Blood and Iron: How Germany Was Made (1815-1871)

18 January 1871, Versailles. Under a ceiling that showed Louis XIV as the conqueror of German cities, the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors while German guns shelled Paris. Fifty-six years earlier the Congress of Vienna had left the German lands a loose league of some three dozen states, with an Austrian in the chair. In 1862 Bismarck said the great questions of the time would be decided by iron and blood; the country repeated it the other way round. This is how Prussia turned that league into an empire: the Zollverein, 1848 and the Frankfurt parliament, the wars against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870-71, the Ems telegram, the fall of Napoleon III, the siege of Paris, the Commune, and the same hall in 1919. Four battles are shown on animated battlefields, unit by unit: Königgrätz, with the fight for the Swiepwald and the Crown Prince's army coming in from the north to take Chlum; Mars-la-Tour, with Bredow's Death Ride and Wedell's brigade at the ravine; Gravelotte-St. Privat, with the Mance ravine and the Prussian Guard on the slope below Saint-Privat; and Sedan, where a ring of German guns closed on the French army, the French cavalry charged at Floing and a white flag went up over the citadel. Chapters 00:00 Versailles, 1871 01:41 Three Dozen States 07:16 Iron and Blood 13:30 The Duchies 19:11 Königgrätz 22:30 The Battle of Königgrätz 27:03 The Ems Telegram 33:38 Mars-la-Tour 36:27 The Battle of Mars-la-Tour 40:37 Gravelotte 41:21 The Battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat 46:08 Sedan 48:27 The Battle of Sedan 53:18 The Siege of Paris 59:05 The Reich 1:04:24 The Hall of Mirrors About the battle maps: places come from the sources and period maps; lines, march routes and most woods at Königgrätz are schematic. Counters stand for units, whatever their strength: a brigade at Königgrätz, a regiment at Mars-la-Tour, a division at Gravelotte and Sedan. At Sedan the French divisions were understrength, so French counters outnumber German ones. Commanders' flags are placed with their troops; the men themselves were sometimes elsewhere. Bredow's brigade rides back to its starting point (the sources say Flavigny) to keep the counters apart. A few moves the narration skips are shown because the sources record them. Where sources disagree on a time, the maps follow the narration. The Thirty Years' War Part I (1618-1629):    • The Thirty Years' War (1618-1629): The Emp...   Part II (1630-1635):    • The Thirty Years' War (1630-1635): The Lio...   Part III (1635-1648):    • The Thirty Years' War (1635-1648): The Roa...   Artwork (public domain unless noted): Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of the German Empire (1877; 1885 version on the thumbnail) and Sedan; Le Brun, Hall of Mirrors ceiling (engr. Dupuis); Isabey, Congress of Vienna; Adolph Menzel; Carl Röchling; Niels Simonsen; Edwin Weedon; Christian Sell; Otto Heyden; Ludwig Burger; Georg Bleibtreu; C. F. Sørensen; Alfred Dehodencq; H. Merte; Paulin Didion; Alphonse de Neuville; Albert Tissandier; Didier and Guiaud; Puvis de Chavannes; Karl Wagner; J. Gaildrau; Charles Marville; Helen Johns Kirtland; William Orpen; prints and documents from Paris Musées and the Rijksmuseum (CC0), the Library of Congress, the BnF and others. CC BY-SA: Dybbøl Mill, 1864, Danish State Archives (2.0); Reffye mitrailleuse, photo PHGCOM (3.0); Emil Hünten, Mars-la-Tour, photo Rauantiques (4.0); Paris Peace Conference, L'Illustration, 1919 (4.0); arms of Denmark by A.T.2014 (4.0). All via Wikimedia Commons. Portraits (public domain or CC0): Numa Blanc, Carl Günther, Hermann Biow, Nadar, Étienne Carjat, Pierre Petit, Mayer and Pierson, Josef Albert, Herbert Watkins, Eduard Kaiser, Cabanel, Horace Vernet, J.-A. Beaucé, R. Brendamour and others. Historical borders: OpenHistoricalMap contributors (CC0). Natural Earth. Elevation: Terrain Tiles (Mapzen / AWS). Battlefields: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); IGN, Carte de l'état-major (Licence Ouverte); Hédin, Environs de Metz, 1870 (BnF); II. vojenské mapování (CENIA / ČÚZK, UJEP). Music: "Sovereign", "Long Road Ahead", "Bittersweet", "Gymnopedie No 1", "Dreamer", "Volatile Reaction", "Five Armies", "Danse Macabre", "Clash Defiant", "Dark Times", "Lightless Dawn", "Vanishing" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📺 Lines of Empire: history told on the map, campaign by campaign and battle by battle. 🔔 Subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss an episode. #history #documentary #historydocumentary #animatedmap ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━