Bismarck's War

The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe

By Rachel Chrastil, and Reviewed by Christopher Bishop

Article published on: January 1, 2026 in the Winter 2026 Edition of Army History

Read Time: < 6 mins

Downtrodden, tired, and humiliated, Emperor Napoleon III left the blood-soaked battlefield of Sedan and a condescending negotiating table. An obscure mediocrity compared to his uncle, Napoleon I, the once-popular statesman was now a prisoner of war, bound for the Wilhelmshöhe Palace in Kassel, Germany. Tears rolled down his cheeks and onto his chest near the Légion d’honneur medal, but he was met with an indifferent silence as his entourage passed through the small French community of Donchéry on 3 September 1870. Nearby, the triumphant jubilations of Württembergian soldiers pounded the broken man’s mind. His capture by the Germans at the Battle of Sedan signaled the end of the French Second Empire and a key turning point in Rachel Chrastil’s sweeping chronicle of the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe.

Chrastil’s work targets a general readership. Although this is not the first book to consider the ramifications of the Franco-Prussian War, Chrastil argues that this conflict largely has left the popular consciousness. She presents several reasons why this trend should be reversed in Western collective memory. It was the largest European war between the battle of Waterloo and the start of World War I. Yet, “neither France nor Germany now includes this conflict among their favored national histories” (xviii). The war, as Chrastil notes, set an eerie precedent for many of the twentieth century’s European conflicts. In an era when linear warfare still dominated the battlespace, the war helped confirm the effectiveness and revolutionary nature of many battlefield tactics, including infantry fire and maneuver, dispersion, individual initiative, artillery indirect fire, and the employment of suppressing fire with the French Mitrailleuse machine gun. The conflict also asked age-old questions about the place of noncombatants and the francs-tireurs in wartime, generating controversy and French accusations of criminality directed at the German armed forces during the war as they hastily developed countermeasures to combat French guerrillas (both real and perceived) in the field. It was one of the first European conflicts affected by the Geneva Convention, international Red Cross volunteerism, battlefield tourism, prisoner-of-war consolidation on a national scale, and the “triumph of universal conscription, war experience and invasion over the civilian claim to peace and normality” (xviii–xix). Chrastil notes that civilians in France had not been entangled in a major war since the bloody days of 1815, “a time that had seemingly receded into the distant past” (75). Thus, the Franco-Prussian War brought to those in its path an acute sense of danger that had not been experienced for well over a generation. A distance had developed between soldier and civilian. The noncombatant’s role in war changed in European wars as the lines between carnage and civilians blurred, adding a forgotten layer of complexity to the fog of war.

Moreover, the Franco-Prussian War was one of the first conflicts to feature the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets in Europe, including Paris, setting a new precedent for the expansion of wartime state power over the lives of civilians and foreigners deemed suspicious. It was one of the first wars in which colonial forces were used significantly on the continent, sparking the “advent of racialized army stereotypes in European conflict,” as Chrastil notes in her references to French North African troops (xviii, 66).

Chrastil engages a vibrant historiography. She leans on Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau’s study of the war, 1870: La France dans la guerre (Armand Colin, 1989) and the writings of Michael Howard. Howard was one of the first historians of the Franco-Prussian War to write what historians called, in the late 1900s, new military history—a methodological approach that emphasized topics beyond the battlefield, including the civilians behind armies and the societies from which military personnel came. Today, new military history is referred to as war and society studies in the historical profession. Additionally, Chrastil considers Dennis Showalter's seminal work, The Wars of German Unification (Bloomsbury, 2004), and Christine Krüger’s “German Suffering in the Franco–German War, 1870/71” (German History, 2011), which analyzes how discourses of suffering were used during the war, particularly within the contexts of the Red Cross, industrialized warfare, and nationalism.

Chrastil takes a chronological approach to the war, producing a captivating twenty-chapter account. As in her previous work, The Siege of Strasbourg (Harvard University Press, 2014), Chrastil considers how this war disrupted preconceived notions of gender roles. During German sieges, civilian men faced crises of masculinity as they failed in their traditional roles of protector and provider because of the scarcity of resources that siege warfare brought to urban centers like Paris, Metz, and Strasbourg. Additionally, some accounts reveal that French women assumed combat roles as guerrillas, vexing German forces as they pushed deeper into France and contributing to broader questions within the German armed forces about the status of the francs-tireurs and the treatment of civilian combatants.

Another noteworthy aspect of this work is Chrastil’s consideration of religious pilgrimages. In an era of European history often tied with industrialization and secularization, Chrastil, among other historians, reinterprets Catholic pilgrimages as a “modern response to a changing world” (391). As the war dragged on, pilgrimages to Marian shrines rose in popularity. In Chrastil’s estimation, these pilgrimages “addressed the hope that public prayer and ritual could expiate the sins of the nation, particularly the Revolution and the Paris Commune” (434). Moreover, Chrastil insists that these Catholic pilgrimages in France were not isolated from the broader populace, “ hidden inside a bubble of reaction.” Rather, they were “integrated into and adapted to the modern world through its use of the media, transportation, and medical knowledge” (391). As Chrastil shows, the war compelled French citizens to both reevaluate and reinvigorate their personal conceptions of religious practice amid great destruction and uncertainty.

The work relies on archival holdings, newspapers, and published sources. Surprisingly, the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg, a major site for German armed forces history, is not mentioned in Chrastil’s bibliography. Most of her archival work, it seems, was done in France. However, she did consult German newspapers like the Kölnische Zeitung and the Volks-Zeitung. The maps at the beginning of the work are useful reference points, though her knowledge of troop maneuvers is so brilliantly detailed in the narrative that having maps throughout the chapters would have been convenient. Finally, regarding the topic of levy en masse, Chrastil describes the triumph of a “modern army” over an “enthusiastic People’s Army” as manifested at the Battle of Buzenval and other areas of contestation and shows that the Germans were “ideologically opposed to the levée en masse” (200, 399). But she misses the opportunity to discuss the legacies of Gerhard von Scharnhorst, one of the great reformers of the Prussian army, who advocated for a Prussian levee en masse during the Napoleonic Wars. Nonetheless, this book cannot be recommended enough. Chrastil’s encyclopedic mastery of the Franco-Prussian War, from its beginnings to its memory, trauma, and, above all, its emotional toll, will be hailed as an indispensable narrative of the Franco-Prussian War for years to come.