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.