The Franco-Prussian war changed the map of Europe – so why are we so ignorant about it?

Is there a single major European conflict of the past 200 years that gets so little attention in this country as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71? In 1961 Michael Howard brought out his history of the war, but Howard and the odd battlefield tourist apart, Rachel Chrastil’s bibliography – strong on contemporary memoirs, strong in fact on everything from the miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary and the cult of St Radegund to the transmission of smallpox – is curiously thin when it comes to British interest.

There may be simple enough reasons for this – among them, Britain’s determined neutrality and the infinitely worse conflicts to come – but none that can detract from the significance of a war that changed the map of Europe and helped seed the horrors of the following century. As Chrastil puts it:

The war of 1870, with its large-scale, mechanised warfare that swept civilians up in a nationalistic conflict, anticipated the motivations, the assumptions and the emotional underpinnings of later conflicts. The line from Sedan to the Western Front was never a predetermined path, and still less complete are the linkages between 1870 and Vichy and National Socialism; yet the Franco-Prussian War provides a bridge between the Napoleonic Wars to the two world wars.

It might seems strange to call it ‘Bismarck’s War’ when it was the French who started it, but Bismarck himself would have had no qualms in claiming the credit. It would perhaps be more accurate – if less punchy – to have called it ‘Bismarck’s Third War’, because 1870 was just the culmination of a decade of diplomacy and wars – against Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866 – that the supreme bully genius of 19th-century politics had exploited to create a united German empire with an authoritarian, militaristic Prussia at its heart.