A less clear cut victory in the Franco-Prussian War?

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.
 
Well, it was actually a much costlier war then the Austro-Prussian war. The French Chassepot rifles actually caused some pretty severe casualties among the Prussian and other German armies. Perhaps if the French army was a bit better lead, and the troops a bit better motivated, the war could be made costlier. The French army of the period was actually rather good when it came to marksmanship, but their troops were ill prepared for war in all other aspects. They could not read maps, and were notoriously ill disciplined. You could improve these aspects of the French army, yet keep it quite a bit smaller then the forces they would face, and that could also achieve what your looking for.
 
Well, it was actually a much costlier war then the Austro-Prussian war. The French Chassepot rifles actually caused some pretty severe casualties among the Prussian and other German armies. Perhaps if the French army was a bit better lead, and the troops a bit better motivated, the war could be made costlier. The French army of the period was actually rather good when it came to marksmanship, but their troops were ill prepared for war in all other aspects. They could not read maps, and were notoriously ill disciplined. You could improve these aspects of the French army, yet keep it quite a bit smaller then the forces they would face, and that could also achieve what your looking for.

If the French army is made stronger in the ways you propose, will Bismarck notice that and avoid the gamble he made IOTL?

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?
 
Get France to have a Prussian-style reserve, but it changes enough to possibly prevent any war from taking place at about the same time.

Then again,I rarely like using battles or wars as PODs, because most are decided before the bullets fly.
 
Wasn't the French Army in the midst of a major reorganization at the time? I think that I have read it somewhere.
My objective are a less poisoned atmosphere in the leading years to World War I, without changing too much the political landscape.
So let's suppose that by better training and leading the French Army put the things difficult to the Prussinas and allies, and the Austrians start sabre-rattling. What then? A peace keeping the Status Quo? Or would the Prussians halt the offensive against france while trying to take Austria (and allies?) out of the equation quickly?
 
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. 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.
 
Get France to have a Prussian-style reserve, but it changes enough to possibly prevent any war from taking place at about the same time.

Then again,I rarely like using battles or wars as PODs, because most are decided before the bullets fly.

Actually, for the TL that I'm working on, the Franco Prussian War is NOT the POD, it's something that happened earlier.

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. 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.

A "peace with honor" was what I was aiming for. But even then, some kind of Great War would probably happen anyway, although probably quite different for the one that we know.
 
A "peace with honor" was what I was aiming for. But even then, some kind of Great War would probably happen anyway, although probably quite different for the one that we know.

I'm not so sure. A united Germany here may well wake up earlier to the problem of assuming force is the best and most clear-cut result, and this in turn may lead to less aggressive German policies that forestall any military Franco-Russian alliance. Or alternately a Russo-Turkish War circa 1870s may well lead to this in a different form with everybody trying to get greater firepower beforehand and seeking to use firepower efficiently so the incidental details change but not a broader pattern.
 
I'm not so sure. A united Germany here may well wake up earlier to the problem of assuming force is the best and most clear-cut result, and this in turn may lead to less aggressive German policies that forestall any military Franco-Russian alliance. Or alternately a Russo-Turkish War circa 1870s may well lead to this in a different form with everybody trying to get greater firepower beforehand and seeking to use firepower efficiently so the incidental details change but not a broader pattern.

Hmm... that idea has potential, thanks! If that does happen, A Franco-Russian alliance is probably unavoidable, given that both would feel threatened by Germany which borders both nations (enemy of my enemy...). That leave us with Great Britain, Italy and Austria. Great Britain would probably end siding with France if the Germans start to build the High Sea Fleet (or if even not, if they look like that they could defeat both France and Russia, becoming the hegemonic power in the continent), and if Austria follows the pattern of expanding in the Balkans, that would put them against Russia, making the Habsburg ally with Germany.

Italy is the wildcard here. OTL they were allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary for a while (Triple Alliance?) but they ended fighting in the Allies side. With the French ocuppied with Prussia they probably annexed Rome like in OTL, but beyond that...
 
Hmm... that idea has potential, thanks! If that does happen, A Franco-Russian alliance is probably unavoidable, given that both would feel threatened by Germany which borders both nations (enemy of my enemy...). That leave us with Great Britain, Italy and Austria. Great Britain would probably end siding with France if the Germans start to build the High Sea Fleet (or if even not, if they look like that they could defeat both France and Russia, becoming the hegemonic power in the continent), and if Austria follows the pattern of expanding in the Balkans, that would put them against Russia, making the Habsburg ally with Germany.

Italy is the wildcard here. OTL they were allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary for a while (Triple Alliance?) but they ended fighting in the Allies side. With the French ocuppied with Prussia they probably annexed Rome like in OTL, but beyond that...

Eh, it depends on the outcome of that war. It was a fairly close-run thing IOTL, so if the Ottomans manage to win (which would itself be a rather thin and close win for them as much as it was for Russia IOTL) then Russia may be faced with far more serious military reforms than IOTL much earlier than IOTL. And if Russia's becoming a serious military contender for the Germans, then France may well sign an alliance with it but for completely different reasons to OTL.
 
Eh, it depends on the outcome of that war. It was a fairly close-run thing IOTL, so if the Ottomans manage to win (which would itself be a rather thin and close win for them as much as it was for Russia IOTL) then Russia may be faced with far more serious military reforms than IOTL much earlier than IOTL. And if Russia's becoming a serious military contender for the Germans, then France may well sign an alliance with it but for completely different reasons to OTL.

Hmmm... Russia with a more powerful military... it fits with some of the thing that I have in mind for the post *Great War world.
 
Hmmm... Russia with a more powerful military... it fits with some of the thing that I have in mind for the post *Great War world.

If Russia has a military more able to co-ordinate properly and to use its potential for sometimes rather formidable quantities of ammunition, this would alter greatly the details of any WWI. It will collapse the German attempt to take down France quickly very thoroughly, as being able to actually *use* the sheer mass of those two armies might make the two-army plan work even in that smaller, less efficient version.

Of course Tsarist Russia would still have the problem of supporting a sustained offensive into Eastern Germany, but it would have much greater psychological advantages over its German counterparts. On a more negative side it would remove the careers of the Terrible Two, meaning it faces much more competent enemies than IOTL....
 
If Russia has a military more able to co-ordinate properly and to use its potential for sometimes rather formidable quantities of ammunition, this would alter greatly the details of any WWI. It will collapse the German attempt to take down France quickly very thoroughly, as being able to actually *use* the sheer mass of those two armies might make the two-army plan work even in that smaller, less efficient version.

Of course Tsarist Russia would still have the problem of supporting a sustained offensive into Eastern Germany, but it would have much greater psychological advantages over its German counterparts. On a more negative side it would remove the careers of the Terrible Two, meaning it faces much more competent enemies than IOTL....

The Terrible Two? Sorry, I don't get the reference.
And besides, by the time that we got to the Alt-Great War, butterflies are going to be in full swing.
 
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.
 
1) France did let its defeat at the hands of the Napoleonic Wars allies stand and did not wage a major, aggressive war to overcome it. There is absolutely nothing indicating France bouncing back from a lesser-scale defeat by a unified Germany would lead directly into war, not when other means might prove more effective.

2) That's not how I understand it. As I understand it they tended to use it where it did not do much good and missed opportunities where it would have done a lot of good, and still preferred rather more a linear war in the classical sense to using the newer types of weapons. This was influenced as much by the political issues of France before the war as any strictly military reason. My statement was more that France would sign an alliance with a militarily more powerful Russia for different reasons than IOTL. The OTL alliance was one of Russian weakness joining a France wanting to leave isolation, this one would be a straightforward aim of restoring the balance of power by tying two strong countries against the third. Same probable ultimate result, different rationale.
 
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1) France did let its defeat at the hands of the Napoleonic Wars allies stand and did not wage a major, aggressive war to overcome it. There is absolutely nothing indicating France bouncing back from a lesser-scale defeat by a unified Germany would lead directly into war, not when other means might prove more effective.
Those are rather radically altered circumstances. The French abandoned their age-old struggle with the British for supremacy in Europe because they fought a twenty-year war, with considerable devastation in France itself (not to mention a helluva lot of dead Frenchmen), and eventually most of France's statesmen figured out that they couldn't compete with British hegemony and instead accepted it.

Even that, of course, came with a great deal of caveats. It 'took' largely because the French turned their frustrations and injured self-views against each other; they could certainly have tried to renew the struggle, although never with a chance of victory in a meaningful sense. It happened in spite of a great deal of Anglophobia (and, in Britain, Francophobia) that persists in various forms to this day. It was only possible because the French were allowed to live under this hegemony with the trappings of a Great Power, fig leaves of colonial rivalry and whatnot. It worked because it was desirable both for the French and the British. And, above all, it was facilitated by the international system of the Congress era, to which there has never since been a counterpart.

Compare this to the situation in 1871. Neither state was close to achieving a sort of hegemony on the level that the British did in 1814, and the most obvious way to get there - a sort of German hegemony - is explicitly prohibited by the OP and at any rate would not be as benign as that of the British by its very nature (Germany not being nearly so isolated as Britain or the other European hegemon, Russia, and therefore possessing a great deal less freedom of action). And even had it been achieved (again, not plausible), the French would have to consistently have a group of leaders that genuinely approved of and appreciated the German tie and wanted to make it work (unlikely), they would have had to take out their national anger on themselves or on a weaker foreign foe of little consequence to the European equation (possible), they would have had to remain a Great Power in their own right, capable of possessing spheres of influence, probably overseas (possible, albeit increasingly less likely as the nineteenth century wore on), they would have had to have found a reciprocal appreciation in Germany (hahahaha), and they would have to have an international system capable of facilitating the tie and generally defusing international tension while satisfying the security needs of all the Great Powers (hahahahahahahaha).
Snake Featherston said:
2) That's not how I understand it. As I understand it they tended to use it where it did not do much good and missed opportunities where it would have done a lot of good, and still preferred rather more a linear war in the classical sense to using the newer types of weapons. This was influenced as much by the political issues of France before the war as any strictly military reason.
It's one of the most persistent myths of the war. While it's not fair to blame Sir Michael Howard for it - nationalist French claims about improperly used Wunderwaffen and nationalist German claims about the institutionally backward French date back much farther - the myth got a fresh lease on life with the arrival of the 'new' military history. It started from a kernel of truth - the mitrailleuse looked like a cannon, so initially (like, at Saarbrücken) it was placed in the gun line, where it was too far away from anything to do any good - but blew up to epic proportions. To assume that that situation went on for more than a few days presupposes a level of idiocy on the part of the French artillerymen that would be unfair to attribute even to YouTube commenters or the denizens of Yahoo!Answers.

Hohenlohe, who was probably the most intelligent and clear-eyed of any of the artillerymen on either side, made note of effective French deployments of the mitrailleuse in his memoirs starting at Vionville. At Gravelotte-St. Privat on 18 August, he was actually scouting one of those emplacements and nearly got his heat torn off by a rocket apparently fired from a Württemberg battery. And, after the war, the German analysis Über den Werth der Mitrailleusen mit besonderer Rücksichtsnahme auf das in Österreich-Ungarn eingeführter System Montigny-Christophe (1874) in the Jahrbuch came to largely the same conclusions. The learning curve wasn't high enough to justify an accusation of institutionalized misuse.
 
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