Why did Prussia just pull out of France after their stunning victory in 1871? Why didn't they annex the damn place?

Because that's not how war worked, tard
Napoleon didnt annex either Prussia after conquering it in 1806

Also, trying to annex an old and united country is a bad idea
Even at the peak of the total war era (WW2), Germany would rather make France a puppet than try to annex it

Bismarck didn't even want alsac lorraine

Because you'll get a large french minority in your newly German nation state, do you want a large minority in your nation state?

>annex france
congratulations, now you have to deal with angry franc-tireurs for the rest of eternity
Even Hitler with ten times stronger army gave the French some sense of continuity of the country with Vichy France

>random unrelated attack on George Bush
It's like I'm really in 2006!

Annexing nations worked wonders when Napoleon tried it 50 years earlier

The other nations already hated him so he had no reasons to care about reputation.

>Why did Prussia just pull out of France after their stunning victory in 1871? Why didn't they annex the damn place?
That generally doesn't work too well for many reasons but the main reason is that Bismarck didn't want to make an enemy of France, he didn't even want to take Elsass-Lothringen.
Unfortunately, the fact that the German Empire did take Elsass-Lothringen and the fact that Germany had just utterly defeated glorious France made the French incredibly butthurt.
pic related

That pic can't be real.

>one does not simply annex franc
vichy, nato, charlemagne, clovis etc etc

There are shitty propaganda maps for every country you know.

looks pretty real. It has the demilitarized rhineland and turkey looks a lot like the treaty of sévres

>Why did Prussia just pull out of France after their stunning victory in 1871?

So they would force the full payment of the reparations and ensure that France is weakened militarily for the next few years.

Prussia won the war against France not because they had better trained army or better equipment but because they had superior mobilisation, logistics and artillery. If they committed to "annexing" France they would commit into a potential loss after a resurgence from French side. They had neither the resources nor the manpower to be able to keep France under control and even losing at Sedan and Alsace-Loren only made French burst with revanchism.

t. /v/ or /gsg/
Imagine having 39 million angry people who hate your guts in your country.
Minimum benefit for too high a price.

Because they didn't want Russian or British involvement. The point of war was to get Southern German states under Prussian Sphere of influence, Alsace was really a secondary thing.

Not for France it wasn't.

ITT

We learn that real life is totally different from annexing countries in a Paradox map painting game.

>annexing arguably one of the oldest countries of Europe

Now I can see that being completely sensual OP!

Oh please, it's quite tame knowing what the germans had envisioned for Europe.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemberprogramm

because life is not a paradox vidyageam

It is real.

Except it's just a wet dream envisioned by a fringe extremist party that got like single digit percentages in elections at most IIRC.

Yes I seem to recall that those stemmed purely from what Action Française had promoted as the peace terms France should enforce on Germany. And as you've commented, Action Française was a fringe-group most would've scoffed at.

Here: fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_française

The argument that the french were this delirious in how they would orchestrate the peace plans is as bias as saying that France had throbbing revanchist spirit in 1914, when the revanchist party in the French parlement had little to no votes.

France was actually expected to
collapse economically and no longer
be a great power anymore after the
annexation because of its extreme
reliance on the iron mines of the
province, so it was considered a
clever move since they had enough
justification to do it to not anger the other great powers too much.
To the surprise of absolutely
everyone however France discovered new iron mines in northern france
and the economy was saved.

Germany intended to annex those
too(along with much industry)
if it won WW1 as a coup de grace for
France.

That, and basically the defeat did re-ignite some degrees of patriotism unprecedented that France would muster to slave away and reimburse the reparations at the earliest, for them to rebuild their economy on the soonest convenience:

>After the Franco-Prussian War, according to conditions of Treaty of Frankfurt (May 10, 1871), France was obliged to pay a war indemnity of 5 billion gold francs in 5 years. German troops remained in parts of France until the last installment of the indemnity was paid in September 1873, ahead of schedule.[citation needed]
>ahead of schedule

And german never paid their debt, dammit i love french.

>Oh please, it's quite tame knowing what the germans had envisioned for Europe.

How is completely dismantling Germany and A-H more and creating a Russian Empire on steroids more tame than the September programe?

>still lacked the financial and military resources to actually occupy an entire country the size of France
>not expect there to be any major revolts following
the prussians quite literally crushed the main nodes of popular resistance, namely, paris and the army led by gambetta. It was definitely possible just not feasible from a geopolitical perspective

it actually did...the only reason it failed was because he lost, otherwise the annexed territories offered great human and natural resources that he exploited

thats basically what they took on mainland europe in wwii so maybe the propagandists were right

I'm pretty sure they did until they paid if off recently

Because Britain would just blockade them and Prussia didn't even have a Napoleonic France tier navy to attempt to break that

>Why didn't Prussia annex all of France?

>minority
pretty sure france was at least equal in population