Bismarck’s War Audiobook Libro.fm

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Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870 the Prussian army had devastated its opponents captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europes pecking order Other countries looked on in helpless amazement Pushing aside further French resistance a new German Empire was proclaimed as a deliberate humiliation in the Palace of Versailles leaving the French to face civil war in Paris reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine

Bismarcks War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history The culmination of a globally violent decade the FrancoPrussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck both to destroy French power and to unite Germany It could not have worked better but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century

Drawing on a remarkable variety of sources Chrastils book explores the military technological political and social events of the war its human cost and the way that the sheer ferocity of war however successful has profound consequences for both victors and victims

2023 Rachel Chrastil P2023 Penguin Audio