An account of the German bombardmentof Strasbourg in 1870 and the destruction of its medieval manuscript collections, focusing on Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus deliciarum, an enormous illustrated encyclopedia made for the nuns of Herrad’s convent. Analysis of the contents and pictures of the work and the efforts made to record it before the destruction.

This historical chapter explains the origins of the ICRC in Geneva immediately before and after 1863 and the organization’s very early activities. It goes into some detail about the two key founding fathers, Henry Dunant and Gustave Moynier. The focus on two key persons gives flesh and blood to early developments for both the ICRC and the global Red Cross network that the ICRC initiated and helped structure. Religious origins are contrasted with secular evolution. Amateurism is contrasted with a quest for professionalization. Flexible decision-making is noted. Also mentioned are Genevan Exceptionalism and Swiss nationalism. This chapter allows a vivid contrast between the early ICRC and the organization it has become in contemporary times.

Chapter 6 studies the case of Franco-Prussian War indemnities of 1871. France paid the indemnity of 25 per cent of output in three years to Prussia. The years following the end of the war featured several default-like characteristics (output contraction and high debt levels) but saw neither a devaluation of its currency nor a fall in real wages. France had easy access to loans at reasonable interest rates, with high investor participation from both foreign and domestic sources. The most important factor was that France had accumulated a high stock of foreign assets, meaning its net debt was essentially zero, which incentivised a settlement that did not include sanctions or confiscations. In this case, enforcement of sovereign debt played a positive role, in that a default would have been more costly than repayment. It is also likely that military enforcement was not needed, because France was incentivised to repay because of its easy access to debt and stock of foreign assets. The macroeconomic situation was, crucially, one in which the current account was positive, meaning that while France repaid the indemnity it did not do so by indebting itself.

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War stimulated an overhaul of the fiscal-military system, but in a way that largely suited the notables. The government rebuffed considerable pressure for an income tax, instead largely opting to raise indirect taxes and a new tax on securities; the post-Revolutionary tax system survived, minimising the burden on the landed classes. The greatest changes were for the army, with the imposition of universal military service. Thus, this concluding chapter underscores the durability of the post-Revolutionary fiscal system that emerged in the early nineteenth century.

The mid-1850s were years of economic boom, which gave way to a slump at the end of the decade. To maintain railway construction, the ongoing rebuilding of French cities and to counter economic malaise, government spending on public works rose. The regime also sought to stimulate the economy through fiscal reform; a trade treaty with Britain in 1860 formed part of a programme intended to reduce taxes and streamline the state. Affairs abroad, though, complicated this agenda. Profiting from the destabilisation of the international order that followed the Crimean War, France intervened militarily in support of Italian unification, while simultaneously seeking greater prestige through a policy of all-out global interventionism in the Middle and Far East and Mexico. The costs of interventionism abroad, combined with ongoing expenses in Algeria and on public works, eroded the regime’s latitude to lower taxes, straining the legitimacy of the fiscal system. Meanwhile, defeat in Mexico added to this discontent, producing a crisis of the fiscal-military system, which weakened the regime, easing its collapse in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.

This chapter is the first of three which attempts to question the assertion according to which the justifications brought forth by States when they resort to force were political and moral and had not legal content or reverberations. It focuses on instance of intervention in the 'centre', i.e., between so-called civilized nations. Five precedents are more particularly analysed in this Chapter: the Austrian intervention in Naples (1821), the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the Spanish-American War (1898), and the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia (July 1914). It shows how, in each of these instances, States took care to develop legal arguments to explain and justify their actions, sometimes even engaging in thorough debates about the legality of their respective behaviours.

Following the revolutions across Europe in 1848, nationalist conceptions of Europe became increasingly dominant, culminating in the founding of the new nation states of Italy (1861) and Germany (1871). The period also saw an intensification of European colonialism, culminating in the “scramble for Africa” towards the end of the nineteenth century. European nationalism and colonialism were increasingly shaped by an ethnological idea of the European, with racial theories of Homo Europaeus justifying colonial barbarism (as exposed by Joseph Conrad at the end of the century). Alongside this particularly dark period in the history of the idea of Europe, Chapter 5 also considers the work of those who sought to champion a cosmopolitan idea of Europe, including Victor Hugo’s calls for a United States of Europe and Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “good European,” most fully embodied for Nietzsche by Western Europe’s Jewish population. As this chapter reveals, however, Hugo’s idea of Europe was profoundly Francocentric, while Nietzsche’s incorporated deeply disturbing elements of the emerging race theory. The chapter concludes with an assessment of growing sense of European decadence at the end of the century, as articulated by writers such as Max Nordau and Georges Sorel.