Giuseppe Garibaldi & the Army of the Vosges: Volunteer Forces of the Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871

Sixty years before the International Brigades fought for the Spanish Republic, international volunteers entered the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 in response to the call of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Army of the Vosges to save a fledgling French republic there from the new Prussianized German empire. Inspired by the lingering radical visions of 1848 and supported by elements of the First International of Marx and Bakunin, several thousand men (and women) came not only from neighbouring Spain, Italy, and Belgium but from Germany itself, as well as the Mediterranean societies and as far as the Americas to fight for a “universal republic”.

Garibaldi and his volunteers faced enemies ultimately more powerful than the Prussian-led German Confederation. The French imperial interests that had started the war remained an ultimately dominant force in the republic and their hostility to “red republicanism” was evident even before their bloody repression of the Paris Commune. They shaped the histories of the war, the international volunteers and the French who fought alongside them.

This study explores the politics of constructing historical memory to challenge that narrative and offers a different assessment of contemporary before its translations into the new language of anarchism and socialism.