Franco-Prussian War of 1870

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 is both a national catastrophe and a living memory in the book: France’s defeat and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine shape Georges Picquart’s military vocation and the army’s later fear of Germany. The war’s history returns in two registers, as a sixteen-year-old’s recollection of Strasbourg under bombardment and as an argument used by senior officers amid the Dreyfus affair.

Defeat and territorial loss

The war ended in a crushing defeat for France, whose army suffered more than 140,000 casualties. Under the armistice, Alsace and Lorraine became part of Germany. The book places this defeat only twenty-five years before the Dreyfus affair, presenting it as a shock to the European balance of power and as part of the historical prelude to the First and Second World Wars.

For Picquart, the loss was not an abstract change of borders. He was sixteen when German forces shelled Strasbourg. After nine weeks, the garrison surrendered, and residents faced a stark choice: remain and become German, or leave their homes and begin again in France. Picquart’s family chose exile; they arrived in Paris destitute, with their confidence in the security of civilized life shattered.

Strasbourg under bombardment

Picquart recalls the shelling as a direct assault on the city and its civilian population. The gallery and library burned, neighborhoods were blown apart, and he knelt beside dying friends while helping strangers from the rubble. His later military education described the bombardment as the first full-scale use of modern long-range artillery specifically to reduce a civilian population. In his memory, the strategic description is inseparable from the people and places destroyed.

The surrender and flight also mark a personal turning point. Picquart later reflects that, before the humiliation of 1870, he might have become a music professor or a surgeon; afterward, any career outside the army seemed frivolous. The war thus helps explain why military service became more than a profession for him: the institution represented a response to defeat and a means of serving the country that had received his displaced family.

The war remembered by the army

The defeat also shapes the outlook of senior officers. Picquart describes Charles-Arthur Gonse, Auguste Mercier, and Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre as members of a generation scarred by 1870 and still frightened by Germany. Their habitual comparison is stark: three Germans for every two Frenchmen, and three francs spent on armaments for every two France can afford. Picquart regards their outlook as defeatist, revealing a divide between his contempt for their pessimism and their continued sense of national vulnerability.

Mercier invokes the same history more aggressively. In a discussion of the secret file prepared for Alfred Dreyfus’s court-martial, he argues that France lost in 1870 because it lacked Germany’s ruthlessness. The recollection of defeat thus becomes part of the case for showing the file to the court: the old military humiliation presses upon a new proceeding and helps turn caution into a purported necessity.

The defeat as political precedent

During the later Dreyfus controversy, Mercier also claimed that the country had come within two finger-breadths of war with Germany. He said that he had ordered Boisdeffre to prepare the telegrams that would trigger full mobilization and had waited with President Casimir-Perier at the Élysée Palace until half past midnight for a response from the German emperor. The book presents this as Mercier’s account, not as an independently established consequence of the 1870 war; its significance lies in how he uses the memory of past defeat to magnify the danger of the current affair.

Across these recollections, 1870 is both lived trauma and political language. Strasbourg’s burned civic institutions, the choice between German rule and exile, and the army’s recurring calculations of relative strength give the later fear of Germany a concrete history. Yet Picquart’s resistance to the senior officers’ pessimism also shows that remembering defeat does not dictate a single response: the same past can be invoked to justify secrecy and force, or examined without surrendering judgment.