Perfidious Albion has made a lot of good points and I agree with him.
Thank you.
I would add that a major weak point of the French army was the doctrine they elaborated after the Austro-Prussian war: the new doctrine called for the selection of strong points from where the superiority of the chassepots could be used to decimate the attacking Prussians. However this did not take into account the superiority of the Prussian artillery as well as the more modern and aggressive way of using it on the field.
Another obvious weakness was in the officer corps: since both pay and prestige were quite low the vast majority of the officers came up through the ranks: the result was an officer corps quite older than its Prussian counterparts (the difference of age was between 10 and 30 years for lieutenants, captains and majors), less aggressive and certainly much less educated (almost the totality of the Prussian officers were university graduates). Officers commanding companies and regiments in the Prussian army were trained to make use of your initiatives and to operate aggressively in the field, always looking for encirclement and probing for weak spots.
I can't comment on any of this. Along with other information, it tells me that you clearly know much, much more about this conflict than I do.
Finally there was the issue of how to use cavalry: Prussians always used the cavalry for scouting and very seldom relied on cavalry charges (when it happened - like at Gravelotte - it was because someone had made a mistake).
The French were much more inert and looked little concerned with aggressive scouting.
If I recall correctly, there was an especially famous incident when Prussian cavalrymen wandered deep into French territory on reconnaissance, stopped at a French inn, had dinner and then went back to their lines, entirely unmolested by any French resistance. Compare that sort of thing to the French, whose scouting was so poor that they invented Prussian armies out of thin air and missed them where they actually were…
All of this is in addition to Prussian superiority in planning and logistics. The mobilization of both armies at the beginning of the war is very instructive: while the Prussians mobilized large units the French mobilized by regiments with the result of army corps being put together in a very slow and haphazard
way (and as usual supplies were not moving properly to the concentration points).
And even when they got there, they often couldn't be unloaded…
I also believe that German armies could have done better (it might be argued that von Steinitz was the best general for the French side
).
I'd actually agree with that, as much a joke as it might be. Given how many German troops French generals caused to die through bold deliberate action and how many German troops Steinmetz did…
I would find very very hard to believe that the war could have ended in anything but a German victory.
Agreed in entirety.
With an 1862 POD, its not certain that the war would happen, or that if it did, it would happen at the same time as it did IOTL.
True; the Spanish succession crisis will pop up on schedule but Prussia may not see it as such a perfect opportunity without Napoleon III's Mainz threat in 1866, which is the point beyond which an OTL-esque Franco-Prussian War became inevitable in my opinion. But that's only relevant if France is likely to greatly improve its army in the intervening time, which I think it probably isn't.
If we push back the war about, say five or ten years, would France be able to make the changes necessary to win?
I am not so sure that the French defeat in 1870 was the worse thing which might have happened to them. At least the dead wood of the 2nd Empire was thrown overboard and France bounced back pretty well in economic terms.
If the French political situation is not changed by force it is much more likely that France will stagnate.
I do not see the 2nd Empire being able to regenerate itself from inside and barring a cataclysmic event like the defeat of 1870.
I think not, largely for the reasons that
LordKalvan said. If I may elaborate:
It wasn't a case of the French army being in the process of reform that was interrupted in the war, it was the case that the French leadership were genuinely convinced that the French army was the best in the world and needed no reform. They had reason to believe this; however poorly they had performed (by early-20th-century standards of national organisation, mobilisation
et cetera) in wars such as Crimea and the North African and Italian conflicts, their opponents had done even worse. When Prussia demonstrated to the world that its army was vastly superior to that of Austria (France's traditional enemy at the time, and one that France viewed as far more dangerous than Prussia until the war proved the French wrong) the French couldn't conclude that it was the inherent nature of the Royal Prussian Army; they picked another explanation, namely the Prussian infantry weapon called the Dreyse needle gun, and consequently replaced their own infantry weapon (the French
chassepot was better than the Prussian Dreyse needle gun) and concluded that their army was now better than the Prussian army… and were catastrophically wrong.
In addition, there were important political reasons why the existing system stood. Napoleonic mass conscription was unpopular at the time. The rich liked the existing system because they could get off scot-free; the poor liked it because
most of them would get off scot-free, though a few unlucky souls wouldn't; and the French army liked it because it institutionally viewed itself as a professional organisation and held a great deal of disdain for conscripts.
In conclusion: I don't think there is any likely political change that could reasonably have given the few reform-minded individuals in the French army the power to institute mass conscription, short of a series of devastating military defeats that proved how poor the
mauvais numéro system was, i.e. exactly what happened IOTL.
Also, had Prussia began its large-scale industrialization at this point, or would that be later? I know that by WWI, America was the only country that outproduced Germany, so if France could be given some extra time to catch up its industrialization to Prussia's, would that be enough?
Prussian industrialisation was good enough to produce what they needed (most famously the
Kruppstahl, the Prussian steel cannons made by Krupp) without problems, so far as I know; it wasn't a limiting factor on the Prussian war effort.
Determining the outcome of a war by comparing industrial capacity only works if the countries are fighting a total war, which is an objection I've raised many times to this kind of thinking. There's also, however, a more subtle objection; it only works if they're using their resources at similar efficiency. One of the most important logistical problems faced by the Second French Empire was that supplies were sent to places which didn't have the facilities to unload them, so vast amounts of supplies ended up just lying around, even when the war was over, while incredibly poorly equipped Frenchmen were fighting the German armies. The Second Empire's logistical situation was so horrendously poor that we can't realistically model it as using all the potential of the French nation. Add that to the overwhelming military advantages of the German coalition and the situation for France becomes untenable.
I think it is possible...but not likely.
As Perfidious Albion mentioned, the conscription system is a mess. I wonder though if there might be ways to go about it...perhaps if France did worse in the Second Italian War of Unification? Mind you, given Austria's situation, I can't really see that happening, and given that it is 'just' Austria, and 'just' Italy that was the problem, I can imagine it being easily overlooked.
There we run into the tricky business of
how France is going to lose. France's army was bad. Austria's was worse.
As for how to make the French army more effective, there are two things. First would be a 1913-style Three Years Law, to be enacted no later than about 1860, so as to be able to have it be somewhat normal, as well as having at 2-3 full classes of reserves ready,
I think this is like the times when people ask about British and French rearmament beginning much earlier and leading to competent Anglo-French forces that fight back the Germans come WW2. It might be theoretically possible but, given the political environment of the time, it wasn't really possible.
As part of this, maybe in 1864, seeing the chaos that Class or Income exemptions played with the American Civil War, they also abolish any of those. Here the warnings the French MIGHT take away from things is that in the United States, there is massive lower class unrest when the rich can pay for exemptions...and to look at the CSA, using wealth as an outright exemption (20 Negro Rule and all) means you're tying one hand behind your back.
The capitalisation of 'might' is, I think, appropriate, given just how little attention Europe paid to the affairs of war in the Americas in this era.
And with a Habsburg being supported in Mexico, there might be pressure from Maximillian to support Austria in the Austro-Prussian War...and in turn Austrian support (which I sort of discuss below in the next quote) for the French when Germany comes after them...
I'm afraid I highly doubt that a French-propped-up puppet monarch in the Americas (as Maximillian could only ever be, barring much earlier PoDs as is done in
English Canuck's
A History of the Great War) would have any influence over the thoughts of Napoleon III.
if French intervention in the Bruderkrieg doesn't already butterfly the 1871 war.
But surely it does butterfly the 1870-1871 war. Given the various points we've been talking about throughout this thread, my assessment of the likely result of French intervention in that war is a humiliating Franco-Austrian defeat that leaves France in no shape to be interfering with Spanish succession crises four years later.
I can't recall the total boundaries...but did France have any designs on Western Prussia, or perhaps the German strip along the Rhine's left bank? I figure one, both, or parts of either, could be an appropriate condition.
Yes, it did. The Mainz threat had been in 1866, not long before 1870-1871, and in the environment of a victorious war (somehow), Emperor Napoleon III (who was not exactly a shining example of caution and intelligence in diplomatic affairs, to put it
very mildly) might well push not just for the more modest annexations suggested in 1866 but for further annexations, with the more extreme suggestions being along the lines of those proposed by French nationalists (including, ironically, Thiers) suggesting that France annex all the land up to the Rhine… which would guarantee a future Franco-German war even more surely than the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine did IOTL.
