by Simon Winder
We tend to think of the post-Waterloo nineteenth century as remarkably rational and peaceful in relation to later Armageddons. But this is all relative, and in its middle decades the century was flaky, violent and chaotic with dynasties and ancient polities crashing to pieces all over the place. Largely for technological and accidental reasons, wars tended to be short, but they were murderous nonetheless and led to huge changes. I am writing this in 2017. If you were to take the twenty-five-year-period 1846–1871 and track back the same number of years from the present it would take you to 1992. In that time within Europe the only serious fighting occurred in Bosnia and Kosovo and, more recently, in eastern Ukraine – each of these being essentially civil conflicts with external stirrers. 1846–1871 – the period not coincidentally of Napoleon III’s regime in France – saw civil wars, revolutions and major inter-state conflicts in and between almost everyone. It would take most of a page just to list the conflicts. Even Switzerland cracked – with the brief Sonderbund War of 1847 creating the modern, federal state and ending the archaic loose alliances between cantons. And this is to exclude such global convulsions as the American Civil War, the Indian Mutiny, the Second Opium War, French involvement in Mexico and the ‘Black Ships’ action in Japan, to name but a few. Almost the only major European state that did not see its integrity directly threatened was Britain – but even the British spent the whole period in anxious defensiveness, pouring money into gigantic new ironclad battleships, and the charming, charismatic sea-forts that still dot the coast off Portsmouth, and worrying about the defence of Canada. The French never attacked Britain and the Americans never attacked Canada – but this was only because they both wound up having other things to do.
The Lord of Misrule at the heart of so much of this was Napoleon III. Most of my adult life I have worshipped Émile Zola’s novels excoriating his regime. Indeed I am proud to have spent my early years in the south London suburb of Norwood, where Zola spent his post-J’Accuse exile. It may be because of spending too much time reading such wonder-works as Nana, Pot Luck and The Kill but whenever the words ‘Napoleon III’ come up, my free-association mental response is always ‘poor sexual hygiene’. This was obviously Zola’s intention, but it is not helped by the spread of photography in the period, which particularly puts prominent Parisian men in a very poor light: with their bellies, their trousers that look as though they were changed only seasonally, their dirty-looking whiskers and such gruesome characters as Napoleon’s venal cousin ‘Plon-Plon’. It must have been a horrific period for women.
But moving back to a more politico-military level, the curiosity of the period was that five European kingdoms or empires – Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia – were comparably strong, assertive and wedded to violence. Indeed, the principal non-court expenditure of the state was on fortifications, troops, ships and weapons. Britain and Russia had substantially avoided the 1848 revolutions (although the latter helped Austria crush the Hungarians), while Austria and Prussia had retained their regimes through their military men and still owed their legitimacy and romance to their roles in the destruction of the Napoleonic Empire. Usually European history’s instability seems to stem from one out-of-control monster being brought down by a coalition of smaller states – but it turns out that even in the mid-nineteenth century, with a fair balance of power between five major states, there was still no peace.
Napoleon III was a quintessentially Lotharingian figure. He was the nephew of the real Napoleon and the son of Napoleon’s brother King Louis of the Netherlands – although recent DNA tests on their blood show that in fact Louis was not his biological father, explaining why Napoleon III always suffered from the awkward problem of not looking even faintly Napoleonic. Fuelled by the – as it proved – mistaken belief that he was born carrying the Flag of Greatness, Napoleon flitted around the edge of France, lurking in Switzerland or England and engaging in two comic coups – one fiasco in Strasbourg and one even worse in Boulogne, featuring a paddle-steamer, a tame vulture pretending to be an Imperial eagle and the effortless arrest of everyone involved as they struggled ashore in heavy surf. In the wake of the 1848 revolutions he was able to use the Napoleonic aura to become voted president of the new French republic and then through a ‘self-coup’ organize an upgrade to emperor in 1852.
The adventures of the Second Empire are too numerous for this book, but Napoleon’s odd form of activist liberal imperialism sent French troops all over the world, with results both incoherent and lasting. He was crucial in destroying Austrian rule over northern Italy and therefore in creating the Kingdom of Italy from what had always been before a jumble of smaller states. In return for his military role, the Kingdom of Piedmont, the initiator of Italian unity, handed over to France the ancient territories of Savoy south of Lake Geneva as well as the County of Nice (Nizza). As the King of Piedmont now became king of the whole of Italy this was a relatively minor swap for him, but a major addition for France. In the later twentieth century Savoy made France into a major winter-sports destination and gave it control over Evian mineral water – two unanticipated pluses. The name-that-fails-to-rise-to-the-occasion peak of Monte Bianco became the no-less-flat Mont Blanc. Some local cafe chat about how it might have made more sense for Savoy to join the Swiss Federation was rapidly quashed by French troops. Evian aside, it had the unfortunate effect of making Britain again absolutely hostile to France – the British seeing Napoleon now not as the quixotic liberal supporter of Italian unification over Austria’s fossil obscurantism, but as an acquisitive adventurer in the same mould as his uncle.
The 1848 revolutions and the Italian wars, combined with extensive colonial activity, made all borders seem up for grabs and Napoleon III was central to this sense of the tree being shaken to see what fell out. While blithely interfering in Mexico and sending soldiers to Asia, Napoleon had unfortunately failed fully to take on board the significance of Otto von Bismarck, who became Minister President of Prussia in 1862. With a strange, devastating confidence, Bismarck spent nine years wrecking all opposition and creating the German Empire. There were many secrets to his success, but at the core was his willingness to wait – he would have been just as happy creating a new Germany under Prussian rule, say, ten years later than he did. He could feel the crazily expanding strength of industry, the growth of nationalism and the pliability of his opponents and I am compelled to admire his sheer ability, even if the result was ruinous. But then, given the generalized nationalist hysteria of the period, as much in evidence in the United States as in the United Kingdom, it is very hard to imagine a future in which Germany was not united.
Luxembourg exists today because it was felt in 1867 that it was not important enough to fight over. It had the strange status of being a grand duchy ruled in a personal capacity by William III, King of the Netherlands, but also being part of the German Confederation – indeed Luxembourg City’s vast, gnarled defences had been further upgraded to make it a key Confederal fortress for penning in France.
It is hard not to see the rulers of the various European states at this moment as a group of only feebly reformed alcoholics being presented with a tinkling, wheeled trolley of rainbow-hued liqueur miniatures. They knew how their grandfathers were bamboozled by Napoleon I into various forms of fake cooperation which allowed them to grab this, that and the other and then in the end be humiliated and destroyed: and yet, with shaking hand, they nonetheless reach for that glowing little bottle of Chartreuse. Much of this temptation was played out in colonial contexts: it was routine in the 1850s and 1860s to come up with all kinds of swaps, nods and winks. Some of these did indeed work out – for example, the creation of Italy. But hardly a month went by without Vienna being offered Romania or Silesia, or Prussia nodding at France to get Luxembourg.
The great catastrophe for Napoleon III was the very violent but extremely short war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, which in a few weeks made clear what had been beforehand genuinely up in the air: that Prussia was mor
e powerful and would now indeed be the dominant European state. Napoleon (like all the other European leaders) had enjoyed the tension between Berlin and Vienna as it allowed everyone to be played off against everyone else. The overnight reduction of the great Habsburg monarchy to a zombie underling of the Hohenzollerns – incapable (as it proved) of further independent action until it destroyed them both through declaring war on Serbia in 1914 – made post-1866 Europe a fundamentally new place. It was not helped by Napoleon III’s regime being so personal that, with his only son a child (‘Lou-Lou’), the regime leant too heavily on the energy of the increasingly puffy, soiled-looking and exhausted figure at its helm.
In the aftermath of the 1866 war Prussia scooped up all the remaining independent German states north of the River Main, marching into the Free City of Frankfurt (the mayor shot himself), the Kingdom of Hanover and the Electorate of Hesse. This left France with only a handful of very cowed southern German allies – most importantly Baden and Bavaria. In a pathetic attempt to regain the initiative Napoleon bribed the gigantic and very unpleasant William III of the Netherlands via his mistress to see if he would be willing to cough up Luxembourg. Bismarck secretly winked at this, although there are arguments both ways: that he wanted to let Napoleon have a minor fillip to cheer him up, or he wanted to trap him and then destroy him by riding to Luxembourg’s rescue. William decided that a necessary preliminary was, wearing his Confederal Luxembourg hat, to ask Prussia. The news of this discussion caused a huge surge of German fervour, beyond Bismarck’s ability to control. It showed very clearly the passions which would now have to be dealt with. The fury at the idea of Luxembourg becoming part of France was felt even in notionally pro-French places such as Baden. At a conference held in London in 1867 Luxembourg had its personal link with the King of the Netherlands confirmed and was made neutral (confirmed by all the powers except Belgium, which could not sign because it was itself neutral and a sort of ‘ward of court’). The Prussian garrison had to leave and the city’s fortifications be dismantled so it could not be seized and used in any future conflict. This decision meant that over the following years Luxembourg was probably the world’s largest building site as some fifteen miles of underground defences and ten acres of fortresses were taken down. The upside of this for Luxembourg was that many of these defence works, once cleared, made superb terraces for growing roses, a surprise new area of specialization, which meant that by 1914 Luxembourg was exporting some six million rose bushes a year.
Things would prove a lot less rosy for Napoleon. At the end of Zola’s Nana, in one of the greatest scenes in nineteenth-century French fiction, Nana, the dazzling prostitute who had stood at the pinnacle of Napoleon III’s Paris, is dying in horrible agony, diseased and impoverished. None of her notional friends and protectors notice, as they all look out agog at the frenzied crowds marching through the streets of Paris, yelling: ‘To Berlin! To Berlin!’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Kilometre pigs » French exiles » Metz and the nationalist frontline » Expanses of baize » Bullets, tusks and rubber » Rays and masks
Kilometre pigs
Vauban’s great citadel for defending the newly acquired French city of Arras never had a starring role, managing to survive as a major military facility from 1672 to 2010 with only a few moments of direct threat. At the beginning of the First World War a small group of Germans reached it, defaced some of the prettier fittings, had their photos taken in the officers’ lounge and then retreated. Part of the vast complex was used as a German prison in the Second World War and there is a monument to 218 individuals from across Europe who were executed there.
Given that it was only evacuated by the French military in 2010 you would like to feel that the sounds of marching boots and sergeants’ shouts could still be heard on the wind, but this would be untrue. The parade ground looks like a car park manqué, too remote from the town centre to fill even this role. Almost the only notable building is an extremely battered chapel. It was decommissioned during the Revolution and patched back together by Napoleon III. The crumbling facade is meant to feature facing carved profiles of Louis XIV and Napoleon III, but the former is badly worn and the latter carefully chipped off. Inside there is an unbearable monument to the many thousands of engineering troops stationed at Arras who were killed during the Great War. There are grander and more lurid monuments but nowhere else I think gives more of a sense both of the out-of-control nightmare of France’s war and of how long ago this was – a building that must have been for many years a serious focus for countless regimental and family pilgrimages now just seems chilly and abandoned.
At the back of the chapel there is a set of slate tablets put up in 1875 listing troops from the Arras garrison killed during the Franco-Prussian War. There are a number scattered across the epochal battles of Spicheren, Le Mans, Sedan; the sieges of Metz, Bitche and Belfort; a surprisingly large number in putting down the resultant ‘Paris insurrection’. What struck me was that, like all such French monuments put up after the fighting had ended (fighting which in total killed or wounded some 280,000 Frenchmen) it does not use our term (the ‘Franco-Prussian War’) but calls it instead simply ‘the war against Germany’.
Many of the wars of the mid-nineteenth century still have a somewhat decorative quality, however horrible in practice, as they either settled an issue (Italian unification; Austrian subservience to Prussia) or settled nothing (the Crimea). They are remembered in brightly coloured, dramatic paintings, made with advice from retired officers over precise details of sashes, shakos, swords and regimental buttons. The ‘war against Germany’, however, moved all this along, and was the founding disaster of the modern era. Over the years I think I must have read every account that has been published in English and indeed read one three times – perhaps in the weird hope that it might come out different, but of course it never does.
Napoleon III’s army was widely viewed as the best in Europe, but while it had fought around the world, the regime had never used it in a context where France itself might be endangered. Even during the wars in Italy, it seemed inconceivable that a serious defeat might result in an Austrian army marching vengefully on Antibes – a peace treaty of a traditional kind would be arranged and life would continue as normal. Prussia’s brief and devastating war with Austria in 1866 horrified Napoleon, whose whole reign was based on the pleasures of patronizing Berlin and playing Vienna and the non-aligned German states off against one another. Suddenly most of Germany was united with Prussia, and Austria went into a state of catatonia. Until that moment Prussia was widely derided, not having fought anyone serious since 1815.
It is hard to imagine this now, but there was widespread contempt for Prussia across the Rhineland, where the substantially Catholic population saw little value in their Prussian masters – which was not to say that this meant they would welcome French rule. France was far larger than Prussia; Paris was twice the size of Berlin and Napoleon III ruled over a global empire, from Martinique to Saigon. The war of 1866 forced all Europeans to think very quickly about how to react to Bismarck’s new, very big Prussia. The still independent southern German states (Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria) which had once been comfortably supported by Austria suddenly found themselves feeling too small. But they also felt swept up, despite themselves, in the excitement of German unity and agreed to various Prussian military proposals that defanged them as opponents, in a context where their fangs were in any event not much to write home about.
The pace of change swamped Napoleon’s regime. It went from being Europe’s premier state to friendless and crumbling overnight. As recently as the early 1860s one of the triumphs of France’s Rhineland policy had come to fruition with the completion of the great bridge across the Rhine linking Alsace and Baden – a wonderful Gothic confection, like a chunk of cathedral, first snapped in half to make the two bridge-towers and then pulled apart like taffy to create its central span. Baden became a genuine neighbour of France and numerous Badenese worked
in Strasbourg, a trend which naturally continued once Strasbourg became Straßburg in 1871. The bridge was blown up by French troops in 1940.
Bismarck realized that Napoleon needed to be tricked into war and defeated if Prussia was to complete German unification. He enjoyed this very much, investing in a Swiss railway because he knew it would annoy Napoleon and having scurrilous, vague conversations with nothing written down urging him to grab Belgium. Napoleon had thought that just as he supported Italian unification and got Savoy and Nice in return, he could be benign about German unification and gain perhaps the Saar and Bavarian Palatinate. But Prussia defeated Austria too quickly – and in any event had no intention of giving France anything. There was a particularly pathetic scene in September 1868 when Napoleon was having dinner with his officers and deliberately served Rhine wines, just so that he could say: ‘Gentlemen, I hope that you yourselves will shortly be harvesting this wine.’ As skittish and aggressive proposals leaked from Paris around the futures of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Rhine, potentially helpful countries such as Britain came to see France as out of control and Prussia as thoughtful and statesmanlike, even though Bismarck was effectively goading and making fun of Napoleon, sure that sooner or later he would do something stupid.
Eventually a row over who should become the King of Spain (in itself a sort of Looney Tunes version of the big-screen epic The War of the Spanish Succession) resulted in a conflict which had become viewed by both sides as inevitable. The result was shameful. Napoleon’s regime was much more successful than his uncle’s (it lasted seven years longer) and defined itself by its constrained but real liberalism, its modernity and its devotion to its army. Incredibly, there were, after years of huffing and puffing, no actual plans to invade the North German Confederation, admittedly quite tricky because its border was mostly masked by Belgium and by independent Baden. There was a tentative nudge over the border into Saarbrücken (a very similar, equally pitiful move was made in 1939) during which ‘Lou-Lou’ fired a cannon for the first time (there is still a commemorative marker stone), presumably much to the delight of his cousin ‘Plon-Plon’. But otherwise Napoleon III’s generals all seemed paralysed – as though the weight of historical expectation was too much and the shadow of the real Napoleon too vast. The actual fighting was ‘boring’ in as much as the French generals allowed themselves to be herded like sheep. Britain had made it clear that Belgian and Luxembourgeois neutrality was serious and would be defended and this, combined with Swiss neutrality, should have provided France – once it had decided not to invade anyone – with an attractively clear and straightforwardly framed theatre to defend. The French rifle was much better than the Prussian and this was the opportunity to unveil the ultimate secret weapon, the machine gun, or ‘hell machine’ as the Prussians called it. Unfortunately the latter, while horrible, could not be moved from side to side as it would in 1914 so it tended to pointlessly hit one unfortunate Prussian thirty times rather sweep the front.
