Steampunks in Paradise: Dessert Wines and the Franco-Prussian War

One of the big historical holes in my head was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

This wiki article indirectly demonstrates war is not only wrong but usually completely bonkers. The apparently famous Ems dispatch regarding the French's errant viscount and his tiresome objections to the Hohenzollerns' aspirations to the Spanish throne caused the war, especially the part about being very rude indeed.  Here it is, in its entirety:

Sent by Heinrich Abeken of the Prussian Foreign Office under King Wilhelm's Instruction to Bismarck.

His Majesty the King has written to me:

Count Benedetti intercepted me on the promenade and ended by demanding of me in a very importunate manner that I should authorize him to telegraph at once that I bound myself in perpetuity never again to give my consent if the Hohenzollerns renewed their candidature. I rejected this demand somewhat sternly as it is neither right nor possible to undertake engagements of this kind [for ever and ever]. Naturally I told him that I had not yet received any news and since he had been better informed via Paris and Madrid than I was, he must surely see that my government was not concerned in the matter.

[The King, on the advice of one of his ministers] decided in view of the above-mentioned demands not to receive Count Benedetti any more, but to have him informed by an adjutant that His Majesty had now received [from Leopold] confirmation of the news which Benedetti had already had from Paris and had nothing further to say to the ambassador.
His Majesty suggests to Your Excellency that Benedetti's new demand and its rejection might well be communicated both to our ambassadors and to the Press.

That's it! Let's invade France.

Later, an awesome detail:

"Dispatched from Paris as the republican government's emissary, Léon Gambetta passed over the German lines in a balloon inflated with coal gas from the city's gasworks, and organized the recruitment of new French armies."

This is of course about the same time when, logically enough, a Austrian Hapsburg was King of Mexico. the Germans besiege Paris, win, leave, and get Alsace-Lorraine, and Germany gets to be Germany for the first time. The Paris Commune gets rolling over all debts being due in 48 hours. Then a bunch of rural French businessmen, presumably Tea Baggers, decide to barge in and kill 20,000 of their fellow citizens for messing around with social equality.

The Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and WWII. Once again, we learn that white wines are bad news.