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Rachel Chrastil, The Siege of Strasbourg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
The forty-four day siege of Strasbourg, lasting from mid-August through September 1870, comprises an "almost forgotten" history, in the words of Martha Hanna's back jacket blurb to Rachel Chrastil's book. Other episodes have certainly figured more prominently within histories of the Franco-Prussian War-the siege of Metz, for example, or the Battle of Sedan, each resulting in a humiliating French surrender and the hastening of the war's end. Yet the siege of Strasbourg in Chrastil's telling augured a new kind of technologically-abetted, impersonal, and indiscriminate war death, one that paradoxically brutalized and mobilized unarmed civilians, and also both endangered and empowered notions of common humanity.
Many of the questions associated with Europe's twentieth-century experience of "total war" registered earlier during the siege. What compels and justifies treating civilian populations as legitimate targets of war violence? What, if any, are the legal and moral strictures that can constrain such violence? What is the role of third parties and of humanitarian concerns in preventing or containing human catastrophe in war? And how do ordinary people bear the brunt of modern war, responding and even adapting to it over time? As a kind of crossroads moment, unfolding within a consummately crossroads city, the siege in Chrastil's view represents an early and instructive case study of "civilians at war within a European context" (5). Her book also signals (less explicitly than it might have, perhaps) the need for more post-national perspectives in the study of modern military conflicts.
The story Chrastil tells is an absorbing one. The confidence accompanying Napoleon III's declaration of war on Prussia in July 1870 quickly gave way to panic, as the large and effectively mobilized Prussian army launched a series of successful offensives in northeastern France in early August that brought its units to the outskirts of Strasbourg. Under the command of General August von Werder, Prussian artillery bombarded both the ramparts and city center, with the aim of pressuring capitulation or effecting a breach in the city's fortifications that might lead to the same outcome. The development of more accurate long-range artillery technologies allowed Prussian troops to shell the city-including its civilian population...