1870: the war that formed Europe

We tend to think that Europe has been as it is for a long time. But no. The Europe we know, with its countries and languages, was born dizzyingly between 1870 and 1871. And this continental Big Bang exploded because of a Catalan, General Joan Prim.

Prim's action was the start of a chain of accidents and coincidences with unpredictable consequences. One, ultimately, was the survival of the Catalan language in Catalonia while dozens of European languages became extinct.

The France of the Second Empire (Napoleon III) and the Prussia of William I and his Chancellor Otto von Bismarck maintained an increasingly tense relationship. The "balance of power" established at the Congress of Vienna (1815), after Napoleon's defeat, no longer worked. But peace was maintained until Joan Prim, President of the Spanish Council of Ministers, proposed that the monarchy be restored with Leopold of Hohenzollern as king.

That Spain should have a German king seemed intolerable to Napoleon III, the picturesque nephew of Napoleon I, because it definitively broke the continental balance. And he decided, cunningly spurred on by his enemy Bismarck (with the stratagem of the Ems Telegram, too long to explain here), to declare war on Prussia.

To confront Prussia, Napoleon withdrew his troops from Italy. The Papal States were left without French protection. This allowed King Victor Emmanuel of Savoy to take Rome and the Lazio region and complete the Italian unification. It was the first consequence of that war.

Prussia spectacularly defeated France. The victory strengthened the prestige of William I and his chancellor Bismarck and stimulated the other German monarchies to integrate into the Prussian orbit. On January 18, 1871, in occupied territory and in a place as symbolic as the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, the German princes (Bavaria, Württemberg, Hesse, etcetera) surrendered their sovereignty and proclaimed William I as Emperor of Germany. This was the second consequence of that war.

The defeat ended the Second French Empire and gave birth to the Third Republic, born from the disaster, from the brutal repression against the revolutionary Paris Commune and, paradoxically, from the rise of monarchical sentiment. Republicans were a minority, but monarchists were divided between Bourbons and Orleanists. The result was a republic without a flag (the white one of the kings and the revolutionary tricolor alternated according to the political moment), without an anthem ("La Marsellesa was not restored until 1878) and without defined objectives.

There were no objectives, but there were lessons learned. For the French, it became evident that the victors of the war were in reality “the German masters,” who had trained several generations of educated citizens capable of understanding each other (more or less) in the same language. This was vital for the logistics of the Prussian troops.

Conclusion? The Third Republic decided to build France through public and secular education. One of the many variants of the “langue d'oeil”, the one spoken in Paris and its surroundings, was chosen among all the others (Burgundian, Norman, Poitevin, Walloon, etcetera) and over the others (Ligurian, Catalan, Gascon, Limousin, etcetera). The national extension of what we now know as “French” was the third consequence of that war.

In the same sense, the government of unified Italy chose the Tuscan dialect, the one used by Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, as the national language. It wasn't easy: it was only spoken by 2% of families, the most educated ones. Even today, according to the Accademia della Crusca (not very different from the Royal Spanish Academy), less than 60% of Italians use Italian in the family sphere. The percentage rises year after year.

What happened in Spain? After the failed attempt to import a “modern” German king, and after the brief experiment with Amadeo of Savoy (1871-1873) and the equally brief First Republic (1873-1874), Spain turned away from the dominant currents in Europe and returned to the Bourbons. And, with them, to clerical primacy in education.

From this emerged a backward and decaying country. The fact is that the clergy taught in "vernacular language" and, therefore, in Catalan in Catalonia. The language survived. Not even the furious attempts of the Franco regime to exterminate it, decades later, were successful: it was too deeply rooted in homes.

Twisting things a bit, the survival (precarious but undoubted) of Catalan was the fourth consequence of that Franco-Prussian war.