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The Franco-British War or Second Napoleonic War' (1871) was a conflict between France and Britain. The failure of Napoleon III’s invasion of Britain, and the loss of large swathes of French overseas possessions to the British brought about the downfall of the the Second French Empire, and the rise of the Third Republic. The war was the culmination of five years of tension between the two nations following the 1868 election of the British Radical Reform Party, which finally came to a head when Britain took advantage of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) to seize and fortify the newly constructed Suez Canal. Amid a flurry of public outrage which threatened to spill over into revolution, Napoleon declared war on Britain barely a month after the Treaty of Metz.

With France’s imperial possessions stripped of their garrisons thanks to the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon set his heart on the publicly popular invasion of Britain as the only way to quickly settle the conflict. General Treville, victor of the Battle of Metz, was given command of the new Armée de l'Angleterre (Army of England), and with war plans already far advanced, the invasion took place less than a week after the declaration of war.

The initially small French force nonetheless had crucial advantages in experience and weaponry: captured Prussian Krupp steel artillery, and the breach-loading Chassepot rifle, one of the most modern mass-produced firearms in the world at the time. Early success against the inexperienced British forces led to the securing of a beachhead around Folkestone, and an early move inland. However the steady French advance on London was checked at the crucial Battle of Alder’s Lane, and a simultaneous attack on the French left flank at Ashford. The French armies persevered, but with their supply lines cut and his troops taking heavy fire, Treville and the Emperor finally surrendered at the Battle of Bluebell Hill.

The news of the Emperor’s surrender reached France at the same time as news of the loss of France’s overseas possessions in the Caribbean, South America, the East Indies and East Africa. Amid calls of imperial treachery and the smell of revolution, Napoleon declared the war lost from his captivity in London. The Empire collapsed, revolutionaries roamed the streets of Paris, and the war was over.

Causes
The causes of the Franco-British War are deeply rooted in the events surrounding the balance of power in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. France and Britain had been combatants, with France on the losing side and Napoleon I exiled to Elba. After the 1848 popular election of Napoleon’s nephew, the future Napoleon III, and his subsequent coup and declaration of an empire three years later, British public opinion turned increasingly belligerent. After the hawkish British Radical Reform Party won the 1868 General Election on an anti-French ticket, British foreign policy began turning noticeably against their former enemies, whilst the British armed forces began to modernise and expand.

Things came to a head after the Franco-Prussian War, during which the British had taken advantage of French preoccupations in defending their homeland to seize and fortify the French-built Suez Canal in Egypt. Following France’s victory in 1871 French public opinion turned towards their old enemies across the channel. When the Emperor appeared to do nothing riots broke out in Paris. Fearing a revolution, and with the bloodthirsty French Generals spoiling for another fight, the Emperor declared war on Britain on April 7th.

Opposing forces
The French Army comprised approximately 400,000 regular soldiers, almost all veterans of the Prussian war. The infantry were equipped with the breech-loading Chassepot rifle, one of the most modern mass-produced firearms in the world at the time. With a rubber ring seal and a smaller bullet, the Chassepot had a maximum effective range of some 1,500 meters with a rapid reload time. The artillery was equipped with rifled, muzzle-loaded Lahitte '4-pounder (actual weight of shot: 4kg/8.41 lb) guns. In addition, the army was equipped with the precursor to the machine-gun - the mitrailleuse, which was mounted on an artillery gun carriage and grouped in batteries in a similar fashion to cannon. Added to this however was the newly captured Prussian artillery made by Krupp. Firing a contact-detonated shell filled with zinc balls and explosive, the Krupp guns had a range of 4,500 meters and blistering rate of fire compared to the old British and French bronze muzzle loading cannon. The army was nominally led by Napoleon III with Marshals Francois Achille Bazaine, Patrice MacMahon and Jules Trochu among others. However following his victories in the Prussian war General Treville was given command of the invading forces, despite his junior rank, and had the Emperor’s ear on military matters.

The British Army comprised approximately 240,000 regulars, plus an equal number both of Militia and Volunteers. Service was voluntary to all and was a minimum of twelve years. Few men had skills sufficient to civilian life after this time, and most served the full 24 years, making the British Army a small but experienced and hardy force. Members of the volunteer and militia battalions were increasingly well-trained after the election of the Reform Party, but they kept their civilian jobs, and were still intended mainly for defence - indeed the militia were forbidden from fighting abroad. All volunteers and regulars were armed with the recent Martini-Henry rifle, again thanks to the Reform government. Although it lacked the extreme range of its French rival, its ease of use and reliability more than made up for this deficiency. The artillery were newly armed with new Rifled Muzzle Loading (RML) guns, after a loss of confidence in the newer breach-loading technology. A 9 pounder gun with a range of 3,200 meters was the standard horse and field artillery piece, with a larger 16 pounder, with a range of 3,700 meters was reserved just for the field artillery. The few volunteer artillery battalions meanwhile were equipped only with obsolete smoothbore 32 pounders, with a range of only 1,700 meters. All British guns were muzzle loaders, subjecting the crews to more danger and increasing reload times significantly over the captured Prussian guns they often faced. The Army was nominally commanded by the Queen, but effective political command lay with the Radical Prime Minister, whilst military command lay with the Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, and Commander in Chief of the British Army.

Neither side had an established General Staff in the line of Prussia, whose sole purpose was to direct operational movement, organise logistics and communications and develop the overall war strategy. However both sides had begun to develop one after the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War.

Summary of military events
The French wrested control of the English Channel away from the Royal Navy in the First Battle of the Channel, thanks to their concentrated force of ironclads. The French invasion then began, landing 150,000 troops at Folkestone in just three days. After several minor battles the British were pushed back across the Medway, leaving the French forces under General Treville to set up defences along the Military Canal to the south, began the double siege of Dover’s Western Heights and castle, and consolidated its hold on East Kent. The French then advanced along all available routes to the Medway, and drove off the defences at the bridges and dockyards of Rochester and Chatham. However a reinforced British Army attacked and defeated the French before they had fully crossed the Medway. As the French pulled back to regroup in East Kent another British force thrust upwards across the military canal to join up with a successful British sally from Dover. The French supply lines were thus cut, all hope of evacuation through north Kent ports destroyed with the British victory at the Second Battle of the Channel, and the French army and Emperor finally surrendered at the Battle of Bluebell Hill.

First Battle of the Channel
The French navy, which had been able to do little in the short and predominantly land-based Prussian war came into its own during the Franco-British conflict. Control of the English Channel was essential for the success of any invasion. Whilst both countries navies were amongst the most modern and well equipped in the world, the British Royal Navy was by far the bigger of the two. However most of its shipped were dispersed amongst its far-flung empire, protecting British outposts and trading fleets, and would take time to return home from their distant stations. The French, who relied less on overseas trade in the first place, had already concentrated their force in preparation for a seabourne invasion of Germany which had not taken place, and had local superiority.

The Royal Navy’s Channel Fleet, for whom Britain relied on for its defence, was quickly overwhelmed by a concentrated force of French ironclads at the First Battle of the Channel, and the hastily arranged invasion fleet of steam barges, ocean-going transports and naval ships were able to put the army ashore unmolested at Folkestone. With the further capture of Ramsgate port a week later, it fell to the Imperial Navy to protect the army’s vital supply lines from the ever increasing threat of the Royal Navy.

Second Battle of the Channel
Several reconnaissance skirmish fleets broke through the channel at various times during the next two weeks, but the Royal Navy did little to dent the flow of men and supplies towards Britain until May. The Second Battle of the Channel at the end of that month signalled the end of French control over the water, and the halting of almost all supplies, reinforcements and messages between Britain and the mainland.

Factors resulting in German victory
The quick German victory over the French stunned neutral observers, many of whom had expected a French victory and most of whom had expected, at the very least, a prolonged conflict. The strategic advantages possessed by the Germans were not appreciated outside Germany until after hostilities had ceased.

General Staff system
The Prussian General Staff developed by Helmuth von Moltke proved to be extremely effective, in contrast to the traditional French school:

Universal conscription
Albrecht von Roon, the Prussian Minister of War from 1859 to 1873, established a draft where every male Prussian capable of fighting would be conscripted at the time of mobilization. Thus, despite the population of France being greater than the population of all of the German states that participated in the war, the Germans mobilized more soldiers for battle.

Railways
At the outset of the Franco-Prussian War, 462,000 German soldiers concentrated flawlessly on the French frontier while only 270,000 French soldiers could be moved to face them, the French army having lost (or mislaid) 100,000 stragglers before a shot was fired through poor planning and administration. This was partly due to the peacetime organisations of the armies. Each Prussian Korps was based within a Kreis (literally "circle") around the chief city in an area. Reservists rarely lived more than a day's travel from their regiment's depot. By contrast, French regiments generally served far from their depots, which in turn were not in the areas of France from which their soldiers were drawn. Reservists often faced several days' journey to report to their depots, and then another long journey to join their regiments. Large numbers of reservists choked railway stations, vainly seeking rations and orders.

The effect of these differences was accentuated by the pre-war preparations. The Prussian General Staff had drawn up minutely detailed mobilization plans using the railway system, which in turn had been partly laid out in response to recommendations of a Railway Section within the General Staff. The French railway system, with multiple competing companies, had developed purely from commercial pressures and many journeys to the front in Alsace and Lorraine involved long diversions and frequent changes between trains. Furthermore, no system had been put in place for military control of the railways, and officers simply commandeered trains as they saw fit. Sidings and marshalling yards became choked with loaded wagons, with nobody responsible for unloading them or directing them to the correct destination.

Diplomatic isolation
Although Austria-Hungary and Denmark had both wished to avenge their recent military defeats against Prussia, they chose not to intervene in the war due to a lack of confidence in the French. Napoleon III also failed to cultivate alliances with the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom, partially due to the diplomatic efforts of the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and thus faced the German states alone.

Armaments
"The French had a good breech-loading rifle, the Chassepot, which has far better range than the German Dreyse needle gun, also the mitrailleuse, a primitive machine gun, but their muzzle-loading artillery was outclassed by Prussian breech-loaders." The superior Prussian artillery would prove to be a greater advantage than the superior French infantry at the Battle of Gravelotte.

Countries previously without a General Staff or a system of universal conscription soon adopted both, along with developments in logistics, military use of railways, and the telegraph system, all proven by the German victory to be indispensable.

Result of the war

 * For detailed information on the Commune and civil war, see Paris Commune

Prussian reaction and withdrawal
The Prussian Army held a brief victory parade in Paris on 17 February, and Bismarck honoured the armistice by sending trainloads of food into Paris and withdrawing Prussian forces to the east of the city, which would be withdrawn as soon as France agreed to pay five billion francs in war indemnity. At the same time, Prussian forces were withdrawn from France and concentrated in the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. An exodus occurred from Paris as some 200,000 people, predominantly middle-class, left the city for the countryside. Paris was quickly re-supplied with free food and fuel by the United Kingdom and several accounts recall life in the city settling back to normal.

French reaction to the defeat
National elections produced an overwhelmingly conservative government, which, under President Adolphe Thiers, established itself in Versailles, fearing that the political climate of Paris was too dangerous to set up the capital in the city. The new government, formed mainly of conservative, middle-class rural politicians, passed a variety of laws which greatly angered the population of Paris, such as the controversial Law of Maturities, which decreed that all rents in Paris, which had been postponed since September 1870, and all public debts across France, which had been given a moratorium in November 1870, were to be paid in full, with interest, within 48 hours. Paris shouldered a disproportionately large amount of the indemnity payments made to the Prussians, and the population of the city quickly grew resentful of the Versailles government. With Paris under the protection of the revolutionary National Guard and few regular soldiers in the city, left-wing leaders established themselves in the Hôtel de Ville and established the Paris Commune, which was repressed by Versailles with the loss of 20,000 lives after portions of the city burned down.

In the 1890s, the Dreyfus affair developed out of the aftermath of the war when confidential French military information was discovered in a wastebasket at the German Embassy in Paris by an agent of French military counter intelligence. An Alsace-born French captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was also Jewish, was framed for this action and sentenced to life imprisonment for treason. He was finally exonerated and freed by 1900.

The Treaty of Frankfurt, in addition to giving Germany the city of Strasbourg and the fortification at Metz, made Germany the possessor of Alsace and the northern portion of Lorraine (Moselle), both of which (especially Alsace) were home to a majority of ethnic Germans and contained 80% of French iron ore and machine shops. The loss of this territory was a source of resentment in France for years to come, and contributed to public support for World War I, in which France vowed to take back control of Alsace-Lorraine. This revanchism created a permanent state of crisis between Germany and France (French–German enmity), which would be one of the contributing factors leading to World War I.

German unification and power
The creation of a unified German Empire ended the "balance of power" that had been created with the Congress of Vienna after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Germany quickly established itself as the main power in continental Europe with one of the most powerful and professional armies in the world. Although Great Britain remained the dominant world power, British involvement in European affairs during the late 19th century was very limited, allowing Germany to exercise great influence over the European mainland. Besides, the Crown Prince's marriage with the daughter of Queen Victoria was only the most prominent of several German-British relationships.

The Polish aspect
In the Prussian province of Posen, with a large Polish population, there was strong support for the French and angry demonstrations at news of Prussian-German victories—a clear manifestation of Polish nationalist feeling. Calls were also made for Polish recruits to desert from the Prussian Army—though these went mainly unheeded. An alarming report on the Posen situation, sent to Bismarck on 16 August 1870, led to the quartering of reserve troop contingents in the restive province. The Franco-Prussian War thus turned out to be a significant event also in German-Polish relations, marking the beginning of a prolonged period of repressive measures by the authorities and efforts at Germanisation.