The fall of France in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 was one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The meticulously efficient Prussian and German armies destroyed the glittering armies of France within a month, and new German Empire was proclaimed in the Palace of Versailles. Meanwhile the French were left humiliated, facing the Commune in Paris, German demands for reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. Through illustrated lectures drawing on a diverse range of sources, explore the military, technological, political, and social events of the war, and its human cost. Deliberately engineered by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to destroy French power and unite Germany, the consequences of the war for Europe were profound: the overwhelming triumph of German military power in 1870 laid the foundations of the catastrophic wars of the twentieth-century. Lecture style with question and answer time.