ABSTRACT
THE SEARCH for the “responsibility” for the war of 1870 is one which historians have long since abandoned. There can be no doubt that France was the immediate aggressor, and none that the immediate provocation to her aggression was contrived by Bismarck; but the explanation that the conflict was planned by Bismarck as the necessary climax to a long-matured scheme for the unification of Germany-an explanation to which Bismarck’s own boasting in old age was to give wide currency-is one which does not today command general assent. The truth is more complex. War between France and Prussia was widely foreseen when, after Austria’s defeat in 1866, the North German Confederation was formed.1 The resulting change in the European balance of power could be made acceptable to France only if her own position was guaranteed by those compensations on the left bank of the Rhine and in Belgium which Napoleon instantly demanded and which Bismarck point-blank refused. After 1866 the French were in that most dangerous of all moods; that of a great power which sees itself declining to the second rank. In all ranks of French society war with Prussia was considered inevitable. It required little insight to see that a French foreign policy based on prestige was incompatible with those swelling forces of German nationalism to which Bismarck had so skilfully harnessed the Hohenzollern monarchy; and the more concessions Napoleon made to Liberal feeling in domestic policy the more bitter was the clamour from the Imperialist element, headed so influentially by the Empress, for a determined stand in compensation abroad. Bismarck could rely for certain on a succession of provocations, growing with French military strength, which he could accept or not as he chose.
