The
advance and the ambitions of Bismarck’s Prussia would bring her into conflict
with France. Napoleon III was eager for some successes in his foreign policy at
the time, after the failure of the Mexican adventure and amidst growing domestic
dissent, while Bismarck wanted to secure the hegemony of Prussia on the European
continent. When the vacant throne of Spain was offered to a German Prince
remotely related to the Prussian Royal family, Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen,
Napoleon III protested against this construed encirclement by the Prussians. The
Hohenzollern Prince withdrew his candidature, but Napoleon III undertook to
escalate the matter anyhow and demanded King William of Prussia's personal
assurance that a similar candidature would not occur again. Bismarck happily
rose to the occasion and claimed that the Emperor had insulted the King. War
followed, and the South German states of Hesse-Rhine, Bavaria, Baden and
Wurttemberg joined Prussia in an all German war against the French. The French
were disastrously defeated and Napoleon III was taken prisoner at Sedan. In
Paris, enclosed by German troops, the Socialist Commune uprising took power,
giving its name to the Communist movement of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. In nearby Versailles, in the Mirror Room of the Palace there, the
German Kings and Princes proclaimed the German Realm (The German word "Reich" is
often wrongly translated as “Empire”). This German Realm was a union between the
North-German Confederacy and its allies Hesse-Rhine (south of the Main river),
Baden, Bavaria and Wurttemberg. The King of Prussia, President of the North
German Confederacy, was proclaimed German Emperor. German unity was now finally
achieved albeit without Austria. The new German Realm was to be a Federal State,
like the North German Confederacy had been, in which the joining constituent
states would retain their own governments and monarchs.
This newcomer would become a rival of France and Britain in the struggle for the
hegemony on the European continent.
In France the Commune
was violently repressed and the Third Republic was proclaimed. France had to
cede Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. The Republic was not generally accepted.
General Mac-Mahon, who was the second President of the Republic, tried to
restore the Bourbon monarchy in the person of former King Henry V (Count de
Chambord), who had reigned briefly as a boy in 1830, before King Louis-Philippe
took over. Henry however refused to accept the tricolour flag, and the
restoration was aborted. The loss of French support for the Papal State resulted
in the annexation of that State by Italy. The Third French Republic (1871-1939)
would become a politically instable and unpopular democracy, plagued by the
conservative and Catholic reaction to the traumatic Commune uprising. The
reactionary forces within the Republic would bring the country to the verge of
civil war in the no less traumatic and anti-Semitic Dreyffus affair. In that
scandal an innocent Jewish army captain was accused of spying for Germany, the
enemy that had taken the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France.
