Between 15 August and 27 September 1871, Strasbourg was besieged by Prussian armies. Rachel Chrastil argues that this overlooked episode in the Franco-Prussian War occurred at a crossroads in the development of democratic warfare and in civilian–military relations. The nineteenth century had witnessed bloodier sieges before, including Saragossa, Sebastopol and Vicksburg. But Strasbourg marked a decisive step towards the systematic targeting of non-combatants by artillery. It also heralded the rise of international humanitarian intervention, thanks to the Swiss offer to provide asylum from the shelling for as many as 2,000 civilians. The Siege of Strasbourg explores the multiple facets of a conflict which anticipates both humanitarian crusading and the horrors of total war. Located on the Rhine, and with close cultural and commercial ties to Baden, residents of Strasbourg had to reconsider their personal and regional loyalties during the ordeal.

Chrastil reconstructs the predicaments that faced the men and women trapped inside the city walls: General Jean-Jacques-Alexis Ulrich, doggedly refusing to surrender, even in a situation that seemed hopeless; doctor Henri-Étienne Beaunis, confronted with the gruesome cases brought to the military hospital, musing on the squalor of war; or Catherine Weiss, opting to flee towards the Swiss border with her children, despite the pain of leaving her husband behind. The book collects their diverse perspectives into an interconnected cluster of micro-histories. In several places historical empathy spills over into sentimental identification with her subjects, as Chrastil celebrates the cosmopolitanism, solidarity and resilience of the besieged inhabitants. Despite the signing of the Geneva Protocol in 1864, there was scant protection for civilians in a siege under international law. According to military custom, the artillery of the besieging army was supposed to be aimed at the fortifications until the point when a breach was opened in the defences. Yet General August von Werder – or General Mörder as he was nicknamed by his enemies – opted for a four-day bombardment of the city centre in late August, convinced that smashing the morale of the population would speed the capitulation of the fortress and spare a needlessly bloody, protracted campaign. The policy backfired. General Ulrich resisted any departure from military protocol, aware that abandoning the city prematurely could cost him his life; meanwhile, the ordinary Strasbourg residents were sickened by perceived German barbarism which recalled the savagery of the seventeenth century. The Municipal Commission introduced a range of measures to mitigate the suffering, including cantines populaires serving free meals and opening up public buildings to provide shelter for the homeless.

If the book creates a mosaic of individual impressions and dilemmas, the specificities of the situation in Strasbourg are put in relief through extensive citation from secondary literature. Since the siege of Strasbourg offers a number of historic ‘firsts’, Chrastil is led to compare the situation in 1870–71 with other instances of the ruthless strategies adopted by German High Command, as well as the long-term histories of humanitarian intervention, the extension of international law, the curbing of violence in European societies and the gendered separation of spheres. The evidence from Strasbourg is situated in a broad panorama of other historical trends and exemplars. The resulting analogies can be very illuminating – for instance in considering the experience of Strasbourg alongside the German offensives against Le Mans and Paris in 1870–71, or in pairing the destruction of cultural sites like the New Church library with later outrages at Louvain and Rheims in 1914. But sometimes the analogies are less persuasive – such as allusions to the siege of Leningrad – and serve to lift this particular incident out of its nineteenth-century context and into a more nebulous realm of reflection. The siege figures as a test-case for human responses to exceptional duress, ‘a metaphor for human frailty and limitations’.

Indeed, Chrastil makes clear her desire to move away from the conventional questions of national identity that dominate writing on Alsace. In their place appear analytics derived from moral philosophy, as Chrastil distinguishes the different strands of opinion in Strasbourg in terms of consequentialism, deontology or virtue ethics. The benefit of such an approach is that it brings us as readers closer to the reasoning of actors in the terrible summer of 1871, confronted on every side by unenviable choices; the disadvantage is that the siege is distractingly situated in relation to the inhumanity of later conflicts. Chrastil passes with regrettable haste over the post-war reconstruction of German ‘Strasburg’, arguing that the siege was largely forgotten rather than dwelling on the complex processes by which it was represented and remembered. For a book that draws skilfully on primary testimony, more could have been said about the private and public motives and practices for chronicling the siege. Yet this is an unusual, thought-provoking study, which presents Strasbourg as a zone of urban combat and a miniaturized lesson in the morality of war.