Bismarck's War by Rachel Chrastil

Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe
by Rachel Chrastil
Basic Books 2023

Rachel Chrastil, professor of history at Xavier University in Cincinnati, starts her new book about the Franco-Prussian War by reminding her readers that size isn't everything. Although the war lasted only about seven months, from the summer of 1870 to the beginning of 1871, two million soldiers were mobilized, and over 180,000 died. As Chrastil points out at the beginning of her terrific new book Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe, this was the largest Western military conflict between Waterloo and the First World War, and although it obviously didn't originate the horrors of warfare, much less the mechanized nightmares of the 20th century's world wars, Chrastil argues that the Franco-Prussian War “made them more thinkable.” “During the war,” she writes, “it was possible to imagine civilians as the direct targets of bombardment and to see them as national enemies who must be identified by the state and forcibly removed.”

Bismarck's War retells the story of the men and motives of the conflict, a story that received a definitive military history back in 1961 with Michael Howard's The Franco-Prussian War, and despite it's title, Chrastil's book is mostly only haunted by Prussia's animating spirt, Otto von Bismarck, rather than inhabited by him. French Emperor Napoleon III and Prussia's King Wilhelm I are far more prominent in these pages, as is the elephantine Chief of the Prussian General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, forever being forced to adapt to the monstrous demands of modern warfare. “The state still required short wars, and short wars required taking the offensive,” Chrastil observes. “Yet increased firepower meant that the defence would prevail. Moltke responded to this challenge with flank attacks at the operational level.”

Despite its brevity, the war's witnesses felt like lasted forever, and Chrastil manages the adroit magic of conveying that feeling without making readers endure a slog. Bismarck's War is a brisk, invigoratingly intelligent read, full of the colorful personalities that governed the war but also full of the million anonymous civilian sufferers on French soil, as one city after another – Mezieres, Rocroy, Peronne, Longwy – fell to brutal German onslaught:

For many, the war dragged on with seemingly endless monotony. Yet in a short span of days in mid-January, a series of emotional dramas unfolded in a constellation of specific localities that brought the war to a climax. From a tiny western village to the streets of Paris to a mountain pass on the Swiss border, the war between France and the German states sounded its final, terrible toll.

At the start of 1871, in a dismal preview of World War I, things looked locked in place: “the French refused to admit they would have to accept a loss of territory, and the Germans would not negotiate anything less.” When the collapse into peace finally came, it seemed to surprise its own architects.

“This was not a war of angels,” Chrastil writes. “It featured nationalistic tribalism, poor leadership, unnecessary physical hardship, and spirals of violence that unfolded across the course of the entire conflict.” Bismarck's War tells this grim story with superb narrative energy – and one eye cocked at the gigantic horrors just over the horizon.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.