It's an idea that I had been entertaining. What if the Prussian Victory in the Franco-Prussian War is less clear cut? I mean that Prussia wins but it has costed them dearly to win over the French.
You mean, what happened historically? You know, the war that Prussia ostensibly won in a month but morphed into a vicious slog against the entire French country? The dress rehearsal for
Volkskrieg? That war?
If the French army is made stronger in the ways you propose, will Bismarck notice that and avoid the gamble he made IOTL?
Historically, the French military underwent significant reorganization and reform in the years immediately before 1870. As it happened, this reorganization might have actually decreased the ability of the French to win the war, by introducing some confusion into the mobilization process, but Moltke and the General Staff, regardless, still considered the French army to have been improved - and still beatable.
I doubt very much that, even had Moltke changed his prognostication - dubious - that Bismarck would have changed his diplomacy in any significant way. And, of course, the war was started by the French anyway; making the French army more powerful (again hammering home the point that there aren't a whole lot of obvious ways of doing this) probably would've pushed Rouher, Gramont, Ollivier and the rest into being even
more ready to go to war and 'restore' France's pre-Luxembourg political position. Perhaps they would have seized the
Kaiserprojekt as a
casus belli, or something similar.
Anyway. One would need a plausible thing to change about the French military in order to improve it for the fight against Prussia, and the most fundamental problem - Système D - cannot be solved in such a short time, nor would there be any obvious reason to do so. Napoleon III cannot be gotten rid of as the supreme commander. There are no reasons to install a Prussianesque general staff system, and such an implementation would cause more trouble than it was worth on such short notice. And France really didn't have any handicaps in the fight other than those. The French troops were better trained, and - at least early on - were better motivated. As has been noted, they had better technology; what
hasn't been noted is that they were using it pretty damnably effectively even at Mars-la-Tour, let alone Gravelotte-St. Privat. (The
mitrailleuse simply wasn't a war-winner, regardless of whether the French had trained with it from the start or not. But the Krupp steel breech-loading artillery that the Germans possessed
was. The Germans learned very quickly that the
mitrailleuse had limited range, and soon took to the tactic of using their excellent field artillery to pound the living shit out of the French.)
Monty Burns said:
Also, what would Austria-Hungary do if it's a closer thing? They didn't intervene IOTL, but the war was rather fast and Prussia seemed to win rather early. But what if that is not the case? After all, mere threats of AH should change the situation, right?
The Austrians had had repeated talks with the French over some sort of arrangement before the war. Napoleon disliked committing himself to an alliance with a clear
casus foederis and Beust probably couldn't have gotten approval for one even if Napoleon had said 'yes'. What they did have was a vaguer understanding, that the French would push across the Rhine into South Germany as soon as any prospective war started, to immediately overawe the Bavarians and Württembergers and bring them on-side. Many Austrians would have been happy to fight if they could be assured of French military assistance. Of course, it's still a coin flip even if the French did get to Munich, because the Austrian military was still horrifically weak after 1866 and 1867, and the Russians had spent the previous year or so ominously threatening Austria with war if they tried to reverse the outcome of the Seven Weeks' War.
After the initial weeks of the war, when it became clear that the French were completely uninterested in a daring thrust across South Germany, the Austrians gave the whole thing up as a bad job and sat out the rest of the war. Even if the French had somehow - and it wasn't going to happen - defeated the Germans and pushed across the Rhine after the initial weeks of the war, the South German states were no longer wavering in their loyalties as they had been before mobilization had been completed. It would've been a horribly hard fight for even a top-notch army to slog its way to Ulm, let alone the Isar.
Wasn't the French Army in the midst of a major reorganization at the time? I think that I have read it somewhere.
That's correct. See above.
Antonio said:
My objective are a less poisoned atmosphere in the leading years to World War I, without changing too much the political landscape.
Snake Featherston said:
Prussia will still win on organization, but the victory will be far less likely to lead them to the kind of indemnity-annexation peace of OTL. Ironically such a case as this will probably avert WWI as we know it.
Impossible. A united Germany causes too many system shocks in European diplomacy, and the French aren't about to let any defeat - Pyrrhic or otherwise - stand. Germany would have to deal with the enmity of France with or without Alsace-Lorraine. And it would have roughly the same shot of escaping the period of French enmity - several decades - without war as it did historically, that is to say, a decent-but-not-great one. Remember, for most of the early twentieth century, the French didn't really seem to care much about Alsace-Lorraine. The Zabern affair drew no comment whatsoever from the government. France and Germany were in opposition for
systemic reasons, not because of a province and a half.
One possibility of this is having the French make better use of the Mitralleuse. The Prussians wouldn't have any preparation to encounter that kind of concentrated firepower and would in many ways still be thinking in terms of classical linear warfare, meaning all that firepower will be turning corps into regiments.
Nonsense. The French made very good use of the
mitrailleuse; while many formations did not train with it before the war, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to employ it. As mentioned above, the French employed
mitrailleuse fire effectively in ambushes at Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte-St. Privat. In neither case was it the be-all, end-all. Sustained fire with the
chassepot still racked up the overwhelming majority of French kills, and the Germans quickly gained respect for French close-range gunnery. Prince Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen and the Prussian artillery, under any and all circumstances, would have been far more valuable than any French proto-machine guns.
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None of this is to say that the French didn't have a shot either at winning or at causing the kind of stalemate that the OP wants. As noted, the best shot was a rapid advance across South Germany to the Isar, to try to overawe the Bavarians and Württembergers, muddy the waters, and have a shot at bringing Austria into the war.
My own suspicion is that this bid, even if attempted by an unusually aggressive Napoleon (not sure how to get this, because he wasn't aggressive by nature), would have bogged down somewhere in the Black Forest, with Moltke simply orchestrating a Sedan against the Swiss frontier or Lake Constance instead of the Belgian. The French supply system was horrific, due in large part to Système D, and living off the land wasn't possible in Napoleon's day and wouldn't be in 1870, either. Napoleon was the only man institutionally capable of energetically directing the entire French war effort (certainly not Leboeuf or Bazaine, ha) and he was not energetic. France's technical advantages were insufficient to surmount Prussia-Germany's, and the Germans' institutional advantages vastly outweighed those of the French (which were better suited to colonial wars in Mexico, Greece, Algeria, or Indochina).
And, as noted, any war that would result in a united Germany, with or without Alsace-Lorraine, would create basically the same diplomatic conditions as the historical War of 1870 did. You can avoid the First World War if you don't have the Germans annex Alsace-Lorraine, but you can avoid it if you give it to them, too.