650,000 casualties in the Franco-Prussian War. The November Uprising 100,000 casualties. Russo-Turkish War 200,000 casualties. Crimean War 800,000 casualties.
I guess I don't know what counts as a serious, bloody conflict.
I think the thing is, the Franco-Prussian war was a limited war with limited goals. The reason why the Napoleonic war stands out as the last war of significance is it was an unlimited war, which reformed europe after it.
I don't think casualty counts are particularly good metrics here - rather, the metric should be the degree to which the civilian population is brought into the war, as victims, soldiers, or workers. In that sense, the colonies had been experiencing 'total' wars in the sense that, europeans rarely distinguished between civilian and enemy forces when putting down insurrection, and rarely had qualms about mass conscription in various forms. Consequently, the casualty numbers and social destruction of the first world war, while extremely unusual for europe, would have been far less unusual in east Africa, or India.
Germany started WW1 with the ambition to make it a limited war, with limited goals. Quickly subduing France, and breaking Russia. Most people on either side thought it was going to be a short war.
It evolved differently though.
As for the second part, take the Franco-Prussian war then, and it's consequences for France, it was massive. Besides the war that went quite badly, a massive uprising happened in Paris (the Commune), under siege from both Germans and Loyalists forces. Starvation was rampant, civilian impact massive, and the final death toll quite important.
The 19th century in Europe was characterized by nationalisms, unifications of countries in blood, and liberation of a few (Greece or Serbia for ex.), again in blood.
I think you're disregarding history, in the name of your argument.
Franco-Prussian War happened in 1870, 45 years earlier than WWI.
There was a surprising period of peace in Europe in the late XIX century where for 40 years there was relative peace. That probably work towards the specifics of WWI (war involving almost everyone in Europe, in a very short timespan, with no clear objective for anyone)
The Seven Years' War killed a million people. Napoleonic Wars 5 million. The Balkan Wars 150,000 (note I'm counting deaths, not casualties). Crimean War 400,000 and the Franco-Prussian War perhaps 200,000.
World War I itself saw the deaths of over 10 million people. The Russian Civil War half that and World War II quadruple that. These numbers are not 10x anything seen since the Napoleonic Wars, they are 100x.
The experience of the long 19th century was that wars would be short, decisive, localized in scope, and fairly bloodless. The Balkan Wars and the wars of Italian and German unification were not exceptions to this rule. The American Civil War and Boer Wars were exceptions, but discounted because they weren't European wars. The Crimean War was a partial exception (it was long and indecisive, but still fairly localized and fairly bloodless for the ambitions of the powers involved). The leaders were wholly unprepared for the long, bloody stalemate that would characterize World War I, or the incessant civil wars and wars of ideology that would characterize the wars between World War I and World War II.
> The American Civil War and Boer Wars were exceptions, but discounted because they weren't European wars
Russo-Japanese War as well. More recent than the US Civil War and gave some early examples as to what WWI would look like, but generally considered to be irrelevant since it wasn't a European War and was generally localized to the far, far east.
Indeed, discounting the American civil war seems to be the crucial step for making the 19th C look safe. While obviously not physically in Europe, it was the closest fore-taste of what determined modern states could do to each other.
But contrary to TFA's claims, colonial wars were also "short, decisive, localized", maybe all 10 times smaller again (unless my googling fails me).
> The experience of the long 19th century was that wars would be short, decisive, localized in scope, and fairly bloodless.
At the risk of writing a 1,000 word reply...for the past 2 decades there's been a growing body of academic research using archival documents from military archives (captured by the Soviet Union after WW2 and unknown to scholars until the 1990s), that politicians and generals didn't actually believe in the "short-war illusion" and they were actually fully prepared for the long, bloody stalemate that happened.
Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers is a popular book containing much of this new research.
Some examples from this kind of research:
Prussian General & Chancellor von Caprivi warned that war against France alone would be "tenacious and protracted."
Field Marshal von der Goltz publicly warned that "future wars would be long drawn-out affairs involving nations and not just cabinets."
In 1890 the architect of the Franco-Prussian War warned parliament that caution the nation that the next European conflict would most likely be a "Seven or Thirty Years' War."
The quartermaster-general of the German army warned "We cannot expect quick, decisive victories." The war of the future instead would feature "a tedious and bloody crawling forward step-by-step," that is, "siege-style" warfare.
Field Marshall von Haenseler also warned that one could not simply "carry off the armed forces of a great power [France] like a cat in a sack."
The German General Chief of Staff believed the coming war "will be a peoples' war, one which would not be concluded by a single decisive battle," but which would deteriorate into a "long and protracted struggle." The future war could not be terminated until "the peoples' energy had been entirely broken"; even if victorious, the German people would emerge from such a struggle "exhausted in the extreme."
The German Imperial Navy office wrote "It is not possible to discern why the war should last only nine months.... In order to avoid arriving at deceptive perceptions, one should, on the basis of available information, base planning on a war of perhaps 1 1/2 years."
The Prussian Statistics Office (who had to figure out how to feed the nation during the coming war) calculated a scenario for "a war of 2 or even 2 1/2 to 3 years."
In 1912 Field Marshall Ludendorff wrote any war would be "a long-drawn out campaign with numerous difficult, long-lasting battles, before we can defeat [even] one of our adversaries."
The General Staff's Third Section (Intelligence) continued to speak of the war of the future in terms of a "peoples' war," of a "protracted struggle," and of a "long-lasting campaign."
German Major Haushofer (the future "father" of geopolitics) believed the coming war would last "at least 3 years".
Falkenhayn told his old regiment the coming war would last "at least one-and-one-half years."
German Chancellor Hollweg believed that any action against Serbia "can lead to a world war".
According to this line of research, the short-term war illusion still existed but in a different (worse) guise. The generals and politicans knew (or strongly believed) the coming war would be anything but short, decisive, localised, and bloodless. But they couldn't see any alternative.
They realised that there was no viable alternative to a desperate HOPE of a short war, short of admitting that war itself was no longer feasible.
I guess I don't know what counts as a serious, bloody conflict.