Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe
£24.50£28.50 (-14%)
‘Compassionate and thought-provoking history’ Daily Telegraph
‘Superb on the human consequences of war, ravishing in its evocations of wartime life’ The Times
‘Fresh and compelling … a tour-de-force’ David A. Bell
Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe’s pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. Pushing aside further French resistance, a new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.
Bismarck’s War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century.
Drawing on a remarkable variety of sources, Chrastil’s book explores the military, technological, political and social events of the war, its human cost and the way that the sheer ferocity of war, however successful, has profound consequences for both victors and victims.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Allen Lane (1 Jun. 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 512 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0241419190 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0241419199 |
| Dimensions | 16.5 x 3.2 x 24.2 cm |
by MysteronMan
Great detail, excellent writing and full of cultural and human stories that helped explain the intricacies of this oft-forgotten war.
by indomir
Thought this was a fairly pedestrian account of what should have been a more gripping story. The lack of decent maps to accompany the text, if you are going to describe individual battles, has been mentioned in another review, while the contributions of some individuals are well done, the main characters – Moltke, Bismarck, Napoleon et al – are merely shadows with little effort to sketch them in and which might have added more colour to the narrative. The same lack of back story to the conflict itself was also a bit disconcerting and a missed opportunity to engage a reader coming fresh to the conflict.
by Mark Pack
Impressively comprehensive and authoritative, this book takes a close up look at the full war – focusing on the impact on individuals and giving the stretch of war after the battle of Sedan a full treatment.
The book’s strength is its focus on ordinary people caught up in the events, and you’ll come away from the book learning more about, for example, an individual officer such as Dietrich von Lassberg than about the famous international figures such as Otto von Bismarck.
Where this focus can be a limitation is in explaining ‘why?’, such as the point at which the book briefly tells us how poor a French military plan was, but that it was at least better than the alternatives. Yet its weakness is not deconstructed and what those alternatives may have been – and their weaknesses – is left to the reader to guess. But then no one book can do everything.
by K. Helme
I read the hardback which was provided with lots of drawings from various events depicted, and which also had a few maps at the front. I’ll deal with the bad bits first. None of the pictured were captioned and didn’t really add much. The maps were uniformly worse than useless. Great swathes of emptiness with no context or reason provided. The only way you could make sense of the book was to have google maps open all the time – because there was a fair amount of description of battles and the movement of troops. The book covers the military involvement of both sides in some detail but also describes how the are affected (for the most part) ordinary French people caught up in the war (which apart from a skirmish at the beginning took place wholly on French soil. The events are well described and provides a good sense of some the politics of the war itself. It falls down (I was unsure whether to give it 3 or 4 stars) in a few places: There is very little about Bismarck, or about his involvement in “his war”, and my sense after having read it is that most of the narrative is really about the French and how they responded to the events. Obviously the German army is dealt with but it felt to be more about the French than the Germans. Secondly, the aftermath in Paris of the siege – the Commune – is mentioned but is cut very short; the involvement in and response to the war by other European countries is not dealt with in much detail at all, and that would have been interesting. I think expanding the book would have been useful, but that is evidently not the book the author set out to write. But for its scope it can be recommended, in spite of its containing no usable maps.
by G. Henry
I had to give up on the audible version after the introduction. The narration is dreadful, pointless emphasis at the end of every sentence. Better suited to a children’s adventure.