The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune
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| Napoleon III |
Napoleon , uncle to Napoleon III, attributed his successes to the fact that every French private knew each carried within his knapsack a Field Marshall's insignia, depending upon performance alone. With the exception of those 10 years, the French Officer Corps has always had something at its core which was irreparably rotting. The Franco-Prussian War was no exception.
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| Honore Daumier: "The Military Heirarchy" |
Having overthrown the Bourbon king which the monarchs of Europe had thrust upon them after Napoleon's defeat, the French hoped the Empires of Europe would find acceptable the compromise of the Pretender, the Duke of Orleans, Louis Phillippe. In 1848, all of Europe was seething with revolt, and Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon, subsequently seized power, bloodily suppressed the workers organizations and the national legislature, and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. He invaded Germany, Russia (with Britain in the Crimean War) Italy, and even Mexico, opposed by Benito Juarez, whose family was sheltered at the White House by Abe Lincoln and who was supported as ably as Lincoln could with the U.S. plunged into a desperate civil war by the slavers. Click here for the text of Lincoln's speech in defense of Mexico, as early as the Mexican War
Napoleon III invaded Bismark's Prussia after the latter defeated Denmark and then Austria. The Prussians crushed the French army decisively and the French government and army then collaborated with the Prussians just as they did later with Hitler, to permit the occupation of northern France. The people of Paris, through the municipal government known as the Commune, resisted and the French army, with the encouragement of the Prussians, turned on them, executing 30,000 Parisians and imprisoning and exiling many thousands more.
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| Manet's painting of the massacres. Manet was involved in the Paris Commune. |
Americans, at first sympathetic with the Prussians because of Napoleon III's schemes, ultimately came to side with the Parisians, as did most of the world. Not only Julia Ward Howe but Clara Barton and Mark Twain were appalled at the carnage.
| Mark Twain's Map of the 'Siege of Paris |
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Twain created the map during one of the "blackest, the gloomiest, the most wretched" periods of his life, when he saw his fragile young wife, pregnant with their first child, increasingly debilitated and exhausted as she came to terms with the illness of a dear friend dying of typhoid in the Clemens house. Clemens's own mood alternated from "deep melancholy to half insane tempests and cyclones of humor." During one of those "spasms of humorous possession," he got a board and with a jackknife carved a "crude and absurd" map of Paris under siege, parodying the current newspaper coverage of the Franco-Prussian War. The map was printed in reverse, comical evidence of the amateur engraver's ineptness. Although its humor seems faint now, the map was wildly popular in 1870 and many times reprinted. It appeared as a fold-out in the Galaxy magazine in November 1870.
Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote to him: "I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished severely."
The "Official Commendations," which accompany the map, are its chief charm. They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:
My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But, sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her. She has nothing but convulsions now.
The "Map of Paris" found its way to Berlin, where the American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be present. Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch results. The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of everybody.
The outrage at the crimes of the French government, and the subsequent territorial and financial exactions of the Prussians, set the stage for WWI, and that in turn for WWII. Years later, the French Officers' Corps would try to blame its own culpability and incompetence during the period upon the Jewish citizenry of France, in the famous Dreyfus case.