France's Long Road to War: 1870 to 1914

Soon to Become Emperor Napoleon III in the 1850s

Excerpted from France and the Great War, 1914–1918 

By Leonard V. Smith, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker

In The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville described the French as a people “talented enough at anything, but who excel only at war. They adore chance, force, success, flash and noise, more than true glory. More capable of heroism than virtue, of genius more than good sense, they are suited more to conceiving immense plans than to completing great enterprises.” Up to a point, Tocqueville knew his compatriots well. 

Over the course of the 19th century, France had gone to war many times and, in general, had fared poorly at it. The French had mainly themselves to blame. The century began in a blaze of Napoleonic glory, followed by complete national defeat in 1815. Not that this prevented the French from erecting to Napoleon their greatest military monument, the Arc du Triomphe, an unusual tribute to a defeated commander. Some victories came at mid-century, against the Russians in the Crimean War of 1853–56, and against the Habsburg Monarchy in Italy in 1859. 

Yet these were classic 19-century “limited” wars, in which France ventured and gained relatively little. But the “immense plan” of Emperor Napoleon III (allegedly the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) to install his protégé, Archduke Maximilian (the brother of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph), as emperor of Mexico in 1861 ended in utter failure. France had nothing to show for it but the famous 1867 painting by Edouard Manet of Maximilian’s execution by Mexican patriots.

Le Siège de Paris, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier

Worst of all, France provoked a war with Prussia in 1870, over what seemed the relatively minor matter of the succession to the Spanish throne. In fact, Napoleon III wanted to forestall the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. He had reason for concern, but blundered without allies into a war that invoked the very thing he sought to prevent. The overconfident French army met defeat within two months, and on 18 January 1871, the victors proclaimed the creation of the German Empire. 

To maximize the humiliation of their foe, the Prussians chose to do so in France, in one of the most splendid spaces created by the old monarchy–the Hall of Mirrors at the palace at Versailles. According to the armistice with the new republican government of France signed a few days later, France had to pay a large indemnity and surrender Alsace-Moselle and most of Lorraine, two wealthy provinces now absorbed into the Reich. France could fume and swear one day to get its revenge, but not much else. Worse, a new Great Power had been created at its doorstep, far more dangerous to France than Prussia had ever been. The Third French Republic had to prepare for a new war with Germany virtually from the day of its inception. France would never again feel safe from Germany until the Allies divided Hitler’s Third Reich after World War II.

Proclamation of Prussian King Wilhelm I as German Emperor at Versailles,
Anton von Werner

Yet Tocqueville, who died in 1856, did not live long enough to see the whole picture. Perhaps he was too taken with his idealized version of the young republic in the United States to see his own country clearly anyway. The French economy boomed through most of the nineteenth century, and French literary and artistic life remained the envy of the West. By the end of a century of war, revolution, and social turmoil, the French, in part through a massive investment in institutions such as the education system and the army, had forged one of the most cohesive national communities in the world. France had also become the only republic among the Great Powers of Europe. The Third Republic proved more cautious about going to war than the regime of Napoleon III. The guardians of the republic made alliances, in order to contain a Germany much larger, wealthier, and militarily stronger than itself. 

Those among the French who sought Napoleon’s sort of military glory did so mainly through the vast French global empire. The French military, as we will see, had many problems, in doctrine, funding, and leadership. But the army and navy of France continued to be feared throughout Europe and even the world. Moreover, despite decades of civil–military turmoil, democracy took hold in the French military. Unique among Europeans mobilized in 1914, the French soldier served neither kaiser nor tsar nor king, only himself and his compatriots. Even before the outbreak of the war, he was a citizen-soldier.

France Mobilizes — 1914
The Departure of the Infantrymen (Detail), Albert Herter

But success in the great enterprise of national rehabilitation came at a price. The alliances made by the Republic, in the end, provoked rather than deterred Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary, and thus helped render the diplomatic situation in Europe more perilous. In the crisis of August 1914, France had little room for maneuver, because of diplomatic and military choices made decades earlier. But this did not obscure the fact that Germany and not France chose war in 1914, because of the inflexibility of prewar German military planning. France had war forced upon it more than any other European country except Belgium and perhaps Serbia. German aggression in August 1914 responded to a long-term threat posed by the alliances made by France. But it was aggression all the same.