Characters

"Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best."

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born on April 1, 1815, in Schönhausen, in the Prussian heartland, the son of a Junker landowner and a mother of bourgeois intellectual distinction. He was the dominant political figure of the nineteenth century — the man who unified Germany, reshaped the European balance of power, and invented the modern welfare state as a conservative instrument of social control. He was also one of history's great manipulators: a man who used diplomacy, deception, and the carefully engineered wars to achieve ends that open conflict or honest negotiation could never have reached. Bismarck entered Prussian politics in 1848 as a reactionary opponent of liberalism and parliamentary government, and spent the 1850s as a diplomat — in Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, and Paris — developing an understanding of European power dynamics that no contemporary matched. Appointed Minister-President of Prussia in 1862 by King Wilhelm I to resolve a constitutional crisis over the military budget, he governed for a decade by royal decree in defiance of the liberal Prussian parliament, funding army reforms through creative accounting, and building toward the wars that would transform the European order. The Franco-Prussian War was Bismarck's masterpiece. He had already unified northern Germany through the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the North German Confederation. But the south German states — Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden — remained outside, bound by treaties but not yet part of a unified Germany. Bismarck calculated that a war with France, if France could be made to appear the aggressor, would trigger south German nationalist sentiment and bring them into the Prussian orbit. The opportunity came in the form of the Spanish succession crisis of 1870: when a Hohenzollern prince was offered the Spanish throne, French protest gave Bismarck the pretext he needed. He edited the Ems Dispatch — a telegram from King Wilhelm to himself — to make it appear that the French ambassador had been insulted, published the edited version, and waited for France to declare war. France declared war on July 19, 1870. The war was decided in ten weeks by Moltke's armies. Bismarck spent the campaign managing the political dimensions — keeping Austria neutral, managing the south German states, negotiating with the captured Napoleon III, dealing with Gambetta's Government of National Defense, and then imposing terms that he privately knew were too severe but could not politically resist taking. He became the first Chancellor of the German Empire in January 1871 and served until Kaiser Wilhelm II forced his resignation in 1890. He died in 1898, having lived to see the alliance system he had constructed with such care beginning to unravel under his less skilled successors.

"No plan survives first contact with the enemy."

Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke was born on October 26, 1800, in Parchim, Mecklenburg, into a minor Prussian military family that could not afford his education — he was sent to the Danish Military Academy on charity and later transferred to the Prussian army as a young officer. He was a military intellectual of the highest order: a novelist, translator, historian, and linguist who also happened to be the greatest operational commander of his century. As Chief of the Prussian — and later German — General Staff from 1857 to 1888, he transformed military planning from an art into a science and the Prussian army from a competent force into the most effective military machine in the world. Moltke's central insight was that modern warfare — with railways, telegraphs, and mass conscript armies of hundreds of thousands — required a fundamentally different approach to command than the Napoleonic model of a single genius directing everything from the front. No general could personally control an army of 300,000 men. What was needed was a staff of trained officers who shared a common operational doctrine, so that subordinate commanders could exercise initiative within a framework of understood strategic intent without waiting for explicit orders. He spent thirty years building this staff and developing the doctrine. The results were displayed in three wars: the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 (seven weeks to decisive victory), and then the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, in which Moltke coordinated three German armies across a 150-mile front with a precision that no French general could match. The envelopment of MacMahon's army at Sedan — two armies converging from different directions to trap 100,000 men in the bend of the Meuse — was Moltke's operational masterpiece, executed almost exactly as planned in a campaign of six weeks from the first battle to the emperor's capture. Moltke was famously laconic — he reportedly spoke only three languages: German, French, and Silence. After Sedan, when Bismarck asked him what he thought of the situation, he is said to have replied, 'It is satisfactory.' His intellectual legacy extended to every European general staff, and his concept of Auftragstaktik — mission-type tactics in which subordinates are given objectives rather than detailed orders, and trusted to achieve them by whatever means appropriate — remains the foundation of modern Western military doctrine.

"Not having been able to die in the midst of my troops, nothing remains for me but to surrender my sword to Your Majesty."

Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was born on April 20, 1808, the nephew of Napoleon I, and spent his early life in exile, conspiracy, and twice-failed coup attempts that landed him in prison. He escaped from the fortress of Ham in 1846 disguised as a laborer — carrying a plank on his shoulder past the guards — and returned to France after the 1848 revolution, winning election as President of the Second Republic before staging the coup d'état of December 2, 1851 that made him Emperor Napoleon III. He ruled France for nineteen years, presiding over industrialization, urban modernization (Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris), colonial expansion, and an activist foreign policy that made France the dominant power in European affairs through the 1860s. Napoleon III was a more capable ruler than his critics admitted and a worse commander than his position required. He understood economics, public works, and the management of a democratic empire with unusual sophistication. He did not understand war. His health had been declining for years before 1870 — kidney stones, possibly bladder cancer — and he arrived at the front in July 1870 in such pain that he could barely sit his horse, his complexion gray, his judgment impaired by suffering. His decision to take personal command of the army after the disasters of Worth and Spicheren was politically necessary and militarily catastrophic: it placed him in the army's path as it retreated toward Sedan. At Sedan, Napoleon III spent the battle riding through the fighting in search of the death that would redeem his dynasty's honor. He was not particularly concerned about dying; he was desperately concerned about the humiliation of capture. The death refused to come. German shells killed horses under him and officers beside him; he rode through the worst fire his generals could identify; and emerged unscathed. At 4 PM he ordered the white flag raised. His letter to Wilhelm I — 'Not having been able to die in the midst of my troops, nothing remains for me but to surrender my sword' — was one of the most dignified acts of his reign, and one of its last. He died in exile in England in January 1873, his empire dissolved, his dynasty ended, his health finally destroying him.

"I shall not make peace. I shall make war!"

Léon Michel Gambetta was born on April 2, 1838, in Cahors, the son of a Genoese immigrant grocer and a French mother. He became a lawyer in Paris, a republican politician of fierce conviction, and the most powerful advocate of French national resistance in 1870–71 — the man who, almost alone, refused to accept that Sedan meant the end of the war and organized the provincial resistance that prolonged it for four months. Gambetta had made his reputation in the 1860s as one of the most effective opposition orators under the Second Empire, combining personal magnetism, rhetorical brilliance, and a radical republicanism that made him the hero of the Parisian working class. When the republic was proclaimed on September 4, 1870, he became Minister of the Interior in the Government of National Defense — the most energetic member of a government that was otherwise characterized by paralysis and defeatism. His balloon escape from Paris on October 7, 1870, was a calculated risk. The balloon was shot at by German rifles during its ascent, rose to 1,600 meters to escape the fire, and came down in the Vosges after several hours in the air, nearly killing Gambetta when it caught in a tree. He made his way to Tours, then Bordeaux, and threw himself into organizing the levée en masse with a physical energy that astonished contemporaries. He requisitioned factories for arms production, conscripted hundreds of thousands of men, bullied and threatened local officials who dragged their feet, and supervised the creation of three new armies essentially from nothing in a matter of weeks. The armies could not match German professionals in open battle — they were defeated at Orléans, at Le Mans, and in the eastern campaign — but they tied down German forces across a vast area and made Bismarck's task immeasurably harder than he had anticipated. Gambetta refused to accept the armistice of January 28, 1871 and resigned from the government rather than sign it. He became the dominant figure of the early Third Republic, serving briefly as Premier in 1881–82, but never achieved the supreme power his wartime role seemed to promise. He died suddenly in December 1882, aged forty-four, from a gunshot wound that was possibly accidental and possibly suicide.

"I have done what I could. History will judge me."

Achille François Bazaine was born on February 13, 1811, in Versailles, the son of a minor civil servant. He rose through the French army from private to Marshal of France over forty years — an exceptional trajectory for a man without wealth or connections, earned through demonstrated competence in Algeria, the Crimea, Italy, and Mexico. By 1870 he was the most experienced combat commander in France, the soldier who had built the best professional reputation in the army. He was also, when the moment of his greatest test arrived, either a traitor, a coward, a defeatist, or simply a man whose nerve broke under the weight of an impossible situation — and historians have never fully agreed which. Bazaine commanded the Army of the Rhine — 180,000 men, the largest and best-equipped French force — as the war opened. After the defeats of Worth and Spicheren, he was appointed overall commander and immediately faced the problem of extricating this massive force from the encirclement that Moltke was constructing. He fought a series of rearguard actions culminating in Gravelotte, where his army came close to breaking through but ultimately failed, and then retreated into Metz with his entire force. Inside Metz, Bazaine's behavior became increasingly incomprehensible. He launched sorties that achieved nothing and were quickly abandoned. He entered into negotiations with both the enemy and the deposed imperial government about political arrangements that might justify capitulation — apparently hoping for a settlement in which he surrendered to end the war while preserving the imperial regime. On October 27, 1870, he surrendered 173,000 men and 1,570 cannon — the largest capitulation in French history. The court-martial was inevitable. In 1873 Bazaine was convicted of capitulating without having exhausted all means of resistance and sentenced to death — later commuted to twenty years in a fortress. In 1874 he escaped from the Île Sainte-Marguerite, apparently with assistance from his young wife, and fled to Spain and then Mexico, where he died in poverty in 1888. Whether he was a traitor who deliberately prolonged Metz's hold to enable political negotiations, or simply a commander whose judgment failed under enormous pressure, has never been definitively resolved.

"I did not want this war. But since it has come, we must prosecute it to a swift and honorable conclusion."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Karl of Prussia was born on October 18, 1831, the son of the future Kaiser Wilhelm I and the grandson of the great reformer Wilhelm III. As Crown Prince of Prussia, he commanded the Third Army in the Franco-Prussian War — the force that shattered MacMahon at Wörth and then executed the southern arm of the Sedan envelopment. He was an intelligent, humane, and politically liberal prince in an increasingly illiberal court, keeping a detailed diary of the campaign that remains one of the most valuable primary sources on the war. Friedrich was genuinely uncomfortable with the war and with the way it was being conducted. His diary records his horror at the destruction of French towns, his sympathy for French civilian suffering, and his deep personal dislike of Bismarck, whom he regarded as cynical, manipulative, and dangerous to the long-term health of the German state. He opposed the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, accurately predicting that it would poison European relations for generations. He was largely ignored. He became Kaiser Friedrich III on March 9, 1888, succeeding his father Wilhelm I — and ruled for ninety-nine days before dying of throat cancer on June 15, 1888. His reign — the 'liberal interlude' that never happened — is one of the great might-have-beens of modern European history. Friedrich was known to favor parliamentary government, reconciliation with France, and a less aggressive foreign policy than his son Wilhelm II would pursue. Had he reigned for a decade rather than ninety-nine days, the history of Europe in the early twentieth century might have been entirely different. His son's dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 and subsequent aggressive foreign policy led directly to the First World War.