Franco-Prussian War

It is not now, and was not at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht, marked throughout by natural features, but the following differences must be noted between the frontier of that time and the frontier marked in maps of our day.

Alsace, the province between the Vosges Mountains and the Rhine, was then under French rule, though since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 71 it has belonged again to Germany, and some parts of the Duchy of Lorraine are now French, though then the whole Duchy was independent, except the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, in the Duchy, yet not of it, formed outposts of France.

Without Lorraine, Alsace seems to have no right to belong to France.

It juts into Germany like a long narrow peninsula, with the narrowest isthmus of junction near Belfort.

Whether France had this duchy from the first in view, or whether finding that the maintenance of Stanisław on the Polish throne was impossible, she made the best bargain for herself, is uncertain.

But as the war went on, France made it her condition of assent to the election of Augustus, that the Duchy of Lorraine should be given to Stanisław, and upon his death be incorporated with France.

This condition was finally accepted, and Lorraine remained joined to France until the greater part was with Alsace taken away again after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

This demand of France came specially hard upon the Emperor, because the Duke of Lorraine was the betrothed husband of his elder daughter Maria Theresa.

My childhood passed happily amid the gentle influences of mother and sisters, a kind father devoted to his children, and the companionship of older brothers.

My first sorrow was the Franco-Prussian War.

It has never faded from my memory.

When peace was concluded, my father chose the French nationality, and we had to leave Alsace.

My first book, The Painting, was historical fiction and it was highly researched because it took place in 1870.

So I had to do a lot of research on Japan during 1870, the Meiji era, and then Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

In this book, now this is book five, and I've done five different, you know, fictive works.

I have learned enough that I just said, I'm going to do a let it rip attitude.

My childhood passed happily amid the gentle influences of mother and sisters, a kind father devoted to his children, and the companionship of older brothers.

My first sorrow was the Franco-Prussian War.

It has never faded from my memory.

When peace was concluded, my father chose the French nationality, and we had to leave Alsace.

I think we're used to thinking of World War I as having an impact on surrealism.

Do you think Redon's service in the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s had impacts on his exceptionalness?

Redon is a late bloomer, is often how I talk about him.

Although he took drawing lessons as, you know, um, a teenager and, you know, he traveled to Paris a couple of times to sort of s- try studying in more academic settings, he, he took a while to sort of not only find his voice as an artist, but even to discover that he wanted to be an artist.

His parents wanted him to be an architect.

And then he sort of took a while making not great art, [laughs] um, throughout his 20s and just sort of figuring out, you know, sort of what he might wanna do.

And it was sort of this moment in the early '70s after serving briefly in the Franco-Prussian War, and he, he writes very beautifully about his experience to his family about sort of how that changed his identity, you know, this, this role serving in the war.

And then soon after, just a couple years later, his, his father dies, and it's, it's after these things that he moves to Paris, and he really does find this voice as an artist.

militarized imperial state under the hereditary monarchy of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

Having given support to the unification of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, Britain had become fearful of this new power.

Its growing industrial and military capability threatened to overshadow Britain's diminishing empire.

After the Franco-Prussian War, Germany powered ahead economically, overtaking Britain as an industrial power by the time of the First World War, second only to the United States.

There was a great deal of catching up to do, a great deal of nation building, of creating unity, of creating vision.

It was ambitious, really, to join the other great powers as one of the major European imperial states.

got? Well, it was invented by a Scotsman.

called John Lawson Johnson, Johnston in the late 1870s, who had been supplying preserved beef products to armies, including in the Franco-Prussian War.

But there was at the time, and I confirm this with, because Oxo was also produced more or less the same time, there was a surplus of Argentinian beef.

And nobody knew what to do with it.

Indeed, the Parisians declared they would hold out to the last.

If so, my prospects of getting away were bad indeed, and I was in danger of this wretched Franco-Prussian war doing a permanent injury to my career.

I remember one evening walking along the Tuileries Gardens, watching the flashes of the Prussian artillery, and seeing the French troops marching up to the ramparts with their drums beating before them.

The cannon were roaring as a thunderstorm, and yet the Parisian crowd was looking on calmly, as if merely witnessing a tragedy instead of themselves being in a beleaguered city.