Napoleon's Downfall

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 20, 1870

Napoleon's Downfall.

On the fifteenth of July the Emperor of France declared war against Prussia. On the second of September his armies were annihilated and he was a prisoner in the hands of the Prussian King. Never since war began to be made has there been such a military spectacle. It is not the overthrow of a barbarous nation by the discipline of a veteran army; the Roman against the Gaul, or the English against the effete Oriental Indian nations or the Chinese. France was on every hand accounted the first military power on earth. Her system has been the model on which the American army has been patterned. She was regarded, at least until within a few years, as the strongest and most inexpugnable of the nations of Europe. The colony of Algeria was a school of practice for her armies. Her shops, foundries and yards, were supposed to be unequaled, and her iron-clad navy bade fair to dispute the supremacy of the sea, even with her island neighbor.

Prussia, too, especially since the war of 1866 against Austria, has been deemed a first-class military power, and no greater compliment could have been paid, until now, to her reputation, than that it was among military men a doubtful question whether France or Prussia would be the stronger in the field.

The result of this campaign is no more a surprise to the French than it is to the whole world. It is said that earthquakes disturb men's minds, not so much by their imminent danger as by unsettling their confidence in the stability of nature and the relation of cause and effect. Stable things become movable. Solid ground heaves like water. Nothing is strong—nothing immovable, and for the moment it seems to the bewildered imagination as if the world's nerve had been cut, and all regulative influence was gone.

Something like this we feel in looking upon France. In an hour all our ideas are revolutionized, and we need time to get agoing with new ideas and corrected estimations.

Not Prussia against France, but all Prussia against the army of France. Its military system makes Prussia itself a camp, and its whole population an army. The whole nation, in successive moves, was precipitated upon the few hundred thousand men of the standing army of France! There were present also the two elements without which this military organization will be but a fine dead body—the spirit of the whole people, and consummate leadership! Germans are slow to kindle, but very hot when fully on fire.

When Von Moltke precipitated Prussia upon Napoleon's army, the movement was more like that of a natural flow such as we see in tropical storms, or in the movement toward the shore of gigantic waves bred by earthquakes, than the effects of ordinary human will. Everything was large, and everything irresistible. All obstacles seem to have lost their opposing power in the presence of an irresistible Fate. From the moment that the Crown Prince broke upon Weissenberg like an avalanche, there was no stopping the monster-motion. Every day swept on with devouring power. The right wing was shattered at a blow. The center, fatally hesitating for a few days, was smitten, and thrust back into prison at Metz. Whatever was left, hastily rolled together, under MacMahon, was next assailed, devoured, and utterly consumed! Then the sword fell from the hand of France, and the crown from her ruler, and Paris was conquered without a siege or a blow. And so in six weeks the first military power on earth is stripped to the ground, without an army, or an Emperor, and lies suppliant at the feet of King William, as sixty-six years ago Prussia lay desolate and unpitied at the feet of a remorseless Napoleon! Prussia is avenged! The long-delayed settlement is accomplished. Sooner or later the cruelty and the injustice of ambition come back upon the nation that indulged them, though not often in so sublimely dramatic a manner as now.—Christian Union.