The Siege of Strasbourg, by Rachel Chrastil

Abstract

The Siege of Strasbourg, by Rachel Chrastil. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. 320 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). Just as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 represented an important milestone on the sanguine path to total war, the sieges conducted during that conflict also reflected a strange hybrid of seventeenth century practices and rituals, and the increasing destructive power of modern industrialized warfare. Of course, the most significant and protracted sieges conducted during this war were of Metz and Paris. For good reason they have received the lion's share of attention from historians studying this period. However, the relatively brief (six week) siege of Strasbourg is of special interest for a number of reasons. Since it was the first major city besieged by the advancing allied German armies the destruction of cultural heritage and civilian lives through artillery bombardment evoked outrage in a European community that had been spared any major war since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. It was also a somewhat unique situation in that the Germans were attacking a city populated by people that they intended to reunite with an empire from which they had been annexed by France centuries earlier. Chrastil has chosen to focus her study on the experience of the citizens during the siege as opposed to the military-political dimension of the conflict. This seems to have been a wise decision as the sections that discuss the military aspects of the conflict are amongst the weakest in the book. Fler chronicle of the drama of the besieged inhabitants of the city is at times compelling and the author has succeeded in bringing new manuscript sources to light that help to provide a very personal perspective on the course of the battle. The author also avoids falling into the trap of providing a chronology of hardships suffered by the city's population by continually attempting to place her narrative into the larger context of broader historical trends--the rudimentary state of international law governing the conduct of war, the role of humanitarianism as a motive for the intervention of non-belligerent states and the importance of gender stereotypes in enumerating civilian suffering. And although Chrastil has pushed the military dimension of the siege into the background and only gives a rough sketch of the actual course of events in the field, she does offer an interesting character study of the leaders of both the German and French forces--Generals Jean Uhrich and August von Werder. In particular, she gives an insightful analysis of how each commander perceived his assigned role based upon military conventions and how each played their designated parts in this drama. …