The Bombardment and surrender of Strasbourg in 1870 was a military defeat with consequences that outlasted the siege: it displaced Georges Picquart’s family, helped determine his career, and remained part of the French army’s political memory during the Dreyfus affair. Through Picquart’s recollection, the event appears not only as the destruction of a city but as an experience later invoked to explain military suspicion, institutional defensiveness, and fear of Germany.

Siege and Displacement

The bombardment took place in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when Germany defeated France and occupied Alsace and Lorraine. The book presents that defeat as a shock to the European balance of power, one that foreshadowed the First and Second World Wars. For the people of Strasbourg, the larger geopolitical rupture was lived as destruction and forced choice.

Picquart was sixteen when German forces shelled the city. He witnessed the art gallery and library burn, neighbourhoods being blown apart, and friends dying; he also helped dig strangers from the rubble. After nine weeks, the garrison surrendered. The inhabitants then faced a stark alternative: remain and become German, or leave for France and give up what they had. Picquart’s family chose departure and arrived in Paris destitute, their confidence in the security of civilized life shattered.

Picquart’s Personal Aftermath

Years later, Picquart recalled Strasbourg while looking at family photographs in his mother’s home in Versailles. The images—a family in Strasbourg, the garden at Geudertheim, and a picnic in the woods of Neudorf—belonged to a world that the war had taken from them. His recollection joins the public history of bombardment and surrender to the private evidence of displacement: a family’s places and possessions became reminders of a life that could not be recovered simply by moving to France.

The defeat also redirected Picquart’s future. He reflected that before the humiliation of 1870 he might have become a music professor or a surgeon; afterwards, a career outside the army seemed frivolous. The Ministry of War financed his education, and he came to regard the army as a father whose approval he strove to earn. His later discipline, military distinction, and ambition therefore grew partly from the catastrophe he had witnessed as a boy. Strasbourg was not simply an episode in his past; it helped form the officer through whose eyes the book recounts the Dreyfus affair.

A Defeat Recalled in the Dreyfus Affair

The memory of 1870 persisted among senior officers who had been young during the defeat. Picquart describes Auguste Mercier, Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre, and Charles-Arthur Gonse as marked by the rout and fearful of Germany. Their habitual comparison of German and French population and armament—the numerical disparity Picquart calls their formula of pessimism—shows how the old defeat continued to structure their sense of national vulnerability.

That fear entered the affair as more than background. When Mercier learned that civilians, including family friends and the Chief Rabbi of Paris, might be involved in a public hearing, he invoked the defeat of 1870 as proof that France lacked German ruthlessness. The memory thus served to frame procedural restraint as weakness in a life-or-death struggle. In another account of the crisis, Mercier claimed that the Dreyfus controversy had brought France close to war with Germany and described preparations for possible mobilization. The book presents such appeals to 1870 as part of the language through which military leaders made present danger feel inseparable from past humiliation.

Reversal and Historical Significance

The affair’s public rituals make the contrast with 1870 especially sharp. At Alfred Dreyfus’s degradation, an official announced the court’s verdict before the Paris garrison, and the condemned captain was made to march before the assembled soldiers while spectators jeered his repeated claims of innocence. In 1906, after Dreyfus was fully exonerated, he was restored to the army as a major and awarded the Legion of Honour. Picquart, too, was restored to the rank he might have attained had he not been dishonourably discharged. He returned to the parade ground of the École Militaire for Dreyfus’s medal ceremony, now wearing a brigadier general’s uniform.

These later events do not undo the loss of Strasbourg or the displacement of Picquart’s family. They show instead how the remembered defeat could be carried forward into another national crisis: first as a source of military fear and claims of necessity, and later as part of the history against which questions of loyalty, justice, and public honour had to be judged. The city’s surrender belongs to 1870, but its consequences remain active in the book’s account of the Dreyfus affair.