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Strasbourg lay at the heart of the conflict. When German forces entered French territory in August, Strasbourg was the first major city they targeted. For six weeks, from August 15 to September 27, the armies of Prussia and Baden
bombarded Strasbourg. German bombs killed three hundred citizens, wounded three thousand more, and caused enormous damage to public and private buildings, including the cathedral roof and the irreplaceable libraries
housed in the New Church. The siege exhibited the important issues raised during the Franco-Prussian War in microcosm: the targeting of civilians, the destruction of cultural sites, the revolution in the midst of war,
and the sacrifice of one’s own civilians for the cause. The siege alone did not determine the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, of course, but the symbolism of Strasbourg elevated its importance in the minds of French and German alike.
The loss of Strasbourg, along with the rest of the region of Alsace and most of neighboring Lorraine, was one of the most important consequences of the war.
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Despite this long history of war, the crisis that the inhabitants of Strasbourg faced in the summer of 1870 came as a shock. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Europeans’ tolerance for violence in everyday life was declining[...] With this decreased tolerance for civilian violence came the belief that civilians should no longer be the victims of wartime violence.
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By the nineteenth century, many Europeans had come to view war as an exceptional experience in which civilians took little part. War, many believed, ought to be circumscribed. Military personnel alone had the duty to put themselves in harm’s way...
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It was nearly impossible to maintain the distinction between soldiers and civilians in war, and especially difficult when an army tried to capture an entire city. To complicate matters, some civilians believed that they had the right to take up
arms to defend themselves from invasion; military leaders could not agree upon the proper response to such actions. All in all, the sharp line that many civilians believed to exist between themselves and soldiers proved less durable than they had hoped. Bertrand Taithe tells us that in the nineteenth century, “the boundary between the military and the civilian sphere—in effect, between the social orders of war and of peace—became more blurred and porous than ever before.”
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In northern and eastern France, civilians felt the terror of occupation and died as hostages. The Prussians burned the entire village of Fontenoy in retaliation for partisan resistance. Paris came under siege for four months of cold and scarcity.
But in many areas of France, and in all of Germany, civilians went about their business and did not suffer from rationing, hunger, or systemized murder. The French finally surrendered on January 28, 1871. The Franco-Prussian War clearly did not share all the characteristics of the wars of the twentieth century, but it shaped the experiences and attitudes that made those catastrophes possible. It was one of the first conflicts in which both sides had signed the Geneva Convention and in which both sides failed to live up to it. When the Prussians targeted civilian noncombatants in the bombardment of Strasbourg, they made possible Dresden, Leningrad, Sarajevo, and Gaza. When civilians accused Prussia of breaking the “laws of war,” they anticipated war crimes trials at Nuremberg and The Hague. When bombs destroyed libraries and set the cathedral on fire, they prefigured the destruction of cultural heritage in Leuven, Rheims, and Baghdad. And when Swiss humanitarians intervened on behalf of besieged civilians, but unwittingly helped Prussia conquer Strasbourg, they paved the way for the ambiguous successes of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
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Strasbourg’s civilian men often claimed that women and children were the primary victims of the Prussian bombardment. But they were wrong. Prussian bombs killed far more civilian men than women.
This error fit with the dominant gender paradigm. Just as nineteenth-century women faced exclusion from politics and increasingly from economic life, they also were no longer supposed to be touched by war.
Men were supposed to protect and provide for their wives and children. Civilization itself, it seemed, depended upon shielding women and children from wartime violence.
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In the midst of these difficulties, a group of Swiss dignitaries proposed a new response: humanitarianism. Humanitarianism was a particular expression of human sympathy characterized by an emphasis on aiding victims,
the physical movement of humanitarians to the site of suffering, and the belief that concrete action could alter the status quo and confer transcendence. Many factors contributed to the development of humanitarianism, including
Enlightenment projects of social betterment, ethical imperatives to help strangers, and the valorization of sympathy, along with mass media, rapid transportation, and advanced fundraising techniques. In the 1850s and 1860s,
during the Crimean War and the U.S. Civil War, a few Europeans and Americans began to apply humanitarian aid to soldiers. Prior to 1870, however, wartime humanitarian aid had not been extended to civilians.