 Well, good morning and welcome to the conference re-assessing the Franco-Prussian War 150 years on. My name is Michael Rowe and I am reader of European history in King's College London, and it's my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to this conference and to have the opportunity to make some opening remarks. I would like to begin by thanking Colonel Almeer Deroux, who's the army attache in the French Embassy London. It was Colonel Deroux who took the first steps in arranging this conference. That was way back in September 2019 when he reached out to my colleague Professor Joe Maolo, director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. And it was Almeer's idea that we should mark the 150th anniversary of a Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. And I guess befitting of a cavalry officer, it's really been his drive that has provided a lot of forward momentum at various crucial junctures over the last one and a half years. Colonel Deroux apart from pursuing an active and distinguished military career has published several works on French irregulars in the war of 1870-71. On a previous stint in London he held a research, a visiting research fellowship at King's whilst at the same time attending the Royal College of Defense Studies. And there was at this time that he reached out to Sir Michael Howard. Indeed to whose hobby was invited for afternoon tea and exchanges of a Franco-Prussian war followed. And one of the outcomes of these exchanges is this conference which is to honour Sir Michael Howard. Who of course sadly passed away at the end of 2019. As I'm sure you're all aware, Sir Michael Howard wrote arguably most important book on this conflict. The first published in 1961, the Franco-Prussian War, the German invasion of France 1870-71 received immediate acclaim from historians based on both sides of the Atlantic. Somebody who's work I know very well Gordon Craig distinguished historian of Germany described Sir Michael's book as a model of what a study in military history should be. An accolade which, although written in the early 60s, remains valid today as it did then. So a seminal study, seminal for the discipline of military history, not only for the history of the 1870-71 war. It's a seminal because of course it treated the conflict as one between armies that were shaped by the societies from which they sprang. Reading you know various transcripts of interviews with Sir Michael Howard and there's a particularly good one from 2008 where Sir Michael Howard spoke about the discipline of history. If you're interested, you can access it on the Institute of Historical Research website by simply typing in Sir Michael Howard and getting a sense of what attracted him to the Franco-Prussian War as a subject. I really know reading that transcript and also other interviews and indeed the preface of the original edition and the later edition. I think what attracted Sir Michael Howard was one, it was between two belligerents other than Britain and so he felt that he could write something which was slightly distanced and dispassionate, a judicious survey. But the second and I think for me more interesting reason is that of course the war of 1870-71 was located more or less halfway between the still pre-industrial wars of Napoleon, that's the first Napoleon, and the industrial carnage of 1914 to 1918. And that was struck by something which Sir Michael Howard points out in his book, you know, it's amazing to think that amongst the participants in the 1870 war were a few individuals who had fought in the later stages of the Napoleonic Wars, of course most famously, the Prussian King, Wilhelm I and one of his Field Marshals, Karl Friedrich von Steinmetz, they're both present, certainly Wilhelm is present at Waterloo, and Steinmetz is present at various key battles, I think at Leipzig in 1813 and the various battles of a hundred days campaign if not Waterloo. There, there, in 1870, but so is Paul von Hindenburg, you know, who will of course play such a leading role in the First World War. So the war of 1870-71 comes across as a war of transition, one which blends features of the era of Napoleon I, for those of the First World War, a war of still of cavalry engagements of splendid uniforms of monarchs, the Third and Wilhelm leading their armies, at least symbolically, but also a war of dog tags, of massive artillery, a power of telegraph of railways, and of course most importantly a war where civil society is mobilised certainly after Sudan on the French side, not in the same way as Spanish guerrillas who resist the First Napoleon, that form of resistance of course goes back much earlier than 1808, but a form of resistance and mass mobilisation within a sophisticated industrial and indeed service sector society, which of course is what France is in 1870, at the end of so called second empire. So of course this transition, if you like, is marked within the war itself, a war up to and including the Battle of Sudan, and then that post-Sidan phase, which of course sees more casualties and more trauma really on both sides than the first phase. So here it's a Michael Howard's book, it does seem appropriate that the subject of that book which is one of transition, but the work itself in a way marks an important transition in the evolution of military history as a subject, so there's a nice symmetry there. Michael Howard of course lives on in his scholarship to a much wider audience and circle, and he also lives on in the centre to which he has given his name but the Michael Howard centre for the history of war. And it's under the auspices of the centre, and also the auspices of the French Embassy in London that this event is being held. So the Michael Howard centres of the SMHC, for short, was founded in 2014-15, that academic year, to promote the scholarly history of war, really know all its dimensions, so very much following Michael's philosophy on how to approach the subject. The centre promotes active research amongst PhD students, it has a flourishing MA programme in the history of war, and it hosts projects and conferences like this one. And that promotes the study of the history of war, really covering the whole swath of history, the whole chronology from the ancient world, really to the very recent past and, you know, dealing with war, not simply as a matter of armed services but very much as something which impacts societies as a whole. There's no text, actually, I'd like to advertise, but there's some Michael Howard Centre annual lecture 2021, so the next lecture and that's going to be held on the 1st of December. And the speaker we have lined up is Dr Erica Charters from Oxford University, I'm sure many of you will know her, and know her work, will know her through her most important work to date, and that's her book, monograph, entitled Disease War and the Imperial State, The Welfare of British Armed Forces During the Seven Years War, and that was published in 2014, so Erica Charters is a historian whose work focuses really on disease and war, medicine and war, so brings in a very distinct sort of history of science approach. The title of her, of her lecture is to be confirmed, but please do make a note of this in your diary so that's the 1st of December 2021 that we will be welcoming Dr Charters. I'd like to mention that the Centre will be running a seminar program soon, beginning of next academic year, so the end of September early October 2021 and this is entitled New Directions and the History of Warfare and Violence. Further details will be available on the Sir Michael Howard Centre website. Please stay tuned. Of course you can also follow us on Twitter as well for more details of these and indeed other forthcoming events. As I previously noted the co-sponsor of this conference as a French Embassy in London, the Embassy for its support and pass on to you the best wishes of her excellency Mrs Catherine Colonna, the Ambassador of France and she writes to us and I quote this conference, marking the 150th anniversary of a Franco-Prussian war's end in 1871 is a unique opportunity to emphasise how much the European Enterprise has helped us rebuild our continent following three successive conflicts between France and Germany, the most recent being the Second World War. I'm delighted to see such a wide range of speakers contributing to thinking on this subject, and I wish this event every success. It should also lead to a publication, and indeed that last point is something that we plan more details to follow after the conference. I also need to pass on my thanks to Dr Mark Kondosh, lecturer in war studies. He's been of course in touch with you over the last few months. It was the elder Malta to who was attributed remark kind plan, who believed the first to find blue room which I think can only be translated as no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Of course, in our case, that enemy has been the COVID pandemic, which, you know, started a few months after those initial meetings between Joan myself and RML. But, you know, like Malta, we've adapted, we've made use of new technology, and much of that extra organisational effort has been borne by Mark Kondosh and also by Danny McDivitt, who is the website and events officer for the School of Security Studies. I was going to say here at Kings, at Kings. And, you know, she's, she's helped with the complex logistics of organising an event which has had to go online and she's really been indispensable, and we are going to be in her hands over the next day and and a bit. So a special thanks to Danny, and also Danny's team, I think that's fair to describe of a such Aisha Khan and Lizzie Ellen. So they'll be, they'll be looking after us in IT terms over the day over the next day and a bit. While I'm on the practical IT side of things, I should mention that these opening remarks, of course, are being recorded, but so will all the panels. So be aware of that they're being recorded. I think there will be up to 200 or perhaps close even to 300 people involved in the audience. So I think under those circumstances it makes sense to make use of the question and answer function, rather than the hand function and for questions to be, you know, which might be quite numerous to be managed and clustered using the Zoom function, the Q&A function on Zoom. Just a couple of updates on the program. Danny sent out the latest kind of what we thought would be the latest and possibly final iteration of a program either yesterday or the day before. There have been a couple of changes this morning which I should flag at least one change and that affects panel four this afternoon. That's the panel entitled the impact of the Franco-Prussian War military fort. And Dr. Hewam Lasconjavé has dropped out, which is a shame since I think we're all looking forward to his paper on the intellectual legacy of the Franco-Prussian War. So that means there'll only be two papers for that panel, those by Robert Foley and Robert Johnson. Those papers might sort of be a little bit longer or and or the virtual drinks can be sort of brought forward a little bit. And then of course the big change which you already should be aware of is tomorrow morning, where we did originally have a panel planned that's been sort of consolidated and merged with the earlier panels. So we will have a fairly sort of late start tomorrow morning 11am with opening remarks and then we'll move on to the round table at 11.30 which will be the sort of concluding event of this conference. And I'm just going to quickly see. Yes, great. I see Anna Ross is is in. What will normally happen between panels and events where their larger breaks is that Danny will, I think so deactivate things so you will kind of have to log out at that point and then log in for the next panel and that's really so as to ensure that everyone gets a bit of a break. We're not going to do that though now between the opening marks and panel one, so we'll just have seamlessly move I hope from one to the other. Okay, I think I've actually completed my opening comments a little bit earlier and Anna. I hope you're sort of getting ready because we could possibly start your panel five minutes or so earlier, which would be no bad thing since your panel is is the only one actually which has four speakers so it's it's a slightly heavier panel than the others. So it might relieve a bit of pressure on you. Anna, are you ready to go if you wish to. Yes, absolutely. I think that makes sense. Michael, thank you. Okay, thanks. I'll hand over to you and myself. Okay, great. Well, I'm delighted to be here and to introduce our speakers for the panel. I'm going to talk about politics geopolitics of the Franco-Prussian war. What I'll do is I'll introduce all four speakers to start off with, and then call upon the speakers to give their papers and I think that that might hold the time together a bit more and I'll keep my eye on the Q&A function so please as we're going through pop questions in there, and we'll assemble them at the end. Jessica is Oliver Jaiak, director of the IESD at Université Jean-Malin-Liontois. He's written a whole range of wonderful articles on geo-strategies, so thinking about spatial categories and strategic ideas and geopolitics in general, and also some wonderful stuff that I looked at on realism in international relations. So he'll be speaking to us first about geo-politics of the Franco-Prussian war. He'll be followed then by Professor Geoffrey Wauro, who's professor of military history at the University of North Texas and director of the UNT Military History Center. Many of us will be familiar with Professor Wauro's Franco-Prussian War, the book he published with Cambridge back in 2003, and more recent work on American soldiers in the First World War, most notably in the book Sons of Freedom. And he'll be speaking to us today on the Franco-Prussian War as the Third War of German Unification. Then we'll have our third speaker, Christoph Neubel, who is a Wissenschaftlicher Oberrat at the Center for Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr in Potsdam. And amongst his many publications that I looked up and fascinating works there, I draw your attention to der Stadt gestürzt auf Blut und Eisen, a military kind of thinking in Bismarck's political thought. I thought that might be a particular relevance of relevance to our community here. And he'll be speaking on Bismarck, 1870, and the problem of civil-military relations in Germany. Finally, to end off the panel, we'll have Dr. Karin Wali, who is lecturer in French and European history at the University of Strathclyde. Obviously, and many of you will be familiar with her work on Under the Shadow of Defeat, the War of 1870 to 71 in French memory. So thinking about the Franco-Prussian War and its impact on French culture. She's been doing a lot of work recently on the Second World War, but he's coming back to the Franco-Prussian War to think about it as a European turning point. So she'll be talking to us about European neutrality and the isolation of the French Republic, September 1870 to March 1871. So I'll ask, first of all, Dr. Jaik to begin and you'll have 15 minutes up to 15 to 20 minutes, a maximum of 20 minutes. Thank you and good morning to all my colleagues and the attendants. It is really an honor to be there with you this morning for this panel and this conference. So my subject is about geopolitics of the Franco-Prussian War. This is a quite difficult subject because I will have to be a little bit simplistic and really straightforward on this due to the limited time we have. But one of the most important events in the contemporary history of Europe. The Franco-Prussian War has had tremendous consequences as we know in terms of territorial control and special balance on the continental scale. So as such, we can say that it is a moment that can be analyzed geopolitically. This war, a very fascinating moment in our common history, represents a pivotal moment in a way between two opposing trends in European special organization. Territorial simplification on the one hand and fragmentation on the other. And this war, which saw the completion of the German unification movement, historical movement under the aegis of Prussia, was a moment of coagulation and territorial simplification in Europe. Nevertheless, this moment of coagulation finds its epilogue, as we all know, with the First World War, which has quite opposite consequences that is a territorial fragmentation of the European continent. And one of the possible interpretation of this paradox is perhaps contained in the seeds of what could effectively be called the geopolitics of this war. That is the spatial response that the Frankfurt Treaty brought to the power equation that preceded the conflict. So it is the form and the context of this response that I propose to review in this, the first part of this presentation. I say overview, because given the time available to us this picture can only be both simplistic and I would say, synthetic. So such a space centric analysis is not quite sufficient to answer to the terms of the subject proposed to me by my friend, Colonel Armel de Roux. It seems to me that when we speak about the geopolitics of this war. It is also necessary to take an interest in the relations that unite this very particular conflict and geopolitics understood as an intellectual phenomenon. That is a special social special study of the forms of power, very various, and this aspect with will constitute the second point of this intervention so first of all, I mentioned a moment ago that the, the Franco-Prussian war was the starting point of a new European territorial concentration. This mainly concerns, as we all know, the Kingdom of Italy and the German Empire, which are completing their unification. Nevertheless, from a geopolitical point of view, there is a huge difference between these two beneficiaries of the conflict. Unlike the German one, the Italian unification completed with the capture of Rome did not lead to a coagulation of power. Therefore, Italy did after the war, it didn't take part in Italy fully integrates the European balance of power, but in a secondary position. The German case, of course, is obviously quite different. Thanks to the war, Germany becomes indeed the most economically and militarily powerful nation on the continent. And with unification, the geopolitical center of gravity of Europe has shifted to the east and Berlin is now the venue for major international conferences. The new empire can therefore play a dominant role in international relations. The geopolitical question that led to the war of 1870-71 is not, however, the unification of Germany. A much larger questioning exists, does exist, which is not resolved by the conflict. It goes on long after Frankfurt, in fact, and this question is, what is Germany's destiny in Europe? Is Germany the Barry Center of a continental equilibrium that does not threaten its neighbors, despite its potential power? Or is it structurally a voracious Aegean whose dynamic will be fatally aggressive? Quite modern question, if I may. And one of the European leaders who tended to favor the first solution was Napoleon III himself. We know his hesitation between, on the one hand, the self-interested defense of the principle of nationalities in Europe, and on the other hand, the search for balance between empires that would have been relatively favorable to France. In this perspective, in 1863, just after the failure of the Paris conference, Golds, the Prussian ambassador in France, or to France, reported those words addressed to King Wilhelm by the French emperor. They can be found in the Aus Vertigo Politicoissance document. It is quite striking, in fact. So I have reported those words here. The striking words are those, pressure is surrounded by a host of small states which hindered her action without adding to her strength. I had hoped that a meeting of the sovereigns would give us or could give us the occasion to establish between us an agreement in this respect, as well as on the other great questions. And Golds, the ambassador, further commands to the address of his sovereign is he would have wished, so Napoleon, that your majesty had hastened to agree with him to rectify the map of Europe. Was Napoleon sincere? It is a possibility. And if he was, it is a proof of naivety. And the question if this is difficult, but the French emperor seems to have really thought that a strong pressure could be an integral part of the European balance under the condition, of course, that this satisfied so-called satisfied pressure would not have been too strong. That is to say that France, who would have been territorially reassured on the Rhine. If this may appear as very naive in retrospect, it should be noted that Napoleon did not seem to have been the only one to entertain this type of geopolitical illusions in Europe prior to the war. From the point of view of the European power equation, geopolitics of the Franco-Prussian war points, of course, also to the United Kingdom. And even if London does not lose any territory after the war, this does not mean that London's position is not politically weakened. As Otto writes in a recent, very interesting research article, I quote him, one notes the failure of the foreign policymaking elite to appreciate the significance of the rise of Russia and the dangers this would pose to European stability. We could say that this kind of geopolitical blindness existed before the war, as shown by London's relatively static diplomacy during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis of 1863-64. Somehow concentrated on the Eastern question or the Russian imperial challenge in Central Asia, Britain failed to appreciate fully that the territorial concentration created by the German unity under the Prussian scepter was, sorry, changed the European balance far more than it has expected. And if I may, I would say that this related blindness appears throughout those three words in English, Franco-Prussian war. Is it indeed? We could consider that the real Franco-Prussian war occurred in 1876. In 1871, it is a Franco-German war. And geopolitically speaking, so to say in terms of the special balance of power in Europe as a war, that difference changed absolutely everything. If we try to simplify, and I apologize in advance for this, if we try to simplify the problematics using the undoubtedly critisizable, critical macro geographic visions that are those of geopolitics, the map linked to the stakes of the war can be presented in the following way. In 1869, one of the issues at stake in Europe was the southern German vacuum. And after 1866, the game was over for Vienna. So by succeeding in dragging the political actors of southern Germany into a national war against France, Bismarck, he finally settled the question of this vacuum to the advantage of Prussia. So after the Austrian option of a great Danubian Germany around Vienna, the last alternative combination disappears, namely the Rhine policy of Paris, which Napoleon III would have perhaps like to see, lead to a balance between the influence of Paris and Berlin in this strategic zone. Let us recall the words of God in 1863. And this is not the case. The winner takes all, and the new balance of Europe becomes this. So it is really a new balance. There is sometimes the impression one gets from what is called the Bismarckian system on whose equilibrium we insist. But there is an another hypothesis, of course, and is it that this solution had nothing of an equilibrium or balance even before the advent of Wilhelm II. It could only be provisional and problematic in so far as the forces and the values that had been mobilized to realize this objective in 1870-71 could no longer be contained, even by the prudence of Bismarck. Cartographically, here the result of the war simplifies European geopolitics. The main players remained apparently the same in the form of a quite stable oligopoly. But when it comes to a relative power, that is to say on a dynamic level, this war really changed the entire European political equation. There was no longer any question of concert, sized in its potential dynamics. The New Deal forced Moscow and London to position themselves differently, to counter the exceptionally rapid, quick and successful rise of power of Berlin. To complete this subject, which can't but being oversimplified in 20 minutes, and I apologize for this. It seems to me that it might be interesting to evoke, in the last part, for the few minutes I have, the very particular form of human geography that emerged from the Franco-German war of 1870-71, along with the geopolitical dynamics linked to and created by this war. We associate, in other words, what will become an extremely singular dynamic geopolitics. And the connection between the two phenomena, the political one and the anti-intellectual one, can perhaps help us to clarify the nature of the tight guised resulting from the war. And thus, to make a contribution to the question of whether Frankfurt was, you know, inevitably leading to Verdun. So, among the specialists of human geography in Europe at this time, the most of course striking example of the cultural turning point that interests has is undoubtedly that of Friedrich Ratzel, the German pioneer of political geography and geopolitics. His major works were all published in the 25 years following the war, anthropogéographie from 1882 to 1891, and also politischegeographie in 1897. So, Ratzel was a combatant during the war, a conflict in which he was invaded, losing his hearing in the year, in one year. So, according, for example, to Klein and Besin, this experience deepens in Ratzel, a profound sense of German nationalism, but more important than that reinforced his belief that war was a natural condition of world history. Klinke, in a very interesting article published two years ago, goes even further, writing that Ratzel's Lebensraum would be fanatological in essence and that the specter of death and survival involved in this concept derives directly from the wartime experience of the geographer. So, Ratzel is not the only geographer to be linked to this war. Karl Ritter in Germany, for example, has influenced Maltke, as we know. But Ratzel, much younger than Ritter, represents a completely different era for European geography at the confluence of biological principles and vitalist philosophy. Can we consider in this way that this vision of a dynamic and bio-conditioned political geography, and soon of geopolitics, can be limited to a German phenomenon. Some people think so, but I'm not really convinced. As a lot of scholars underline it, Paul Vidal de la Blache, the most influential geographer of the early 20th century in France, was also deeply conditioned by the Franco-Prussian War as a formative intellectual experience. Vidal was only 25 years old at the time of the war. He was in Paris during the Commune, from where he escaped to Versailles. And although he was not a soldier himself, he was nevertheless traumatized by this war. His career is interesting then, because a teaching at the very symbolic University of Nancy Nancy in Lorraine, he quickly became, after the war, one of the symbols of a new French geography that was part of a national intellectual and scientific development influenced by the analysis of the causes of the defeat. What is interesting here is that Vidal de la Blache is not only the major French geographer of the early 20th century. He is also a precursor, a pioneer of geopolitical approaches, as shown in his work La France de l'Est, Eastern France, published in 1917. Vidal's questioning focuses above all on the dynamics of nation building. And indeed, the war, the Franco-German war, encored him in a direct relationship with the German model. Vidal enrolled his son, his proper son, in the German University of Darmstadt. He traveled to Germany in the early 1880s, as we can see from his notebooks, which were just published last year for the first time. Very interesting reading. He met Ratzel. It is not that Vidal imitates the effort of Lebensraum. It would be more accurate to say that in their way of inventing a vitalist political geography for their time and for their respective countries, Vidal and Ratzel are influenced in a parallel way by the same foundational trauma, the war. And on this point, I think we should stop following Lucien Fevre, who in 1922, in latter, in l'évolution humaine, opposed German determinism to the French possibilities in political geography, as if to deny any Ratzelian impregnation in Vidal's work. In reality, one could say that the shared experience of war brought their conception closer together, and their shared vitalism is expressed in the form of a politicized dynamic anthropogyography. They were very influential after the war in Germany, in France, and outside those two countries. So one point to conclude that strikes me personally is the transposition that can be made between the character of the Franco-German war of 1871 on the one hand, and the character of this new vitalist political geography on both sides of the Rhine on the other side. The war of 1870, as mentioned by Michael Rowe at the beginning of this conference, marked an evolution in military strategy in so far as it illustrated the passage from classical warfare to industrial warfare. It's quite fascinating to note that the German and French political geography influenced by the conflict will operate a synthesis of the same type in Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche works, we find a paradoxical balance between on the one hand a naturalist and another approach stemming from a pre-industrial past and at the same time, a more technical approach adapted to the very dynamic description of an economically globalized post-war period in which the notion of distance takes on a new geostrategic meaning. And in this vitalist philosophy, the notion of balance or harmony counter balances that of efficiency. So, from then, it appears to us that the paradox that I mentioned at the beginning of this paper of this communication is perhaps not a paradox at all. This war was, as we all know, an intellectual as much as much as a strategic turning point. It led to a political balance whose apparent Bismarckian statics poorly concealed the intrinsic turbulence. If the Franco-Prussian or the Franco-German war has indeed led to a special coagulation from a geopolitical point of view, the intellectual approaches to special order to which it has given rise at the same time largely contradict this appearance of both simplification and balance. From this point of view, considering what would be a geopolitics of the Franco-Prussian war, it implies reinserting it in a broader framework, the broader framework of the history of ideas, and in particular that of the specialization of the concept of power. Thank you for your attention and really sorry for having been perhaps too long. No, that was perfectly one or two minutes over. So that was perfect. And what a really fascinating paper you've given us to start things off. I've got half a page of notes there. That was fabulous. We're now going to have my understanding is our talk from Professor Wara, but it's going to be played as a prerecorded video. So perhaps, Oliver, if you could stop screen sharing. Of course. And then the team should be able to pop that up is my understanding. Thank you everyone present virtually, of course, I want to make a fond mention of Sir Michael Howard, who I dedicated my last book to he was one of my great advisors mentors friends over the over the years and I know we all miss him so very much. Bismarck and milky tower over the title of my paper Franco Prussian war as the third German war of unification for deep odds. Imagine, just two years before Bismarck became Russian Minister President, the times of London had scoffed Russia on aided would not keep the Rhine of the Vistula for a month. The kingdom was relatively small and divided into Western and Eastern halves, fiercely independent German states like Hanover sandwiched in between that Voltaire had called Prussia, that kingdom of mere border strips. Prussia's population before 1866 was barely half the population of France or Austria, Russian politics were savage the younger class clinging to ancient privileges and resenting Bismarck's efforts to centralize power in his own hand. The liberal business class that made that so far I'm resenting Bismarck's authoritarianism and the people of Western Prussia despising the people of Eastern Prussia as Polakian Interpol or stink poison. In the years before 1870 and even after Westphalian fathers sending their sons off to perform their military service, lamented that their boys were serving with the Prussians. As if it were a foreign country which in a way it was how Prussia became a great power. History tells us the times of London declared in 1860. Why she remains so nobody can tell. Bismarck besieged by all of these forces in the 1860s, staked his entire career on the Austro Prussian War of 1866. Austria driven from German affairs and Prussia enlarged by 7 million new subjects and 1300 square miles of new territory solved all problems in Prussia. The Junkers and the Liberals were one of the Junkers by Bismarck's determination to stitch the authoritarian Prussian system onto a new Germany, Liberals by Bismarck's great strides for national unification. That had one third the inhabitants of France in 1820, one half in 1860, and after 1866 it nearly even the score 30 million Prussians, the Francis 38 million. Because this enlarged Prussia in North German Confederation have universal conscription, the shift in the military balance was even more striking. Prussia added 35 infantry regiments and seven corps. Prussia now had a fully mobilized army of 1.2 million, three times larger than the fully mobilized French army on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War of just 400,000. For France, the surprise de Sadova, the surprise of Sadova, the rapid and unexpected Prussian expansion in 1866, made a Franco-Prussian war likely. Napoleon III had lost face and viled at home for losing first Italy and now Germany, and for putting French power and influence at risk. The 1860s were horrible for Napoleon III. Italy unified against his wishes and failed in efforts to reconstitute Poland. Bismarck crushed Austria and created the North German Confederation, rejecting all of Louis Napoleon's demands for compensation in Belgium and Luxembourg. And after spending today's equivalent of a billion dollars in Mexico, Napoleon III was forced to pull out in 1867 with nothing to show for the venture. The French Emperor, weak, ill, and unpopular, would be counted on to provoke a war over any further Prussian attempt to expand, namely into South Germany. The three states there, Bavaria, Wartemberg, and Baden, contained 8 million more Germans, 200,000 well-trained troops, and their territory would permit a unified German state the ability to invade France on a broad front of Luxembourg round to Alsace. It was with these hard geopolitical facts in mind that the French Empress, Eugénie, said to the Prussian ambassador after Königretz, in the nation like yours in the neighbor, we French are in danger of finding you in Paris one day unannounced. I will go to sleep French and I will wake up Prussian. Napoleon III was more specific about the threat. Telling the British Foreign Secretary in 1868, if Bismarck draws the South German states into the North German Confederation, our guns will go off by themselves. Knowing all of this, Bismarck very deliberately created the conditions for a third war of German unification. Great crises Bismarck like to say, provide the weather for Prussia's growth. Bismarck had created a crisis in 1866, using a quarrel over the spoils of the first German war of unification, revoked the Austrian Emperor into declaring war on him in what became the second war of German unification. He needed another crisis to cast Prussia as the blameless defender of German sovereignty and to isolate France, the inevitable adversary after 1866. Bismarck knew that the Prussian people with the memory of 1866 fresh would hesitate to embark on a new war with France, which was a far more formidable adversary than Austria. Bismarck knew that South German resistance to Prussian rule would be deep and that the old Junkers and perhaps the Prussian king himself would hesitate to add so many Catholics to the North German state. He had to break the hold of the South German princes and reach past them to their more willing subjects. A few years earlier Bismarck had remarked, there is but one ally for Prussia, the German people. Like him, they wanted a German nation state. If France declared war on Prussia Germany, if France presented Prussia Germany with a mortal threat, they would probably pressure their princely regimes to fight. And so Bismarck stoked several crises, hoping that one of them would trigger the polling the third's wrath. And finally one did, the candidate question for the Spanish throne. The polling the third rushed headlong into the trap made by Bismarck and in this way he solved all of the Prussian leaders problems. We must remember that on the eve of war in 1870 Bismarck's problems were apparently as grave as the polling the first. Bismarck's wrangles with the Prussian legislature North German Reichstag and the German solar parliament, as well as the various German governments were so severe that he increasingly retreated to vaccine. The 20,000 acre of Pomeranian estates gifted to him after Königs. He hated his complicated new role as Bundeskanzler, federal chancellor of the North German Federation. Trees mean more to me than humans Bismarck grumbled in this period. The Junkers, after 1866 blocked his efforts to subject Prussia, the heart of the North German Confederation to new German laws and taxes. The new member states of the North German Confederation also bought to the new taxes levied by Berlin. Russia Darmstadt went so far as to inquire in Paris about the possibility of French military protection against Prussia imagine a member of the new North German Confederation is greatly reaching out. The French officials and saying will you protect us if we wish to break away from this new confederation. The Prussian National Liberals Bismarck's erstwhile foes, who had rallied to him only after the victory of 1866, tried to cut the military budget while the Prussian army tried to exceed its budget. Those same liberals also criticized Bismarck's cautious haste formula for unification, either mitweiler, they wanted unification. Socialism, blooming in the mining and industrial towns of Germany, workers condemning Bismarck's wars of annexation. The South German states continued to put distance between themselves in Berlin. The war of Französisch was poisish with a common South German electoral slogan at the time. Indeed, in February 1870, just a few short months before the Franco-Prussian war broke out. The very invoders ousted the pro-Prussian government that had served since 1867 with the aid of Prussian subsidies, and returned the devoutly Catholic pro-independence, pro-French patriot party to power. The crisis of the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne was the third, in a string of attempts by Bismarck, to go to touching the fine French emperor into declaring war on Prussia. Bismarck was seeking what he called the talisman that will unify Germans, the red rag that will taunt the Gallic bull. First, he had floated the idea of a Kaiser title for the Prussian king. Then he had financed an Italian railway through Switzerland that, given Italy's military alliance with Prussia in 1866, seemed to threaten and encircle France. After that second move, Napoleon III had replaced his dovish foreign minister, Napoleon Daru, with a hawk, Duke Antoine Aginot des Grameaux. Grameaux called himself the Bismarck-Français. The next rebuff from Bismarck will be war, Grameau said in May 1870. Bismarck searched for the outcome that would make Prussia the victim, and France the aggressor. He needed to trigger the military alliances he had concluded after 1866 with the South German states and ensure the neutrality of the other great powers in order to wage a third war of German rule. A third war of German unification. First, he proffered the Prussian king's Catholic nephew as a candidate for the vacant Spanish throne. Spain accepted the Hohenzollern candidate. Napoleon III, Eugenie and Grameau spoke of Prussian perfidy, malice, and recklessness, and they threatened war. The Prussians withdrew the candidate in July. Bismarck then edited the famous M's dispatch, just enough to insult the French, yet remove the cause for war. Napoleon III ran headlong into the trap, making impertinent and impossible demands that the Prussian king link himself formally to the renunciation, not just the Hohenzollern nephew. And that the Prussian king promised never again to put anyone forward for the Spanish throne. Well that was going too far. Europe had been relieved by the passing of the crisis without war. Now France, not Prussia, seemed to be the warmonger. Bismarck deftly reversed the attempted French humiliation of Prussia and put unbearable pressure on France to attack. Well the French declared war in mid-July 1870, alienating the other great powers and galvanizing the German people just as Bismarck had intended. He now turned the Third War of German Unification over the Molke, thanks to the adhesion of the South Germans who enthusiastically joined the war when the French showed their teeth, put invade France on a broad front with 25 North German divisions in two armies and a third army of 12 South German divisions. Bismarck and Molke had worried that the South Germans wouldn't do their bit. They had refused to provide the South German armies with the excellent large-scale Prussian Kriegskotten war maps, forcing the South Germans to campaign in 1870 with road atlases purchased at bookshops. When it all came together in the war, the obstacles to German unification swept away and a new power created Bismarck and Molke were its architects, the better and worse. Thank you very much for the great pleasure. Wonderful, great. So we're building up a lovely picture here of the kind of contrasting geopolitics and the political kind of feelings of these tensions between a German and an oppression war. We'll move on to Christoph next. But can I just remind people if you have a question, please pop it in the Q&A and I'll keep gathering them as we go along so we can group them together. But Christoph. Thank you very much, Anna and ladies and gentlemen. It's a privilege and at the same time a great pleasure for me to talk to this distinguished audience. In 1871, the Linn hosted the great of the young German Empire. This event turned under the Linden into a road of prime. Among the elaborate statues and pictures along the alley, two portraits were out. Those of Helmut von Molke, Chief of the General Staff and Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the North German Federation and Minister President of Prussia. Let's see the picture right now. The portraits were created by Lord Menzel, who become one of the leading artists of the empire. Menzel showed Molke as military commander equipped with binoculars ready to survey the battlefield. Interestingly enough, the artist painted Bismarck in a quite similar manner. The portrait shows the Chancellor in the uniform of a general leaning over a map of France. The maps stood for mastering space that were usually associated with the virtues of the military commander. By the unique arrangement, Menzel's portraits underlined the military qualities of both Molke and Bismarck. Interestingly enough, the artist established a sort of equivalence between the two by conferring on them the grand cross of the iron cross decoration Bismarck actually never received. These portraits somewhat contradict a common view of the civil-military relations during the Franco-Prussian War. Okay, Bismarck Molke, thank you. Historical research has often interpreted this conflict in the light of the Sonderweg thesis. Lames, the Germany followed a special path in history where she drifted off the Western course marked by democratic civilian control over the military. All examples of that are the Third Reich, or the military dictatorship established by Ludendorff during the First World War. In the light of what happened during the Age of Extremes, as Eric Hobsbawm called it, research on the Franco-Prussian War largely followed a somewhat realistic interpretation. In this context, Bismarck is considered a statesman representing political leadership, while Molke favored military command and destruction, thereby demanding even a say in the political decision-making process. This interpretation regularly portrays Bismarck as a man with superior political insight who struggled to keep politically ambitious generals in check. I will question this view by analyzing the war not in the light of the 20th century, but by situating it in the 19th. I assume that dividing the problem into two separate fields, the civilian domain here, the military there, gives us a too simplistic as dualistic image of the events and neglects the complexity of 19th century decision-making process. Here, Sir Michael Hout's blended book on the Franco-Prussian War, which most of us have probably read again prior to this conference, marks a good starting point. In a thoughtful remark, Howard pointed out that in 1870, the spheres of civil and military authority overlapped, as they always will, and nobody could tell precisely where the line of distinction should be drawn. Building on Howard's observation, I would like to question the dualistic view that the political and the military sphere should be regarded as well-defined and separate ideals. Instead, I propose a historicizing perspective and consider them as fields of meaning which the contemporaries interpreted differently. Thus, the correlation of certain issues to the political or to the military fields is understood as a negotiation progress and process, and as we will see, not least a power struggle among the Prussian decision-makers, most notably Bismarck and Moltke. I will try to approach this issue in two steps. Firstly, I will give an outline of Bismarck's military career until the beginning of the war, showing how a politician became a general, and in 1870 Bismarck ranked major general. And secondly, I will analyze this drive between Bismarck and Moltke during the conflict. One may have the impression that the Iron Chancellor was a died-in-the-world soldier, but that was not the case. During his lifetime, he had an ambivalent attitude towards the enforcers and the leaders. In 1838, young Bismarck joined the Königliche Gardejäger in Potsdam from where I speak today, after he failed to convince the authorities that he suffered from a muscle weakness in his right arm. One year later, Bismarck already left the army as NCO. What followed was an average reservist career. Later, when Bismarck became Prussian diplomat, that aroused suspicion at the court. Brown Prince and future King William lamented that blessed a ship was assigned to this lieutenant of the territorial army. Obviously, military rank and experience were seen as essential features of the Prussian elite. Here, as anywhere in Europe, noblemen and many state officials were provided with military ranks and uniforms, but were regarded as symbols of loyalty and signs of belonging. The uniform bearer showed his allegiance to his monarch together with his affiliation to the state and the army. This background explains why Bismarck's makeshift military career took off when he became Prussian ambassador and was sent to St. Petersburg and later to Paris in 1862 when he became major. Obviously, Bismarck should be able to keep up with the reputation and prestigious uniforms of those he was dealing with in the European capitals. After the war against Austria in 1866, King William appointed Bismarck major general and you might notice that he thereby skipped ranks. The King attached him to the prestigious Magdeburg-Kürsir Regiment nr. 7 two years later. From then on Bismarck frequently chose the flamboyant white uniform of the Kürsir with his characteristic yellow color while performing governmental duties. After 1866, the uniform became his work attire and trademark. The Franco-Prussian War fueled this image. During the first weeks when all went rather successfully, Bismarck hardly was concerned with matters of warfare. Nevertheless, Bismarck adopted certain habits of a soldier. When William Russell met Bismarck, the British war correspondent noted that he certainly bore more resemblance in his outward aspect to a soldier than to a statesman. In his reputation, Bismarck's self-confidence grew as the German troops advanced victoriously into France. When after Sedan, both past cheering soldiers, Bismarck confidently remarked, they all recognized my curious cap, neglecting the fact that the men presumably honored the well-known architect of the military triumph as well. Then later, in the course of the People's War after Sedan, the relationship between Bismarck, Maltke and other members of the military elite soared. In September, Paris was under siege, but the new republican government of natural defense continued fighting. France constantly raised new armies, which were repeatedly beaten, but yet no peace was in sight. During the stalemate, Maltke agreed with a letter that had been found in one of the balloons that managed to leave Paris, and I cite this source for a friend colleague. Les Prussians ne peuvent pas entrer à Paris, et nous ne pouvons pas les entrer. As nobody could present a hand to receive for ending the conflict, a struggle over how to win the war and fold it. Soon, the complex structure of Prussian civil-military relations came to bear. During the war, Prussian decision-making took place in a triangle of leadership, as the historian Stig Förster has rather fittingly called it, with King William at the top. As no single person could master the increasingly complex task of exercising supreme command and steering the state's administration, William relied on Bismarck and Maltke. Both acted as supervisors and formed the lower edges of the triangle. In the end, Prussia went to war without having a plain command and control structure. As a result, decision-making took place in a complex process of negotiation within the triangle. Its resources were personality, authority, and power, together with a special relationship with the king, who had the final say. We assumed that he and Bismarck were equals under the king, with the chief of staff slightly in front due to the imperatives of war. While Maltke basically acknowledged political leadership during peacetime, in wartime he advocated a military command that could operate completely independently from any political interference. On the other hand, he had a nearly all-embracing understanding of policy and considered himself a supreme advisor to the king, who was in charge of Prussia's overall policy. Bismarck even did not refrain from approaching issues that Maltke felt to be within his authority. During the winter campaign, both sides struggled over the question of how to end the war. More than once, Bismarck stated that the purpose of war is to achieve peace, an idea that Maltke proved. The means to effectively end the war, the military, and here both strongly disagreed. Maltke wanted to crush the military capabilities of France in order to prevent any future attack on the German lands, no matter how long that might take. Bismarck disapproved and advocated its speedy end of the war, because he feared that the other great powers might intervene. In December, Bismarck started to send a series of detailed dispatches to the king. They concerned the future course of the war and regularly began with an explanation of why the chancellor dealt with military issues. Bismarck regularly spoke of an indispensable interaction between political leadership and military operations, which in his opinion could not be considered separately from one another. By putting military matters in a political framework, in a Tasic-Auswitzian sense, if you like, he aimed at legitimizing his military proposals, thus implying that he was aware of his incursion into a field that General Staff claimed to be his memorial domain. Now, Bismarck went so deeply into military considerations that he could have borne the signature of Maltke as well. Bismarck expressed the need to intensify the pressure on the French people so that they finally longed for peace. In order to achieve this aim, Bismarck proposed that fewer prisoners should be taken on the battlefield, thereby deterring recruits to join the army where they were more likely to expect death and imprisonment. In Bismarck's opinion, the Germans were too lenient in their treatment of the occupied territories. Enteurur had to be punished harshly and relentlessly, in Bismarck's words, thereby holding even the population accountable by inflicting collective punishment. Here, one might notice the influence of Philip Sheridan, the infamous Union general who devastated Genendoa Valley during the US Civil War. In 1870, Sheridan joined the Prussian headquarters where he found that German campaigning was more a vast picnic than like actual war. Bismarck's chilling proposals clearly exceeded the measures taken by the General Staff. Even if its forces committed extreme acts of violence, Maltke tried to contain the worst excesses of people's war, which he considered as a regression to barbarism. As this example shows, the dualist image of its babesmen who epitomized peace and order and who, during the Franco-Prussian War, struggled to contain rampant generals advocating destruction falls apart. Instead, it was reversed. At this time, Bismarck submitted ideas that were more brutal than anything the General Staff had ordered. In his dispatches to the King, Bismarck even put operational planning under review. Such a critique was rather uncommon in an era when, according to a humorous remark, there were five perfect things in Europe. The Curia of the Catholic Church, the British Parliament, the Regime Ballet, the French Opera, and the German General Staff. Therefore, we may find in Bismarck's behavior a sign of the self-confidence and rigorousness of the Chancellor. It's hardly surprising that the General Staff became furious about Bismarck's dispatches. By speaking of Bismarck as a civilian in a Curious Year's uniform, its members acidly emphasized that they drew a clear line between soldiers and what they considered as civilians, even if they wore a uniform. So, Malkus' indignation, Bismarck now regularly entered into professional discourse, like a military specialist, be it during the King's Councils or at the dinner table. An officer thus moaned that Bismarck entirely behaved as a general. Obviously, the Chancellor linked rank with expertise and a claim for power. Indeed, the balance seemed to shift towards Bismarck's cause. On December 17, the King ordered the General Staff to keep Bismarck informed about future operations. Later, in January 1871, when it came to fix the terms of surrender for Paris, the Chancellor had his way. When in February, an army corps was inquiring how to deal with the French General Loiseuil, who declined to act according to the Armistice Agreement, Bismarck instructed the corps to threaten him with attack. He also recommended this episode bitterly. I'm curious to know whether Count Bismarck will also give the order to strike. Dear colleagues at the climax of the war, we find Malkus in a defensive position. The Chief of the General Staff insisted on a dualist stance, struggling to keep the two lower edges of the triangle separate. He thought this argument fit to repel what he considered illegitimate incursions into his domain. But finally, Malkus failed against an adversary that might remind us of Stevenson's Dr. Jacqueline Mr. Hyde, a literary figure that combined diverse and contradictory characteristics. During the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck not only performed as a statesman, but acted as a general as well. Bismarck's action did not fit into a dualistic model of civil-military relations, a concept with which research oftentimes analyzed the Franco-Prussian War. Perhaps you remember Mansell's colorful portraits, which also attributed to Bismarck the virtues of a military commander. He impressively illustrated that at that time, even the wider public drew no distinct line between the political and the military domains. As I suggested here, this was the case even among the decision makers who acted within a governmental system that left space for negotiation, thus depending on personality and authority. The question of whom and what determined the future course of the German Empire lay in the hands of the political and office holders. Thank you Christoph. Wonderful. That stretches this out now into the civil-military relations and it's a lovely embedding into the 19th century and trying to pull that back into that context. We finish off then with Karine who's going to come and talk to us about European neutrality and the isolation of the French Republic, September 1870 to March 1871. Karine, if you're there. Yes, thank you very much. So I'm going to begin by showing my screen. So I hope everybody can see my screen there. So, well, firstly, thank you very much. Sorry, Karine. Sorry, just to interrupt, did you want to go into a full screen mode just so your, your PowerPoints. Okay, yep. We just had a few comments that it might be easier for people to see. Yeah, okay, thanks very much. So yeah, I just want to start by thanking the organizers for this conference, really exciting couple of days of papers. So I'm going to be talking about the French situation and in particular focusing on the isolation of the French Republic following Sudan. Now, it's traditionally been argued that one of the main outcomes of the Franco-Prussian war and the German victory in the Franco-Prussian war was the victory of might over rights that 19th century ideas on international law and the European concert had given a way to an aggressive, conservative infused nationalism. And it has been described as marking a turning point when realpolitik and power politics prevailed over restraint encouraged by the concert system and the values of international law, and that this helped create an international climate that led to the end of the First World War. According to this narrative, the lack of military or direct diplomatic intervention by the other European powers represented an abrogation of morality, right and justice, as well as the abandonment of the principles that have underpinned the European concert since the Second World War. What I want to suggest today is a more nuanced picture than that of French isolation amidst European hostility and indifference. Focusing on the period after Sudan, I want to suggest that the French Republic not only mobilized a significant swathe of European public opinion, the press, humanitarian organizations and volunteer organizations, but that the more the war went on, the more the French Republic prioritized these aspects over its military effort. In a real prospect of victory, its aim was to transform the war from a military conflict between two nations into a transnational struggle over the values that defined Europe and the wider world. At the outbreak of the war, France found itself militarily and diplomatically isolated in Europe, largely because of the mistakes and assumptions that had been made by Napoleon the Third Government. And because of the widespread assumption that France would win. In other words, such as Austria and Italy never made good on the positive noises that they made to French diplomats and the preparations for any military intervention were either stood down or never put into place. Meanwhile, Bismarck played upon European suspicions of French expansionism, appealing to the British government by leaking earlier French plans to incorporate Luxembourg and Belgium and secretly promising the Russian government support for its plans to renounce the Black Sea clauses of the 1856 Treaty of Paris. Matters didn't improve after Sudan. France became a republic in the sea of conservative monarchies and empires. European governments saw it as a threat to the existing orders within their own states and empires, stirring up revolutionary elements and rousing nationalist movements. Russian ministers labelled the new French Republic a quote perpetual nightmare, threatening to revive unrest in Poland. But whereas, as Stacy Gullard has argued, Bismarck forstalled European intervention by using rhetoric that appealed to shared norms in international relations, the French government did the very opposite. From the outset, the government of national defence was uncompromising in its rhetoric. Ministers believed that because the French Republic incarnated the universal values of reason, progress and liberty, it projected itself onto a wider international canvas, fighting not for its own national interest, but for the values of an international community. As such, French ministers believed that they had a duty not to compromise or to surrender to German demands. And here we see in the post, particularly on the right, these references to the 1790s and to the Revolutionary Wars. Now, these beliefs of the French Republic were most clearly manifested in the circular by the new foreign minister, Jules Favre, on the 6th of September, 1870. Favre argued that it was, apparently, the third regime, not the French Republic, that was responsible for war, and that since that regime had fallen, Prussia had no right to continue the war or to demand any French territory in the peace terms. To do so, Favre argued, would be in contravention of the European values of humanity, reason and science. In consequence, Favre insisted, France would quote, not seed an inch of its soil, nor a stone of any fortress, end quote. The problem was, of course, that the prevailing view across European governments was that the demand for, as a Moselle, was a legitimate condition of peace, especially as Bismarck framed it in terms of German security. And even Glaston, who opposed territorial annexation without consulting the people, said that the French government were insane, not only to refuse what he described as moderate German terms in late September 1870, but to treat them as a moral outrage and to continue fighting a war that they couldn't win. There was therefore a significant disjuncture between French and European perspectives on the justification for war, as the French government sought to turn the narrative away from the legitimacy of its initial causes to the legitimacy of its conduct and continuation. Now, although none of the other European states intervened militarily or explicitly took size diplomatically, neutrality didn't mean passivity, a lack of interest or powerlessness. As Margeur Ebenhuiz has argued, neutrality was used by major states in the mid to late 19th century as a means of maintaining peace through restraint. Both sides, however, sought to stretch and challenge the meaning of neutrality. Bismarck asked the British and Russian governments to adopt an approach of benevolent neutrality towards Prussia. In the case of Russia, as early as February 1868, Bismarck had assured the Chancellor Gorchakov that he would support the proposed renunciation of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris in exchange for Russia promising to send 100,000 men to the Austrian border to deter Austrian intervention on the French side. In the case of Britain, Bismarck appealed to past alliances against France in the Napoleonic Wars. But as the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville rejected the notion of benevolence as being incompatible with neutrality. As they witnessed the successive German victories, the British, as well as the Italian, the Austrian and even Russian government became increasingly aware that non-intervention was not neutral in its political and military implications. European neutrality served Bismarck's aim of a short, limited war. But despite French efforts to portray non-intervention as a kind of malign neutrality, harmful not just to the European balance but to European civilization, no change of policy ensued. Being unable to persuade European governments to support its cause, it was to European opinion that the French government turned instead. Zufav described the new French administration, the Republican administration, as a government of publicity, whose actions should be conducted openly so that the people might judge its actions hour by hour. Its every decision was therefore closely bound up with the desire to elicit particular responses from the public and thus to stir a moral outrage against the legitimacy of German victory. As the war went on, so the French campaign became less about military or even diplomatic objectives and more about the pursuit of European and global opinion. In their testimonies to the National Assembly inquiry that was held after the war, senior French officials affirmed that the government believed that by offering a vision of defiant resistance, they would earn the respect of Europe. Prolonged suffering, greater losses and even worse peace conditions were a price that they considered worth paying in order to win the war of opinion. Now, one of the greatest hurdles for French ministers was turning international opinion away from viewing France as the aggressor to persuading it that it was the victim. The French government therefore engaged upon an international propaganda campaign to claim that the since the values of the Republic were universal by waging a barbaric war against France. Prussia was really waging a barbaric war against European civilization. When the bombardment of Paris began in early January 1871, Zufrave 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 civilization. Now the French and German governments repeatedly accused each other of reaching the 1864 Geneva Convention, red cross ambulances and voluntary humanitarian relief organizations from 12 neutral countries will witness to the violations. But it was the French allegations that resonated most widely in international opinion. In October 1870 the French government released a list of alleged atrocities that have been committed by the Germans to the international press, provoking horror and outrage in many countries. Zufrave followed this up with a diplomatic circular, tying what he described as Prussia's war of extermination with the wider French narrative of offenses against Republican and universal principles of justice, law and civilization. And this image of this painting was actually done, of course, in 1896, but it was part of this narrative that began during the war of these German violations of these international agreements, Geneva in particular, of German forces targeting civilians and notoriously of course in the episode at Bazin. Now the French narrative had a ready audience thanks to the enormous global appetite for news about the Franco-Porsche war. Episodes such as the alleged Bavarian massacre of French civilians at Bazin gained international notoriety, being splashed across newspaper front pages. As we can see here in the illustrated London news, which shows us this image of the so-called massacre at Bazin, which as it turned out, of course, proved to be rather exaggerated, rather more exaggerated than was the reality. Seasoned war reporters such as William Howard Russell of the Times helped swing public sympathies round to the French side with vivid accounts of the suffering of both French soldiers and civilians. But it was perhaps above all the Prussian siege and bombardment of Paris that horrified international opinion. The Lord Mayor of London launched a public appeal that raised 250,000 francs to pay for food convoys to be sent to Paris as soon as the siege was lifted. And similar efforts were witnessed in Belgium, Russia, Canada, and the United States. In Britain, public meetings were held across the major cities, including Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, in support of the French public. One of the largest was held at Trafalgar Square on the 19th of September, 1870, in which a reported 10 to 20,000 people attended. French Republican rhetoric resonated with nationalist groups in the Balkans and in Poland in particular, many seeing the French campaign as part of a shared international struggle for freedom against tyranny. But as the war went on, international sympathy widened beyond liberal and socialist supporters of the French Republic. French diplomats reported favourable opinion in Austria and Italy, and even in autocratic Russia. The French ambassador reported public and press sympathy towards France's suffering. But it was perhaps above all the mobilisation of international volunteer competence that showed how the French public projected its vision of the war onto a transnational struggle for the values that it claimed to represent. The most famous volunteer was of course the 63 year old veteran combatant Garibaldi, but he was 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. And it wasn't only those who sympathised with Republican values. The French narrative of victimhood and German barbarity resonated more widely, mobilising Catholic and conservative volunteers, such as Ronald McIver from Scotland, who was both a monarchist and a Christian, as well as those who served in the papal's wealth as part of the volunteers of the west, and Ronald McIver is pictured on the right. So as you conclude then, the war began with international sympathy towards pressure against French provocation. After the fall of Napoleon III, the French Republic sought to change international opinion and to shift discourse on the legitimacy of the war away from French responsibility towards arguments about German moral and ethical conduct. The French Republic didn't persuade any European powers to intervene, but through its mobilisation of public opinion, it challenged the moral legitimacy of the German victory. It also helped to transform the Franco-Russian War into a transnational shared experience for many Europeans that played out in the press and in relief efforts and that raised wider questions about the values that defined late 19th century Europe. It helped transform ideas about nationalism, liberalism and humanitarianism, and through its defined rhetoric and resistance, the French Republic also helped mobilise the revolutionary left, resonating through the rise of the Paris Union and in international socialist movements, as I'm sure we'll hear more about later today. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much, Karine. A fabulously rich and interesting paper there. We have 15 minutes for Q&A. I have two questions already in the chat so I'm going to ask one very direct question to Karine to follow up on her paper. And then if anyone else wants to, you know, while you're just getting your ideas going, pop it in the Q&A. I can then gather those for us. So just to start us off, Karine, I thought, you know, this is a wonderfully rich way to kind of round off a panel on politics. And I wondered if you might say something about how then press agencies in particular are transforming this landscape because you were talking about, you know, international opinion and a newspaper suddenly, you know, picking up these ideas. But surely the French have a huge advantage at this juncture in that they have one of the earliest and most developed international press agencies have asked, and the Germans don't yet have an international press agency. And the Gulf is still trying to get going and Bismarck will get that going as a response, I think, to the Franco-Prussian War. So I just wondered how much are their material structures that are helping opinion and news around the world to be shaped in favour of this push towards a larger, as you put it, battle over values or, you know, on French terms. Okay, thanks very much for the question. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. There is an agreement that is made between the two, between the major news agencies just prior to the outbreak of the war to ensure global coverage of the war. So, you know, what we do see, I mean, this is something that we see over the course of the 19th century, of course, the development of war reporting. And of course, this is aided by the new infrastructures, the ability to transmit news through the telegraph and so on. And we now also have, of course, these very experienced war reporters as well. But of course, I think, you know, although, as you say, there is this infrastructure that is in place and, you know, the French on the face of it would seem to be well placed. The problem is, of course, that the international view, the outbreak of the war is very much against the French. You know, we see this, particularly in the British press, that the French are portrayed as being the aggressors that they are responsible for this and, you know, you see this also with some of the senior reporters, the likes of William Howard Russell, who are there, you know, who are reporting, but who are sort of embedded with German forces as well. So there's very much a sense in which the war, that war reporting is very favourable to the German war effort at the beginning of the war. And it's only really later on that it starts to favour the French war efforts and you start to get that greater sympathy emerging for the French. I think it is striking. I mean, some of the other contributors to this conference, I can see the names who've done more research on the press and on this. Well, I'm sure we'll talk about this later today, but you know, it's really quite striking just how enormous the appetite was and just how the news about the Franco-Russian war really became dominant. You see, these figures like something like 60% of global news was about the siege of Paris in the first week of January 1871. So, you know, there was huge interest, not just in France and Germany or even Europe, but globally about the Franco-Russian war. Thank you. We might go to Jim Digerman, if you can unmute yourself. You've got a nice question that kind of opens up the whole panel to think about difference between what we're saying now and what Michael Howard has said in the past about the Franco-Russian war. Can you unmute yourself? Yes. Thank you. I wanted to get a sense from the panel of how they feel the perceptions of the military balance. These are the Germany and France have changed in our perspectives because I don't have to tell an audience like this or the panel that we've had, you know, a huge amount of of work going on for 60 or 70 years, which Michael Howard, of course, was very important in contributing to. But how do you see the perceptions and misperceptions of the military balance between each power? That is, could we win a war, not win a war? What could we succeed in doing and not succeed in doing? How is it new in what you see from now, as opposed to what Howard wrote 60 years ago? Perhaps speakers, you can just unmute yourself as you'd like to enter and comment on that if anyone would like to respond to that. Otherwise, please, speakers, you know, turn your cameras on. I don't want to miss you. The other option is for me to ask a direct question and you keep mulling that over in your head. Oliver, switch it on. Go for it, Oliver. I don't think really I'm the most indicated to answer this question. Perhaps Jeffrey would be far more precise than me, but just one point. One of the most valuable and interesting direction in the last research is, to me, now is the comparative approach in order to assess the quality and efficiency of general staffs on both sides of this war. And especially the way French officers were trained and recruited and used in this war by the generals, by the high command. And I think that here we have really space of a new, a new direction, new approaches in order to perhaps more accurately understand the very reasons of French underperformance. It is really the word here underperformance during this war. So I would say something new, perhaps, is this comparative approach pointing to or focused on the comparative performance of general staffs. I would say it, and perhaps that would, that would lead us to view French officers not as bad as they are sometimes depicted in the history of this war. It's perhaps a matter of balance, but well, I'm interested in this in this subject, in order to answer the question. Yes, I should say something about the Prussian army. The Prussian army was quite self confident army when the war broke out, perhaps you can imagine that because they won against Denmark okay that was not the biggest war they ever waged but they were beating Austria in 1866 and they went through a quite rigorous army reform in the 1860s with what was conducted by King William and the war minister, and this this reform saw a reorganization of the army in its strength and enlargement of the army. Together with the reform, the army head and the victorious wars in the recent past, the Prussians went to the Franco-Prussian war rather as a self confident army because the German or the Prussian general staff system obviously worked very well. Please, Oliver, you wanted to jump back in. I don't want to take the turn off perhaps carrying or someone else. I'm carrying back in after this. Yeah. Okay, just one perhaps one last point. I must confess. For this question. I find really fascinating, the question of, you know, the balance between the colonial military experience or pre-colonial military experience of France at this time and also French armies during this high intensity war at the center of Europe, that is, is what is explanation for French underperformance during the war, of course, the quality of the high command, of course, the perhaps relationships between civil, military and military decision makers and I found really the presentation of Christophe really insightful and really interesting from this point of view. But there is another question here that leads us and it is, it is really modern. It is a question for France as for now, in our time, the balance between high intensity skills at war and expeditionary culture, colonial culture, for example, operations in Africa at this time in Mexico and so on. What is the relationship between this quite mixed operational culture and the performance of French armies during the war? But that's a very modern question. And I think that it is one of the reasons that can lead us to consider the Franco-German war as a very, very interesting war for our time if we try to assess it from our point of view. Thank you. Karine, did you want to address that? Just to just very briefly, I mean, I think that's a really good question and actually, I think probably like everybody, all the speakers, you know, I still go back to Michael Howard's book and I think it's still, you know, really, you know, it has done the test of time. The more recent research has really drawn attention in particular to the ways in which we understand the role of irregular combatants and there's been a lot of really interesting research as well in recent years that has been done on the debates about the conduct of the war, and in particular the debates about the way the war was conducted in terms of the kind of rules of war and humanitarian ideas and international law and what isn't acceptable in the way that the war was conducted. And in particular this debate about to what extent the Germans were, you know, sort of conducting war in a way that was somehow breaching these international laws and this was particularly the French narrative. And there's been a lot of work re-assessing that and in particular linking that in with the way that the First World War has been understood and particularly the stories of the atrocities in 1914. So I think, you know, we can connect developments in the scholarship on the Franco-Prussian war with the developments in the scholarship on the First World War as well. Absolutely. I'm going to bring Philip Median, who has a question for Christoph, because it develops quite nicely on Oliver's response to these questions. Oliver said, you know, one way to think about this and push it forward is to think comparatively. Philip has a comparative question for Christoph. Do you want to unmute, Philip? Hello. We can hear you. We can hear you, Philip, if you want to ask your question. Philip, if you can't hear me, I'll, I can ask the question. I'll just give him one more second to have a go. Okay, I'll ask the question. Hello. I don't know how to re-mute, Philip. Christoph, Philip asks, in Bismarck's blurring an overlap of a military civil authority. And I'll just keep reading the question and the public's own conflation of these two areas. Did this not also occur with France during the war itself, this civil military overlap? What does Dr Neubull see as distinctly and singularly Bismarckian in the way the German Chancellor transgressed the civil military divide during the war? Thank you for this interesting question. I think there is some kind of intermingling between the military and the civil sphere in France as well. This actually appears to the Napoleonic Age when Napoleon, of course, went to the public in uniform dressed in uniform because he, as the Prussian King Wilhelm I, commanded the political and the military sphere. And later this changed a bit and at the same time the military was in again and I mean the government of National Defense and General Trohu. He was leading the government but at the same time was general and he was the commander of the city of Paris. You have this overlap of the both tiers again, but if you consider the iconography of the French government, how it represented itself, you can see them appearing mostly in civil clothes and not in uniform. So, and the government of National Defense draws a distinction here between governmental duties and military duties. Whereas Bismarck regularly performs in uniform because he followed some somewhat prussian court regulations. So, perhaps this was not Bismarck's choice to deliberately to wear uniform, but he had to and he made use of that. And I think, well, the Bismarckian aspect here, perhaps less Bismarck, well, yes his power attitude is very Bismarckian. So it's claim for power is enormous authority within the Prussian Triangle. This is Bismarckian, but the structure is not, has not been made by Bismarck because he found the structure in 1862 when he became Prussian Minister President. And he claimed to the structure and he never attempted to change it. So the army was very strong in Prussia and he never tried to, well, some kind of delegitimize or keep the army far from power. So, what I want to say is, yes, there is some kind of idea Bismarck had while performing his duties. But on the other hand, he worked in this particular Prussian governmental structure. Great, thank you very much. Unfortunately, I think we need to leave it there. We've got a whole host of questions that are still that we're going to have to leave. Suffice to say the kind of the direction of the questions seem to be pushing towards this comparative or thinking about the international identification. So I'm very much picking up on comments all speakers have made and, you know, with those ending comments from Karine in trying to make a step back and think internationally about this. So I'll hand it over to Michael who will tell us what's next. Thanks. Thanks very much Anna for sharing so wonderfully poorly and efficiently not being thrown by anything and thanks you know above all to our four panelists, I think all the papers kind of gelled and spoke to each other so they're individually good but also more than the sum of their parts. So now we have half an hour or so so we'll be reconvening at 11 o'clock the panel to Franco Prussian one of forging a modern France, which will be chaired by Dr Tavita a la quah. So, yeah, we've got time for some coffee or if you're on the Eastern sea would be United States. Frigerade I guess might be in order now. So, um, thanks very much.