The Prussian Terror

"The Prussian Terror," one of Dumas' last novels, was originally written as a serial in the journal "The Situation" circa 1867. Contemporary readers with a taste for hyperbole might have described it as "ripped from today's headlines" because Dumas took, as his subject, the just-concluded Austro-Prussian War of 1866. During the 1860's, Prussia, guided by the Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Iron Chancellor, the Graf von Bismark, created a unified Germany by the sword. German-speaking middle Europe was, at that time divided into a host of statelets, Duchies, and free cities, over which the Prussians, Austrians, and Danes contended for control. Prussia had the best army and first crushed the Danes (in 1863), and the Austrians in 1866. Dumas' novel opens in Berlin, where his hero, a peripatetic multi-lingual Frenchman of independent means, Benedict Turpin, defies an angry mob by shouting "Vive la France" in the middle of a patriotic demonstration. Benedict infuriates several Prussian officers, including the Count Frederic von Bulow. Von Bulow, a favorite of the Kaiser, is part of a Prussian contingent stationed in the free city of Frankfurt, and is married to a Frankfurt girl. Frederic and Benedict fight a duel, in which Benedict wounds von Bulow, and they become friends. Meanwhile, Frederic's wife's sister, Helen, falls in love with Frederic's best friend, the Austrian Count Karl von Freyburg, a member of an Austrian unit also stationed in Frankfurt. The Prussians provoke a war, and the two officers retire to their respective camps, leaving behind, in neutral Frankfurt, the two women who love them. In a foreshadowing of thousand NATO war games, a Prussian army crashes through the Fulda Gap and encounters an Austrian army in the Battle of Sadowa, which ends with the rout of the Austrians, and with Count Karl left lying on the battlefield.