Chapter ǴǴ: Uchronia, or Alternative History ȂȈȂstopped there, but they didn’t. Not content with this diplomatic triumph,
the French foreign ministry tried to humiliate the Prussians further. It
instructed the French ambassador to accost Prussia’s King William I at a
spa and press for written assurance that no such candidacy would ever be
renewed. Ļe king politely refused. Bismarck, the Prussian prime minis-
ter, published the king’s report of the episode after tendentiously editing
it to give the impression to the French that the king had insulted their
ambassador and to the Prussians that the ambassador had been impolite
to their king. Empress Eugenie of France, a leading war hawk, expected
that victory would further consolidate the Napoleonic dynasty. So the
French enthusiastically let themselves be tricked into declaring war, even
though they were militarily unprepared and lacked even adequate maps
of the likely theaters of operations. NapoleonIIIlost his throne, the
Bonapartist Second Empire collapsed, France lost Alsace-Lorraine, revan-
chisme emerged as a political force in France, and danger of another war
developed. What if soberer minds had prevailed in the French govern-
ment? What if the Spaniards had invited some non-German as their king
in the first place?
As the end of the Second Empire hinged on chance, so did its begin-
ning. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, as he was then known, staged a gener-
ally unforeseen coup d’etat on Decemberȁ,ȀȇȄȀ. His term as president of
the republic (won by name recognition) would soon expire, and the consti-
tution barred his reelection. Hence he seized power. But his cruel stroke
might well have failed, and with it the train of events that led France and
Germany to the wars ofȀȇȆǿandȀȈȀȃ.
Ļe Great War was a tragic and unnecessary modern turning point.
Ļink of its consequences—economic, political, military, and psycho-
logical. InȀȈȀȃno power desired or foresaw a war so long and bloody.
Although a complicated network of alliances did pose danger, events on
the scale that later developed were not predicted. Ļey did not stop with
the armistice ofȀȈȀȇ. World WarII followed, largely as a consequence of
and sequel to the first war. One of the causal connections was the fact that
Germany’s defeat and the ensuing Treaty of Versailles gave Hitler mate-
rial for domestic propaganda. But what if advice not to punish Germany
so severely had prevailed at Versailles? Or what if Britain and France had
acted decisively when Hitler first violated the treaty inȀȈȂȃ–ȀȈȂȅ?
Ļe fateful significance of Juneȁȇ,ȀȈȀȃ—the date when the Aus-
trian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo and the
curtain began to rise for the world conflict of ȀȈȀȃ–ȀȈȀȇand then of