or in a (compeletly ASB) total victory in which Prussia captures Paris
Prussia? Prussia, of all countries,
capturing Paris? It took
six coalition wars by practically the whole of Europe united to do that just a few decades earlier, and you think Prussia alone—
Prussia, not exactly the world's greatest military power—could do it in
one? People overlook the fact that France had many advantages over Prussia long before the war began. As
Anaxagoras points out, the French
chassepot was far superior to the Prussian Dreyse needle gun, and also French mobilisation was significantly faster and more effective than Prussian mobilisation. I mean, Napoleon III's generals weren't perfect but men like the great Adolphe Niel, one of the heroes of French military history, had learnt from the recent wars in Italy where they had had supply problems and thus they had managed to develop more effective systems of logistics than the Prussians did (all this revisionist nonsense about Prussian logistical system is, as I said, nonsense—they famously had problems where they sent supplies by rail to destinations which didn't actually have the equipment to unload the trains), since the Prussians didn't have anywhere near the necessary military experience to have worked out those things, nor did it have anyone in power who could deal with it. The only advantage Prussia
could have had was in artillery, and they didn't really use it very well, as any student of the Battle of Braunschweig knows. Plus, of course, Paris was incredibly well-defended, as the French had been spending on it for so long; it would take French stupidity of a truly staggering degree to make the capture of the city possible.
That might have happened as a role-reversal in the anguished dreams of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV when the French artillery thundered at Berlin, but it couldn't happen anywhere else. Prussia capturing Paris isn't even ASB, it's just… no. Just no.
Oh, and as for a North German-South German union, it's really unlikely. In the Franco-Prussian War, where French troops were invading German-speaking lands (the best possible scenario for how to provoke pan-German nationalism, which was largely an anti-French force since the time of Napoléon I), Bavarian peasants were burning their crops so that the hated enemy couldn't use them… the enemy being the
Prussians, not the French. And
these are the people who are supposed to want to unite with North Germany? Honestly, North Germans are so annoyingly revanchist sometimes; they're almost as bad as the English.