[catches up]
This is compelling stuff - today especially. I just hope things work out better than 100 years ago (I almost wrote “I hope people are more sensible than 100 years ago” but I know that’s not true …)
Already two days on this cliffhanger… the suspense is killing me! Why couldn’t Poincaré just use a private jet?
(Excellent thread, triggercut!)
July 19th or 20th, President Poincare arrives at the Tsar’s palace in St. Petersburg. It isn’t known clearly whether Poincare had much intention of discussing what a few newspapers in Germany and Austria were calling “The July Crisis” or not when he boarded his ship. When he got there, it’s fairly clear that his ambassador, Monsieur Paleologue only wants to discuss it, and has put it on the agenda.
Meanwhile, Berlin is starting to get itchy. Herr Bethmann-Holweig (he’s the German foreign minister) has returned from his outing, and can’t help but notice that Austria hasn’t done anything with the “Blank Check” they were issued. He starts getting nervous about that.
Unfortunately, from here on out he–and everyone else in Europe–isn’t going to hear much from Vienna. As bumptious as Conrad and Berchtold are, they are wily about one thing. If they tell anyone–including their ally and protector Germany–anything about what they’re going to do, it’s more likely they’ll be told not to do it. And so they’re in full “better to ask forgiveness than permission” status. They’re bunkered up. Wire after wire arrives from Germany. None are responded to. When Austria issues their ultimatum, it’ll be like a big Christmas In July surprise present for all European heads of state! Wee!
At this point, I think it prudent to take a brief interlude on Germany, since it’ll be important to understand in the next 12 days why they’re sort of everybody’s European asshole in all this.
Some of this may be old news to a lot of you, so…hopefully it’ll be accurate enough and moderately entertaining!
OK. Germany wasn’t always Germany. You fire up a game of EU3 or EU4, you’ll see that what makes up modern Germany used to be dozens of smaller duchies, principalities, tiny kingdoms, and the like. One of these–Prussia–began to assert themselves as a power to be reckoned with. Frederick The Great. Napoleonic wars. That kinda stuff.
Thing is…the Prussians really weren’t Prussian. They were a royal family called the Hohenzollerns, and they were actually from a German-speaking territory–the Margravate of Brandenburg. (When you’re playing EU4 and you run into the armies of this small central European territory called “Brandenburg” and they kick your ass, now you know why that happened.) For reasons of getting their royalty recognized, they had to sort of align themselves with this fairly nondescript principality called Prussia, and forever more they’d be known as the Prussians.
Still with me?
Earlier in this thread, I mentioned that Prussia really didn’t have any designs on a bunch of territory when Europe redrew its map at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. After revolutions swept through Europe in 1848, though, Prussia started thinking hard about German unification. By the 1860s, the chancellor of Prussia, Otto Von Bismarck, was making that happen. With quick victories over Denmark (sorry Razgon!) and Austria, Prussia began to become this giant, Germanic Katamari, absorbing all those little German-speaking kingdoms and duchies in north central Europe.
And so that brings us to 1870. When you fire up a game of Civ, one of the leaders you can play is Otto Von Bismarck. The reason for that is mostly for what he pulled off that year, against the hapless French. Prussia had absorbed enough territory into their unification plan that they were now starting to consider themselves as a new country. Work needed to be done though. There were these pesky little independent Germanic kingdoms in the south and west of the unified areas of greater Prussia (Bavaria, Wurttemburg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt if you’re curious). Bismarck recognized them as strategically important and wanted them. Had to have them. To get them, Bismarck cooked up perhaps the most brilliant, devious, amazing, devilish, machiavellian, and audacious piece of diplomacy in modern times.
Bismarck figured “What circumstances would get these independent lands to join our unified Germanic country voluntarily?” Well…what if they were in danger of being in the middle of a war and invaded by France? That might do it, right? Thing is, you gotta get France to attack you to make that work.
About that time, Spain was having a bit of a mild succession crisis, and wouldn’t you know it, the Hohenzollern monarch–Wilhelm I–had a very tenuous, small claim (it was the sort of claim that most highly placed royals would have never pressed.) Bismarck decided to press it. France–with Spain on one border and agitated by this suddenly large, unifying county on another, was horrified. Add to that that Wilhelm was, like all Prussians, a protestant…well, that just wouldn’t do. Bismarck kept pushing, kept outraging the French and Emperor Napoleon III more and more. Eventually for a coup-de-grace, he cooked up a fake telegram full of terrible insults to the French Emperor and Empress.
James Carville, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater…they’re pikers compared to Von Bismarck here. Heck, everyone back then absolutely was. Bismarck was playing by a decidedly late-20th century set of diplomatic rules. He was running a chessboard, everyone else was playing tiddlywinks. French Emperor Napoleon, outraged, sought out his General Staff, who were also outraged. Could they teach these Hun upstarts a lesson? His generals assured him they could. Should they teach them a lesson? Absolutely they should. It would be treasonous not to.
And so, France declared war on Prussia. Yep, Bismarck had done exactly what he wanted to do–he got France to declare war. On him. Within days, those holdout Germanic countries had turned to the Prussians for protection. Bismarck, meanwhile, anticipating the war, was able to have Prussia’s forces mobilized in no time. Over the course of two quick months, they repeatedly routed piecemeal French armies that were still trying to assemble, leading to a decisive (if not final…there was some wrapping up to do) victory at the battle of Sedan. At Sedan, not only did Prussian armies capture the entire French army, they also took Napoleon III himself prisoner. The French government collapsed completely, marking the end of the Second Empire.
Napoleon III’s famous quote, “Well, that escalated quickly!” has survived to modern times.
We’re almost done, promise.
Everything would have been hunky-slash-dory for Prussia–now sort of calling itself “Germany” and possessing all the territories we’ll come to associate it with by 1914–had they just sort of said “Thanks, y’all!” to France for helping finish off that unification deal.
Unfortunately, here’s where Bismarck decided to hit the snooze bar and let Prussian and Germanic nobles get in and screw up the sausage.
Rather than just let France lick her wounds, form a new government (the Third Republic, which survives to this day), and everyone carry on, the Prussian/German nobility decided they wanted to spike the football. Bad idea. We’re finally back to the “Why is Germany everybody’s asshole in 1914” thesis.
Germany’s peace demands in 1871 were as follows:
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They wanted their armies to march down the Champs-Elysees in Paris in full “Screw you, Frenchies” formation.
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They insisted on the ceding of two French provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, to the new German Empire that was about to be declared by King Wilhelm I, soon to be Kaiser Wilhelm I. For a decent amount of time, WWI historians have tried to push the notion that there was some strategic or industrial importance to either province. There really sort of wasn’t either of those things, actually. In all honesty, it was Germany being jerks about it, and insisting on some permanent spoils of war.
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They asked to teabag deposed Emperor Napoleon III on the front lawn of the palace of Versailles. (I made this one up, but in tone it wouldn’t be far off from the insult of the other two major demands.)
Bismarck thought all of these were TERRIBLE ideas. He recommended against them, but apparently not too strongly. When told that the Kaiser was going ahead with them, Bismarck shrugged and told the nobility that they were free to do as they liked, but they’d be fighting another, bloodier war with France within the next 50 years.
And yes, France was pissed. Obsessively pissed. French speakers and German speakers already got along with the gentle friendliness one usually finds from a pillowcase of wet cats. This made the animosity something almost primal with the French. They didn’t hate the Germans. They HATED the Germans from then on.
The French weren’t the only ones. The Russians looked at this brand new German Empire that had kicked the asses of two perceived central European superpowers (Austria too, remember). “Hmm,” the Tsar thought. “These guys are going to be trouble.”
There were other things the Germans did that freaked everyone out, of course. They started building a North Atlantic fleet. That scared and pissed off the British. They kept spending money and modernizing and adding to their army, which continued to alarm France and Russia. (Austria, after being defeated by the Germans, had already adopted an “If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” attitude for self-preservation.) That 1870 war and the insistence of Prussian hoi polloi to rub it in, however, were the root from which the tree of hate against Germany grew.
OK! We’re caught up! Next up are the Excitable Boys in St. Pete’s!
Reading any account of revanchism and Alsace-Lorraine invariably makes me think of Captain Haddock.
Looking forward to finding out more about the villainous M. Paleologue.
(Also, if you’ll pardon an unasked-for correction: the Third Republic ended with the fall of France in 1940. The current French Republic is the Fifth.)
Ah, thanks. A reference I saw listed the French Prime Ministers going forward from 1871 in an unbroken line. My bad!
I’m guessing that someone must have shot his whiskey bottle. Billions of blistering blue barnacles!
What that brings me to is conscription. Universal conscription. My ancestor in Germany had just reached “military age”, and promptly fled Westphalia for America. So yes, proud descendant of draft dodgers!
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Same here, corsair! My namesake, and the first direct ancestor of my family to live in the US fled here in 1871 for the same reason.
Interestingly, my family on my fathers side first came to the U.S. from Germany in the same time period. I don’t know enough family history to know if that was a reason or not, but it’s fascinating to know the history of what they were leaving behind to come to the U.S.
It could’ve been that, but it’s also worth noting that to get some of these new countries to go along with marrying their kingships to the new German Empire, that Bismarck and the Kaiser had to seize farmlands and other property and then cede it to the nobles who were giving up a lot of their authority to provide them with enough wealth to toe the line going forward. That also caused a lot of fairly poor farmers to give up and set sail to America.
roflmao. We got out while the getting was good.
It was treated as something of a joke in the family, but all the dates match up - his age, the start and duration of the Franco-Prussian War, his arrival in America. So, myth confirmed for me. Interesting that others have the same story.
He didn’t get my family’s farm. On the internet, you can type in my last name, the province of Westphalia, and then zoom in on the farm, listed by name (I’m told it is down to just about the last of my name in Germany). Not exactly sure why an individual farm is on the map, but in the early days of the internet I got a message from someone traveling in Germany who stumbled onto the farm and a post of mine on Compuserve and put the two together. He mentioned that it was an “old farm”, and then specified that “old” in Germany translated to “Really Old!” in American terms (at least the late 1600s in this case).
Heh… I’m another whose family (on my father’s side) left Germany in the same time period.
This thread is really interesting. I almost feel like it needs screenshots ;)
It’s July 21st, 1914. President Poincare is about to board his ship back to Paris. One hopes he enjoyed St. Petersburg. It’s almost certainly the last time he’ll see the Royal Family alive.
In 1913 when Monsieur Poincare assumed the Presidency, he took a meeting with his military commander in chief, General Joseph Joffre. It was rather a momentous meeting, actually. While perhaps not as heralded as the assassination of the Archduke, if you wanted to make the point that it had almost as much to do with the start of WWI, I won’t argue with you.
The point of the meeting was to determine how General Joffre was doing at the job he’d been appointed to. A status report, if you will. You’ll recall that in 1870, France kiiiiinda got their asses kicked in the Franco-Prussian War. This was an extremely surprising result to the world, who up until that time in the 19th century sort of feared the French army the way Europe in the next century would fear the German army. In 1911, Joffre had been appointed by Prime Minister Cailloux (yep, the first term of philandering fellow who’s wife killed the newspaper editor) with the express idea that he should overhaul the French army and modernize it.
By September of 1914, it would become apparent that Joe Joffre wasn’t much of a tactical or strategic general in wartime. However, he was a pretty good French version of American general George McClellan. Joffre was an excellent organizer, and was able to quickly make drastic changes to the way the military did things. For instance, he insisted that going forward, the French army would promote officers based upon aptitude, ability, and merit. This was a complete 180 from the previous policy in the French military of promoting officers based upon sizes of land holdings, last names, amount of money in the bank, and how well your great grandfather fought in a war eighty years ago. Joffre was getting the army newer guns and better uniforms. They were looking like a sharp, smart, fighting machine again.
We can surmise then that he was pretty happy to take this meeting and brag on his accomplishments. Poincare asked him pointedly how able the French army would be if it had to defend itself against the Germans. “We can do that,” said Joffre. “We’ll be able to defend French territory and destroy them.”
That pleased Poincare, but not completely. He had another question: if it came to attacking Germany, how would the new French army fare then on the offensive?
Joffre was circumspect. He didn’t want to out and out say: “That’s probably a terrible idea, Prez.” He had made progress. The army WAS better than it had been. So, Joffre hedged his bets a bit. “Well…if Austria-Hungary got their German allies involved in some foolishness in the Balkans, and if the Kaiser had to contend with the Russians as well, and if Britain or America joined us…well then, yes. In that very specific yet hard-to-imagine happening set of circumstances I think we’d maybe have a chance.”
What Joffre was saying, in his mind–and in the minds of any sane person hearing that–was “That’s a preposterously silly idea, and the only way we might have a chance would be if there was a terrible war involving all of Europe, which is too awful to even think about.”
What Poincare heard, however was: “If you can set all that other stuff up, we can totally kick Germany’s ass!”
Thus, actually (and seriously, this is so absurd that if it didn’t actually play out that way you’d have a hard time believing that this wasn’t Dr. Strangelove or Rocky And Bullwinkle set in 1913-14), Poincare made trying to set up that chessboard of events the thrust of French foreign policy going forward.
The French had cooed in the ears of Serbia for a few years, but had recently backed off support. Now they renewed their efforts. Covertly, they told the Serbs that they had their backs if they wanted to maybe, um, you know…make it clear they wanted Bosnia by doing something provocative. Many smart historians have theorized that the plot to assassinate the Archduke never would have happened at official levels had Serbia not believed that France would help them out.
The French also told the Russians–a country they pretty much shouldn’t have had any damned thing to do with (being as France was a mostly-Catholic republican state, and Russia was an Eastern Orthodox repressive monarchy) that they absolutely ADORED onion dome churches, cold winters, the Tsarina’s fashions, and that lovely Russian army…which they’d also support unconditionally if things might “happen” with Germany.
Even more crazy for Europe, they started making serious googly eyes at the British. Up until this point in history, France and Britain had a relationship that can be best described as “abject hatred and mistrust”. Still, the Brits needed friends on the continent because of Germany’s damned naval building program, and the French needed a navy that wasn’t as comically inept as their own, so it was sort of two adversarial countries starting to thaw things over a mutual potential enemy.
To his credit, Poincare would eventually–likely in further consultation with Joffre and the rest of his own government advisers–come to see the folly in all this.
However, the cat was out of the proverbial bag, as far as the French foreign service was concerned. They at least knew about the Joffre meeting and knew what had been said. Most were smart enough to see it all in the light with which Joffre intended his comments to be made.
One guy who didn’t: the French ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paleologue.
That was going to cause some serious, serious problems.
Bloody marvelous, you should publish !
Thanks for these series of creative history posts! They’ve encouraged me to take up reading about the runup to WW1; The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 has been excellent so far and has shed light on the tangled series of international crises that culminated with the Great War. Your recounts do differ in some respects, mainly in that it seems like the formation of the Triple Entente or Entente Cordial and the Triple Alliance began with the German Naval Race more than 15 years before.
It also seems like EVERYONE has obsessed with attack; the lessons of the American Civil War were lost in translation across the pond because of the decisive, Cannae like results from the Franco-Prussian war. The obsession with attack was the hope to achieve a dramatic victory and mobilization in the fear of being caught with your pants down when an enemy had mobilized first. Even crazier were the many plans, often kept secret from the governments themselves, in which the details of mobilization would play out like clockwork, out of the control of the clockmakers who wound them, and the dry economy of the plans which held their nations’ fates. Plan 19A or plan 19B? Pick wrong and lose a nation. Some wise voices noticed the increasing volume of firepower that modern weapons could mass against the attack, combined with fortifications (applying the spade) and warned that a European conflagration would be apocalyptic, but their advice was ignored for myriad reasons.
Great thread! Getting in a little late, but I’m here now.