Seven-Week War

The Seven Weeks war initially began after Napoleon II disappeared and Louis Bonapart was elected president of France in 1848. He named himself Napoleon III and his main purpose in power was to break the confine that restricted expansion of the French which was the Congress of Vienna. He practiced realism in politics, better known as realpolitik whereby he didn't care about the human economic cost of building a union. The Seven-week war is also known as the Austro-Prussian war or the unification war and is popular for, in this era, the Prussian empire took power from the Germans. This because Napoleon III was after the crash of the Germans as well as Russians, in fact, he was the one that propagated the war in the 1850s when the Russians wanted the Crimean Peninsula and since the French army was more superior, the Russians lost.

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This encouraged the Russians to become aggressive and in 1859, the Russian army attack Ottoman's fleet in Istanbul and this led to the Crimean war which cost the lives of 750,000 people. Russia, therefore, became weakened by Napoleon III regime and eventually, he got payback for his uncle eventually allowing France to reassert itself into European politics. Wilheim stepped into the Prussian throne in 1861 and requested the parliament to grant him an unlimited budget where the king would use any resources he wanted to run the government, the military included with an aim of expanding the army. This was met by controversy since the government wanted an accounting for his expenditure and this made him appoint a Prussian prime minister, Otto Von Bismarck

He taxed the people heavily with the aim of raising the budget creating Germany and hegemony and this began to be a threat to France. Otto Von utilized the realpolitik concept and since he controlled the German federation, he tore it apart then brought it together using Prussian leadership by using Schleswig and Holstein. Denmark does not support this and Prussia and Austria make an alliance in rode to go to war with Denmark which was quite at a disadvantage. Austria could not fight Prussia since they had the declaration of neutrality with France and this led to the Seven-week war where they fought for three weeks long and spent four weeks negotiating peace treaties.

The king of Prussia wrote a telegram to the French ambassador but Bismarck intercepted it and since his aim was propagating war, he modified it and made it look like the Prussian king is insulting the ambassador as well as the French people. This infuriated him upon reception of the telegram and as a result, Napoleon III declared war in 1870 on Prussia which was known as the Franco/Prussian war where he visited a fortress where his troops were in the sedan. The Prussian army later surrounded the fortress and found Napoleon III forcing him into exile where he later died, therefore, leaving France with the option to stop the war or continue. The interim government continued it and this was a bad idea since the Prussian pushed to Paris and in January 1871, German became one of the greatest lands in Europe. Prussian armies came in multitudes and despite the rate in which they were being killed by the French due to their advanced artillery, they pushed on and eventually overcame them in Sedan.

All the German states except Austria sent their leaders, king or prince to the castle in Versailles in the hall of mirrors where they offered Wilhelm I the empirical crown of Germany, therefore, making him the first Kaiser in German history. The next couple of decades before World War I, the German troops focused their energy and resources on building more advanced weapons and forming lethal armies because they had taken over some frontiers that belonged to the French. Since Germany knew the French would not let that slide, they decided to prepare the troops for war as well as create advanced artillery in preparation for war.

After the second Schleswig war, Bismarck was not so nice to the French and since he wanted to take over, he forced peace terms on them and forced them to pay indemnity in order o cover the cost of war that they had incurred. The French had to surrender Alsace and Lorraine and it suffered diplomatic isolation. In addition to this, there was a nonaggression treaty that was signed by Czar of Russia in order to ensure no further wars and diplomacy instead. In order for Germany to ensure its sovereignty, they created alliances with Italy and Austria but in 1888 when Wilhelm I died, Wilhelm II took over but did not like Bismarck running the government for he wanted to emulate his grandmother's empire who was Queen Victoria.

He wanted a blue navy that could reach the world despite the fact that the English did not advocate for this. Denmark fought Prussia in the second Schleswig for control of the duchies in Holstein but they lost to the Prussians. The treaty of Vienna ended the war after it agreed on the cession of the duchies to Prussians and Austria. The seven-week war was the beginning of many wars among the Europeans all brawling for territory and additional and the thirst for power is what led to the first and second world wars since, over time, Germany had created advanced weapons of destruction and were waiting for any form of provocation to act.