The painting by Wilhelm Camphausen was taken made eight years after the scene it recaptures, but it is instructive all the same. Two figures; one of them with his eyes cast downward, shoulders slumped, hair unkempt, dress coat ruffled, hands held upward—the look of a supplicant. The other; his chin upright, sword clasped firmly, helmet tucked over his forehead; eyes sparkling and shiny—the epitome of confidence. Such was the encounter in the late afternoon 2 September 1870 when the two men, whose countries had clashed at the battle of Sedan and were still clashing in the bloodiest of the wars of the middle of the nineteenth century, came face to face: Napoleon III and Otto von Bismarck—both extraordinary characters. Before turning to the events that led to this war and the battle that decided it, let us delve a little into the background of the personalities of two of the most fascinating characters produced in the nineteenth century, and one might as well start with Napoleon III who had, unlike his great antagonist, been a familiar figure on the European political stage for over two decades. Sixty-two years old at the time this story opens, Napoleon III was a tall thin figure, a man of enormous intellectual depth. His mind teemed with original, often dangerous, ideas that were years ahead of his time. These ideas ran across national frontiers; they were European, even worldwide, in scope. In home affairs, his ideas were also new. He wanted free trade, public direction of industry, and a systematic use of credit to promote expansion and full employment. His intellect was enriched by great personal charm. He was vain, solitary, even moody, yet, as Queen Victoria once said, “a prince among men.” He was a beautiful speaker with a ravishing voice and a fine turn of phrase. He bewitched Tsar Alexander II and Emperor Francis Joseph. Statesmen and monarchs alike succumbed to his magic. There were great political gifts behind the cloud of phrases. He was a skillful, though not always a successful, negotiator. Though he appealed to the fears of the middle class, he was also a socialist. He did more for the French working class than any other government before or since, and when he died he was, like Benjamin Franklin, working on an economical stove for the poor. Napoleon III began his career as president of France, an office to which he was elected in December of 1848. He had run on a ticket of law and order, and his election was certainly a defeat for radicals and republicans. All the same, the lesser bourgeoisie and peasant proprietors who formed the bulk of his support dreaded a return to the ancien régime. Napoleon I had in their eyes been a democratic sovereign, attached inextricably to the principles of 1789: they saw in Louis Napoleon both order and balance. Bonapartism meant balance: no reaction, no revolution. In the final analysis, Louis Napoleon won because his inner complexities had reached a precarious balance that matched exactly the national mind. This was a rare moment, for Louis Napoleon III’s mind was a tangle of contradictions. He was a constant mixture of idealist and conspirator, consistent in one only thing. Or rather two things. He could never resist the temptation to speculate; equally, he could never resist the opportunity to manufacture plans—first plans for getting power, then plans for using it. But, in the words of the British historian A.J.P. Taylor: “he hated the action which threatened to follow these plans. For example, the coup d’état of 2 December had been planned months before and put off at least twice. When it came to the point, Louis Napoleon hesitated again and might have put it off once more had not the politicians of the national assembly forced his hand by beginning to make plans against him” There was a further contradiction. Though Louis Napoleon talked ceaselessly to an endless number of witnesses of every political stripe, he was not given to revealing himself on paper. The correspondence of his uncle runs to sixty-four volumes; that of Louis Napoleon, when it was recently brought together, filled only one. Nor was he more forthcoming in the practical consideration of running the country. It was a hard task to be one of Louis Napoleon’s ministers. He never learned to give precise instructions; hence the difficulty of his ambassadors in writing accurate reports. Walewski, illegitimate son of Napoleon I and later foreign minister under Louis Napoleon, once complained: “The ambassadors see my door open, but they by-pass it; they prefer in matters of great sensitivity, to deal with the emperor alone.” In December 1852 Louis Napoleon proclaimed the Second Empire and took the title Emperor Napoleon III. The first whiff of the French empire brought cries of alarm from the Great Powers. The British were the first to expostulate: they protested over the “III” of Napoleon’s title, then recognized the new emperor without reserve. They were followed by Frederick William IV of Prussia who, in turn, was followed by Francis Joseph of the Habsburg Monarchy. Only the Russians hesitated. They had been won by the Austrians for a scheme to greet Napoleon III as “friend,” not as “brother,” and they refused to drop the idea even after the Austrians had pulled out. The tsar noted: “Brother! This relationship does not exist between us and Napoleon. The title of ‘Brother’ can only be addressed to one who receives his authority from heaven.” Some of Napoleon III’s advisors were outraged by this offense and urged him to break off relations with Petersburg. Louis Napoleon replied: “God gives us our brothers, we choose our friends,” and refrained. Louis Napoleon had now attained the summit of his ambitions. His title made him master of France. Yet this mastery was not achieved without costs. As emperor, Louis Napoleon was not a free agent. He was reigned in by the institutions, customs, and legal practices he inherited from his predecessors, especially from his uncle. It was hard to distinguish between authenticity and sham, between what was genuine and what was imitation, between real article and the false coin; for that reason Napoleon III aroused more unmeasured slander from contemporaries than any political leader since the days of Louis XIV. The popular images of his rule can be expressed in three sentences of Taylor’s: “The Second Empire claimed to be Wagner and turned out to be Offenbach—a frivolous echo of the past, not an inspiration for the future. It was the bastard of the great Napoleon in name, in policy, even in men. It was said at the time that, though Louis Napoleon was not the son of his father, everyone else at court was the son of his mother.” At the same time Napoleon III undertook a vast program for the reform of French institutions in the hope of giving the French people a richer life than any that they had previously enjoyed in the history of the world. More jobs, longer holidays, shorter hours, higher wages—these were the things he advocated and worked for. He made Paris what it is—as far as appearance is concerned—the Paris of the great boulevards and the Paris of the grand operas. He turned the geography of world power upside down by building the Suez Canal. He used the plebiscite more skillfully than de Gaulle, the twentieth century figure with whom he is sometimes compared. The contradictions of Napoleon III were shown especially in foreign affairs. He advocated, or claimed to advocate, an entirely new system of foreign policy. He attempted to display this system in various ways: sometimes through speeches—speeches which retain a high reputation for oratory because the twists of Napoleon III’s utterances make it almost impossible to pin down his thought; sometimes through manipulation of the press: he would write an article in Le Moniteur—anonymously, though signed in every line advocating a policy and often by implication criticizing his subordinates. He had, however, one overpowering belief: his belief in the power of nationalism. This was indeed the panacea for Europe’s ills. Antagonism among the nationalities was a canker at Europe’s heart; remove this antagonism and peace would follow. It was for France to take up the cause of nationalism and discharge her European mission. But how? “By promoting a United States of Europe.” Everything in Europe called for unification. More uniform in climate than China, less diverse in religion than India, less diverse in race than the United States of America: a single culture and a common social structure. Self-determination ascertained through a plebiscite was Napoleon III’s goal; then free nations could live as happy neighbors. Such at any rate were the views he outlined in Napoleonic Ideas—a remarkable little book published in 1839. Championing nationalism had for Napoleon III a second advantage: it would open the door to a general revision of the territorial settlement established at Vienna in 1815. He said in 1852: “Nations are not thrones and crowns; people have a right to assert themselves against their masters not of their own choosing.” To those who had constructed the Vienna system this sounded like the trumpet of doom. These men played out their lives in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars. They saw in Napoleon III’s program no mere revision of grievances and defects. Europe, which existed on the basis that France had lost the wars, was to be rearranged on the basis that she had won. Nor were their fears groundless. In Sorel’s words: “His name drove him to dazzle France.” Napoleon III liked to suppose that the congress of Vienna had brought France down from her high estate in Europe; on the contrary, this settlement had given her a position of preeminence in Europe and had made her secure. If it were changed, France was bound to suffer. Hence Napoleon III was constantly driven forward, and yet shrank from the results. Two objectives he pursued throughout his life: an alliance with Great Britain and destruction of the Holy Alliance—the union of the three northern courts, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, that had been formed in the wake of his uncle’s downfall to guard against the reappearance of “the revolution.” Despite Napoleon III’s inaction, he could never support the conservative cause when it came to the point: hence his sympathy for Italian and later German nationalism. Everything else about him defies analysis: conspirator and statesman; dreamer and realist; despot and democrat; maker of war and man of peace; adventurer, procrastinator, prognosticator—in the end elusive, a sprite vanishing into the garden. There were still further contradictions. Napoleon came to power proclaiming that “L’Empire, c’est la paix,” but within three years Frenchmen were dying on the battlefields of the Crimea. In 1859 embroilment in the first national wars in Italy gave France Nice and Savoy but at the cost of Italian affections, as did his sending of French troops to Rome in 1849 and again in 1867 to protect the pope. At the same time, the principle of nationalism led him to support Polish aspirations of independence at the cost of friendship with Russia. Most dangerous of all, the example that he set in siding with the unification of Italy morally forced him not to intervene in Bismarck’s scheme to bring the states of Germany under the rule of Prussia. The largest obstacle to German unification had been eliminated by Prussia’s success at Königgrätz on 3 July 1866 and by the treaty of 23 August of that year, which gave a formal registration to the defeat of the Habsburg monarchy. Napoleon III’s prestige suffered as a result. By 1870, “L’Empire, c’est la paix” had become a joke and had won him the overwhelming hostility of the intellectuals of his day, from whose witty and pungent attacks he never recovered. Nor was this all. At the time this tale begins, that is in the spring and summer months of 1870, Napoleon III was also very sick, suffering from cold, fever, tooth trouble, and most outstandingly from stone as well as from the aftereffects of the drugs administered for the relief of these miseries. To mount a horse was torture and, at times, coherent thought impossible. Stricken by these various douleurs, in acute pain sometimes almost past endurance, he suffered daily the take of telegrams and other official business brought currently to his apartments and coped as best he could with the responsibilities that flowed from it all. By 1870 Napoleon III was, as was plain to all who saw him, a man gravely weakened by age and by illness—indeed a shadow of his former self. Physically he had the appearance of a man already dead. His left arm was paralyzed; his eyes were glazed; he moved with a slow shuffling walk and was kept going only by increasing doses of drugs. Sick and racked by pain, his judgment, though still shrewd, was clouded by the languor that often interrupted his rare moments of energy. The few visits by the members of his government so obviously tired the emperor that the ministers often withdrew for sheer pity without even having attempted to broach the subjects about which they had come to see him. The upshot of all this was that Napoleon III, in the last year of his reign, came increasingly to rely upon those members of his entourage for whom conflict with Prussia was considered unavoidable, and among these his wife, the Countess Eugénie Montijo, was the most conspicuous. An auburn-haired Spaniard, aged twenty-seven at the time of her betrothal to Napoleon III in 1853—a woman of passionate political temperament, inexhaustible energies, wide interests, and varied tastes, Eugénie cut an imposing figure at court. In August 1855, at a great ball in the Tuileries, Bismarck, then the Prussian minister at Paris, was presented to Napoleon III and Eugénie, and he was properly responsive to her grace and beauty; the empress “was more beautiful than any of the portraits I have seen” he told his wife Johanna, not in general style, he added, unlike his sister Malwine, though her face was narrower and longer and her eyes and mouth more beautiful. Eugénie did not reciprocate Bismarck’s disposition. Of all her enthusiasms and passions, the greatest and most consuming were her hatred for Bismarck and her longing for the day when France would avenge the reversal of 1866. She gloried in the reputation she derived from these enthusiasms. She shared with Napoleon III a deep commitment to the empire, but she combined it with a virulent chauvinism. She claimed that “real strength only comes from consistency”—a phrase that shows how drastically she differed from her husband. She pushed this view all the more strongly because of her view that “France is losing her place among nations and must win it back or die.” It is said that on 15 July 1870, after a vote approving war credits had been taken in the French legislature, she summoned two aides to her chamber and described what was about to occur as “ma petite guerre.” We know a great deal about Eugénie’s activities during the last years of the second empire, most of which were based on her desire to bring about a crisis of relations with Prussia. Early in the year we find her recording the fact that the inspector-general of the Austrian army, Archduke Albrecht, was visiting Paris with a view to combining Austrian and French movements in times of war. This pleases greatly. “Il est, comme moi,” she writes, “passioné du désir d’un alliance avec l’Autriche.” Nor is this all. In her diary she pours out her resentments surviving from the confused and frustrating years between 1866 and 1870, and a most cynical and discreditable interpretation is given to the motives of Bismarck in blocking French plans to obtain control of the Belgian railways in 1869. Eugénie’s influence mounted as the health of the emperor fell into a decline. It is impossible to believe that Franco-Prussian relations were bettered in any way thereby; in all her pronouncements and writings, Eugénie stands in marked contrast to her Prussian counterpart, Queen Augusta. Needless to say, her pernicious influence was not inconsiderable. We have it from no less an authority than Halévy that the empress had set her face against the constitutional changes (see below) of 1870 because they represented the total defeat of her political views. Years later, when she had calmed down considerably, she still recalled Napoleon III in the spring of 1870 as “practically counting for nothing because of illness, yes; but particularly because he had surrendered the right to act arbitrarily against his ministers.” Of course, explanations such as these can be pushed too far. How many decisions would have been made differently had Napoleon III not been ill in July 1870? The record does not afford a single example. French policy was full of blunders, but through it all, and even in the darkest hours, Napoleon III was animated by a deep faith in the cause in which he believed. The decision for war in 1870, as for peace in 1866, will be forever controversial, but neither can be ascribed to the state of Napoleon’s health—and for one reason: these decisions were not made by Napoleon alone. Good health was no guarantee of freedom or blunder, given the constraints that imposed themselves on the crucial decisions. That said, it is undeniable that the unhappy imperial marriage did much to throw French policy into confusion. Napoleon had, during the time of the Crimean War (1854-56) overcome similar problems of health and had learned to live with marital disappointment, though it can hardly be said that his escapades with a host of mistresses afterwards were vicarious or that they gave him the degree of comfort and security that he wanted. For Eugénie, however, the cleavage with her husband had an unmistakable effect. It made her resolute for an independent course. She had little influence on the day-to-day formulation of French policies, but the contemptuous and offhand way that she characterized them undermined the consistency of application that they desperately needed. It is beyond question that she deluded the Austrians in this period about Napoleon III’s intentions and about the strength of his diplomatic position. And in 1870 she was only too willing to throw out the liberal ministry whose prestige had been one of the overriding factors in bringing on the declaration of war. Worse still, her appraisal of the crisis after the initial defeats prevented the retreat to Paris for which Napoleon III was pushing and led straight to the path of Sedan. In 1870 the Second Empire, which had been proclaimed with such fanfare eighteen years earlier and which was peculiarly the product of Napoleon III’s mind, had fallen into a decline. Its prestige was going. With that peculiar ease that the French have for unloading upon an individual the shortcomings of a nation at large, blame for all that was wrong with it, all that was corrupt in it, was quickly heaped upon the man at the top, and upon his shoulders rested the whole weighty structure of the empire that he had established. As the years passed, it became more and more evident that, should this main pillar ever be removed, the structure that supported it would instantaneously and irremediably collapse. And that pillar was crumbling. Election results bore this out. In each successive election the opposition showed itself to be increasingly powerful, and in May 1869 the foremost group, the republicans, captured Paris and most of the big cities. The government faced a new crisis of staggering proportions: half the members of the lower house, the Corps législatif, consisted of candidates who had rejected the official ticket and had campaigned for constitutional reform. By January 1870 the opposition finally forced Napoleon III’s hand; he drew up a new constitution, summoned to the premiership the opposition’s leader, Émile Ollivier, and with this proclaimed the advent of the “liberal empire,” in which he agreed to rule “with the cooperation of ministers and parliament” and to share the initiative in legislation with both houses of the legislature. The new constitution was decked out with democratic trappings; in reality it was a bundle of contradictions. Ministers were responsible, but to whom was left to speculation. And though the powers of the Corps législatif were increased, those of the upper house—the senate—still a nominated body, were increased as well, indeed more so: the senate was given a veto over legislation. ***
In Prussia, of course, things were quite different. Flush with success from her victory over Austria in 1866, Prussia had become the indisputable power in north and central Germany. As a result of her annexations in that war, she comprised four-fifths of the bulk of the population north of the river Main. The decisiveness with which her victory had been achieved opened up the possibility of greatly expanding her power base by absorbing the southern states—Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt—themselves magnets that for centuries attracted the attention of hostile powers. If Austria sought to turn the tables and to avenge her defeat—and it was not obvious at first that she would not seek to do so—these states might prove useful allies, and for France they served as a shield against further Prussian expansion. As to internal matters, here, too, matters were less complex. Prussia had a king and a minister-president neither of whom was responsible to parliament. There were also, of course, ministries of the king: of finance, of the interior, of war. In the personal incumbencies of these offices there reigned—again in contrast to the situation in France—a great stability. Of the two predominant figures, one, King William I, had ruled since 1858, first as regent then (after 1861) as king; the second, the minister president, Otto von Bismarck, had been in office since 1862. William would reign until his death in 1888; Bismarck, until he was dismissed from office in 1890. Each of these men needed the other. Each cut fundamentally a Prussian, rather than a German, figure. When he came to the throne at the age of sixty-three, William was set in his ways, and his mind was dominated by one overriding passion: the army. The liberal politician, Ludwig Bamberger, put it succinctly when he observed that for William “the state consisted of soldiers and soldiers were kings.” He spoke truly. William loved the army with a passion for which, save perhaps for his ancestor Frederick I, it is impossible to find a parallel in the history of modern Germany. William never envisaged the army as the agent through which Prussia would achieve mastery of Germany, but the plans for the army that he had in mind could never be launched (let alone realized) without a political crisis as wrenching as that through which England had passed in the 1640s and whose outcome was every bit as decisive for the future character of the state. To do its job, the army had to be reformed from top to bottom and, for a long time, first as prince of Prussia, then as king, William had been thinking of little else. The problem for the king was that the lower house of parliament did not, to put it mildly, share his enthusiasm for reform. Particularly repellent to it was the plan of Roon, the minister of war, to abolish a militia called the Landwehr. The Landwehr was middle class, not aristocratic. It had its own officers, most of them not drawn from the nobility. Moreover, it was a symbol of democratic nationalism. And its members were also voters. Roon despised it. He proposed to increase the number of years spent by recruits in the regular service from two to three years and to whittle the Landwehr to almost nothing. With these proposals, William could not agree more. The liberals in the Prussian parliament, on the other hand, wished to reduce the number of years spent in the regular service to two and to make the Landwehr the core of the Prussian army. A rousing constitutional conflict (beginning in 1860) ensued and got only worse as the years dragged on. By September 1862 matters had reached a crisis. The assembly refused all further money for the army. William threatened to abdicate. Civil war loomed. On Roon’s advice, William summoned his ambassador to Paris, the ruthlessly unorthodox Otto von Bismarck, and on 23 September appointed him prime minister of Prussia. Within fifteen months of taking office, Bismarck had involved Prussia in a war with Denmark; two years later, he entered her into a struggle with Austria for the mastery of Germany. With these two wars all the unity and fervor of the opposition began to melt away, and the constitutional conflict was decisively resolved in favor of the king on 3 July 1866 at the battle of Königgrätz. On 20 October 1867 Roon could write jubilantly to William that the struggle was over at last. And so it was. Not only had the army been remodeled along the lines William had fashioned, the forces of the North German Confederation (whose creation the victories of the armies had made possible) were put under the control of Berlin as well. By July 1870 the entire Prussian government, from the king on down, could take comfort in knowing that it had under its hands one of the greatest engines of war the world had ever known. William I was, of course, not alone responsible for this. Quite the contrary; this achievement belonged to his minister-president, Otto von Bismarck. The personality of Bismarck and his role in Prussian life at this time are so well known that one hesitates to expand upon them, but there are certain features of his personality that are particularly relevant to the subject at hand. Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815 at Schönhausen, in the Old Mark of Brandenburg, just east of the Elbe—in appearance a typical estate of the Prussian landowners, the Junkers. The district was largely inhabited by Protestants. The son of a dull and unprepossessing father from whom he inherited his massive physical frame and a clever quick-witted mother who sprang from a long line of civil servants, Bismarck’s advocacy of reform had earned him a reputation for Jacobinism. His mother was different creature from her plodding husband, she was nervous and quick tempered and always ill at ease. Bismarck inherited her brains. Bismarck himself was unmistakably North German in appearance and outlook. Compared to his contemporaries—to Napoleon III with his appreciation of the forces of modern Europe and his understanding of the career of his great uncle, Napoleon I, and even to Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria, who despite being a wooden headed character had in him all the traditions of the Habsburgs—Bismarck was pretty small beer. He belonged to what we would call the modest gentry. He had a humble upbringing, living on a farm, doing plenty of the farm work himself; he did not have a particularly distinguished career at the university. There was another extraordinary thing about him: until he became prime minister of Prussia he had never held domestic office. He held important diplomatic offices, and from these Bismarck got his vision of the world. Marriage brought lasting and secure happiness to Bismarck. His wife, Johanna von Puttkamer, was a selfless woman—the opposite of his mother—simple, devoted, and ready to endure anything. Under his tough exterior Bismarck was deeply emotional, a man not of the Enlightenment but of the Romantic Movement. He had lived out his youth in the days when the Byronic legend dominated the continent. He was a contemporary of Heine and Wagner, whom he both disliked. He was much given to tears at any public or private crisis. He wept openly after his first public speech and again after the battle of Königgrätz. He broke down sobbing when he took office and even more when he was dismissed. William I and Bismarck often sobbed together, though Bismarck always got his way. Music affected him deeply, the more so because he was musically illiterate. He could not read or play a score. He seconded his wife’s version of Anton Rubinstein, the greatest pianist of the age: “The playing was masterly both in control and attack and in everything like you and yet the heart, the heart, remains homeless.” Johanna gave him a home for his heart and it was very homely indeed. Though he played high drama on the high stage, his private setting resembled a Victorian boarding house. Contemporaries often commented on the banality of Bismarck’s surroundings. When the year 1866 opened Bismarck was certainly at the center of European diplomacy. The speed of Prussia’s victory over Denmark upset the calculations of both Russia and France. The Prussian victory meant that in the event of war between Prussia and Austria, France and Russia could be expected to intervene to prevent the victory of either belligerent. The high probability of a Franco-Russian intervention that would deny Prussia the fruits of any victory she might achieve was a compelling reason for Bismarck to be genuinely eager to achieve his aims without war and tells against the widely held theory that he had steered his course from the beginning in the direction of a confrontation. It was nevertheless his policy to prepare for such a collision, and for this purpose he concentrated his diplomacy on ensuring the isolation of Austria and persuading the French and Russian governments that they would never have cause to intervene against Prussia because Prussia would never pose a threat to their interests. The real turning point for all Europe was that France did not intervene, but even the dramatic nature of this has been much exaggerated owing to the fact that history has been written by those who opposed or regretted the decision, while Napoleon III, the man who made it, remained silent. He had made up his mind all along; he was on the side of “the revolution.” There was no real crisis of decision in Paris between 4 and 10 July 1866. It was simply that Napoleon III, having deceived his ministers from the first, now decided to override them. There is a simple defense of Bismarck’s policy on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War. He did not provoke war at all except of exploding it at the last moment. Later on, when the war became a national legend, Bismarck tried to take credit for it, but the credit was unearned. Of course the Hohenzollern candidacy for the throne of Spain was of Bismarck’s devising—though his enthusiasm for it, during the first two years the throne was vacant, waxed and waned; it was never consistent. But the object of the Hohenzollern candidacy was to act as a check on France, not to provoke her into war. His encouragement of or indifference toward the Spanish affair varied inversely with the Franco-Russian entente. When France and Russia were on good terms, this gave Prussia security, both against Austria-Hungary and against being involved in an eastern war; whenever they fell out, he tried to find some means of distracting French attention from the Rhine. He took up the Hohenzollern candidature in February 1869 when France and Russia were in dispute over Crete. He dropped it once the tension simmered down, and he kept his hands off it when it appeared that it might be renewed. He revived it once more in the spring of 1870 when Franco-Russian relations turned sour. Yet the main question to be asked about 1870 is why Bismarck went to war with France at all. For the more we look at the background of the conflict the more we wonder, as does Norman Rich, why he did not do all he could to avoid it. The position of Prussia in Germany after 1866 could hardly have been more favorable. No observer in 1870 surveying from a distance of four years could have failed to be impressed not only by the inordinate increase in the power of Prussia but also by the extensive decline in the rival powers that confronted her across her eastern and western borders. Not only had Austria been expelled from Germany, the states south of the river Main—all allies of Austria in the war just ended—were allied to Prussia by treaties and under the firm control of Berlin. The international situation had been unsettled as long as Prussia and Austria were rivals in central Europe; now that rivalry had been decisively resolved by the Prussian victory at Königgrätz. So many hurdles had been surmounted, so many difficulties overcome, that war against France seemed completely unnecessary to accomplish that ambition. There was, to be sure, a great deal of opposition to the extension of Prussian domination over south Germany on the part of the particularists, ultramontanes and rulers jealous of preserving their sovereignty. Elections to the German customs parliament in 1868 had resulted in a disconcertingly large number of victories for the anti-national candidates, and the Bavarian elections of 1869 demonstrated further the strength of the particularist tradition. Outside Prussia, but especially in south Germany, there was hostility to the introduction of the Prussian military system, including the conscription and taxation in the absence of which it would be fundamentally weakened. So deep was the resistance to Prussian rule in south Germany that some historians maintain Bismarck’s policy in terms of the stagnation of the unification movement. According to this theory, Bismarck provoked war with France to create the German empire in the heat of the popular enthusiasm that a war with a common foe would arouse. The thesis is convincing and may indeed have stood at the forefront of his calculations. Yet between 1868 and 1870 he had times without number declared himself satisfied with the progress of the unification movement, and on numerous occasions he found it necessary to rein in the zeal of the German nationalists—military men, parliamentarians, and journalists—who denounced the failure on the part of Prussia to impose her will on the states of south Germany in 1866. Bismarck’s replies to such arguments are famous. And they are convincing because they corresponded precisely to the requirements of Prussian self-interest at the time. Consider as one example a letter he wrote to Karl Werthern, his minister in Munich, who had become critical of his policy and who was expressing the view that the cause of unity would be lost unless there was an abrupt reversal of policy. The letter has come down as one of his greatest acts of statesmanship. Space does not permit a summary of it here, which is a pity, because his entire outlook of policy in that agitated winter was reflected in it. Concise, pithy, beautifully organized, an invaluable analysis not only of recent political developments in Bavaria and France but also of the military and religious trends that supplied the backdrop for them, the letter is also replete with interesting and penetrating observations on individual matters, and it may stand in its entirety as one of the most eloquent and compelling pleas for recognition of the folly of modern war and for international peace not just in Europe but everywhere else in the civilized world ever penned. Bismarck argued, first of all, that he was unconvinced that war with France was really inevitable. But he could not be brought to concede that even if at some point it should appear inevitable, this would mean that one should initiate it at any particular juncture—even one that appeared favorable from a military standpoint. The course that appeared most favorable from a military standpoint was not always, indeed hardly ever, the most favorable from the political standpoint. Beyond this, Bismarck was not willing to concede that even a war against France that could be expected to end successfully in the military sense was necessarily desirable. What would Germany’s objectives be in such a war? The conquest of new territory? But the Germans wanted no French territory. The destruction of the French armed forces? But the destruction of them was not possible. Nor would such destruction be permanent, for the military humiliation of France would only rouse the Powers of Europe to intervention and produce new opponents to join the one Germany had to her east, down the Danube. This was a plain description of fact. Though neither Great Britain nor Russia was on good terms with France at this time, neither was likely to relish the prospect of a general upheaval that would be unchained by the creation of a national Germany—and nor would Denmark, still in the throes of recovery from the defeat she sustained at the hands of Prussia six years before. Never surely was the issue more clearly drawn than here between the duty of the statesman to avoid, if possible, the horrors of war in the modern industrial age and the perennial tendency of military leaders to see as inevitable any war for which they are asked to plan and prepare and which they wish to begin at the time and under circumstances most favorable to their side. Bismarck ended by a brilliant word picture of the principles by which his statecraft was guided and, despite its length, the passage is too striking not to be quoted in full:
That the unification of Germany would be enhanced by policies involving force I think is self-evident. But it is another question, one that has to do with the precipitation of a violent catastrophe and the responsibility of choosing the time for it. An arbitrary intervention in the course of history, on the basis of purely subjective factors, has never had any other result than the shaking down of unripe fruit. That German unity is an unripe fruit today is in my opinion obvious. If the time that lies ahead works in the interests of unity as much as in the period since the accession of Frederick the Great has done, and particularly the time since 1840, the year in which the national movement was discernible for the first time since the wars of liberation, then we can look calmly to the future and leave the rest of our resources to our successors. Behind the wordy restiveness with which those who do not know the trade search for the talisman that will produce German unity in a trice, there is generally a superficial and, in not a few cases, impotent lack of knowledge of real things and their consequences.
All of the above having been said, the importance of this communication (and others like it) for the diplomatic situation of July 1870 cannot be over-emphasized. That Bismarck did not want a violent solution to the German question; that he did not wish to impose Prussian rule on south Germany by force; that he knew it would have to go through transitional stages lasting five, ten years, perhaps as much as a generation—is clear. All the same he was confident that final unification would be realized in the fullness of time: “We can set our watches, but the time moves no faster, and the ability to wait while a situation develops is one of the prerequisites of practical politics.” Instead of provoking war with France, Bismarck wanted to accustom European and especially French public opinion gradually to the idea of a unified Germany. When public opinion was sufficiently prepared, the time would have come to absorb part or all of southern Germany. It was primarily because this preparation process had not been given sufficient time to mature that Bismarck brushed aside a proposal in February 1870 to incorporate Baden, the most nationally minded of the southern states, into the North German Confederation. The time for such action was premature, he said. He did not want to alarm the other south German governments, but above all he did not want to provoke a crisis with the new constitutional government in France “as it signifies peace for us.” Napoleon was very changeable and could not be relied upon, but for the time being it was desirable to follow a policy of extreme caution. He said to his minister in Baden: “You know how firmly we have kept our common goal [of German unification] in view, but you also know how carefully considered the motives are by which we choose our course and measure our pace.” It is one of the great ironies of history that on the day after Bismarck sent these instructions to his minister in Baden in which he forcefully restated his views about avoiding war and slowing down the pace of German unification, he purposefully took up a campaign to make Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen king of Spain, a campaign he knew was certain to bring about a crisis of relations with France and which at the very least seemed to run a serious risk of war. The paradox Bismarck’s policy involved here can be most easily explained by flicking aside his statements about a peaceful solution of the German problem as a cloak for disguising his real intentions. Perhaps that was all it was. Bismarck was a master at verbal manipulation. But statements apart, Bismarck had every reason for preserving peace. Prussia had already progressed a long way toward the goal of German unification, and it seemed possible that that goal could be realized without a major war. War with a Great Power like France was always a formidable undertaking, no matter how confident the Prussian generals might be about their ability to win. No one was more aware than Bismarck that war, even under the best of circumstances, is a dangerous gamble and one that should only be taken when all other means are exhausted—and in 1870 other means for achieving German unity were far from exhausted. Even if Prussia succeeded in defeating France, there was always the danger that foreign mediation would deprive her of the fruits of victory. Even if foreign intervention failed to materialize, Bismarck had every reason to fear the effect of a Prussian victory on his own position, for a victorious war would inevitably create military heroes who could be expected to challenge his position. Why then did Bismarck take up the Hohenzollern candidacy? It is possible that he had indeed come to the conclusion that all peaceful means of unification had been exhausted, that a national war was necessary to break the deadlock in the unification movement, reawaken national enthusiasm and overcome the resistance of the south German governments. It is also possible to argue that he sought to increase the prestige of the House of Hohenzollern by putting one of its members on the Spanish throne; he may also have wanted, as Paul Schroeder has persuasively argued, to forestall the possible election of a Bavarian or Habsburg prince, the rise in prestige of these rival houses and their enrollment of Spain in an anti-Prussian coalition. All these are weighty enough considerations, but even when taken together they do not seem sufficiently convincing to explain Bismarck’s abandonment of a safe and eminently sound evolutionary approach to the German problem to adopt a policy of what up till recently would have been called one of brinkmanship. In searching for Bismarck’s motives in taking up the Hohenzollern candidacy, it is necessary to remember that he always saw politics in terms of power, and the power center of opposition to German unification did not lie in Stuttgart or Munich; it lay in Paris. Bismarck might welcome the constitutional government in France; he might hope that in time French statesmen and public opinion could be persuaded to accept a united Germany, but he also knew that French national interests could not tolerate the establishment of a new Great Power in Germany and that every French government would, or should, feel obliged to oppose German unification if it had the power to do so. It is therefore safe to assume that Bismarck took up the Hohenzollern candidacy primarily as a counter in the power struggle against the France of Napoleon III. This assumption is supported by Bismarck’s record in handling the Spanish problem from the time a revolution in Spain threatened to overturn the pro-French government of Queen Isabella. On 27 September 1868 he wrote to the Vice President of the Prussian ministry of state, Freiherr von der Heydt, that he did not believe the Spanish revolution would lead to European complications despite the desire of several parties, especially the ultramontanes (with the support of Napoleon III), to intervene on behalf of the existing regime. The revolution seemed to be succeeding, and if it did its triumph would provide a valuable tool for preserving peace. How the revolutionary movement would be an aid to peace Bismarck did not explain, but it is clear that he expected the new Spanish government to be anti-French and that an anti-French regime on the other side of the Pyrenees would act as a restraining influence on Napoleon III. For this reason he kept a watchful eye on Napoleon’s government while the revolution in Spain was going on and envisaged the possibility that France might attack Prussia while she was still free from any threat in her rear. “I hope God will bless the love of peace we showed eighteen months ago [at the time of the Luxemburg crisis in 1867] when we seemed stronger,” he wrote. “And if they do attack us, we are with God’s help still superior to France and the Russians will hold the Austrians in check.” On 3 October Bismarck wrote to his foreign office: “It is in our interest that the Spanish question remains a peace-fontanel ; a solution acceptable to Napoleon is hardly desirable for us.” And the next day he said: “For the moment, with this Spanish fly on his neck, Napoleon cannot of course think of war with Germany.” When the revolutionary party in Spain set up a provisional government on 5 October 1868 Bismarck called upon the king to do everything in his power to convince the new regime of Germany’s friendship. “Even if it should not endure, the decisive factor for us is that government that was overthrown was hostile whereas the present government is friendly to us.” Particularly pointed instructions were sent to Saurma, the German chargé d’affaires in Madrid, who had expressed personal disapproval of the Spanish revolution. It was only natural that Saurma should be concerned about the overthrow of a monarchical regime, Bismarck observed, but the only concern for Germany was that in all political calculations it would have to be counted on the side of Germany’s enemies. “Its overthrow is therefore a desirable event for our policy.” Fearing that Saurma’s attitude might damage Germany’s position in Spain, Bismarck ordered Canitz, his regular minister to Madrid, to interrupt his leave and return to his post. Bismarck believed that Germany’s ability to preserve the friendship of the present Spanish government might mean the difference between peace and war, and he intended to take no chances. At the end of the year he told Max von Forckenbeck, a National Liberal member of the Prussian chamber of deputies, that “the Spanish revolution saved us from war.” Even before the revolution took place in Spain, rumors had been in circulation that Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was very much in the running as a possible candidate for the Spanish throne in case the government of Queen Isabella were overthrown. These rumors grew after the revolution, and in September 1869 a Spanish politician named Salazar actually came to Germany to sound Prince Leopold about his willingness to accept the crown if offered. The prince was a member of the Catholic line of the ruling house of Prussia, but he was also closely related to the emperor Napoleon. It therefore seemed acceptable to two of the continental Great Powers. Salazar was told that the first condition of acceptance would be Napoleon’s consent. If Napoleon could be persuaded to convince the King of Prussia that the Hohenzollern dynasty in Spain would be a guarantee of European peace and stability, and the king gave his consent, only then could the question of acceptance be considered. Salazar left with the understanding that the agreement of Napoleon would be sought. “To avoid every possibility of danger for Prussia we will endeavor to make the candidacy acceptable to the emperor.” Despite these assurances, there is no evidence that Napoleon was in fact approached. Why the Spanish government failed to sound the emperor on this question, which after all crucially affected the relations of France and Spain, is impossible to determine. It is equally difficult to understand why Napoleon III did not approach the Hohenzollern family directly about the Spanish question. He was closely related to the Hohenzollern princes, and it is clear from the French documents that he was well aware of the rumors about a Hohenzollern candidacy—one possibility is that he was waiting for the chance to blow those rumors open and provoke a crisis with Prussia. In the previous May he had instructed his minister in Berlin to speak to Bismarck on the subject and to inform him of the objections of the French government. Why did he not make his objections equally clear to his French relatives? Neither the French nor the Hohenzollern archives have thrown any light on this matter. The Spanish government had meanwhile been negotiating with several candidates, and among these the Duke of Genoa was for many months the foremost contender. Not until the Duke’s candidacy was definitely abandoned on 13 January 1870 does Prince Leopold appear to have emerged as the favorite. On 17 February, Marshall Prim, on behalf of the provisional Spanish government, wrote officially to Prince Leopold, offering him the Spanish throne. At the same time he wrote a letter to Leopold’s father, Prince Anton, to William I, the King of Prussia, and to Bismarck. It was not until 27 February, when Prim’s letter was delivered to Bismarck by Salazar, that there is clear evidence that Bismarck was involved with the candidacy, but by now his involvement was crucial. Upon receiving Prim’s letter, he instructed his aide, Keudell, not to show anyone else in. He evidently needed some quiet to think through the matter. By the following day he had made up his mind and dictated a long memorandum to Keudell outlining his reasons for acceptance of the Spanish crown. On 9 March he submitted his arguments to the king. In presenting his case for acceptance to the king, Bismarck drew attention to the political and economic benefits for Germany that would result from closer ties to Spain. He explained in some detail how a Hohenzollern in Spain would raise the prestige of the Prussian royal house in Germany and be a substantial advantage in the development of the German question. In the event of a Hohenzollern refusal, the Spanish crown might very possibly be offered to the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach. This would not only be a damaging blow to the Hohenzollern position in Germany but would establish a dynasty in Spain which would look for support to France, Rome, Austria, and the anti-national elements in Germany. Even more dangerous was the possibility that a Hohenzollern refusal would lead to the establishment of a republic in Spain. The consequent spread of the republican infection to Italy and France would have the effect of panicking the French emperor into a breach of the peace. “Acceptance,” said Bismarck, “would ensure safe development of the Spanish question. For France it would be a great value if the Orleanist candidacy as well as the republic in Spain appeared to have been eliminated.” That Bismarck seriously thought a pro-German Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain would be more acceptable to France than a republic is not only difficult to believe; it is preposterous. Many other of his arguments to which the king affixed marginalia indicating disagreement were equally flimsy. In building up the patchwork of arguments, many of which catered to the dynastic and monarchical feelings of his sovereign, Bismarck’s main purpose may have been to obscure the importance of the Hohenzollern candidacy to Napoleon III and the probability that it would produce a crisis with him, for the king could be expected to object vigorously to any policy that ran the risk of war. Bismarck made the strategic importance of the candidacy clear enough: a pro-German government in Spain would compel Napoleon III to devote at least one to two army corps to the Spanish frontier against Germany. But this too would be a valuable contribution to peace. “France’s desire for peace with Germany will always rise or fall in direct relations to the hazards of war,” he argued. “In the long run we cannot look to the goodwill of France for the preservation of peace, but to the impression created by our position of strength.” The importance of the strategic aspect of the Spanish question was again evident when Bismarck personally presented his arguments in favor of acceptance to the leaders of the Hohenzollern family on 15 March. At this meeting there were only two officials whose presence Bismarck specifically requested: Roon, the minister of war, and Moltke, the chief of the general staff. It was the king who invited Schleinitz, the minister of the royal household, and Thile, the head of the foreign office. As so often at meetings of this kind, Bismarck succeeded in gaining the support of the majority of the participants. But the king was not convinced, and all seemed lost. On 20 April Leopold and his father sent the Spanish government a letter declining the offer that was made to them. Bismarck had no trouble diagnosing the situation. He said to Delbrück, president of the North German federal chancellery: “The Spanish affair has taken a wretched turn. Indubitable reasons of state have been subordinated to private inclinations of princes and to ultramontane female influences. Irritation over this has, for weeks, placed a heavy burden on my nerves.” Still Bismarck would not be deterred. Before the definite Hohenzollern refusal of the Spanish crown was sent to Madrid, he sent two of his agents to Spain to keep the door open. One of these was his trusted aid, Lothar Bucher; the other, Major von Versen, a Prussian officer designated by Moltke. According to the Spanish sources, Versen was sent to Spain with instructions to negotiate a military alliance. Bismarck himself fell ill with yellow jaundice early in April and from 14 April to 21 May, he remained at his Varzin estate, having given up the whole Spanish affair for lost. But almost immediately after his return to Berlin the Spanish question was reopened, and on 28 May he wrote to Prince Karl Anton, the father of the candidate: “Today no less than before I feel no doubt that Germany has a vital interest here, and that at critical moments the pointer on the scales might well register differently depending on whether we know Madrid to be a friend or an enemy.” Bismarck had once more raised the subject with the king and received the assurance that he would not oppose Leopold’s acceptance of the Spanish crown. This was the utmost that could be expected, Bismarck assured Karl Anton, because the king would never command a member of the royal family to undertake a mission of this nature. Shortly after receiving Bismarck’s letter, Karl Anton accepted the Spanish offer on behalf of his son. After discussing the question with Bismarck personally, Karl Anton reported that Leopold was now “triumphant and couleur de rose. If another refusal had come from us we would have had to answer for it—because the Spanish throne question is a big factor in Bismarck’s political calculations.” Versen also saw the chancellor at this time and asked what Leopold could expect from Prussia. Bismarck answered: “He can expect nothing at all from Prussia; he has to be a German in Spain. He is stationed in a Prussian warship.” Bismarck only regretted that the more energetic Prince Friedrich Karl, who had once been mentioned as a candidate, had not been offered the Spanish throne. In Bismarck’s words: “We could have counted him as offsetting three French army corps.” By 21 June the final negotiations between the Spanish envoys and the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen family had been completed, and on that day Versen left Sigmaringen for Berlin bearing with him two telegrams from Salazar, the chief Spanish negotiator in Germany, informing the leaders of the Spanish government of Leopold’s acceptance. Both telegrams were to be sent in cipher through the German foreign office. In the telegram to Zorilla, president of the Cortés, Salazar announced that he would be back in Madrid “about the 26th” meaning 26 June, the implication being that Prince Leopold’s election by the Cortés could take place immediately thereafter. There now occurred one of the strangest incidents in this strange story. The telegram to Zorilla was decoded incorrectly at the German legation in Madrid so that instead of “about the 26th” it said that Salazar would return “about the 9th” which could only mean 9 July. Unable to keep the Cortés in session for so long a time, Zorilla allowed it to adjourn until 1 November. Thus no election was held upon Salazar’s return, and by 1 July the secret of Leopold’s candidacy—never well kept—was secret no longer. On 3 July Prim thought it expedient to inform the French ambassador officially of the affair. With the error in the telegram to Zorilla, all the calculations built around the Hohenzollern candidacy dissolved, or so it seemed. Prince Leopold’s election did not take place; the French received due warning and had ample time to take countermeasures. Prim even told the French ambassador that it was not he who had concocted the affair: the Hohenzollern candidacy had been thrust upon him. All available documents indicate that Prim was lying to escape the wrath of France, but this too we may never know for certain. The scene now shifted to Paris. To those in charge of French policy news of the selection of Leopold seemed a stunning reverse—a shock comparable to the removal of a pin from a hand grenade. There is not much to this. Leopold’s decision was, far from being the riveting sensation that it was made out to be, a fist that the French had seen on the horizon for a long time. Nonetheless the French rulers were alarmed and for good reason. Leopold’s selection would mean that the royal house of Prussia would rule on both sides of France. In a Franco-Prussian War, the French would have to keep an army on their southern frontier. William I’s acquisitions north of the river Main, together with his expulsion in 1866 of Austria from the German confederation, made the cup of Prussia’s power, almost bone dry only ten years before, suddenly dangerously close to spilling over. For this reason the rulers of France resolved to bring to bear at Madrid such pressure as to make the Spanish government withdraw the offer it had made to Leopold; they resolved to protest at Sigmaringen to the Hohenzollern family in the hope that this decision would be reversed. Some of the French rulers developed a higher and more urgent aim: they wanted to humiliate Prussia and restore French prestige throughout Europe. This cause just at this time found a powerful supporter in the person of the French foreign minister, Antoine Agénor, the duc de Gramont. Called to office by Napoleon III less than two months before, Gramont reportedly said: “Je serais le Bismarck français.” Gramont has been judged harshly but surely not unjustly by historians. As Gordon A. Craig has so convincingly demonstrated: “Where reflection was needed, he was impulsive; where deliberation of utterance was advisable, he was violent; and where some sense of measure might have crowned his career with a brilliant success he overreached, and tumbled his nation into disaster.” On 6 July Gramont issued a sensational denunciation of Prussia and Prussian policy from the tribune of parliament:
It is true that Marshall Prim has offered Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen the Spanish throne and that the prince has accepted it. But the Spanish people have not yet declared their will, and we do not know the details of a negotiation that has been concealed from us. A debate cannot, therefore, end in any practical result. We invite you, gentlemen, to adjourn. We have not ceased to manifest our sympathy for the Spanish nation nor to avoid the appearance of any intervention in the affairs of a great nation carrying out its full sovereign rights; we have not departed from the most strict neutrality toward the candidates for the throne and we have not shown any of them either preference or intervention. We will continue this line of conduct.
These last two sentences were the purest nonsense; the main reason why a candidate for the throne of Spain had not been found was that the French, and especially Napoleon III himself had, between 1868 and 1870, frustrated every hopeful effort at a solution, particularly because no such solution could bring the defeat for their opponents and the victory for France that Napoleon III and imperialist prestige demanded. But the truth was not the issue. Gramont wanted to give the members of the chamber, the French people, and the Powers of Europe a jolt—and so he did. The chamber was duly alarmed, and its members kept grumbling more loudly at intervals during his declaration. Accusations against Leopold were voiced, much to Gramont’s delight. He went on:
We do not believe that the respect for the rights of a neighboring people obliges us to endure that a foreign power seating one of its own princes on the throne of Charles V may upset to our disadvantage the present equilibrium in Europe and place in jeopardy the honor of France. This situation, we hope, will not come, to pass.
This was not the end of the speech. Gramont raised the question what the French government would do if Leopold refused to stand down, and himself returned a defiant answer on the grounds of high principle:
“We shall count on friendship of the Spanish people and on the clear-sightedness of the German people. If it should prove otherwise, fortified by your strength, gentlemen, and that of the nation we know how to fulfill our duty without hesitation or weakness.”
Here was a clear affirmation that the Prussian government was behind the candidacy and that France would fight if Leopold did not withdraw his acceptance. Why did Gramont raise the stakes so persistently and so dramatically? Was it merely to swing the weight of opinion behind the French government? Or did he hope that such a tone would bustle the Prussians into confessing their role in the affair? Probably a little of both. But Gramont alone was not responsible. He was also being pulled hard in this direction by Ollivier. Unlike Gramont, Ollivier had no deep-seated hostility to Prussia and much sympathy for her; on the other hand, he was convinced that a strong stand from the outset would set things right. He was away in the country while Gramont was preparing his declaration. He had not been back in Paris for three hours before he found ways of involving himself personally in the declaration. The declaration was already hot and strong, and Ollivier made it hotter and stronger. French opinion had to be given some dramatic encouragement; Gramont invoked the ghost of Charles V and the scourge of universal monarchy bound by family ties, but it remained for Ollivier to promise that the French nation would take up arms if the ghost were not excised. It was thus he who penned the final sentence in the hope of raising a fighting cry from the chamber and the nation. Ollivier was proud of his work. He later declared: “The declaration that France received, in great majority, with impassioned appeal, stirred up neither surprise nor shock in Europe except on the part of timorous diplomats who were scared of everything that rose above their usual chatter.” It would be difficult to find in the contemporary record evidence of any kind that gives a scintilla of support to this attitude. Three reasons prompt this conclusion. First, the Gramont declaration—as it became known—was a dramatic public gesture delivered before the tribune of the French parliament; its brazen challenge to Prussia had the effect of shutting off or rendering ineffective private diplomatic communication. Second, the Gramont declaration effectively undercut the French case, very strong hitherto, at the courts of Europe. As Granville, the British foreign secretary, put it: “Her Majesty’s Government very much regret the language used by the duc de Gramont and wonder whether so strident a tone will lead to complications more serious than the incident itself.” Third, and most important, it was precisely because of Gramont’s declaration that France became the egocentrical embattled empire, and Gramont became a victim of his own propaganda. France’s enemy, Prussia, became in his eyes the embodiment of
Prof. Dr. David Wetzel
