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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.52: what you already know about the origins of World War I?

Hello, I’m back. Back in the United States, back to full health. All the surgeries were successful in the moving, went off without a hitch, so it’s time to get back to work.

To commemorate the end of my time in France and return to the United States let’s please remember why I moved to France in the first place. I went to write Hero of Two Worlds, the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. The book is done now, the galleys are out and in circulation, and Publishers Weekly actually just dropped a very positive review of it the other day, they said it was a quote comprehensive and accessible biography, and that quote Duncan, marshals a wealth of information into a crisp and readable narrative. This sympathetic portrait illuminates the complexities of Lafayette and his revolutionary era. So, that’s pretty rad, to get a good review from Publishers Weekly. Now, pub date is August 24th, 2021, which is just about 16 weeks from now, and you know what that means: that’s right. It’s time to start the old pre-order campaign. This is where I implore you and beg you and threaten you with various degrees of severity for you to pre-order the book. Now we did this last time, and put Storm Before the Storm on the bestseller list, which I remain eternally grateful for, and now I’m going to ask you all to help me make my prove it shot. Last time. I made a simple and manageable request, 5,000 pre-orders. And we did that. In fact, they told me we ended up with 8,500 pre-orders. Now that was back in 2017, and since then, the audience for Revolutions has only grown. There are more of you fine people out there listening to this than ever. So this time, they are asking me to ask you for a nice round 10,000. That is not unreasonable. And I am not asking you, dear listener, who is listening to this right now, to personally go order 10,000 copies for yourself. I just want you to do at once.

Well, maybe twice.

As you know, this is the last series of Revolutions I will be producing, and if you have enjoyed all the free content I have made for you over all of these years, and you feel like it’s enriched your life, please support me now by pre-ordering Hero of Two Worlds. It is 500 pages covering Lafayette’s life and times from being a teenage runaway who went off to join the American revolution to being a still vigorous senior citizen, helping overthrow his old classmate King Charles the 10th. It’s got shipwrecks and prison breaks and political intrigue and giant public spectacles and underground revolutionary cells. If that all sounds good, please go pre-order the book. I worked really hard on it, and I still don’t hate it, so that means you’ll probably like it.

Now over the next few months, we will do some fun promotional and PR stuff. But one thing I want you to do when you pre-order the book is: do it from your favorite local bookseller. We are now coming out of a year of COVID, the world is starting to open back up, and just like on a personal level, I’d like to see how many different brick and mortar local bookstores we can get Hero of Two Worlds pre-ordered from. At some point, I’m going to issue a call for you to submit the name and address of the local store you ordered the book from, so we can track it, and celebrate spreading the love around as we all try to get back on our feet together. As the pre-order campaign unfolds, there will be various prizes and other carrots out there to further incentivize you, but the stick is going to be that if you don’t pre-order the book and we don’t hit 10,000 pre-orders and Hero of Two Worlds succumbs to sophomore slump and I’m humiliated in the eyes of the publishing world, I’ll just quit Revolutions early. If we’re not at 10,000 pre-orders by August 24th, I’ll release an episode the following Sunday that just says the commies won and walk away forever. And you wouldn’t want that now, would you? Well, me neither. So please pre-order Hero of Two Worlds today. Stop this episode right now and go do it! It’s very easy. You can get it at bookshop.org or wherever else you can pre-order books from, like your local favorite bookseller. So pause the episode and go do it. I’ll wait.

Okay, great. Thanks. On with the show.

The narrative of the Russian Revolution we’ve been doing here got a bit herky jerky and stalled out because of my health issues, and then moving back home — I mean, I sure did not mean to spend three weeks talking about Rasputin — so we need to goose us thing a little to keep moving. That means that today we’re moving onto World War I, which is to the Revolution of 1917 what the Russo-Japanese War was to the Revolution of 1905. Now, since I came back from my very long finished the book hiatus, we’ve talked a lot about the liberals and their duma, the now late Pyotr Stolypin and his reforms. We talked about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, we talked about the imperial family living in their imperial and very fretful bubble. And some of you noticed amidst all of this that the SRs have started to get short shrift, but don’t worry, they’re not forgotten, we’ll catch up with them. But right now, we need to get back to the wider world of foreign affairs and great power politics, because to get to the Revolution of 1917, first, we need to plunge Russia, Europe, and whole world into a global war.

So today we are going to talk about the deep roots of the cataclysm that was World War I. Specifically, what I want to do in this episode here, is demonstrate one of the fun things about studying various historical events in their own right and on their own terms. Because it turns out when you study things like the French Revolution or the Revolutions of 1848 or the Paris Commune, when it comes time to answer the question, what are the origins of World War I, like 80% of the pieces are already in place for you. So today I’m going to show you how much we already know about how and why everything blew up in the summer of 1914.

Over the course of the Revolutions podcast going all the way back to episode 3.6: The Stately Quadrille, we’ve been dealing with five major European powers: France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. And the whole theme of that episode was how these powers shifted alliances like dance partners to defend their interests and maintain a balance of power. And specifically, we talked about the major European powers undergoing a diplomatic revolution in 1756, that saw rising Prussia and their great armies ally with the also rising United Kingdom and their great navies, creating a formidable new alliance that forced two implacable enemies — Bourbon France and Habsburg Austria — into a very awkward counter-alliance. And that’s how these things always go in Europe. New alliances based on the new environment or new foreign objectives or new domestic concerns creating new counter alliances, as old allies become new rivals, and old rivals become new allies.

Now all of the talk we did in the early episodes on the French Revolution were mostly about the west facing axis of European great power politics in the 18th century. But if you skip ahead to the middle of the French Revolution series when war starts brewing, or really skip ahead to the early episodes on 1848, or this current series we’re doing right now on Russia, we’ve talked a fair bit about the east facing axis that revolved around Protestant Prussians, Catholic Austrians, Orthodox Russians, and Muslim Turks jockeying for each other over places like Poland and the Balkans. We know, for example, from Episode 7.4 on the Austrian empire, and episode 7.6 on the Kingdom of Hungary, that the Ottomans broke into Europe in the mid 1500s and planted their flag over a huge chunk of the Balkans, leading the Austrians to turn their southeastern border into a perpetually mobilized military frontier. Then, if you skip ahead to episode 10.10 of our current series, we talked about how the Ottoman expansion ceased, and started to be turned back as the Russians and Turks, for example, fought rounds of wars against each other, which, starting around Peter the Great and then really by the time of Catherine the Great, saw Russia pushing south into the Black Sea at the expense of the retreating Ottomans. They took ports and coastlines and ultimately annexed all of Crimea. They did all this with an eye on maybe one day recapturing Constantinople and returning it to the Orthodox faith, and controlling the Dardanelles to boot.

We also know from episode 3.20, that when the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Prussia, Austria and Russia were all mostly focused on the partitions of Poland, which were far more immediately vital to their national interests than the collapse of Bourbon France into domestic chaos, which they all welcomed, and had little interest in either arresting or getting involved in. But just a few episodes later, in episode 3.22, we saw the commencement of a war between France on one side and Prussia and Austria on the other in the spring of 1792. The dynamic of an aggressively revolutionary France now created an alliance between erstwhile rivals Prussia and Austria. Not unlike some of the assumptions on the eve of World War I, both sides calculated that the war in 1792 would be quick and easy. Instead, it opened up 23 years of near continuous warfare that remade Europe and remade Europe again. The immense power of revolutionary and then Napoleonic France led all of the other great powers into coalitions against them, with partners coming in and dropping out as France slowly but surely got the upper hand and started dominating western and central Europe. Meanwhile, off in the east, French aggression in the initial form of Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt, which we talked about in episodes 3.48 and 3.49, brought the Ottomans and Russians into the anti-French coalition on the same side, which, the Ottomans and Russians had never been on this same side of anything for any reason. And that’s how things go: when your interests align or you share a common enemy, you join together. In this case, with France threatening the conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Ottomans and Russians joined forces to prevent it, and the stately quadrille danced on.

In episode 3.55, and then again in, let’s see, episodes 7.3 and 7.4, and then again, in episode 8.2, and then again, in episode 10.11, we covered the Napoleonic era from all sides, and talked about the advance and retreat to France through central Europe to Russia and back again. And as I mentioned in episode 8.4, the war indemnity that Bismarck would impose on France at the end of the Franco-Prussian war was precisely the same as the war indemnity Napoleon imposed on Prussia 65 years earlier — adjusted for inflation, of course. And looking ahead just a little bit, when World War I ends, French diplomats at Versailles will want to pass this debt of blood and national honor back to Germany, and thus make it a cause of World War II. And I actually said in episode 8.4 and I’m quoting now, “there was a reason the Germans were forced to sign their acknowledgement of guilt culpability and defeat in the hall of mirrors. But that is a story for another time.” And well, here we are telling that story in another time.

We link the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of the restoration and post Napoleonic Europe in episode 6.1 on restoration, France, and then a lot in the supplementals to series 6, specifically 6.8C, on Metternich, and 6.8D, on the Italian Carbonari. Then we did it all over again in episodes 7.3. 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6, covering the Germans more on the Austrian Empire, more on the Italians, and introduced the Hungarians into the mix. And then again, we did it most recently in episodes, 10.12 and 10.13 covering the Russian angle to this period. Now, like I say, you start cutting and pasting this stuff together and it turns out, we’re all intimately familiar with the deep background of World War I, so congratulations on that. With the Napoleonic Wars fresh in everyone’s mind, there were no great power wars during the 1815 to 1848 age of Metternich, though the period was not devoid of conflict. All the great powers dealt with one of the great invasive weeds left behind by the French invasions, and that is nationalism. Nationalism sprouted up in Germany and Italy and Poland and Greece and the Balkans, all over the place. All of these subject peoples, who had just been re-subjected to various foreign rulers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, wanted freedom and self-determination, and it became a real pain in the neck for the great powers of Europe.

Well, that brings us to one of the great gaping holes at the Revolutions podcast, a big revolution I elected to skip over: the Greek War of Independence. Now had I covered the Greek War of Independence, the origin story of World War I told through various revolutions would be almost airtight. Because Greek independence really introduces the eastern question, which was a question posed by the great European powers as the Ottoman empire continued its slow and steady decline. That erosion was now being fueled from both the inside and the outside. From the inside, Christian subjects in the Balkans, Bulgarians and Romanians and Serbs, fueled by that new fire of nationalism and encouraged by Greek success in the 1820s, wanted to break away from Constantinople. From the outside, the pressure came from Britain and France and Austria and Russia, all of whom looked to grow their own empires at Ottoman expense. The Austrians and Russians jockeyed for hegemony over the Balkans, Britain and France swept around through the Mediterranean, directing their imperial and colonial ambitions to North Africa and the Middle East, and like, for example, we talked about the French invasion of Algeria in episode 6.3, in terms of its role in the domestic political conflicts between Charles the 10th and his liberal enemies leading up to the Revolution of 1830. But it also took place in the context of the declining Ottoman Empire, whose authority and influence were now on the wane. And they could do nothing to stop the French from advancing into Muslim territory in North Africa.

Meanwhile in the west, we planted a very big seed of World War I in episode 6.8B, on the Belgian Revolution. Because that episode finished with the treaty of London, which recognized Belgian independence in 1839. And I will just go ahead and quote myself from that episode: “this treaty was signed by all the other powers, and most importantly, for the Belgians and world history, the 1839 treaty of London guaranteed Belgian neutrality. It was this very treaty that the Germans would dismiss as a mere scrap of paper in 1914. A scrap of paper that no one would actually risk another mass European war to defend.”

Then moving on to series seven on 1848, we find so many of the roots really starting to pop above the ground. Because the springtime of the peoples and the explosion of nationalism as a major ideology would play a huge role in the events that triggered World War I. You skip to the end of the series on 1848 and we see the failure of liberal nationalism to unify Germany give way to the Bismark led path of blood and iron. In Austria, we saw every one of their subject peoples — Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Hungarian, Serbs, you name it — all fired up by dreams of national independence and self-determination. And just to highlight one bit in particular, in episode 7.24, we covered the first Pan-Slavic Congress. The idea being that above certain regional differences, there was a greater Slavic national identity that set them apart from the Germans and the Magyar and the Turks, who sought to dominate them. And again, of particular note, remember an episode 7.29, we saw how most of the Slavic peoples in the Austrian Empire, the Croats and the Serbs in particular, rose up and fought with the Austrians against the Hungarians, because they felt more threatened by Magyarization than Habsburg sovereignty. That growing self-confidence Slavic nationalism in the Balkans winds up being the trigger for World War I. And before I move on, I should also say that episode 7.29 was called The New Emperor because it was in that episode where I put young Franz Josef on the throne to replace his inadequate cousin. 65 years later, that new young emperor will be the very, very old Emperor Franz Josef signing declarations of war in the summer of 1914. Same guy, many decades later, personally linking 1848 to 1914.

In episode 8.1, we moved directly from 1848 towards the Franco-Prussian War by recapping the second French Empire, which saw among other things, Emperor Napoleon the Third end the days of French pacivity on the world stage. Seeking to reassert French power and influence after two generations of humble reticence, Napoleon the Third started getting very bold. In the early 1850s, he got into it with the Tsar of Russia over who got to be the patron of Christians in the Ottoman controlled holy lands, Napoleon promoting Catholicism for domestic political reasons, Russia, as ever, considering itself the great protector of Orthodox Christians everywhere. Now we talked about all this from the Russian side in episode 10.14. The resulting diplomatic crisis saw Britain join France for an unprecedented joint military operation against Russia, which we call the Crimean War. Now what really drove them together was their shared ambitions to control the Mediterranean with the Ottomans continuing to recede, and their shared fear that Russia had exactly the same idea. But this moment, the Crimean War, is when France and Britain really start to come together.

The Russian defeat sent the Russians into a shame spiral, while Napoleon the Third emerged so self-confident that he proceeded to back the Italians against the Austrians in the Second War of Italian Independence, which successfully broke off Northern Italy from the Austrian Empire in 1859, which pissed off the Austrians something fierce, let me tell ya. Now, all of that was in episode 8.1. Then in 8.2, we talked about Bismark’s wars of German unification. He first answered the Schleswig-Holstein question we introduced in episode 7.20 — where do you draw the line? When we talked all about the problem of mixed populations and transnational regions and divergences between elite leaders and the local population, all posing almost insurmountable conundrums to those seeking pure national unification. Regions where Germans lived right next door to Danes or Poles or Czechs makes it very difficult to draw clear national boundaries because clear national boundaries simply do not exist, it’s not a thing. All of that will play directly into World War I.

As does Bismark’s answer to whether Austria would be in or out of unified Germany. In 1866, Prussia launched a lightning war against Austria that drove them out of unified Germany. Which had the effect, I should mention, of turning the Austrian empire into the Austro-Hungarian empire. After a conscious decision to make the Magyar Hungarians equal partners in the empire in 1869. Now that the Hapsburgs had lost their Italian provinces and had no hope of dominating other German realms, it was only to the Magyar that they could look to keep their empire intact.

Now, the really big event in terms of leading up to World War I is of course the Franco-Prussian War, which we talked about in detail in episode 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4. Specifically, so we could talk about the Paris commune, but we also talk about all that stuff so now we can reference it when it comes time to explain World War I. Bismarck goaded Napoleon the Third into a war that bound the German states to Prussia, then saw this unified German army trounce the French and declared the German empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1870, a French humiliation they did not forget when staging their treaties ending World War I in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. We also mentioned in episode 8.5, that the German seizing Alsace-Lorraine became a major source of national resentment and a rallying cry for the French for the next 50 years. Maps of the departments of France continued to depict Alsace and Lorraine, but marked in black. This is also of course, the moment Prussia stops being one of the great powers, and becomes Germany. And so after German unification, the great powers are pretty much what they have been all this time, but they’re kind of under different names. The names that we will know them in World War I: the United Kingdom, the French Third Republic, Tsarist Russia, the German Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s still pretty much the same players just in different forms.

Now to really start bringing things together, we need to turn to stuff we recently talked about in episode 10.25. After their humiliating defeat to Prussia — now Germany — the leaders of France wanted to A. make sure no such thing ever happened again, and B. maybe get their revenge one day. So France started courting the heck out of Russia. Now, Germany also courted Russia, but by the late 1880s, France had the upper hand diplomatically. Russia itself felt threatened by the rising immensity of German power, but also Tsar Alexander, Nicholas’s father, didn’t really like young Kaiser Wilhelm personally. In 1894, France and Russia signed a defensive treaty of alliance. In this treaty, France got a Russian army sitting on Germany’s Eastern border, making Germany forever think twice about attacking France, and Russia got a vice-a-versa assurance, but mostly they got loans from French banks to finance the industrial boom being mastermind by Sergei Witte. The defensive alliance between France and Russia secured in 1894 is crucial to the origins of World War I. It’s only going to get stronger over the next 20 years, right up into the events of 1914, because France and Russia are both going to be committed to defending each other against Germany.

Germany, meanwhile, knows it’s going to have to fight a war on two fronts if it ever goes to war with either Russia or France. The arrival of the Franco-Russian alliance also pretty much coincides with the arrival of Tsar Nicholas to the throne. It was all done before he came to power, but he’s the one who inherited it. His cousin, Kaiser Wilheim, is then going to do everything he can to break the Franco-Russian alliance. We talked all about this when we talked about the origins and course of the Russo-Japanese war in episodes 10.26 and then again in episode 10.31. Willy relentlessly encourages Nikki to advance the Russian Empire into the far east, hopefully turning Russian attention, money, and manpower away from the German border in the process. Willie so relentlessly encouraged Nikki to go fight the Japanese yellow menace on behalf of the white Christian civilization that the tsar believed, right to the end, that Germany would eventually join the Russo-Japanese war and bail him out once it started going bad. But then it turned into a humiliating catastrophe, and it was not at all in German interest to help the Russians fight the Japanese, so they didn’t. International real politik is a game of interest, not sentiment.

The Russian humiliation, of course, led to the Revolution of 1905 domestically, but it would also lead the Russian leaders to further reassess their position against Germany. It would also lead them to seek the restoration of their national honor at the earliest possible opportunity. In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war, the Russians would dramatically reform and rebuild their armies and look for a chance to prove to the world that they could still project their power and authority, that they were not like the Ottomans or the Austro-Hungarians an empire in decline. So, for example, they would try to advance their long standing ideological position that the tsars of Russia were the patrons and protectors of all Orthodox Christians everywhere, particularly Slavic Orthodox Christians. Like, for example, the Serbs.

So just trying to talk about all these European revolutions over all these episodes and all these years, we have simultaneously planted many of the seeds of World War I. Not all of them, mind you, but tons of them. The rivalry between France and Germany and the lingering grudges caused by the Franco-Prussian War; the long-standing Russian encroachment on the Ottomans and the larger eastern question; the state of the Austro-Hungarian empire and their relationship to their subjects and neighbors in the Balkans; the recent Alliance between France and Russia; the colonial expansions of France and Britain into North Africa and all the way to the far east; the destabilizing humiliation of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war; and then of course, just generally the rise of nationalism as a powerful new ideology.

None of this is new information. It’s all been refresher. The pieces are nearly all in place. And next week, we will come back and tie the Russian humiliation of the Russo-Japanese war to the steady rise of nationalism in the Balkans and the steady decline of the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to give us the Balkans crisis, which de-stabilized the balance of power in Europe and which would truly, directly, lead to World War I. That will all be new information.

Before I go, let me please just say again, that Hero of Two Worlds is now available for pre-order everywhere you can pre-order a book from. On the internet, bookshop.org is a great option, but really your local bookshop, where you would normally go to buy books, that’s where I would encourage you to go. So please let’s hit 10,000 pre-orders so I don’t have to quit podcasting.

Okay, look, you and I both know quitting podcasting is an idle threat. I’m not actually going to do it. It’s a joke, but just do me this solid. Pre-order the book. Thank you.