Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR By the year 1867 all of Italy was united into a kingdom under the House of Savoy, except the city of Rome and the region immediately surrounding it, and all of Germany was united into a strong confederation, under the leadership of the House of Hohenzollern, except the South German states, Bavaria, Baden, Wiirtemberg, and a part of Hesse-Darmstadt. The unification, however, of neither country could be considered complete until these detached parts were joined with the main mass. This was brought about as one of the incidents of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Some knowledge of that war, therefore, is necessary to a comprehension of the subsequent period. Another by-product of that war was the Third French Republic, a fact in contemporary Europe of large significance. How did the clash come about between France and Prussia, a clash that had such consequences ? France, since 1852, had been an empire, ruled over by the Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of the great Napoleon. The Emperor played a large role in European politics from 1852 to 1870. His government was as much of an imitation of the system of Napoleon I as the nature of the times and the character of the ruler would allow. During most of the period the government was auto- 33 cratic; only toward the end was it somewhat liberalized. In the main it was the personality of the monarch that counted, and that shaped the course of events. While there were occasional elections and a national legislature, and while universal suffrage nominally existed, in practice the legislature was controlled by the Emperor, universal suffrage was cleverly manipulated, the Emperor was, in large measure, an absolute sovereign. France experienced a great economic expansion during this reign and grew in w...