Part 58 (1/2)
[Rouen occupied, Dec. 6.]
[Bapaume, Jan. 3.]
[St. Quentin, Jan 19.]
After the fall of Amiens, Manteuffel moved upon Rouen. This city fell into his hands without resistance; the conquerors pressed on westwards, and at Dieppe troops which had come from the confines of Russia gazed for the first time upon the sea. But the Republican armies, unlike those which the Germans had first encountered, were not to be crushed at a single blow.
Under the energetic command of Faidherbe the army of the North advanced again upon Amiens. Goeben, who was left to defend the line of the Somme, went out to meet him, defeated him on the 23rd of December, and drove him back to Arras. But again, after a week's interval, Faidherbe pushed forward. On the 3rd of January he fell upon Goeben's weak division at Bapaume, and handled it so severely that the Germans would on the following day have abandoned their position, if the French had not themselves been the first to retire. Faidherbe, however, had only fallen back to receive reinforcements. After some days' rest he once more sought to gain the road to Paris, advancing this time by the eastward line through St. Quentin. In front of this town Goeben attacked him. The last battle of the army of the North was fought on the 19th of January. The French general endeavoured to disguise his defeat, but the German commander had won all that he desired.
Faidherbe's army was compelled to retreat northwards in disorder; its part in the war was at an end.
[The Armies of the Loire and of the East.]
[Le Mans, Jan. 12.]
[Bourbaki.]
[Montbeliard, Jan. 15-17.]
[The Eastern army crosses the Swiss Frontier, Feb. 1.]
During the last three weeks of December there was a pause in the operations of the Germans on the Loire. It was expected that Bourbaki and the east wing of The Armies of the French army would soon re-appear at Orleans and endeavour to combine with Chanzy's troops. Gambetta, however, had formed another plan. He considered that Chanzy, with the a.s.sistance of divisions formed in Brittany, would be strong enough to encounter Prince Frederick Charles, and he determined to throw the army of Bourbaki, strengthened by reinforcements from the south, upon Germany itself. The design was a daring one, and had the two French armies been capable of performing the work which Gambetta required of them, an inroad into Baden, or even the re-conquest of Alsace, would most seriously have affected the position of the Germans before Paris. But Gambetta miscalculated the power of young, untrained troops, imperfectly armed, badly fed, against a veteran enemy. In a series of hard-fought struggles the army of the Loire under General Chanzy was driven back at the beginning of January from Vendome to Le Mans.
On the 12th, Chanzy took post before this city and fought his last battle.
While he was making a vigorous resistance in the centre of the line, the Breton regiments stationed on his right gave way; the Germans pressed round him, and gained possession of the town. Chanzy retreated towards Laval, leaving thousands of prisoners in the hands of the enemy, and saving only the debris of an army. Bourbaki in the meantime, with a numerous but miserably equipped force, had almost reached Belfort. The report of his eastward movement was not at first believed at the German headquarters before Paris, and the troops of General Werder, which had been engaged about Dijon with a body of auxiliaries commanded by Garibaldi, were left to bear the brunt of the attack without support. When the real state of affairs became known Manteuffel was sent eastwards in hot haste towards the threatened point. Werder had evacuated Dijon and fallen back upon Vesoul; part of his army was still occupied in the siege of Belfort. As Bourbaki approached he fell back with the greater part of his troops in order to cover the besieging force, leaving one of his lieutenants to make a flank attack upon Bourbaki at Villers.e.xel. This attack, one of the fiercest in the war, delayed the French for two days, and gave Werder time to occupy the strong positions that he had chosen about Montbeliard. Here, on the 15th of January, began a struggle which lasted for three days. The French, starving and peris.h.i.+ng with cold, though far superior in number to their enemy, were led with little effect against the German entrenchments. On the 18th Bourbaki began his retreat. Werder was unable to follow him; Manteuffel with a weak force was still at some distance, and for a moment it seemed possible that Bourbaki, by a rapid movement westwards, might crush this isolated foe. Gambetta ordered Bourbaki to make the attempt: the commander refused to court further disaster with troops who were not fit to face an enemy, and retreated towards Pontarlier in the hope of making his way to Lyons. But Manteuffel now descended in front of him; divisions of Werder's army pressed down from the north; the retreat was cut off; and the unfortunate French general, whom a telegram from Gambetta removed from his command, attempted to take his own life. On the 1st of February, the wreck of his army, still numbering eighty-five thousand men, but reduced to the extremity of weakness and misery, sought refuge beyond the Swiss frontier.
[Capitulation of Paris and Armistice, Jan. 28.]
The war was now over. Two days after Bourbaki's repulse at Montbeliard the last unsuccessful sortie was made from Paris. There now remained provisions only for another fortnight; above forty thousand of the inhabitants had succ.u.mbed to the privations of the siege; all hope of a.s.sistance from the relieving armies before actual famine should begin disappeared. On the 23rd of January Favre sought the German Chancellor at Versailles in order to discuss the conditions of a general armistice and of the capitulation of Paris. The negotiations lasted for several days; on the 28th an armistice was signed with the declared object that elections might at once be freely held for a National a.s.sembly, which should decide whether the war should be continued, or on what conditions peace should be made. The conditions of the armistice were that the forts of Paris and all their material of war should be handed over to the German army; that the artillery of the enceinte should be dismounted; and that the regular troops in Paris should, as prisoners of war, surrender their arms. The National Guard were permitted to retain their weapons and their artillery. Immediately upon the fulfilment of the first two conditions all facilities were to be given for the entry of supplies of food into Paris. [545]
[National a.s.sembly at Bordeaux, Feb. 12.]
[Preliminaries of Peace, Feb. 26.]
The articles of the armistice were duly executed, and on the 30th of January the Prussian flag waved over the forts of the French capital.
Orders were sent into the provinces by the Government that elections should at once be held. It had at one time been feared by Count Bismarck that Gambetta would acknowledge no armistice that might be made by his colleagues at Paris. But this apprehension was not realised, for, while protesting against a measure adopted without consultation with himself and his companions at Bordeaux, Gambetta did not actually reject the armistice.
He called upon the nation, however, to use the interval for the collection of new forces; and in the hope of gaining from the election an a.s.sembly in favour of a continuation of the war, he published a decree incapacitating for election all persons who had been connected with the Government of Napoleon III. Against this decree Bismarck at once protested, and at his instance it was cancelled by the Government of Paris. Gambetta thereupon resigned. The elections were held on the 8th of February, and on the 12th the National a.s.sembly was opened at Bordeaux. The Government of Defence now laid down its powers. Thiers--who had been the author of those fortifications which had kept the Germans at bay for four months after the overthrow of the Imperial armies; who, in the midst of the delirium of July, 1870, had done all that man could do to dissuade the Imperial Government and its Parliament from war; who, in spite of his seventy years, had, after the fall of Napoleon, hurried to London, to St. Petersburg, to Florence, to Vienna, in the hope of winning some support for France,--was the man called by common a.s.sent to the helm of State. He appointed a Ministry, called upon the a.s.sembly to postpone all discussions as to the future Government of France, and himself proceeded to Versailles in order to negotiate conditions of peace. For several days the old man struggled with Count Bismarck on point after point in the Prussian demands. Bismarck required the cession of Alsace and Eastern Lorraine, the payment of six milliards of francs, and the occupation of part of Paris by the German army until the conditions of peace should be ratified by the a.s.sembly. Thiers strove hard to save Metz, but on this point the German staff was inexorable; he succeeded at last in reducing the indemnity to five milliards, and was given the option between retaining Belfort and sparing Paris the entry of the German troops. On the last point his patriotism decided without a moment's hesitation. He bade the Germans enter Paris, and saved Belfort for France. On the 26th of February preliminaries of peace were signed. Thirty thousand German soldiers marched into the Champs Elysees on the 1st of March; but on that same day the treaty was ratified by the a.s.sembly at Bordeaux, and after forty-eight hours Paris was freed from the sight of its conquerors. The Articles of Peace provided for the gradual evacuation of France by the German army as the instalments of the indemnity, which were allowed to extend over a period of three years, should be paid. There remained for settlement only certain matters of detail, chiefly connected with finance; these, however, proved the object of long and bitter controversy, and it was not until the 10th of May that the definitive Treaty of Peace was signed at Frankfort.
[German Unity.]
France had made war in order to undo the work of partial union effected by Prussia in 1866: it achieved the opposite result, and Germany emerged from the war with the Empire established. Immediately after the victory of Worth the Crown Prince had seen that the time had come for abolis.h.i.+ng the line of division which severed Southern Germany from the Federation of the North.
His own conception of the best form of national union was a German Empire with its chief at Berlin. That Count Bismarck was without plans for uniting North and South Germany it is impossible to believe; but the Minister and the Crown Prince had always been at enmity; and when, after the battle of Sedan, they spoke together of the future, it seemed to the Prince as if Bismarck had scarcely thought of the federation of the Empire or of the re-establishment of the Imperial dignity, and as if he was inclined to it only under certain reserves. It was, however, part of Bismarck's system to exclude the Crown Prince as far as possible from political affairs, under the strange pretext that his relations.h.i.+p to Queen Victoria would be abused by the French proclivities of the English Court; and it is possible that had the Chancellor after the battle of Sedan chosen to admit the Prince to his confidence instead of resenting his interference, the difference between their views as to the future of Germany would have been seen to be one rather of forms and means than of intention. But whatever the share of these two dissimilar spirits in the initiation of the last steps towards German union, the work, as ultimately achieved, was both in form and in substance that which the Crown Prince had conceived. In the course of September negotiations were opened with each of the Southern States for its entry into the Northern Confederation. Bavaria alone raised serious difficulties, and demanded terms to which the Prussian Government could not consent. Bismarck refrained from exercising pressure at Munich, but invited the several Governments to send representatives to Versailles for the purpose of arriving at a settlement. For a moment the Court of Munich drew the sovereign of Wurtemberg to its side, and orders were sent to the envoys of Wurtemberg at Versailles to act with the Bavarians in refusing to sign the treaty projected by Bismarck. The Wurtemberg Ministers hereupon tendered their resignation; Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt signed the treaty, and the two dissentient kings saw themselves on the point of being excluded from United Germany. They withdrew their opposition, and at the end of November the treaties uniting all the Southern States with the existing Confederation were executed, Bavaria retaining larger separate rights than were accorded to any other member of the Union.
[Proclamation of the Empire, Jan. 18.]
In the acts which thus gave to Germany political cohesion there was nothing that altered the t.i.tle of its chief. Bismarck, however, had in the meantime informed the recalcitrant sovereigns that if they did not themselves offer the Imperial dignity to King William, the North German Parliament would do so. At the end of November a letter was accordingly sent by the King of Bavaria to all his fellow-sovereigns, proposing that the King of Prussia, as President of the newly-formed Federation, should a.s.sume the t.i.tle of German Emperor. Shortly afterwards the same request was made by the same sovereign to King William himself, in a letter dictated by Bismarck. A deputation from the North German Reichstag, headed by its President, Dr.
Simson, who, as President of the Frankfort National a.s.sembly, had in 1849 offered the Imperial Crown to King Frederick William, expressed the concurrence of the nation in the act of the Princes. It was expected that before the end of the year the new political arrangements would have been sanctioned by the Parliaments of all the States concerned, and the 1st of January had been fixed for the a.s.sumption of the Imperial t.i.tle. So vigorous, however, was the opposition made in the Bavarian Chamber, that the ceremony was postponed till the 18th. Even then the final approving vote had not been taken at Munich; but a second adjournment would have been fatal to the dignity of the occasion; and on the 18th of January, in the midst of the Princes of Germany and the representatives of its army a.s.sembled in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, King William a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of German Emperor. The first Parliament of the Empire was opened at Berlin two months later.