all this.

because they had oriented their entire industrial development around the idea of prosecuting exactly this new style of industrial warfare. It was military concerns that explained why the Prussians laid their railroad tracks where they did.

It explained what kinds of factories they encouraged. It explained where they directed their state resources. The Prussians also spent years reforming and reorganizing their armies around these new modern methods. And it put them very much ahead of the curve in the 1860s. It's one of the big reasons why the three wars of German unification were each so quick and decisive. Just two weeks after the declaration of war, the Prussians were invading Bohemia with hundreds of thousands of men.

They faced off against an Austrian army roughly the same size, about a quarter of a million men each, at the Battle of Königretz on July the 3rd, 1866. But despite the Prussians being slightly outnumbered, their war machine inflicted four times the casualties, the defeated Austrian army was left in scattered disarray, and the road to Vienna lay wide open. Now, the King of Prussia and most of the generals were all for continuing the war.

driving for Vienna, capturing the Austrian capital, and stomping up and down on the necks of the Habsburgs. But that was not what Bismarck wanted, and Bismarck had a way of getting what he wanted. The object of this war was only eliminating Austrian claims to power in Germany. It was not about defeating the Austrians. That would upset the general balance of power in Europe.

It would create an unstable post-war environment, and it would likely see the Austrians looking for revenge and the other European powers scared of Prussian aggression. So Bismarck advised the king and the general staff to pull up short and offer terms of peace. The king was incredulous, but Bismarck not only threatened to resign from office if the war kept going,

but he also threatened to throw himself out of a fourth-floor window. Bismarck got his way. An armistice signed on August 12, 1866 brought an end to the fighting. In contrast to the first great war between Austria and Prussia that, as we all know, lasted for seven years, we call it the Seven Years' War. This last great war between Prussia and Austria is sometimes called the Seven Weeks' War.

The peace talks that formally ended the war took place in Prague under the mediation of Napoleon III, and Bismarck achieved all his aims. The German confederation that had been in existence since 1815 was abolished. and Austria agreed that they would be permanently excluded from any role in quote-unquote Germany. Meanwhile, all of those smaller German states would now be merged with Prussia.

Now those of you who had joined Prussia at the outset of the war had already agreed to do this. Those who had tried to fight against Prussia, well, this was their punishment. The whole of Germany was then reorganized into a transition state that is called the Northern German Confederation.

Bismarck and his advisors went to great lengths to give the Northern German Confederation the appearance of a coalition of autonomous states, while actually, very clearly, being dominated by the central Prussian government. Per the terms of the Prussian Treaty with Italy, and with French approval, the Austrians were also forced to give up Venetia, which they were pretty angry about. Northern Italy had been a second front in the Austro-Prussian War.

And though the Italians had succeeded in their objective of tying down Austrian forces in Venetia, those tied down Austrian forces had actually defeated the Italians in battle. But Prussia was dictating the terms here, and so Venetia was detached. and given to Italy. So, that's the end of that part of the story that we spent so much time on in 1848. The old Habsburg possession of the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, it has now been fully absorbed into the unified kingdom of Italy.

And speaking of picking up threads from 1848, after Austria was defeated by Prussia, expelled from Germany, stripped of Venetia, the Hungarians were able to come back. They were able to lay heavy pressure on Vienna to make major concessions to the Magyar or risk having the Habsburg Empire dissolve completely. So, Austria's defeat in the Austro-Prussian War led directly to the deal the following year that would turn the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

But, as fascinating as all of that is, our objective here is to set up the third of the three wars of German unification, the Franco-Prussian War, because that's the one that explains the Paris Commune. And the origins of the Franco-Prussian War are to be found right here at the close of the Austro-Prussian War. The creation of a unified German state, currently dubbed the Northern German Confederation,

was of course going to pose a potential threat to France. So, Emperor Napoleon III had a notion about how to guarantee French security by acquiring key strategic positions in Belgium, and specifically, the fortress city of Luxembourg. Now, this would all be in direct violation of the Treaty of London, which had been signed by everyone in 1839. It guaranteed Belgian neutrality.

Talked all about it at the end of episode 6.8b, remember? But Napoleon III reckoned that if Bismarck went along with it, that there wouldn't be much anyone else could do. So the French ambassador presented the planned annexations to Bismarck, who was surprised the French were so boldly demanding territory after having done nothing but remain neutral and then preside over the peace talks. Bismarck later said that it was like...

getting an innkeeper's bill or a waiter asking for a tip. The French ambassador said, if you don't let us do this, then it's war. And Bismarck said, and I quote, good, then it's war. not actually wanting a war, the French backed off. But in the midst of this secret little diplomatic back and forth, the French committed what turned out to be a huge blunder.

They had presented their plan to toss aside the Treaty of London in writing, and Bismarck slipped this note into his pocket and waited for the right moment to reveal to the world what the French had secretly been up to. But the French did not quit their designs on Luxembourg, and a few months later they arranged another path to acquiring it. They were going to buy it outright from the king of the Netherlands, who held the little territory in personal union.

But just as the sale was about to go through, Bismarck again threatened war. And this again stopped the deal. But now the emperor, his advisors, and all the French leaders who knew what was going on... started to feel like their honor and prestige were being spit on by the Prussians, who might just have to be taught some manners. But this would prove to be much easier said than done.

Because as Prussia and its new unified Germany were rising, the Second French Empire was falling apart. As we discussed last time, Napoleon had ruled as an autocratic dictator during the 1850s. He engaged in grand economic investments and projected French military and political power across the world.

But the 1860s had seen financial problems, which led to an opening up of space for the legislative body to critique budgets, and a loosening of press laws that allowed the opposition to speak up openly. even if really out-of-bounds doctrines like anarchism and socialism were still ruthlessly stifled. In foreign affairs, the relative successes of France during the early phase of the empire

gave way to embarrassments like the debacle in Mexico that cost France blood, treasure, and its reputation. Now, by the late 1860s, they were further embarrassed over these matters in Belgium and Luxembourg. So it's safe to say that by the end of the 1860s, the empire was not very popular and its position was very tenuous. Opposition leaders in France particularly from the thus far dormant Republican wing of French liberal politics, were starting to seriously nip at the emperor's heels.

And it did not help that the once boundlessly energetic Napoleon had slipped into an unhappy lethargy. Even by the time of the Austro-Prussian War, the emperor had developed the painful bladder stone that would eventually kill him. So his energy and attention and focus were all on the decline by the late 1860s, and this only allowed his domestic opposition to pick up further steam. And far from trying to crush them all,

the emperor decided it was just easier to give way. So in the fall of 1869, the emperor abandoned strict autocratic rule entirely, and it gave way to a very short-lived parliamentary monarchy phase of the Second French Empire, when the emperor's ministers were no longer answerable to the emperor alone, but also to the legislative body and the senate.

This would hopefully turn some of the opponents of the empire into defenders of the empire. But to establish that the empire itself was still a popular thing, Napoleon held one of his stage-managed plebiscites in May of 1870, and the question that was to be voted on was very carefully worded. It was, do the people approve of the liberal reforms since 1860?

Now, this question was billed by both supporters and opponents of the emperor as a referendum on the empire, and the vote could not have been clearer. 82% said yes. and it was considered a major political victory for the emperor. But the referendum was hollow. It invited you to vote yes both if you liked the empire or if you just liked that the empire was liberalizing.

So though it looked like a grand popular stamp of approval for the emperor, in just a few months, the empire would be overthrown, and no one would mourn its passing.

While the emperor was dealing with these domestic political transformations, he was also managing the increasingly combative relationship with Prussia. I mean, the Northern German Confederation. Whatever it is. By this point, the emperor and his ministers had kind of started to see a war with Prussia as the answer to all their problems. As I just said, French prestige had taken a hit the last few years.

and despite the recent plebiscite, public confidence in the empire was clearly flagging. So Napoleon could kill two birds with one stone if France were to, say, get into a war with Prussia. beat Prussia, and maybe add some territory to France and Belgium, maybe some along the Rhine. They could maybe bring back that old natural borders of France business, the old nationalistic dream from the days of the French Revolution.

So both to enhance France's international reputation and to cover their domestic political troubles, by 1870 the emperor was talking himself into a war with Prussia. And he was quite confident of victory. The entire working premise of French preparations was that when hostilities broke out with Prussia, that the rest of Europe would join France in a grand anti-Prussian alliance.

that Europe would treat an aggressive and unified Germany the same way that the rest of Europe had once treated revolutionary France, as a genie to be put back in its bottle. Austria would of course jump in immediately to avenge their defeats in 1866. The Italians would of course support France because France had played such a large role in unifying Italy. The smaller German states...

would welcome the opportunity to cast off the recently harnessed Prussian yoke. Britain and Russia would of course be concerned about the balance of power in the North Sea, certainly enough that they would help knock Prussia down a peg. So, Napoleon went into 1870 believing that if a war broke out with Prussia, that all of Europe would join him in beating Prussia into a pulp.

He did not realize that every single one of those calculations, every single one of them was wrong. Meanwhile, over in Prussia, Bismarck had long since determined that a war with France was necessary to complete the unification of Germany, and he too believed this for both international and domestic reasons. On the international front,

France had to understand that Prussia was not an upstart to be tolerated, but an equal to be reckoned with. But far more importantly were his domestic concerns. After the forced annexation of the southern German states,

Bismarck believed that only a patriotic war against France would fuse them all together into a single nation. The shared threat, shared mobilization, shared patriotic zeal, shared sacrifice, But to truly make this work, both domestically and internationally, Bismarck calculated that France had to be the aggressor. This had to be a defense of Germany, a defense of Germany that would drive Germans into permanent union with each other and accept Prussian domination.

It would be the aggression of France that would remind the rest of Europe that it was not Prussia, but France that always posed the greatest threat to European stability. So by the spring of 1870, it's pretty clear that France and Prussia are both eyeing a war with each other, and the only thing left to be settled was the reason for it. And the reason for it...

turned out to be a great throwback to the good old days, when Europe would blow itself to pieces over which inbred prince would sit on which random throne. So don't worry about the details of any of this, but in 1870... Queen Isabella of Spain formally abdicated the throne and she went into exile. Don't worry about the details. The important thing is that the Prussians backed one of their own, Prince Leopold.

to accept an offer from the Spanish to come be the new Spanish king. The French freaked out about this. They had no desire to see Prussians surrounding them on all sides, and so they opposed the ascension of Leopold vigorously. Now, whether this was all intentional bait or simply Bismarck overreaching, the result was the same. The Prussians backed down. They dropped their push to put Leopold on the Spanish throne, and maybe that would have been that.

But hardliners inside the French ministry decided it wasn't enough that the Prussians had withdrawn his candidacy. So the French ambassador to Prussia was told to demand that the king of Prussia never involve himself in Spanish politics ever again. So this brings us to July the 13th, 1870.

The king of Prussia is strolling around a resort town he's vacationing at called Bad Ems. While on this walk, he was approached by the French ambassador, who delivered the demand that Prussia swear off Spanish politics forever. So the ambassador and the king have a little incident, and both go on their way. Then what happens is a staffer in the Prussian foreign office wrote up an account of the incident and sent it to Bismarck.

Leaping at this opportunity, Bismarck very subtly reworded the report to make it look more contentious than it had really been. Then he sent that reworded version of what history has dubbed the M's dispatch. out to be printed in the international presses. When the dispatch was read, German readers came away believing that the French ambassador had been abrasive and rude. French readers came away believing the Prussian king had been

condescending and high-handed. Bismarck, meanwhile, rubbed his hands together with delight and later called the M's dispatch, quote, a red flag for the Gallic Bowl. Okay, so now public sentiment is inflamed all over Europe, and both sides, the French and the Germans, started mobilizing for war.

Now, though events were spiraling out of control faster than anyone could have anticipated, and Napoleon flirted with getting cold feet, the emperor was ultimately convinced that if he let this latest Prussian affront pass without answering,

that the future of the French Empire could not be vouched for. So on July the 19th, 1870, the French declared war on Prussia. But as the French started mobilizing, it became clear to them that far from being the leaders of a grand anti-Prussian coalition, that the French were about to have to go this alone. Austria had already gotten kicked around once before by Prussia.

and they refused to budge until France successfully invaded and made inroads in southern Germany. And even then, it wasn't at all clear the Austrians were going to help, because the Hungarians wanted no part of it. And those southern German states? Well, they had all signed secret deals with Prussia that should the French attempt to invade, that they would all fight with Prussia. So far from getting ready to join the French against Prussia, they were all ready to join Prussia against France.

Italian sentiment, meanwhile, had turned decidedly anti-French over the last few years because, in order to maintain support from French Catholics, the emperor was still maintaining a French garrison in Rome that prevented the Kingdom of Italy... from making Rome its capital. So the Italians just decided to sit this one out. And as I mentioned earlier, Bismarck had been cultivating the Russians for years, and far from backing France,

The Tsar actually told Bismarck that Russia would cover Prussia's eastern flank if the Austrians or the Poles decided to make trouble. Finally, to keep the British out of all this, all Bismarck had to do was show them that letter from the French a few years earlier. that proposed the annexation and partition of Belgium. So just as he had done to Austria four years earlier, Bismarck had maneuvered the French into a position of total diplomatic isolation.

So that isolation was a huge part of how and why the Franco-Prussian War went so badly, so quickly for the French. But it was not the only reason. Having been caught flat-footed diplomatically, The French were also caught flat-footed militarily. The French army was nominally about 400,000 strong, but it was mostly filled with unhappy conscripts serving seven-year hitches. The best and brightest in France...

had long since taken advantage of paying for a replacement whenever their draft number came up. And that 400,000 was the nominal number. In the summer of 1870, it was estimated that the French would need a million men to fight the Prussians. but they could only scrounge up about 280,000 actually ready to fight soldiers. The French had not been insensible to all this.

And the government had instituted reforms over the past few years to create a reserve army and also a home-based mobile guard. But those reforms were still ongoing when the war hit. The French also lacked any kind of coherent plan of attack, and they were merely improvising a campaign on the fly. The Prussians, meanwhile, stood in sharp contrast to all of this.

They had long since adopted a permanent general staff that had war plans drawn up for every conceivable scenario that would now run up and down a well-oiled and well-trained chain of command. Their system of universal conscription meant that they could mobilize a million men in just three weeks. And as I said, their industrial infrastructure revolved around ensuring Prussian military supremacy in Central Europe. For example,

They made the very simple decision to run two parallel train tracks out to their frontiers. Those two tracks would allow for constant motion in both directions. The French were stuck trying to move troops to the front lines on a single track. You had to wait for the empty train to get back before you could send another load of troops.

So the Prussians could move men to the front lines five times faster than the French could. Finally, there was the matter of, for lack of a better term, zeal. Not unlike the French during the Revolutionary Wars. The Germans were going off on a patriotic levee en masse to defend themselves against a foreign aggressor. The French, meanwhile, were driven by, what, enhancing the prestige of a regime that they didn't really like anyway?

When the declaration of war came in July of 1870, there was a lot of fanfare and cheering, but nobody volunteered to fight. So, this war that the emperor was embarking upon to save his empire? wound up leading directly to the collapse of his empire. The first phase of the Franco-Prussian War was waged in the territory of Alsace along the Middle Rhine.

The emperor himself rode out to take overall command of the French armies. They still hoped that they would be going on a strong offensive campaign, pushing across the Rhine River, peeling off German support for the Prussians and securing the support of the Austrians. But nothing even close to that happened. Instead, from August 4th to August 6th, the Prussians delivered three successive victories that sent the French armies reeling backwards.

It was clear that the French generals were not exactly the best and the brightest, and their lines of communication, supply, and movement were a mess, and then they were busted beyond repair. And I don't know how literally true this is, but I have seen it written that the French general staff went off on campaign with maps of Germany, but no maps of France, because it never even occurred to them that they might find themselves fighting in France.

Now that seems like an exaggeration, but it does capture the heart of the thing. So after those initial defeats, there was another round of defeats from August the 16th to August the 18th.

The French lost two more battles, and then the key fortress city of Metz, with close to 200,000 French troops trapped inside, was surrounded by the Prussians who put it to a siege. Now up the road... the Emperor and his generals reorganized their now totally fractured armies into a single fighting force of about 130,000 men, and they determined that they had to make an attempt to relieve Metz.

But as they set out on the road on September 1, 1870, they found the road blocked by a Prussian army 200,000 strong near the village of Sudan. The two sides fought it out over the course of that day. but the French were encircled by the larger Prussian forces. The next day, the emperor had no choice. His army was surrounded. He ordered the white flag raised. The army he led?

surrendered en masse, and the emperor himself was now a prisoner of war. This disastrous four weeks of battle spelled the end of the Second French Empire. But it was not the end of the Franco-Prussian War. So next week, we will turn our attention specifically to Paris, where the civilian leadership of France and the citizens of Paris would demand the abolition of the empire.

the creation of a third republic, and the continuation of a patriotic war of national defense against the invading Germans. But with the French armies defeated, these guys couldn't just snap their fingers and win the war. Especially...

because unlike the Prussian decision not to march on Vienna, the Prussian armies were now marching on Paris, and those armies would place the French capital under a grueling siege. They would soon see the citizens of one of the richest and most splendid cities in the world, And on that very pleasant note, I will now transition seamlessly into plugging a total random thing for all you baseball fans out there. And I know you're out there.

During the Break In Between series, I wrote an article for the Hardball Times talking about Shohei Otani's attempt to become the first great two-way superstar since Babe Ruth. Except the point of the article is that Ruth was not the last great two-way superstar. Comparisons like that overlook legendary two-way players who played in the Negro leagues in the 1920s and 30s and 40s.

So I will post a link to that article in the show notes to the podcast and also at revolutionspodcast.com. And then also I did an interview about it with the guys at the This Week in Baseball History podcast. So this is a little off topic. But if you want some Mike Duncan baseball content in your life, there's an article I wrote for the Hardball Times and an interview I did with This Week in Baseball History. Check it out.

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