Mathias Gantz's Role
in World History

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Nona Jones's Gantz research information begins around the year 1770 with Michael Gantz.

Great grandfather Mathias Gantz was born in Durrenentzen, Alsace Lorraine, France. The eventual father of 12, Mathias had graduated from college in Bern, Switzerland; had 20 acres of vineyard; made wine and vinegar; had a job with the city government; and had served 18 months in Napoleon III's army during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, described in Emile Zola's The Debacle.
Mathias came to the United States in 1883 to have a better life for his family. The Jones data base contains all of the information found on this side of the family. Nona asks that any family members searching this data base please inform her of any corrections or updates needed.

Mathias Gantz and Margaurette Burger Gantz , photo and identification courtesy of Nona Jones

Will, George, Fred Gottleib, Mathias, and Margaurette Burger Gantz, photo and identification courtesy of Nona Jones

The Franco-Prussian War -- Did you know...?

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 brought on the fall of the Second French Empire and created the situation that enabled Otto von Bismarck to establish the German Empire. It was the first European war in which both principal adversaries used railroads, the electrical telegraph, rifles, and rifled and breech-loading artillery--technological innovations that revolutionized warfare in the 19th century.

Causes

The two nations went to war nominally over the candidacy of a Hohenzollern prince for the Spanish throne but actually over Prussia's growing power in Germany, which Napoleon III saw as a threat to French security. In 1870, Bismarck, anxious to complete the unification of Germany begun in 1866, undertook to use the issue of the Spanish succession to provoke France into an act of war that would frighten the south German states--which had not yet joined the North German Confederation organized in 1867--into alliance with Prussia. On July 13 the Prussian king (later Emperor William I) sent a message to Napoleon III reporting a fairly innocuous meeting with the French ambassador. Bismarck, however, edited this Ems Telegram to suggest that the meeting consisted of an exchange of insults. He thus maneuvered the French government into a position where it had either to accept a diplomatic defeat or go to war. Napoleon III's government, judging the former course to be politically dangerous at home, declared war on Prussia on July 19, 1870. Course of the War

When hostilities began, the French armies, outnumbered and outgeneraled, fell back from the frontier--one army to Metz, where it was besieged, the other to Sedan, where it was surrounded in an untenable position. The emperor, judging further resistance there to be futile, surrendered the army of Sedan and himself to Bismarck on Sept. 2, 1870.
When news of Sedan reached Paris on September 4, republicans proclaimed the Third Republic and established the Government of National Defense to carry on the war. The government remained in Paris but established a delegation in Tours, under Leon Gambetta, to direct the war effort in the provinces. From September 23 to January 28, Paris was beseiged and for the last 23 days was bombarded by German artillery. In the Loire Valley, Gambetta organized and equipped new armies and carried on the war for five months, but he failed to relieve Paris. On January 28 the government concluded an armistice with Bismarck. This gave the French three weeks in which to elect a national assembly that would reflect the public's choice between war and peace and have authority to negotiate a peace in the name of France. The elections in early February returned a large majority in favor of ending the war, and a peace was quickly concluded. By the Treaty of Frankfurt (May 10, 1871), France was required to cede Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany and to pay an indemnity of unprecedented size--5 billion francs.

Results

At the outbreak of war the south German states joined their forces with those of Prussia. Aided by the impressive military victories of August and September 1870, Bismarck persuaded all the German rulers to join together in forming the new German Empire with the king of Prussia as the German emperor. The empire was formally proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles on Jan. 18, 1871. It was to survive only until Germany's defeat in World War I, when Germany became a republic and France recovered its lost territories.

David H. Pinkney
Bibliography: Bury, J. P. T., Gambetta and the National Defense (1936; repr. 1970); Corbin, Alain, Village of Cannibals, trans. by A. Goldhammer (1992); Howard, Michael, The Franco-Prussian War (1961; repr. 1990); Steefel, Lawrence D., Bismarck, the Hohenzollern Candidacy, and the Origins of the Franco-German War of 1870 (1962).

Prussia -- Where was it? What was it...?

Prussia was the name used for the region on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea that the Hohenzollern dynasty organized into a hereditary duchy under Polish suzerainty in 1525. When it became a kingdom, with its capital at Berlin, in 1701, its territories stretched from the Rhine to the Nieman River. Prussia was the state around which modern Germany was unified in 1871. After World War I, Prussia continued to exist as the largest Land (state) within the Weimar Republic and Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. After World War II it was dissolved by decree of the Allied Control Council in 1947.
The original Prussians were pagan peoples who resisted outside control until the mid-13th century, when they were conquered by the Teutonic Knights. Two centuries later the knights succumbed to the growing power of Poland-Lithuania. Under terms of the second Peace of Torun (1466), they ceded their territories west of the Vistula River to the Poles; their eastern possessions became a fief of the Polish crown. In 1511 the knights elected as their grand master Margrave Albert of Ansbach from the Franconian line of the house of Hohenzollern. He introduced Lutheranism into his domains, dissolved the Teutonic Order, and was recognized by Poland as the first duke of Prussia (investigate Albert, First Duke of Prussia).
In 1611, Ducal Prussia passed to the Hohenzollern elector of Brandenburg, John Sigismund. His grandson, Frederick William, known as the Great Elector, gained complete sovereignty over Ducal Prussia in 1660 and laid the foundations of a standing professional army and centralized bureaucracy, thus turning Brandenburg-Prussia into an ascendant European power.
The status of Prussia and its ruling dynasty rose rapidly during the 18th century. In 1701, Frederick William's son secured the title King in Prussia from Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I in exchange for Hohenzollern support in the War of the Spanish Succession. He ruled as Frederick I. Soon all of the Hohenzollern provinces were collectively called the Kingdom of Prussia. By building a strong army of 80,000 men and creating a tightly knit administrative system to sustain his troops, Frederick William I (r. 1713-40) gave to the Prussian state a militaristic and bureaucratic character that it never lost. He also acquired Swedish Pomerania, with the port city of Stettin, in 1720. Prussia's most celebrated ruler was Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great (r. 1740-86). He made Prussia a dominant European power when he wrested Silesia from the Austrians in 1740. By obtaining West Prussia in the first partition of Poland (1772; see Poland, Partitions of) he at last linked Brandenburg and East Prussia.
Frederick the Great's nephew and successor, Frederick William II (r. 1786-97), added the old family lands of Ansbach and Bayreuth to his kingdom in addition to extensive territories in the east through the second and third partitions of Poland (1793 and 1795). Prussia did not fare well in the era of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. Compelled to surrender its provinces west of the Rhine in 1795, Prussia remained out of the wars until 1806, when it was badly beaten at the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt. By the Treaties of Tilsit (1807), Napoleon stripped away nearly half of Prussia's territory. Subsequent political and military reforms allowed Prussia to play a prominent role in the campaigns liberating Germany from French occupation. As compensation, the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) awarded Prussia Posen, Swedish Pomerania, parts of Saxony, Westphalia, and the Rhineland.
During the first half of the 19th century, Prussia vied with Austria for prestige and influence in the German Confederation, with Prussia emerging victorious in the 1860s. Otto von Bismarck, who became chief minister in 1862, provoked--and won-- wars with Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870-71), completing the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. On Jan. 18, 1871, King William I of Prussia was proclaimed German emperor (or kaiser). Although Prussia was now a federal state within the new empire, it comprised two-thirds of the population and land area and dominated German policy until the end of World War I.
The last Prussian monarch, German Emperor William II, was forced to abdicate (1918) after the German defeat in World War I. Prussia was incorporated into the Weimar Republic, retaining its disproportionate size but without an overriding influence in political affairs. What remained of Prussian autonomy disappeared on Jan. 30, 1934, when Hitler eliminated the governments of the various German states. Thereafter, Prussia functioned as an administrative unit until the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945.

John A. Mears
Bibliography: Barker, Thomas, Frederick the Great and the Making of Prussia (1976); Carsten, F. L., The Origins of Prussia (1954; repr. 1982); Craig, G. A., The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945 (1955; repr. 1964) and The End of Prussia (1984); Fay, S.B., and Epstein, K., The Rise of Bandenburg-Prussia to 1786, rev. ed. (1981); Feuchtwanger, E. J., Prussia: Myth and Reality (1970); Koch, H. W., A History of Prussia (1978; repr. 1987); Mitchell, O.C., A Concise History of Brandenburg-Prussia to 1786 (1980).

Napoleon III -- Who was he? What washe thinking...?!

Napoleon III was emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870, when he lost his throne in the Franco-Prussian War. The period of his reign is called the Second Empire.
Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born on Apr. 20, 1808, the son of Napoleon I's brother Louis and Hortense de Beauharnais (investigate Bonaparte family and Beauharnais family). On the death of Napoleon I's only son in 1832, Louis Napoleon asserted his claim to the imperial heritage. Two attempts to start a Bonapartist insurrection--in Strasbourg in 1836 and in Boulonge-sur-Mer in 1840--failed; after the second he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but he escaped in 1846 and went to England. After the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in the February Revolution of 1848, Louis Napoleon won election to the National Constituent Assembly; in September he returned to Paris and took his seat. He soon announced his candidacy for the presidency of the Second Republic and in December was elected by an overwhelming majority.
On Dec. 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon, posing as the savior of French society from radical revolution, seized personal power. He promulgated a constitution that gave him a presidential term of ten years with almost full powers; the parliamentary bodies had only advisory roles. A year later he established the Second Empire and took the title Napoleon III. In 1853 he married the Spanish countess Eugenie de Montijo de Guzman; she bore him one son, Eugene Louis Napoleon, the Prince Imperial (1856-79).
(Eugenia Maria de Montijo de Guzman, b. May 5, 1826, d. July 11, 1920, was empress of France (1853-70) as consort of Napoleon III. Daughter of the Spanish conde de Montijo, she married Napoleon in January 1853. Eugenie's beauty, intelligence, and extravagance enlivened the court. Consulted on state affairs, she supported the disastrous project of making Maximilian emperor of Mexico in 1861. In 1870 she urged belligerence against Prussia.)
This image from Chalons is not a family photograph, but one may click on it to see a larger image.

The camp at Chalons was a city created each year between 1857 and 1870 in the summer months in a region that had until then been designated Champagne pouilleuse (barren, wretched part of the region Champagne); in winter it would go back to sleep. It was an ephemeral city, but one that bustled with activity, in which the military uniform was most visible even as civilians visited in droves, where celebration was present throughout and economic activity never absent. It reflected the image of Second Empire society, both frivolous and dynamic. The camp at Chalons participated in the "imperial fête" then disappeared in this form with the downfall of Napoleon III. All the same, its memory lives on even if the wood pavilions have disappeared, and some excellent photographs allow us to reconstitute the ambiance and to see it as it once appeared. In the 1850s Napoleon III governed as an authoritarian ruler. Beginning in 1860, however, he gradually transferred power to the legislature, and by 1870 France was essentially a parliamentary monarchy, the so-called Liberal Empire.
Napoleon III rejected the laissez-faire policies of his predecessors. Maintaining that the government should intervene actively in the economy to promote economic growth and the public welfare, he undertook vast programs of public works, saw to the completion of the national railway network, encouraged formation of modern credit institutions, and negotiated a series of commercial treaties that opened French industry to salutary competition.
Foreign policy proved to be his undoing. In the 1850s, allied with Britain, he won victory over Russia in the Crimean War and intervened in Italy (1859) in support of the nationalist war against Austria (see Risorgimento). The 1860s brought a succession of reverses, however. The French endeavor (1861-67) to establish a Mexican empire under the Austrian archduke Maximilian was a disaster. In the meantime Napoleon failed to prevent an ominous increase in the power of Prussia, which defeated Austria in the Seven Weeks' War of 1866. In 1870, Napoleon sought to reassert French influence by challenging the candidacy of a Hohenzollern prince for the Spanish throne. He played into the hands of the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who provoked a French declaration of war. Defeated by the Prussians in the Battle of Sedan, Napoleon surrendered on Sept. 2, 1870. Two days later republicans in Paris proclaimed the Third Republic, and Napoleon's reign ended. After his release from Prussian captivity in 1871, Napoleon lived in retirement in England until his death on Jan. 9, 1873.

David H. Pinkney
Bibliography: Bierman, John, Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire (1988); Bury, J.P.T., Napoleon III and the Second Empire (1964); Duff, David, Eugenie and Napoleon (1978); Echard, William, Napoleon III and the Concert of Europe (1985); Pinkney, D. H., Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (1958); Thompson, James M., Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire (1958; repr. 1983); Williams, Roger, The World of Napoleon III, 1851-1870 (1965).

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, sometimes called the "Iron Chancellor," was the architect of German unification and the arbiter of European power politics in the second half of the 19th century.

EARLY LIFE

Bismarck was born at Schonhausen in Brandenburg on Apr. 1, 1815. His father came of the old Prussian nobility, his mother from the upper bourgeoisie. Distaste for the study of law and bureaucracy caused Bismarck to turn to management of the family estates in Brandenburg. There he was converted to the fundamentalist religious views of the Lutheran pietists. During the Revolutions of 1848, Bismarck gained political notice in Prussia as an extreme reactionary, who supported suppression of revolt and continued Austrian leadership in Germany. As Prussian minister to the German Confederation in Frankfurt (1851-59), he adopted the independent line of realpolitik, backing a policy based on Prussian interests, without regard for ideology, or humanitarianism. He now supported the Zollverein against Austria, favored cooperation with Napoleon III of France, and opposed intervention in the internal affairs of other states in the interest of legitimate sovereigns. After briefly representing Prussia at St. Petersburg and Paris he was summoned home to become (Sept. 22, 1862) minister president and foreign minister for the Prussian king (later German emperor) William I.

UNIFICATION

After proclaiming the policy of "iron and blood," Bismarck defied the Prussian Chamber of Deputies, which was locked in a constitutional conflict with the king, by implementing army reforms, administering without an approved budget, and following an independent foreign policy. His diplomacy brought victorious wars with Denmark (over Schleswig-Holstein, 1864) and Austria (the Seven Weeks' War of 1866), as a result of which the chamber passed an indemnity bill (in effect forgiving Bismarck's constitutional transgressions) and approved past budgets. With Austria excluded by force from Germany the North German Confederation was formed (July 14, 1867) under Prussian control. Under the constitution of the new state the Prussian king retained control of the army and policy-making, and the chancellor (Bismarck) was responsible only to him. The Bundesrat (federal council) represented the interests of the separate states, while in the parliament, or Reichstag, universal adult male suffrage (which Bismarck had discussed with the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle) was instituted. In 1870, Bismarck's backing of a Hohenzollern prince as candidate for the Spanish throne, coupled with his inflammatory editing of the Ems Dispatch (a message from William I to Napoleon III), had the desired effect of provoking France into the Franco-Prussian War. France was rapidly defeated, the German Empire (including the southern German states) was proclaimed at Versailles on Jan. 18, 1871, and Bismarck was named prince and German chancellor. The 1867 constitution was retained, and Bismarck also maintained civilian control over the army with William. He was thus able to block preventive war in the following years.
Bismarck unified Germany and maintained European peace for a generation, but he also perpetuated the obsolete dominance of the Prussian landed aristocracy (Junkers) and upper middle class, as well as a tradition of intolerance of partisan and personal dissent. Under William II, Bismarck's alliance system (with crucial modifications) contributed to World War I and the collapse of the German Empire.

Frederic B. M. Hollyday
Bibliography: Crankshaw, Edward, Bismarck (1981); Eyck, Erich, Bismarck and the German Empire, 3d ed. (1968); Gall, Lothar, Bismarck, 2 vols. (1986); Hollyday, Frederic B. M., Bismarck (1970); Palmer, Alan, Bismarck (1976); Pflanze, Otto, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 3 vols. (1963-92); Stern, Fritz, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire (1977).

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