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Future French President Adolphe Thiers shrewdly remarked in 1866 that “it was we who were beaten at Sadowa.”

After the 1870 plebiscite, an imperial politician said, “Now we have won our own Sadowa.”

The speech was, in brief, a powerful, passionate denunciation of Austria, and the principles which Austria represented before Sadowa taught her a lesson of tardy wisdom.

With the success of Prussia at Sadowa ended King William's personal unpopularity in Europe.

Little did even he himself think when, after Sadowa, he accused the Emperor's Government of having left itself no blunder more to commit, that it had yet to perpetrate one crowning and gigantic mistake, and that one effect at least of this stupendous error would be to compel Paris to treat au sérieux, and as a supreme necessity, that system of defences so long regarded as good for little else than to remind the present generation that Louis Adolphe Thiers was once Prime Minister of France.