Operational Command in the Franco-Prussian War
Arthur Coumbe1991
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Abstract
War erupted between France and a confederation of German states led by Prussia in July 1870. Within a month of the war's first major battle (Wissembourg, 4 August 1870), the French imperial army had been neutralized. Half of it, along with the Emperor Napoleon III himself, had been led off into captivity in the Rhineland while the other half found itself incarcerated in the fortress of Metz. The rapid demise of France's regular army stunned Europe. Before the summer of 1870, this veteran force, inheritor of the Napoleonic legacy and victor in hundreds of colonial encounters stretching from Cochin China to Mexico, had been considered by most informed observers to be the best army in the world. In Paris, a proviSional republican government, led by the fiery lawyer Leon Gambetta, took up the struggle after the fall of the discredited Bonaparte dynasty (4 September 1870). Despite valiant efforts, all Gambetta and his followers could do, however, was to postpone final defeat for ...
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Key takeaways
- The German army entered the war with certain organizational and institutional advantages over its French rival as regards command and control in a European setting.
- By 1870, many brigade and division commanders had personally studied under Moltke, and at the side of every corps and army commander stood a chief of staff, a member of the General Staff Corps who, along with his superior, was held directly responsible for the performance of his organization.
- The Second Army employed only six assistant staff officers to draft and pass along instructions to its six assigned corps.
- Written orders in the French army were, as a general rule, extremely long and detailed.
- Yet for US military officers, the French case is in many respects more relevant.
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