The Franco-Prussian War overturned the balance of power in Europe. That balance, stable since the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1814-15, had depended on a rough equivalence among five European great powers: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia.
It helped, too, that all five powers were preoccupied: the British and the French were building overseas empires; the Russian Tsar was expanding into Central Asia; the Austrian Habsburgs were sinking in a cauldron of national tensions; while the Prussians had the opposite problem, that the Germans were fragmented into petty states.
Between 1864 and 1871, this situation was transformed by the enforced ‘solution’ of the national question in Germany – the Prussian-dominated unification of the country by Bismarckian ‘blood and iron’. The Danish-Prussian, Austro-Prussian, and Franco-Prussian Wars had the intended effect of generating a tidal wave of German nationalist sentiment that overwhelmed the petty-potentates of the minor German states and compelled them to unite with Prussia. The Prussian King became the German Emperor in January 1871.
Seasons, saints, and feast days