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While I agree the French tend to get short shrift in American historical interpretation, I must take some issue withe your interpretations of German history.The Reasons for the Franco-Prussian war go deeper than German Imperialism. Germany, at the time, was made up of a plethora of individual duchies, principalities, city states etc. the largest of which was Prussia. Germany’s traditional role in Europe was to serve as a battlefield for Russia, Austria and France. When Bismark came to power as Prussian Chancellor he wanted to change the situation. He engineered wars with Denmark, Austria and France so as to take advantage of a preexisting pan-German desire for unity. (By the way, in 1870 it was the French who declared war on the Prussians.) In the years leading up to the German unification France had, on occasion, bullied the various German states to exert her will and to keep the Germans from becoming a powerful rival. The “appropriation” of Alsace and Lorraine (Elsass and Lothringen) just continued a back and forth for these provinces that had been taking place since the death of Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse). The people there, even today, are ethnically German but view themselves as French. Bismark was help along by the French Emperor Napoleon III, who, Like Wilhelm II later on was intelligent, but a pompous oaf with dreams of grandeur. As to the unbending militarism of Prussia, that is a myth. In the middle 18th century Prussia was the most liberal state on the continent, and was still not the horror Germany would later become even up to the end of WWI. As to WWI, it was a series of blunders by Wilhelm II, and political maneuvers by Russia, Serbia, Austria and France that led to that catastrophe. Wilhelm II had pretty much used up any good will in the international community by 1914 by shooting of his mouth at every opportunity, and by wanting an ocean full of toy boats (”his” fleet). The Serbs wanted to push the Austrians out of the Balkans, not out of any sense of idealism, but so that they could take over. So Serbia sponsored the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne. Wilhelm told Austria he would back whatever decision was made and left on vacation. The Austrians saw this as an opportunity to destroy Serbia and issued some very intrusive demands. The Russians were pleased by this because they wanted hegemony in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, so the tried to steer things toward war (they felt it was time to deal with Austria once and for all.) The Germans played right into the Russian hands. They mobilized their forces in response to Russian mobilization, which was in response to Austrian mobilization. As the Russians were allied with the French, the Germans had only one mobilization plan, for war against both. (Great military minds my fuzzy buttocks). It was, of course, a “France first” plan which made no allowances for a war only in the east. When France mobilized, Germany made a few demands to insure France would stay out of any war with Russia. The demands were insulting and overbearing and of course France refused. Not that the French had any intention of sitting it out, since 1871 their foreign policy was one of revenge (revanche). Of the initial participants only Germany and Belgium entered the war without any clearly defined war aims, and Belgium hadn’t intended to enter at all, Germany’s idiotic war plans forced it on them. After WWI and the great stupidity at Versailles I have no defence for the evil that enveloped a once great and cultured nation, but I did have to speak to your simplistic view of German history before that. Study of the Causes of WWI has come a long way since “The Guns of August” thanks in no small part to the fall of the USSR and the opening of Russian archives.