If the Franco-Prussian War Doesn't Happen, How Does German Unification Play Out?

You can get Bavaria into the club by simply waving money before Ludwig II's face - he was bankrupting the kingdom with his castle building spree.
 
If only the French Ministry of War had assigned a catchy name (after a maritime mammal, maybe) to the not really existing war plan.
Then generations of althist newbies would go "If only Opération Ouate de Phoque had been attempted in 1870, then the French navy would have landed in Usedom, taken Stettin and marched the zouaves to Berlin in just a week!" with all the althist veterans gently or exasperatedly corrcting that.
I see what you did here. Although, Operation Sealion is traduced in French as Opération Otarie.
For those who didn't get it, Ouate de Phoque pronounces a lot like What the Fuck.
 
You can get Bavaria into the club by simply waving money before Ludwig II's face - he was bankrupting the kingdom with his castle building spree.
which is what happened IOTL, more or less: obviously the money was waved in the face of Ludwig's ministers :p

However this worked late in 1870, after the Bavarians had bought much more into the war and a wave of nationalism had swept through the country after Wissembourg (where the Bavarian troops' performance was less than stellar, and the decisive attack on Wissembourg was carried out by Prussian troops only).

Without the boost of the war and the victories it is much more doubtful that just waving money in the face of Bavarians would have been equally successful.
 
Speaking of possible French reforms, the most needed one was a complete overhaul of the army and finding a way to attract educated people to improve the officer corps (in Prussia a career in the army was an attractive one, providing status and career prospective; all the officers and a large portion of the NCOs were well educated. In France the army was not an attractive career, and the prospects for most officers were quite dismal). Solving this problem would have helped a lot, provided that it would be followed by some rational thinking in terms of training, logistics and mobilisation.

I've seen two things on that topic: that the High officer corps was rotten to the core (good ol' "not one button missing") but the field officers were pretty great. They were however not trained for pitched battles but used to colonial wars, which is another beast entirely.

I don't know how correct that is. It sounds plausible but it also sounds like a French stab in the back.
 
I've seen two things on that topic: that the High officer corps was rotten to the core (good ol' "not one button missing") but the field officers were pretty great. They were however not trained for pitched battles but used to colonial wars, which is another beast entirely.

I don't know how correct that is. It sounds plausible but it also sounds like a French stab in the back.
Well, you have to admit France repeatedly had issues with its high command in both 1940 and 1914. It having issues with its high command in 1870 doesn't seem much of a stretch.
 
I've seen two things on that topic: that the High officer corps was rotten to the core (good ol' "not one button missing") but the field officers were pretty great. They were however not trained for pitched battles but used to colonial wars, which is another beast entirely.

I don't know how correct that is. It sounds plausible but it also sounds like a French stab in the back.

That sounds weird. They had fought in the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, after all, against Austria. Not exactly a colonial war.
 
There was also the Crimean War in 1853-1856. Does the Pastry War against Mexico count? Or the French Intervention in the 1860s?
The Crimean War and the Italian war would have been 11 years before the Prussian war so I'd imagine there would have been a lot of new faces in the soldiers and officer corps, especially sous-officiers.

I'll say I don't know enough about the Mexican intervention to say if it was comparable but to me, we should see if there were any recent war, as in, from 1865 onwards. Otherwise, the skills wouldn't be fresh, which would especially matter given the brevity of the war.

I might be all wrong, but to me the most recent operations would have been Algerian and Cochinchinese pacifications.
 
Hm, from what I've read wasn't the French army undergoing reforms at the time of the Franco-Prussian war? I remember that some reforms had started after the Austro-Prussian war in 1866 but weren't nearly close to being finished in 1870. So a few more years could mean that the French army is on par with the Prussians. As for the high command, I can't comment on that (don't know enough about it to do so) but as pointed out above the French had similar problems in WWI but they still one that war so couldn't the same happen in an ATL Franco-Prussian war?
 
I suspect that in the long run, the European balance of power will still tilt against France. By the early 20th century, the Kingdom of Prussia in its 1867 borders had a population comparable to that of France. A Prussia-dominated North Germany will eventually outweigh France.

If we postpone the war long enough, might we settle into an enduring peace instead?
 
The most likely result of a unification without a Franco-Prussian War would have been a federal state along the lines of the 1866 Prussian federal reform plan with the presidency either perpetually held by the King of Prussia, as proposed by the Prussian representative Karl Friedrich von Savigny, or a revolving presidency as e.g. preferred by the Bavarian Minister-President Baron Karl Ludwig von der Pfordten (in his case between just Prussia and Bavaria). The resulting rather unwieldy title of the head of state of this country may have thus been: His Excelleny the President of the German Federation, His Royal Majesty King Wilhelm of Prussia / King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
 
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The most likely result of a unification without a Franco-Prussian War would have been a federal state along the lines of the 1866 Prussian federal reform plan with the presidency either perpetually held by the King of Prussia, as proposed by the Prussian representative Karl Friedrich von Savigny, or a revolving presidency as e.g. preferred by the Bavarian Minister-President Baron Karl Ludwig von der Pfordten (in his case between just Prussia and Bavaria). The resulting rather unwieldy title of the head of state of this country may have thus been: His Excelleny the President of the German Federation, His Royal Majesty King Wilhelm of Prussia / King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

The North German Federation of 1867 would still exist, and there was no title for the head of state: The constitution states that "the presidency of the federation is granted to the Prussian crown." Note the impersonal, institutional way of phrasing. The King of Prussia was not named president, technically.
Later laws of the NGF are introduced by the phrase: "Wir, Wilhelm, von Gottes Gnaden König von Preußen, verordnen im Namen des Norddeutschen Bundes, nach erfolgter Zustimmung des Bundesrates und des Reichstages, was folgt:"
Google Translate: "We, Wilhelm, by the Grace of God King of Prussia, decree in the name of the North German Confederation, with the approval of the Bundesrat and the Reichstag, the following:"

Beyond these formalities: The NGF was constructed around the idea that the Prussian king was the permanent and organisational centre of the federation. The NGF (and the later Deutsche Reich) had originally a very small bureaucracy, with almost all functions filled by the corresponding Prussian official, from the minister-president on down. Having the presidency rotate would really destroy this set-up and would be politically impossible. I even think that the inclusion of the Southern German states would be seen as not worth it.
 
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