THE ORIGINS OF THE WARS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION

The War of 1870–1 which led to the collapse of the Second Empire and the proclamation of the German Reich in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles was in one sense another chapter in the old power struggle between the French and Germans which stretched back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the French kings had intervened actively in German affairs and which culminated in two world wars in the twentieth century. But it was also the first of the modern wars when national passions were loosed in the mass of the population and thrown into battle on an unprecedented scale with lasting effects on the international scene – at least until today when nuclear weapons have rendered major conflicts between Great Powers obsolete as a means of resolving contentious power-political questions. To this aspect of the origins of the war we now turn, commencing with the changing attitude of the Germans to their Gallic neighbours.

Frequent incursions into Germany during the Thirty Years’War and the devastation caused by the wars of Louis XIV had not endeared the French to many German princes or to those Germans unlucky enough to be caught in the maelstrom of war. Still, they did not attribute this to barbarous instincts inherent in the French ‘national character’. On the contrary: French cultural values were widely accepted throughout Western Europe in the eighteenth century. Despite the growth of an indigenous German cultural movement, at the fin de siècle French remained the language of the educated classes. Frederick the Great’s preference for it and his friendship with Voltaire are well known. And the generality of German princes aped the court etiquette and the lavish architectural tastes of the Sun King.

The growth of German nationalism has been commented on already. It is sufficient to emphasize once more that at the time of the War of Liberation nationalism was an essentially negative force directed at the foreign invader. Popular hatred of all things French died away after the Congress of Vienna. It is true that some anti-French sentiments lingered on among middle-class liberals who remained highly critical of the xenophobic nationalism of the French, rejected French constitutional models and insisted that constitutional change must grow out of indigenous German traditions. But, on the other hand, the much more virile and more radical liberal movement in the south and west of Germany was greatly influenced by French political ideas. They looked to Paris to give a lead to the rest of Europe as she had in 1830. And in the aftermath of that revolution many radical liberals of the Young Germany school, including Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Borne and Arnold Ruge, forced to leave their native land, found a welcome haven in the Paris of the Citizen King among the liberal bourgeoisie who had put him on his throne.

A second wave of anti-French feeling gripped Germany in 1840. French policy had run into difficulties in the Near East. France had supported Mehemet Ali, an ambitious subject of the sultan who was eager to expand at the sultan’s expense. Britain, for whom the maintenance of the Ottoman empire as a barrier against Russia was the sheet-anchor of her Near Eastern policy, was determined to force Mehemet out of Syria, which he had seized. With the help of the other Great Powers, Palmerston successfully isolated Mehemet and brought him to heel. The government of Adolphe Thiers reacted violently to this humiliation and stirred up the Paris press to demand compensation in the Rhineland. Although surprisingly little is known about the extent of the national outburst in Germany, it seems possible that it gripped all classes of the urban population, if only temporarily. Its spontaneity suggests that, although popular anti-French feeling died away after the War of Liberation, the experience of French occupation had made an indelible impression certainly on the generation which experienced the stirring events of 1813–4, so that it surfaced again quickly at moments of crisis. Perhaps press censorship and the ban on associations in the 1830s which hampered political protest had obscured the smouldering resentment of France. Significantly Nikolaus Becker’s poem ‘Die sollen ihn nicht haben den freien deutschen Rhein’ (‘They shall not have the free German Rhine’) became a firm favourite overnight; set to music it became an unofficial national anthem sung in the streets and clubs. Around this time Max Schneckenburger wrote ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and Hoffmann von Fallersleben ‘Deutschland Deutschland über alles’. The tide of feeling ran strongly enough to affect the two major German powers. In November they agreed a common plan of operations in the event of war, with France referring specifically to national feeling as the reason for their initiative. In 1841 the Diet agreed to build fortresses at Rastatt and Ulm.

But although the 1840 crisis gave an enormous boost to the growth of nationalist organizations in the next decade, the intense anti-French mood of that year quickly evaporated. When the 1848 Revolution broke out most German liberals happily exchanged fraternal greetings with their French counterparts whom they regarded as allies fighting the same battle against the forces of reaction. It is true that the accession to power of Napoleon III and his suppression of political liberties soon alienated liberal opinion east of the Rhine from France, but for political, not nationalist, reasons. Again, French involvement in the Crimean War did something to stimulate anti-French feeling when France and Britain attempted to pressurize the reluctant German states into joining in the war. But opinion was very divided in 1855: while some liberals were strongly anti-French, others regarded France as a potential ally against despotic Russia. Conservative circles were equally divided: Protestant Prussia, with vivid memories of 1813–14, remained anti-French but Catholic Austria applauded the new alliance with imperial France as a victory for the principle of legitimacy.

The real turning-point in Franco-German relations occurred in 1859–61. The French attack on Austria in Northern Italy in 1859 in an area where the first Napoleon had won his spurs set the alarm bells ringing in Germany. While liberals sympathized with Italy’s struggle for independence, which they admitted was as legitimate as their own, many feared that if France defeated Austria, Napoleon would attempt to seize the so-called ‘natural frontier’ in the Rhineland. For that reason even those who were highly critical of Austrian illiberalism expected Prussia to stand by Austria in the fight against the hereditary enemy. When Prussia did not come to Austria’s aid and the latter suffered defeat, the military weakness of the Confederation was thrown into sharp relief, a humiliation which only intensified the demand for a strong Reich to uphold Germany’s honour abroad. The great flood of pamphlets and newspaper articles and the demonstrations at popular festivals and scientific congresses and in Landtage all over Germany testified to the intensity of anti-French feeling in 1859. The nationalist agitation reached a high point in November with the centenary celebrations of Friedrich Schiller’s birth which fell on the same day as Austria formally ceded Lombardy to Italy.

This time anti-French feeling did not die away. On the contrary, it received a further impetus in the spring of 1860 when Napoleon acquired Savoy and Nice from Piedmont as the price of French intervention in Northern Italy. All shades of opinion liberal and conservative were at last united in the belief that Napoleon’s ‘hidden agenda’ had at last been revealed and that an attack on the Rhineland was imminent. Napoleon had become a figure of obloquy to all Germans; to Protestant conservatives who denounced the friend of revolution; to Catholics who blamed him for the threat to the Church from Italian nationalism (many believed the Pope’s spiritual independence rested on his temporal power in the Papal States); to democrats who hated his despotism; and to liberals who feared French domination in Europe. All were resolved to resist attempts to secure the frontiers of 1814. Significantly, demands were now being made for the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to safeguard German frontiers against French aggression. As excitement mounted in the summer of 1860, many German states including Prussia began to prepare for war. Regent William publicly declared his readiness for war to the knife against the French. When he met Emperor Francis Joseph at Teplitz in July both rulers expressed their intention of resisting France together, although the question of command of the federal forces still prevented further agreement.

Anti-French feeling, institutionalized in the nationalist organizations which proliferated in the 1860s, remained a permanent and visible feature of Franco-German relations during the next decade, and for that matter until well into the twentieth century. At a popular level it was sustained by propaganda works such as Anton Tellkampf’s Die Franzosen in Deutschland: Historische Bilder (The French in Germany: Historical Pictures), a phenomenal success first published in 1860 and in its third edition by 1864. In the preface the author made no bones about his intention of keeping the flame of hatred burning bright by enlightening the public about ‘the injustice … which the German people … has suffered on their own soil from the French; how they … plundered, destroyed towns, devastated countries, treated the oppressed with contempt and scorn and tore whole areas away from the German Reich’. The Germans must remember, he concluded, that ‘only common action … could safeguard them for the future against successful attack by the old enemy’. Equally successful was Johannes Janssen’s Frankreichs Rheingelüste und deutschfeindliche Politik in früheren Jahrhunderten (French Longing for the Rhine and their Anti-German Policy in Earlier Centuries), a scholarly if one-sided work which, though its Greater German bias did not please Little German historians, nevertheless helped to confirm for the reading public the picture of France, ‘the hereditary foe’.¹

Turning now to the French attitude to Germany. At the close of the eighteenth century when France was still dominant politically and culturally in Europe, French intellectuals had no high opinion of the Germans. This changed dramatically after the publication in 1814 of Madame Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. A daughter of Louis XVI’s finance minister, Jacques Necker, she visited Berlin, Weimar, Munich and Vienna at the turn of the century and returned home full of enthusiasm for what she had experienced there. In her book she painted a glowing though tendentious and naïve portrait of the Germans as an idealistic, upright and high-minded people. Disturbing features such as the outburst of savage anti-French feeling during the War of Liberation were not mentioned at all. Despite the lacunae the book introduced into French literary salons a positive image of the Germans as a Kulturvolk which quickly replaced the negative impression of a nation of bucolic bumblers. The Rhineland crisis of 1840 notwithstanding, this remained the dominant image for many educated Frenchmen until well into the 1860s. Of course, not all Frenchmen were whole-hearted admirers of things Teutonic. Conservatives, while admiring German culture, were not blind to latent anti-French feeling much in evidence, for example, at the Hambach Festival, while many old Bonapartists never forgot the German role in the defeat of Napoleon. But most members of the liberal-minded bourgeoisie – notably the opponents of the Napoleonic regime – were staunchly pro-German. Literary figures, dramatists, poets and historians continued to admire Germany. Austria was dismissed as clerical and absolutist by French liberals, whereas Prussia was admired as the home of the Reformation and of Kant, the laboratory of scientific advances and the driving force behind liberal trading policies. With considerable justification the French historian Hippolyte Taine wrote as late as 1867 that ‘in the field of science and literature in philosophy and scholarship the Germans are the initiators, yes, perhaps the instructors in the modern spirit’.²

Admiration for Germany’s cultural achievements was not a major determinant of French foreign policy. Power-political considerations weighed much more heavily with the conservatives in the Quai d’Orsay. After 1815 Restoration governments continued to pursue the traditional policy since the days of Cardinal Richelieu of keeping Germany (and Italy) weak and divided, playing off Prussia against Austria and the smaller states against both to maximize French security. In the 1820s they had still not given up hope of one day recovering the Rhine frontier which France had held under Napoleon, perhaps even by agreement with Prussia who might be compensated elsewhere in Germany. But as Prussian power increased with the growth of the Customs Union, suspicion of her ambitions deepened. The French foreign minister, Prince Auguste Jules de Polignac, restated traditional policy bluntly in 1829: ‘It is very important for us to prevent the unification of Germany into one or two states. If it ever happened, this country which is [divided?] up today among the princes, who need our protection, would become for us a jealous rival and even a hostile force.’³

This was not official policy in the spring of 1848. On the contrary; during the initial euphoria which gripped revolutionaries all over Europe the French National Assembly offered fraternal greetings and a ‘pact between brothers’ to the German people. That theme was reiterated by the new foreign minister, the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, in a rhetorical manifesto to Europe. But by the summer the next foreign minister, the conservative-minded Jules Bastide, was expressing grave concern about the ‘aggressive nationalism’ of the Germans in Posen and Schleswig-Holstein and their disregard for treaty rights. With a sigh of relief the Quai d’Orsay resumed normal business and returned to the traditional line. In August Bastide commented that ‘German unification as it is now emerging would turn a people of 40 millions into a very different power than Germany is today – and one to be feared. Therefore I do not believe that it is in our interests to desire unification let alone to press for it.’⁴

With the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852 the personal rule of Napoleon III became a factor of major importance in the formulation of French foreign policy. It has rightly been said of this enigmatic ruler’s policy that it ‘is no less puzzling and confusing to historians as it was to contemporaries: a confused mixture of fantasy and calculation, idealism and Machiavellianism, tenacity and indecision, which confuses every judgement and which by general consensus has been described as that of the sphinx’.⁵ Several strands can, nevertheless, be detected in his policy. First, like any dictator he was interested in maintaining his own power base and perpetuating his dynasty. Secondly, he was determined to avenge the defeat of 1815, disrupt the Vienna settlement and make France the dominant power in Europe. Thirdly, because his stated objectives were disruptive of the status quo, he had to manoeuvre carefully to avoid becoming isolated in the face of the combined opposition of the three conservative powers: Austria, Prussia and Russia. To guard against such a combination, he regarded friendship with Britain – the power Napoleon could not break – as the cornerstone of his diplomacy. And from time to time he tried to disrupt the solidarity of these powers by, for example, working for a Prussian alliance. On occasions, as in 1866, he hoped to benefit from clashes between them. Fourthly, there was an ideological infrastructure; he subscribed to some extent to the principle of nationality. Indeed, he seems to have genuinely believed in the romantic nonsense he wrote in 1839 in the Idées Napoléoniennes, a treatise in which he depicted his uncle not as an odious tyrant menacing the peace of Europe but as a prophetic Mazzini-like figure, ‘the Messiah of the new ideology’ whose life-long ambition had been the creation of a harmonious comity of nations organized in accordance with the principle of nationality. At the same time – this is a fifth strand – he was too astute a Realpolitiker not to appreciate the need for a balance of power in Europe which a united Germany and Italy would threaten to upset as Polignac and Bastide had feared in their time. Partial unification around Prussia in North Germany and Piedmont in North and Central Italy would square the circle between power-political objections from conservatives and his personal predilection for nationalism. Add to this a free Poland, independent states in South Germany looking to Paris, and Austria holding back Russia in the east and France would be the dominant power in Europe. There was more than a touch of his uncle and proleptic hints of General Charles de Gaulle in his remark in 1859 that ‘… une grande nation est comme un astre; elle ne peut pas vivre sans satellites’.⁶ And even partial solutions of the German and Italian problems would weaken his and his uncle’s great enemy: Austria.

Finally, Napoleon was always anxious to ensure that his foreign policy was in tune with public opinion. Under the authoritarian system established in 1852 Napoleon had a firm grip over France. Through the mayors and prefects he controlled the administrative machine. The Senate and Corps Législatif – the latter ‘un parlement anonyme’ elected by universal male suffrage – had limited powers and were packed with his supporters, while the press was completely under the thumb of the government. But precisely because a free press did not exist, Napoleon, like any authoritarian ruler, had to have reliable sources of information about the attitude of his subjects. This information he received from the procureurs généraux and the prefects. The former were the officials, twenty-eight in number, attached to courts of appeal and in charge of the prosecution staff. On a quarterly basis they sent in reports about economic conditions and public attitudes based on material gathered from officers down to local magistrates. The prefects in the eighty-eight departments also sent in regular reports to Paris. Digests of these were prepared for Napoleon, though how carefully he scrutinized them we do not know.

The state of public opinion in Napoleonic France is a complex area bristling with difficulties. Most scholars have concentrated on an analysis of newspaper opinion rather than popular attitudes. There seems to have been a sharp division of opinion between the bonapartisme des notables and bonapartisme populaire. The former was the attitude taken by middle-class admirers of German culture who believed that it was the special mission of France to spread the gospel of nationality far and wide and bring into being an association of nationally organized states. Many liberals and some democrats subscribed to this point of view.

On the other hand, in the working population in the towns and in the countryside anti-Prussian feeling was fairly widespread. It was very easy to drum up support in these circles for demands for ‘natural frontiers’ and compensation for changes elsewhere. Significantly, democratic papers such as Le Siècle and L’Avenir were the first to raise such demands, which did not meet with approval in middle-class circles. This was a complete contrast to the position in Germany where the middle class was anti-French in attitude and where, arguably, the rural population was much less affected by nationalism. For in France the impact of social and economic changes brought about by the Revolution had committed the rural population to the concept of a nation of citizens to a much greater extent than in Germany where allegiance to local dynasties remained a potent force.

The year 1859, so significant in moulding German attitudes to France, was not particularly significant for French attitudes to Germany. True, in court and military circles there was some resentment of Prussian behaviour which had forced Napoleon to make peace. And when Savoy and Nice were annexed in 1860 (Napoleon’s reward for allowing Piedmont to annex the Central Italian duchies) some democrats publicly demanded the return of the Rhineland. As one paper expressed it: ‘… the least even-minded men … take delight in the thought that having retaken the line [of the Alps] France must one day recover the Rhine territory’.⁷ But these were isolated voices. As tension between Austria and Prussia mounted in the spring of 1866, French opinion was overwhelmingly pacific and favoured non-intervention in the event of war in Germany. The spectacular victory at Königgrätz, skewing the balance of power against France, aroused some uneasiness. ‘We felt,’ remarked the historian Pierre de la Gorce, ‘that something in the soil of old Europe had just crumbled. …’⁸

Still, not until the peace preliminaries were signed at Nikolsburg in July were the worst fears of the critics realized. Terms which doubled Prussia in size were universally condemned. As one procureur report observed: ‘The territorial expansion of Prussia raising her in the space of a few days to the rank of a first-class power, as a result of forceful annexations, has not only been considered an abuse of force but a menace to France … the memories of the last half-century have not effaced, rather have combined, in regard to Prussia animosities and mistrusts strongly revived in the circumstances we have just traversed. …’⁹ This was the turning-point in French attitudes to Germany. Not only were the anti-Prussian sentiments of the working population aroused but similar feelings took root in middle-class circles. Their reactions, however, were due not so much to national sentiment as to a growing realization that unification under Bismarck’s aegis meant the spread of illiberalism over wider areas of Germany, a retrograde development not likely to be conducive to the liberal changes they expected in France. The sense of frustration was turned inwards leading to increasing attacks on the regime and demands for political change. After 1866–7 Napoleon faced mounting difficulties at home, partly because of his failure to obtain territorial compensation and partly because of impatience at the pace of political change. By the end of October Thiers expressed a growing feeling that in two years when Austria was ready the moment would arrive for France to resist Prussian expansionism by force.

One can summarize this brief survey of popular attitudes by saying that between 1867 and 1870 anti-French feeling on the German side and anti-Prussian feeling on the French side became prominent features of Franco-German relations. These animosities found frequent expression in newspapers and books on both sides of the Rhine and helped create an atmosphere of mutual suspicion between Paris and Berlin, making possible the outbreak of war over a matter of ‘national honour’. This does not mean that national feeling on either side of the Rhine was a prime determinant of war. But it did ensure for both governments that groundswell of popular support in moments of crisis without which modern war is a hazardous undertaking.

NAPOLEON III AND BISMARCK, 1866–9

It has been argued earlier that the dispute about the relative merits of the Primacy of Foreign Policy and the Primacy of Domestic Policy as rival explanations of the relationship between external affairs and internal affairs is sometimes carried too far by over-zealous partisans. In practice the two are closely interconnected; at times one element predominates, at times the other in the ever-shifting balance of factors determining foreign policy. Napoleonic France is a particularly apt illustration of this inter-relationship because of the emperor’s function as an integrating figure in French society; both at home and abroad Napoleon’s political survival depended on his ability to hold together disparate social groups.

Throughout the 1850s he enjoyed considerable success abroad. The Crimean War conferred immense prestige on the new empire. In 1859 French armies inflicted defeats on Austria, while in 1860 Napoleon rounded off the south-eastern frontier with the acquisition of Savoy and Nice. The 1860s, by way of contrast, were years of failure when Napoleon was outmanoeuvred by his opponents. As discontent began to show itself in France, a tyrant of the old school would have relied on police and army to stamp out every manifestation. But although Napoleon III will always remain something of an enigma, a man whose motives were complex and contradictory, it seems likely that he half-believed the myth he had created of his uncle as the great liberator. Even when he was at the height of his powers in 1860–1 Napoleon commenced to liberalize the political system through a modest increase in the powers of the Corps Législatif and some relaxation of the press regulations. Not, of course, that he ever intended to divest himself of the substance of power. When the opposition doubled its vote at the 1863 elections and thirty-two of them (seventeen Republicans and fifteen Monarchists) were returned to a chamber of 282 deputies, he expressed displeasure at the result – he was particularly incensed that the département of the Seine had returned eight Republicans and one Orleanist.

These modest beginnings simply increased opposition to the regime. By 1864 a third party appeared in the Corps Législatif which, while loyal enough to the emperor, campaigned for a completely free press, free elections and responsible ministers. Hitherto Napoleon had successfully maintained his authority by appealing to all groups in French society. Now he was being forced to take sides. To avoid that and to remain in control of the situation he needed to score a foreign political success. Precisely that eluded him. ‘Les traités de 1815, n’éxistent pas’ he announced with characteristic élan. But his imaginative proposal in November 1863 for a great European Congress to scrap the settlement of 1815 and redraw the frontiers of the continent fell on deaf ears. Russia had no interest in an independent Poland and Britain had been suspicious of Napoleon’s motives ever since the annexation of Savoy and Nice. And over Schleswig-Holstein Napoleon had encountered an opponent committed to a more drastic resolution of the German problem than was compatible with French power interests. Most of all, there was the Mexican adventure which typified the curious mixture of imagination, miscalculation and obstinacy characteristic of the emperor.

Originally Napoleon had planned to set up a Central American state as a centre of industrial activity and a barrier to North American penetration of that region. Then his interest shifted to Mexico where the anti-clerical regime of Benito Juarez had just suspended payment of its foreign debts. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 encouraged Napoleon to intervene at first as part of a joint expedition with Spain and Britain to force Juarez to face up to his financial responsibilities. Misled by Mexican exiles and isolated when Britain and Spain withdrew their forces from Mexico, Napoleon attempted to restore monarchy to Mexico in the person of Archduke Maximilian of Austria. At the height of the campaign against Juarez France had 30,000 troops in the field. And Napoleon, who had fought alongside Italian nationalists, now found himself fighting against equally ardent Mexican patriots in order to impose a discredited foreign prince on them. When the American Civil War ended in 1865 Napoleon appreciated that the United States would not tolerate French interference in Central America. At home public opinion was sharply critical of the Mexican adventure. As the situation in Europe suddenly deteriorated, Napoleon had no alternative but to withdraw his troops from Mexico. Left to his own devices, Maximilian was captured and shot in 1867. The whole episode dealt a perhaps irreparable blow to the prestige of the regime.

Even before French troops were withdrawn the Prussian victory over Austria plunged France into a fresh crisis. Napoleon tried valiantly to argue that France had gained a great deal out of the war; the cause of Italian unification had been advanced by the cession of Venetia; Austria had been defeated for the second time in a decade; and the settlement of 1815 had been badly dented by the destruction of the German Confederation. And all this without a shot being fired from French guns. The problem, as we have already seen, was that the working population in town and country took a less altruistic view. And Napoleon always attached great importance to these elements, seeing in them the radical base of the regime. Now a sick man suffering from stones in the bladder for which he refused surgery, he was in a much weaker political position and felt obliged to support demands for territorial compensation in which he probably did not believe.

How best to secure this compensation was hotly debated in the imperial entourage. Austria had just asked the emperor to arrange an armistice with Italy. In return Austria ceded Venetia to France to be held in trust for Italy. Napoleon, anxious to extend the armistice to Prussia, approached King William on 4 July. The next day, however, the council of ministers decided on armed mediation to defend French interests. Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys supported by War Minister Marshal Jacques Randon, Pierre Magne and the Empress Eugénie persuaded Napoleon that Prussia was now so strong militarily that she might refuse an armistice and continue the war. To prevent a further unwelcome shift in the balance of power, France would dispatch an observation corps of 80,000 men to the frontier at once, mobilize a further 25,000 men and, relying on the opposition of Austria and the southern states to Prussia, extract maximum benefit out of the situation.

Whether armed mediation would have been a more effective strategy is a matter of surmise. For it was abandoned almost as quickly as it was decided on through a combination of external developments and domestic pressures. Once the kings of Prussia and Italy agreed to an armistice the advocates of armed mediation were at a disadvantage. In addition their opponents – Marquis Charles de La Valette, Eugène Rouher and Jules Baroche, ably supported by Prince Jerome Napoleon – buttonholed the emperor after the council meeting and persuaded him that France was too weak to engage in a hazardous policy which could easily backfire if Prussia refused an armistice. To end up at war with Prussia and Italy could lead to charges of double-dealing in view of prior French promises to these countries. Finally, public opinion had suddenly swung from a belligerent to a pacific posture when war suddenly loomed on the horizon. This may well have been a decisive consideration. Years later Napoleon confided to the Spanish ambassador that ‘It cost us a great deal to recognize the state of affairs which the battle of Sadowa created in Germany. We tolerated it, although not without regret. French public opinion was at that time very emphatic in favour of peace and I was resolved to respect that trend of thought.’¹⁰

But French opinion was equally insistent that France receive compensation for the dramatic shift in the balance of power. Thus, after the conclusion of the armistice Vincent Benedetti, ambassador to Berlin, sounded out Bismarck on the possibility of a secret convention giving France the 1814 frontier (i.e. the Saarland, Landau and part of the Palatinate) and Luxemburg. Bismarck’s initial reaction was bellicose: in the face of such demands the king would probably refuse to sign the Nikolsburg peace agreement, continue the war and capture Vienna. Then, after consulting a map, he adopted a more congenial stance and remarked that ‘for his part there would be no difficulty in establishing the frontier of 1814’ always provided that the king and the Landtag agreed.¹¹ Nor did he object to the cession of Luxemburg. But finding compensation for the Dutch king might be difficult; perhaps he could have the Bavarian Palatinate, or perhaps France might settle for that territory in lieu of Luxemburg?¹² Belgium, too, was mentioned as an area where France might seek compensation.¹³

Naïvely the French took Bismarck at his word. On 5 August in addition to the 1814 frontier Benedetti demanded the Bavarian and Hessian Palatinate and the severance of all ties between Luxemburg and Limburg. Once the Nikolsburg peace preliminaries were signed Bismarck ceased to equivocate and declared vehemently to Benedetti that the surrender of German territory – especially the loss of Mainz – was out of the question. Neither the king nor the crown prince would countenance such exorbitant demands. Nor, he might have added, had he any intention of making Prussian expansion more difficult by alienating at a stroke National Liberals and South German rulers. Still, he pretended to leave the door open for negotiation. While refusing to accept Benedetti’s main premise that the shift in the balance of power threatened France and justified compensation, he encouraged France to seek this in Belgium. But when Benedetti arrived back in Paris on 10 August to report to Foreign Minister Rouher he discovered that the whole city knew the details of his conversations with Bismarck. This because the minister–president had through an agent leaked them to the French correspondent of Le Siècle in order to emphasize the impossibility of any cession of German territory. These revelations produced angry outbursts in Germany where the bellicose liberal press demanded war with France rather than the surrender of German land. Napoleon quickly repaired the damage, informing the German ambassador in Paris that the convention project was all due to a ‘misunderstanding’. With that retreat the first French attempt to obtain compensation ended ignominiously.

The second attempt, culminating in the Luxemburg crisis of 1867, had lasting effects on the attitude of both Prussia and France and deserves more detailed consideration.

The small but strategically important grand duchy of Luxemburg was handed over to the king of the Netherlands in 1815 as compensation for the loss of the duchy of Nassau. It had been a member of the German Confederation, and the confederate fortress in Luxemburg was garrisoned by the Prussians. French was the official language though the inhabitants spoke a German dialect. Some inhabitants were pro-French, others pro-German, but like most people throughout history what they really wanted was to be left alone to enjoy their independence.

The Luxemburg story commences in August 1866. After the first rebuff at German hands Drouyn de Lhuys, whose armed mediation policy was rejected on 6 August but who nevertheless had been obliged to stay in office and operate a policy which he rightly believed would not work, was replaced with effect from September by the Marquis Lionel de Moustier. While the latter was winding up his affairs in Constantinople, where he was ambassador, La Valette temporarily took over at the Quai d’Orsay. On 15 August Napoleon and Rouher agreed on a new approach to Prussia based on the nationality principle rather than on French strategic interests. Accordingly France would seek compensation in Belgium and Luxemburg.

Rouher instructed Benedetti to propose two agreements to Prussia. First, a secret treaty of alliance allowing France to acquire Belgium at some future date; in return the two powers would help each other if this led to war, for Rouher anticipated strenuous British opposition if France annexed Belgium. Secondly, a public treaty conceding the 1814 frontiers – a demand which Rouher knew was unacceptable and which Benedetti did not even bother to raise with Bismarck – and the right to acquire Luxemburg. Bismarck encouraged Benedetti to believe that Prussia would not oppose French acquisition of Belgium and Luxemburg provided that France accepted final unification. Towards the end of August Benedetti drafted an agreement based on discussions with Bismarck.¹⁴ In order to accelerate the negotiations Benedetti gave Bismarck a copy of the agreement but omitted to retrieve it after the London Conference. That copy was used by Bismarck in 1870 to discredit the French in the eyes of non-belligerents.

Historians are divided in their interpretation of Bismarck’s motives in negotiating with Benedetti. Was this a genuine attempt to advance Prussian ambitions and avoid war by agreement with a powerful neighbour? Or was it simply a sophisticated exercise to lull the French into a false sense of security until the North German Confederation was founded? Or was Bismarck simply leaving his options open as he had done so often in the past?¹⁵ The strong probability is that Bismarck was playing a double game and keeping the options open. Significantly he did nothing to help the French acquire Luxemburg. And, while readily agreeing that in the event of war France and Prussia would confer, he evaded references to a formal alliance; the harsh reality was that Prussia had not the slightest intention of fighting Britain to pull French chestnuts out of the fire. Writing to the French ambassador in Paris a few months later, Bismarck summed up his tactics in the autumn of 1866 succinctly: ‘The French must retain hope and especially faith in our goodwill without our giving them definite commitments.’¹⁶

Taken ill at the end of September, Bismarck departed from Berlin and remained well out of Benedetti’s reach until early December. When the ambassador eventually managed to see Bismarck, the latter, while still indicating nominal support for French plans, emphasized the difficulty of persuading the king to approve them. Significantly Bismarck now started to refer to the grand duchy as ‘German territory’. By the end of that year he informed Goltz that Prussia could scarcely deliver ‘Germans against their will and for no apparent cause to France’. An alliance would be ‘too dearly bought’ at the price of ‘a humiliating injury to German national feeling’.¹⁷

As Prussian interest in the draft agreement waned in the winter of 1866–7, French anxieties increased. The domestic situation spurred Napoleon and his advisers to fresh action. In February 1867 the Corps Législatif was due to meet. Action was imperative to ward off the anticipated onslaught on the government for its manifest failure to obtain compensation. When Moustier instructed Benedetti to press Bismarck once more it was, as the foreign minister observed, because ‘we must … give reply soon to the legitimate preoccupation of the country and to the great legislative bodies’.¹⁸ But Benedetti could not move Bismarck.

Unable to make progress and deeply aware of mounting discontent at home, Napoleon attempted to defuse the situation with a measure of political change. In January 1867 the Corps Législatif was allowed to question ministers (but lost the right to vote an annual address); and all ministers were in future obliged to reply to interpellations (but ministers could not be members of the Corps Législatif). This cunningly balanced reform package did not save the government when Napoleon addressed the Corps Législatif on 15 February. Nailing his colours to the mast, he boldly declared his satisfaction with the recognition accorded the principle of nationality in Germany – an inevitable development in accordance with his uncle’s (alleged) vision of a Europe of nation states. French prestige had been high enough to prevent Prussia absorbing all Germany. The speech was received coolly. Worse followed when Thiers delivered a devastating attack on the government on 15 March. To his mind the balance of power, not nationalism, was the only proper basis for foreign policy. By this criterion Great Powers had a perfect right to territorial compensation when the balance of power shifted significantly. The government had, however, failed miserably, dithering between intervention and non-intervention and ending up without a friend in Europe. He concluded with a savage comment on Napoleon’s government: ‘Il n’y a plus une seule faute à commettre.’¹⁹

Rouher vainly attempted to retrieve the situation with the dubious argument that Germany was not stronger but weaker. The Germans were divided: twenty million lived in the North German Confederation, fifteen million in the southern states and thirty-three million in Austria. France was not isolated and friendless; on the contrary, she enjoyed the goodwill of all. Therefore ‘… it matters little whether France gains in width so long as she gains in stature’.²⁰ Rouher’s apologia was ill received. On 19 March it was laughed to scorn when Bismarck suddenly revealed the existence of offensive–defensive alliances with the southern states. No doubt Bismarck hoped to warn the French against precipitate action. Yet domestic pressures were in his mind as much as in Napoleon’s. Sharp criticism of the Nikolsburg preliminary peace was expected in the Constituent Reichstag where the National Liberals were likely to condemn Prussia for stopping at the river Main By revealing the existence of the treaties Bismarck hoped to deflect their wrath.²¹ But the announcement completely discredited the French government, shattering the illusion that the Main would be a formidable obstacle to further Prussian expansion.

Meanwhile the French intensified their efforts to secure Luxemburg. Since mid February they had been negotiating directly with the Dutch. King William III was perfectly willing to sell his grand duchy for five million gulden and a French guarantee of the Netherlands and Luxemburg. However, Bismarck’s announcement of the treaties combined with ominous Prussian troop concentrations on the Dutch frontier and a reference to Luxemburg in the Reichstag convinced the Dutch that Prussian agreement to the deal was essential. Accordingly the king approached his Prussian counterpart on 26 March.

Bismarck was far from displeased with this turn of events. Domestic concerns were still uppermost in his mind. Discussion of the draft constitution was entering the final stage in the Reichstag. Votes were due towards the end of March on the crucial issues of ministerial responsibility and the iron budget for the army. If external affairs could be pressed into service to secure a satisfactory outcome, so much the better.

The king of the Netherlands had played into Bismarck’s hands by formally involving the Prussian government in the Luxemburg affair. Furthermore, while Bismarck had at an earlier stage encouraged the French to organize genteel demonstrations of pro-French feeling in Luxemburg, the French agents had encouraged large noisy demonstrations in favour of annexation which caused angry outbursts in Germany. Probably by pre-arrangement the Hanoverian politician Bennigsen asked Bismarck on 1 April 1867 what the government’s intentions were towards Luxemburg, ‘a German land from whose princely houses emperors of Germany have gone forth’ and a land which the Dutch king had, therefore, no right to alienate from the fatherland. Secondly, Luxemburg was of strategic significance: ‘We are not just defending a piece of German territory. We also have an important military position to protect for if this were to be lost when France acquired the territory both Belgium and the German Rhineland would always be exposed to an immediate threat.’²² Thirdly, attempts by foreign powers to exploit the temporary weakness of the new Confederation must be vigorously resisted in order to prevent future interference. Regardless of party the German nation would support a strong policy on this issue – a remark greeted with rapturous applause.

Bismarck had for the first time succeeded in harnessing nationalism to the Prussian cause. Because liberals of all shades of opinion were united in face of the ‘old enemy’, they were much more accommodating over the power of the Reichstag, especially in respect of the military budget. It has rightly been observed that the decisions arrived at in this highly charged atmosphere left ‘a permanent mark upon the institutional relationships of the Second Reich’.²³

Simultaneously Bismarck used his domestic triumph as a launching-pad for an offensive against France. Public opinion was again pressed into service, this time to secure foreign political objectives. In the face of such intense national feeling, what could Prussia possibly do about Luxemburg, he asked tongue-in-cheek. She could not even contemplate withdrawing her garrison, much less allow France to acquire the grand duchy. What mattered was not the intrinsic worth of the area: ‘…. Luxemburg in itself is hardly worth a war.’ It was the nation’s sense of honour which must determine Prussian policy.²⁴

This was obviously a calculated ploy to scare the Dutch and French off the deal. War was never in his mind. In replying to Benningsen Bismarck carefully avoided inflammatory language, promising only ‘to watch over the interests of the nation’. And while deepening the crisis he sought an avenue of escape from it. Already on 30 March he tried to mobilize Russian and British support. That met with little success. Russia left the initiative to Britain but Lord Edward Stanley, the British foreign secretary, thought the acquisition of Luxemburg by France would not upset the balance of power. Then on 3 April Bismarck informed the Hague that ‘after the incitement of public opinion war would scarcely be avoided if the affair proceeds’.²⁵ War had never been in the Dutch king’s mind either. Having inadvertently precipitated a crisis by appealing to Berlin, he de-escalated it by announcing on 5 April that he would not sign the treaty of cession.

The French were thoroughly mortified by this outcome. War was out of the question, as the council of ministers was well aware. Nor had France an ally on whom she could depend. How could she at least save face? Bismarck was most obliging. Once he had extracted the maximum benefit for Prussia out of the situation, he agreed to a British proposal for a meeting of the signatory powers of the 1839 treaty. At the London Conference in May 1867 a solution was found. The king of the Netherlands would remain ruler of Luxemburg; the grand duchy would enjoy autonomous status; Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia guaranteed its perpetual neutrality; and the Prussian garrison was withdrawn and the fortress demolished.

In retrospect the Luxemburg crisis was an important milestone on the road to the war of 1870. The Mexican débâcle had been followed by complete failure to obtain compensation to offset a significant alteration in the balance of power. Influential sections of public opinion in the middle classes as well as in the working population were now hostile to Prussia. Some Bonapartists, fanatical right-wing Catholics who had the ear of the empress, military circles and Orleanists led by Thiers, believed war inevitable. Any attempt by Prussia to absorb South Germany by force would be the signal for a war in which they supposed – with reckless disregard for political realities – France would be actively supported by Austria and Italy while the South German states remained neutral.

That does not mean that the war of 1870 was in any sense inevitable. In the spring of 1870 the French government put on record its desire for peace. And a sizeable section of opinion – Radicals, Socialists and Conservatives – was still not prepared to believe that the final unification of Germany along Little German lines need lead to war. But one can say that the balance of opinion was such that in a crisis war was more likely to break out than before Sadowa.

BISMARCK AND SOUTH GERMANY, 1866–9

We turn now to Prussia. By expelling Austria from Germany Prussia had achieved her first objective of linking up her territories and becoming indisputably the dominant power in North and Central Germany. The decisive nature of her military victory opened up the possibility of absorbing the southern states and greatly extending her power base. In an age of Realpolitik when the Concert of Europe had manifestly broken down so far as major disputes between Great Powers were concerned, the continued independence of the southern states was likely to be precarious. Surrounded on three sides by powerful neighbours, the four states were likely to fall under the influence of one or other sooner or later. If Austria sought to reverse the defeat of 1866 – and it was not obvious at first that she would not seek to do so – South Germany was an ideal ally. Similarly for France these states formed a useful barrier against further Prussian expansion.

As for Prussia, the men in the corridors of power in Berlin including the king and the crown prince regarded the frontiers of the new Confederation as purely provisional. Staatsrat Gelzer, writing to the grand duke of Baden, observed that ‘the Main line has to be observed for the time being out of concern for France and in order to allow the northern union time to consolidate. The complete union of North and South is, however, solely a matter of time ….’²⁶

Gelzer was quite correct in thinking the diplomatic situation an important factor restraining Prussia in 1866 from precipitate action. Whenever major changes occur in the balance of power, other Great Powers are apt to intervene to safeguard what they suppose are their ‘vital interests’. That happened in 1864, obliging Bismarck to manoeuvre adroitly at the London Conference to avoid a settlement of Schleswig-Holstein’s affairs which would have tied Prussia’s hands. Similarly, in 1866 the defeat of Austria might well have led to Great Power intervention.

Russia was the first to move. On learning of the Prussian peace terms, the tsar proposed the summoning of a European congress at which the signatory powers of the Treaty of Vienna could again try their skill at regulating Germany’s affairs. When Russia persisted in this, Bismarck raised the bogey of revolution to scare her off. Outside interference, he announced, would compel Prussia to ‘unleash the full national strength of Germany and the bordering countries’.²⁷ On 3 August, failing to drum up support in Paris and London, the tsar abandoned his proposal. But he remained uneasy about Prussian plans to annex territories in North Germany at the expense of the princes. Bismarck sent General Edwin von Manteuffel to St Petersburg to make it clear that attempts to pressurize Prussia would force her to proclaim the radical 1849 constitution. In Bismarck’s famous phrase: ‘If there is to be revolution, we would rather make it than suffer it.’²⁸ On 12 August the tsar assured the Prussian king that Russia would never be found on the side of Prussia’s enemies. Bismarck’s robust determination to use every means to ward off foreign intervention indicates his high degree of concern.

Of course, there were sound objective reasons why Russia did not intervene actively in German affairs at the end of the day which had nothing to do with Bismarck’s bullying language. The real explanation for Russian inaction lay in the history of Russo-Prussian relations since the Crimean War. During the Polish Revolt of 1863 Prussia had actively aided Russia, offering in the Alvensleben Convention to return to the Russian authorities Polish insurgents who strayed on to Prussian soil. In view of the deepening antagonism with Austria in the Balkans, her defeat was a matter of some satisfaction in St Petersburg. The tsar’s call for an international conference was a knee-jerk reaction quickly abandoned, as we have seen, when Britain and France showed no interest in it.

French intervention in the summer of 1866 was a much more serious possibility; Bismarck admitted in 1874 that this would have posed serious problems. Though the abandonment of armed mediation greatly reduced the danger, Prussia still had to handle Napoleon with great care. Though he did not hesitate to shake the mailed fist at Benedetti on 5 August, threatening to release the genie of ‘national war’ if the French persisted in demanding German territory, he did not, as we have seen, continue in this intransigent vein. He was flexible in other directions. In the draft peace treaty he had included a clause allowing for a future union between the new Confederation and the southern states. Bavaria at once lodged an objection. More important than that was Napoleon’s mediation plan which guaranteed these states ‘an independent international existence’. Bismarck’s attempts to delete this from the final settlement failed. A further concession to French pressure was the promise to hold a plebiscite in North Schleswig, which Bismarck repudiated in 1879.

Although Austria obviously presented no immediate threat to Prussia, Bismarck was concerned to avoid unnecessary provocation likely to send her into the arms of the French. With the crown prince’s help he restrained the exultant Prussian monarch from avenging Olmütz by staging a triumphal march through Vienna exacting a heavy indemnity and annexing some Austrian territory. The fact that Bismarck recognized the independence of the southern states helped to reassure Austria that, having won the struggle for mastery north of the Main, Prussia would not disturb the new status quo.

Secondly, as Gelzer remarked, for reasons of domestic policy Prussia could not possibly have absorbed the southern states in 1866. Her first task was to digest the annexed territories where Prussia was anything but welcome. Bismarck was deeply absorbed during these months with the task of drafting a constitution which would preserve the power of the monarchy and prevent the euphoric liberals from obtaining parliamentary government. Until these tasks were accomplished further extensions of Prussian power were excluded from the realm of practical politics.

Thirdly – a factor of great importance precluding union of north and south in the foreseeable future – was the attitude of the southern states towards Prussia. Three of them – Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden – were well established states. Though their boundaries and political structures dated only from Napoleonic times, their rulers had successfully consolidated them and enjoyed much popular support in these predominantly rural communities. Politically the consultative assemblies established after the Congress of Vienna had been in advance of anything north of the Main; in Bavaria taxpayers had the vote, while in Baden universal male suffrage with no tax qualification had obtained since the 1848–9 Revolution. In Prussia, by way of contrast, under the three-class system class 1 electors who comprised 47 per cent of all those entitled to vote chose the same number of Wählmanner (electoral college members) as class 2 (12.6 per cent) and class 3 (82.7 per cent) – though, of course, the introduction of universal male suffrage for the new Reichstag had brought Prussia into line with Baden and put it ahead of the rest of the south. Historically, liberalism had always been a more virile plant in Baden and Württemberg where liberals enjoyed much wider support than their Prussian counterparts. This was still the case in 1869, as will be seen later.

Another contrast between north and south lay in the strength of Catholicism in the southern states. Five million of the nine million inhabitants of these states were Catholic, the highest concentration being in Bavaria (71.2 per cent) and Württemberg (64.5 per cent). The south was also the heartland of political Catholicism or Ultramontanism. To this nineteenth-century phenomenon Bismarck remained bitterly hostile all his life. Writing to Leopold von Gerlach in 1854 he had described it as ‘a hypocritical idolatrous papism full of hate and cunning, which conducts from the cabinets of princes and ministers right down to the mysteries of the marriage bed an unrelenting struggle with the most infamous weapons against the Protestant governments and especially against Prussia, the bulwark of the Gospel’.²⁹ Some words of explanation are called for about a political animal alien to the Anglo-Saxon world.

Political Catholicism was in essence the response of a Church which felt itself to be under siege because of its refusal to effect a reconciliation with the modern secular state emerging so rapidly in the middle of the century in Western Europe. The doctrinal intransigence characteristic of the post-Tredentine Church programmed Catholics to gravitate towards those of the same faith and to condemn as heretical all other denominations – an exclusive attitude heartily reciprocated by Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when theological differences were fiercely debated and deeply held on both sides. In the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, interest in theological speculation declined and religious animosities diminished in intensity. In the nineteenth century, however, religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants deepened once more, introducing a new dimension into the political conflicts of the century. Before Napoleon’s intervention in Germany the balance between Catholics and Protestants had been roughly equal. The abolition of the prince bishoprics and the drastic reduction in the number of states transformed the balance. By 1815 the majority of rulers were Protestant; the only Catholic dynasties were the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs. Furthermore, the Catholic populations in the Rhineland, Westphalia, Baden and Württemberg were now ruled by Protestant dynasties, while pockets of Evangelicals in Franconia, the Palatinate and Swabia were now under the Catholic Wittelsbachs.

These territorial changes need not in themselves have led to renewed tension between Catholic and Protestants. The really significant change was in the attitude of the Catholic Church towards state power whether exercised by Catholic or Protestant rulers. Pope Pius VII’s resistance to Napoleon had greatly enhanced the status of the papacy and made it a rallying point for Catholics in the more centralized and Rome-oriented Church which emerged after the defeat of Napoleon. In some parts of Europe notably in France, Belgium, and Ireland, resistance to state attempts to control the Church led to the emergence of Liberal Catholicism, a movement highly critical of the ‘Throne and Altar’ mentality of extreme Bourbons such as Charles X of France. Liberal Catholics believed the time had come for the Church to recognize that close ties with monarchy had alienated it from the mass of the people. ‘Libera chiesa e libero stato’ was their high ideal; a Church freed from the embrace of the state and able to fulfil her mission of evangelization. Liberal Catholicism did not take root in Germany, perhaps because German Catholics were little affected by the spirit of the Enlightenment so that in conflicts with the state the Church authorities could rely on the support of a loyal and obedient flock. What they borrowed from Catholic movements elsewhere was the technique of mass organization, not their outward-looking attitude.

The effects of this were first seen during the dispute with the Prussian government in 1837 over mixed manages. The government introduced into its Catholic territories a regulation of 1825 whereby the father in a mixed marriage would determine the religion of the children. The Church insisted on the absolute right of the Catholic partner to decide and consequently came into conflict with the state authorities. During this contest – which ended very largely in a Catholic victory when Frederick William IV came to the throne – the Church enjoyed the support of liberals who argued that the Church as an independent association had the right to formulate her own regulations for her flock free of state interference. There was reciprocity in the alliance; in Wurttemberg Catholics supported liberals in their political struggle. However, these were exceptions. Elsewhere, especially in Bavaria, heartland of Catholicism, and in Austria popular Catholic movements gave active support to reactionary Catholic regimes which on occasion made life difficult for Evangelicals in those states.

A major confrontation between the Catholic Church and the new liberal philosophy was scarcely avoidable in the circumstances of the time. On the one hand an increasingly Rome-dominated Church clung more tenaciously than ever to an inward-looking and traditional theology. Neither Pope Gregory XVI nor his better-known successor Pius IX showed the slightest inclination to compromise with the secular world of expanding technology. On the other hand European liberals were not prepared to allow the churches to retain their near-monopoly in educational and matrimonial matters. Secular education and civil marriage were standard liberal demands fiercely resisted by the Church as unwarranted interference in an area which had been under her control from time immemorial.

Developments in Italy had a direct bearing on this clash of philosophies. Throughout the 1850s Rome was fighting a running battle with the Piedmontese government following the introduction of the Siccardi laws regulating relations between church and state to the disadvantage of the former. As Piedmont conquered more of Northern and Central Italy in 1860–1 Pope Pius clung tenaciously to the Papal States, claiming that continued sovereignty over them guaranteed the independence of his spiritual office. When Italian troops occupied them the pope excommunicated Cavour and his colleagues. After the occupation of Rome in 1870 the intransigent old man retired into the Vatican and refused to recognize the new kingdom of Italy. Not until 1929 did Pope Pius XI heal the breach between Church and state.

Against this background the pope issued the encyclical letter Quanta Cura in 1864. Attached to it was the Syllabus of Errors, a forthright condemnation of liberalism and all its works with which – so the pope declared – the Church would not come to terms. It is hardly a coincidence that as the political bases upon which the Church rested began to crumble, her doctrinal intransigence increased; in 1854 the pope had proclaimed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and in 1870 he was to declare at the First Vatican Council that the supreme pontiff when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals was infallible – propositions which only deepened the divisions between Catholics and Protestants. It was little short of tragic that the politico-philosophical conflict between the Church and liberalism was deepening at a crucial stage in the struggle between Austria and Prussia. Sadowa had tipped the balance decisively against Catholicism. In the old Confederation twenty-three million of the forty-three million inhabitants were Catholic, i.e. roughly 53.5 per cent. Once the twelve million Austrian Catholics were excluded Catholics became a minority in the new Reich. And as a Protestant state dominated the new Confederation, southern Catholics were not anxious to join it on religious grounds. Political Catholicism became a significant force after 1866 precisely because southern opposition to union with the north coincided with Catholic resistance to the attempts of liberal regimes to promote secular education and civil marriage.

Political Catholicism has had a bad press at the hands of the Little German historians – and others – who dismissed it as ‘obscurantist’, ‘reactionary’ and ‘particularist’. No one would attempt nowadays to defend the excesses of clerical obscurantism or justify the dishonest electoral tactics employed on occasions by militant Catholics against liberal opponents. But one must distinguish between obscurantism and the natural desire of many German Catholics to defend the beliefs of their Church and the traditions of their engere Heimat against a state which from the time of Frederick the Great had been equated with militarism and Kadavergehorsamkeit. The ruthless treatment of defeated states in 1866, the disregard of dynastic rights and the minimal concessions made to liberal opinion in the new confederate constitution confirmed this view and strengthened the south in its opposition to the idea of union with the north.

The probability that France would take military action to prevent further Prussian expansion together with mounting opposition to Prussia in South Germany seemed certain to postpone the final stage in the creation of Little Germany to a date in the distant future. However, from the very beginning Bismarck did his best to even up the balance by establishing those ‘national ties’ between north and south envisaged in the Peace of Prague. His first limited success was the conclusion of offensive–defensive alliances with the southern states.

Bismarck had excluded them from the peace negotiations with Austria. Only when the latter were completed did he turn to the southern states. His peace terms were deliberately onerous: in addition to military alliances he demanded large indemnities and territorial cessions from Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt (but not from Baden, a state whose government was more favourably disposed towards Prussia.) The stick-and-carrot tactics worked. In return for a reduction in the size of the indemnity and the abandonment of most of the territorial demands, Württemberg agreed to a military alliance, as did Baden. The Bavarian foreign minister, von der Pfordten, turned in vain to France for support. Napoleon was hoist with his own petard: busily engaged in extracting territorial compensation out of Prussia, he was in no position to object to Bismarck’s demands. Bavaria had no alternative but to accede to the Prussian request. In the offensive–defensive treaties the three states and Prussia guaranteed each other’s territory and agreed in the event of war to place their railway systems and armies under the command of the king of Prussia. The first bridge had been built across the Main, ‘the fruit of military victory and French rapacity, of southern isolation and the threat of a Draconian peace’.³⁰

While pressure from Prussia was obviously a major factor in bringing about the alliances, strategic necessity would probably have forced the southern states into alliances. For as Baron Friedrich von Varnbüler of Württemberg commented:

Because it seemed to us to be very dangerous to be in an isolated position as a small state without the support of a Great Power even if one could assume that our neutrality is guaranteed by Europe – which in any case is hardly likely to happen – and as our experience with Austria make dependence on her the most thankless [option] imaginable and as reliance on France except in circumstances of exceptional necessity is contrary to national sentiment, we were obliged to conclude that the commitment entered into with Prussia corresponds to the interests … of Württemberg for it guarantees the integrity of the state.³¹

Incidentally, Bismarck did not demand that Hesse-Darmstadt conclude a military alliance with Prussia. As the province of Upper Hesse which lay north of the Main had become part of the new North German Confederation, a sizeable part of the grand duke’s army was already under Prussian control. Prussia had not, however, annexed Upper Hesse so that the grand duke still exercised sovereign power over it as well as over Hesse-Darmstadt south of the Main where the remainder of the grand duke’s small army was stationed. This territorial monstrosity, as even Baron Reinhard von Dalwigk, the leading minister, described it, was scarcely viable politically. Militarily Hesse-Darmstadt was in a most vulnerable position in view of French strategic plans for a thrust along the river Main in the event of war. So despite Dalwigk’s well-known antipathy towards Bismarck, military necessity forced Hesse-Darmstadt to conclude a military convention with Prussia in April 1867 placing all Hessian troops under Prussian command. On 11 April, largely to please the National Liberals who controlled the government, Hesse-Darmstadt signed a military alliance with Prussia similar in format to those signed by the other states in the summer of 1866.

The offensive–defensive treaties did not remain paper agreements. Between 1867 and 1870 considerable progress was made towards the coordination of the military systems of the southern states with that of Prussia. Prussian discipline and techniques were introduced into the southern armies. In 1867 an exchange of military plenipotentiaries took place with Prussia. And in May 1868 Bavaria and Württemberg adopted the strategic plans of the Prussian general staff which required the concentration of the southern armies in the Palatinate to threaten the right flank of an invading force.

There was, of course, much popular opposition to the introduction of the three-year service system, the rigid drill and discipline of the Prussian army, as well as general resentment at mounting expenditure on armaments. Legislation on military reorganization had a difficult passage through the chambers in Bavaria, Baden and most of all in Württemberg in 1868. Southern governments shared with the opposition reservations about the corrosive effects of Prussian militarism. During the Luxemburg crisis Bavaria and Württemberg expressed alarm at the prospect of war. Varnbüler protested when Bismarck revealed the existence of the treaties and argued – much to Prussia’s annoyance – that they were purely defensive agreements which left the southern governments free to determine the casus foederis. On the face of it a setback for Prussia. In fact, despite all their bluster Varnbüler and Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst of Bavaria suspected that had it come to war Württemberg and Bavaria would have had no alternative but to fight. Certainly had they refused to join in 1870 their continued existence might have been problematical after a Prussian victory.³² On the other hand, the persistence of anti-militarism in the south had one important consequence: it was a clear signal to Berlin that, in the event of war with France, Prussia must ensure that France be made to appear the aggressor in order to trigger off a wave of anti-French feeling which would carry the south into the fighting.

Prussia succeeded in establishing another bridge across the Main when the Customs Union was refounded in 1867. On the outbreak of war the customs treaties had lapsed technically, though in practice the economic ties were so strong that they continued as before and dues were paid out as usual at the end of 1866. During the peace negotiations Bismarck announced that within six months a new-style customs union would be founded to supersede the existing treaties (temporarily renewed in the peace treaties). On 15 February 1867 he proposed formal negotiations with the southern governments for a new union with a customs parliament as its central feature. That did not suit Württemberg and Bavaria, who preferred a looser association based on a federal council composed of representatives from the new Confederation and the southern states; its decisions would require ratification both by the Reichstag and by the southern chambers. That was totally unacceptable to the Prussians, who were determined to end the liberum veto in the old Customs Union.

The impasse was broken by Varnbüler. Anticipating trouble in persuading the chamber to pass the military reorganization bill, he hoped to swing the vote in favour through the renewal of the Customs Union. Bismarck was adamant: negotiations were dependent upon prior acceptance of a customs council and a customs parliament. The former would be composed of forty-two members of the federal council (Bundesrat) of the Confederation plus sixteen representatives from the southern states. The latter would consist of the members of the 297-strong Reichstag plus eighty-five members from the southern states elected by universal male suffrage. Decisions would be arrived at in both bodies by majority voting. Prussia would have seventeen of the fifty-eight seats on the council and would be the only state with a veto over decisions. She would convene and dissolve both bodies and preside over the customs parliament. In short, a structure reflecting the economic and military power of Prussia which by now controlled 90 per cent of German production in the mining and metallurgical industries and 50 per cent of textile production and employed two-thirds of all factory workers.

Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt agreed at once to renew on these terms. Bavaria and Württemberg were less easily persuaded. Dissatisfaction was loudly expressed in the lower chamber in Württemberg and in the upper house in Bavaria. Bismarck’s threat in the autumn to dissolve the Customs Union forced the issue. The Bavarian upper chamber approved the treaty by thirty-five votes to thirteen; and reluctantly, the Württemberg chamber approved it by seventy-three votes to sixteen. For, as a contemporary observed, if Bavaria left the Customs Union ‘one can say with mathematical certainty that such a storm would break out in Franconia, Swabia, the Rhineland Palatinate and here in Munich that any ministry of whatever complexion would have to give way’.³³ The simple truth was that manufacturers and merchants south of the Main did not want to create their own customs union. However strong their dislike of Prussia, economics in the final analysis determined the issue of union. Of course, whether the military and economic ties between north and south would on their own have brought about political union in the fullness of time is an open question on which historians are divided.³⁴ What can be said with assurance is that attempts by Prussia to build further bridges across the Main were frustrated by strong opposition in the south.

For a fleeting moment in the summer of 1866 the southern states were stunned by the extent of the Prussian victory. The high hopes entertained by von der Pfordten, Dalwigk and Beust that they could form a southern confederation with Austrian and French support were dashed overnight. On the other hand, National Liberals in the south were supremely confident that final unification would occur in the very near future. Their hopes, too, were dashed in the winter of 1866–7 as it became apparent that Prussia intended to be the dominant power in the new state and that the constitution drafted by Bismarck would severely restrict the effectiveness of the new Reichstag. Soon the liberal minister in Baden Roggenbach was referring contemptuously to the new state as ‘the union of a dog with its fleas’.³⁵ Not only had liberal opinion grown sceptical about the type of union on offer. The rapid growth of Political Catholicism after 1866 created a new and formidable barrier to unification. Hence, Bismarck’s attempts in the winter of 1866–7 to extend the authority of the Confederation over the southern states while allowing them to remain in control of their finances and armies were wrecked by Bavaria’s staunch opposition. Similarly his attempt to facilitate the entry of Hesse-Darmstadt into the Confederation – as a means of attracting the other states to follow suit – ended in failure. Although Hessian members of the Reichstag as well as a majority in the Hessian Landtag favoured union, Dalwigk’s stubborn opposition could not be overcome. In the midst of the Luxemburg crisis Bismarck was forced to agree to the military convention and lost the lever which he had hoped to use to secure her entry into the northern state.

Bismarck’s hopes that economic ties might bind the south closer to the north were dashed by the outcome of the 1868 elections to the Customs Parliament. Southern National Liberals campaigned vigorously on the slogan ‘From Customs Parliament to Union Parliament’ (Von Zollparlament zum Vollparlament) in the confident expectation that the elections – the first to be held on the basis of universal male suffrage – would return candidates pledged to final unification. Yet only in Hesse-Darmstadt were nationalists elected to half of the (six) seats. Elsewhere anti-Prussian and anti-Protestant sentiment carried the day. In Bavaria the Progressive Party won only twelve out of forty-eight seats. The newly formed Bavarian Patriotic Party, drawing support from the rural population and petty bourgeoisie in the towns, won twenty-six seats. Even in Baden where nationalism was a strong force because of its proximity to France and nationalists won eight seats with 86,890 votes, their opponents who won six seats polled more votes (90,078). The greatest sensation was in Württemberg where the German Party was totally defeated. Ten seats were won by the Peoples’ Party, which capitalized on the strong democratic and anti-Prussian feelings of the Swabians, and another ten by pro-government candidates. The oppositional mood of the electorate was encapsulated in a quip going the rounds during the campaign which summed up the essence of the Prussian spirit as: ‘Pay up, join up and shut up’ (Steur zahlen, Soldat sein, Maul halten). Considerable as the advantages of economic association with the north were, they were not great enough to overcome a visceral dislike of all things Prussian. The result was that forty-nine opponents of political union were returned to the Berlin parliament and only thirty-six supporters.

Bismarck had high hopes of the new-style Customs Union. ‘Everything,’ he commented, ‘depends on the direction and swiftness with which public opinion develops in Southern Germany and a fairly serious judgement about this will first become possible through the Customs Parliament.’³⁶ Not that he would have welcomed a demand by that parliament for immediate union. That would have embarrassed him too much, for further Prussian expansion depended on a favourable international situation. What he did expect were indications of general support for the concept of final unification.

He was quickly disappointed. At the beginning of the first session, opened by the king of Prussia, the nationalists failed to carry a motion demanding that final unification be brought about through the Customs Union. This was defeated by 186 to 150 votes because Bismarck, having good reason to believe that Southern Catholics would stage a walk-out if the motion was carried, urged Prussian Conservatives to support an amendment that no vote be taken. Further nationalist attempts to introduce the unification issue into debates on purely commercial matters were frustrated by noisy interruptions. The point was not lost on Bismarck. Shortly before the session ended he observed that if unification was completed by the end of the century that would be a considerable achievement, if in five to ten years ‘an unhoped-for gift of grace from God’.³⁷ Southern Catholics left Berlin rejoicing that they had ‘brought the Prussian locomotive to a permanent halt on the Main’, as one of them put it. The nationalists learned their lesson and did not attempt to raise the unification issue during the second session of the Parliament in June 1868. From now on the Parliament confined its deliberations to purely commercial matters. In general much good work was done in the three sessions to facilitate the progress of the Customs Union. Bismarck did not abandon hope that the political climate would change but consoled himself with the thought that ‘we all have national unification at heart, but for a calculating politician the essential precedes the desirable, i.e. first build the house then extend it’.³⁸

Nevertheless, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War anti-Prussian sentiment in the south was, in fact, growing stronger, not weaker. The nature of this opposition varied from state to state. In Württemberg it was purely political. As the government had not come into conflict with Catholics over the sensitive areas of education and civil marriage, they did not form a separate party but continued to cooperate with the democratic Peoples’ Party. At the Landtag elections in July 1869 the party secured twenty-three seats and the Greater German Party – for which most Catholics voted – twenty-two seats, giving the two parties a majority of twenty over the German party and the ministerial party. The success of the opposition was explicable in terms of mounting resentment at an impending increase of 30 per cent in taxation to cover the costs of military reorganization. In the autumn of 1869 the Peoples’ Party launched a campaign and secured 150,000 signatures (i.e. 75 per cent of those who had voted in the last election) on a petition for a reduction in military expenditure. In March 1870 the two parties introduced a motion to cut expenditure and alter the period of service with the colours – a feature which was arousing intense popular resentment. The government, realizing that it could not secure the passage of the budget and fearful of the outcome of fresh elections, postponed the meeting of the chamber until the autumn. The opposition was further antagonized by a government reshuffle which strengthened the conservatives and by Varnbüler’s statement in reply to a question in the chamber that he had been wrong when he declared in October 1867 that Württemberg had the right to determine the casus foederis under the offensive – defensive treaty. In the summer of 1870 the government attempted to conciliate the opposition by publishing new budget proposals cutting military expenditure slightly and reducing the period of service with the colours to twenty months. Whether the political crisis would have been resolved in the autumn of 1870 seems highly unlikely. The government was determined to make no more concessions on military expenditure, while the opposition was strengthened in its resolve by the promise of grass-roots popular associations to organize a tax boycott in support of the chamber.

In Baden and Bavaria where governments had attempted to curtail the activities of the Church, Catholic parties hostile to Prussia on both religious and political grounds came into existence. In Baden at the close of the 1860s Catholics clashed with the government over a range of issues: approval of a new archbishop to replace Archbishop Vicari (an implacable opponent of the liberal government); regulations requiring Catholic theological students to pass a state examination in secular subjects; the introduction of civil marriage; and the transfer of charitable institutions from Church to state control. In 1869 the Catholic Peoples’ Party was founded in Heidelberg. It demanded the separation of Church and state, freedom for the Church to manage her own affairs; and the unification of Germany on a federal basis with the inclusion of Austria. It also stood for the introduction of universal male suffrage for it had dawned on Catholic leaders that a broad franchise would enable them to mobilize the rural population with the help of the clergy and swamp the urban base of political liberalism. Though only three members succeeded in being elected in 1869 to a chamber of fifty-one – not surprising under the prevailing system of indirect election – these members were constant critics of government policy.

But it was in Bavaria that Political Catholicism emerged as a major force, partly for political and partly for religious reasons. The appointment in 1867 of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, a Catholic firmly committed to final unification, antagonized Catholics still nominally committed to the creation of Greater Germany – though in practice most realized that this was an impossible objective and concentrated instead on preserving Bavarian independence. Secondly, government measures reducing Church control over Catholic schools was bitterly denounced as ‘godless liberalism’. In the winter of 1868–9 the Bavarian Peoples’ Party or Patriotic Party was founded as the political arm of Bavarian Catholicism. After a bitter election campaign in May 1869 the Patriotic Party, which had the support of the rural population and the lower middle class in the towns, won an overall majority in the lower chamber.³⁹ After ten members were disqualified for electoral irregularities, the Patriotic Party and its opponents held seventy-two seats each. Following a bitter election campaign in October 1869 during which officials openly intervened in the government interest and the Catholic clergy acted as recruiting agents for the Patriotic Party, it was returned with eighty seats to a combined opposition of seventy-one.⁴⁰ The political crisis deepened in February 1870 when both houses of the legislature carried a no-confidence motion in Hohenlohe, who resigned feeling that he could not rely on King Ludwig’s support should he follow Bismarck’s advice to dissolve the chamber and create new peers to break the hostile majority.

The crisis deepened still further when a committee of the lower house proposed a cut of 2,200,000 gulden in the military budget and reduced the period of military service to eight months – clearly a first step towards the introduction of a militia system. In July 1870 the new minister–president and the finance minister both declared the proposals unacceptable. Had war not intervened, a head-on collision between the Bavarian government and the lower chamber would have been unavoidable.

The outbreak of war and the wave of anti-French feeling which swept through Baden and Württemberg and affected Bavaria (though to a lesser extent) has tended to obscure the fact that the two largest German states in which six and a half million of the 8,700,000 inhabitants of South Germany lived were in the grip of a political crisis in the summer of 1870 much more serious than that facing the Prussian government in 1862. In both states a significant polarization of opinion was taking place. The forces of ‘law and order’ – the crown, the military, and the bureaucracy supported by the National Liberal minorities – were coming together in one camp held together by the threat mass democracy posed to their privileged position and throughly resolved for that reason to resist cuts in military expenditure. Their opponents enjoyed wide grass-roots support which Prussian liberals had neither possessed nor really wanted, and they displayed a much greater degree of determination to win the struggle against the government.

It would be far too simplistic an interpretation of the complex relationship between external policy and domestic tensions to suggest that Bismarck plunged Prussia into war in 1870 to divert attention away from an internal political crisis, any more than it would be fair to Cavour to say that he invaded the Papal States in 1860 only in order to prevent Garibaldi’s forces spreading radical ideas destructive of monarchy throughout the whole of Italy. But we know that Bismarck did regard the rapidly deteriorating political situation in South Germany with grave concern. Lord Loftus reported in mid February Bismarck’s comment that in the event of serious complications in Bavaria the Prussian army would march into that state at once: ‘Nous entrerons de suite, nous ne pouvons pas faire autrement.’⁴¹ In March after the fall of Hohenlohe it was rumoured that Prussia was contemplating military action against Munich and Stuttgart and had designated three army corps for this purpose.⁴²

Although Bismarck often cautioned against arbitrary interference in the course of history, remarking in a celebrated passage in 1869: ‘… we can put the clocks forward, but time does not on that account move any faster, and the ability to wait, while the situation develops, is a prerequisite of practical politics’, he did not always follow his own advice.⁴³ In the early months of 1870 he was actively seeking to refloat the becalmed ship of unification. That is the significance of the Kaiser project. Early in January Bismarck investigated the possibility of obtaining for King William the title of emperor of Germany or perhaps emperor of the North German Confederation. Domestic considerations certainly entered into his calculations. He confided to the crown prince that the government needed favourable majorities in the forthcoming Reichstag and Landtag elections because on 31 December 1871 the Iron Budget arrangement would lapse, i.e. the compromise agreed to by the Constituent Reichstag in 1867 whereby for four years military expenditure – which accounted for 95 per cent of total expenditure – would be outside Reichstag control. Bismarck clearly hoped to make the Iron Budget a permanent feature of confederate finances but feared he might be plunged into a bitter struggle over budgetary control if the opposition got the upper hand. However, if an imperial title was conferred on the king this might help whip up enthusiasm for government candidates in the elections. The project did not become airborne. Reichstag approval of a title would be needed and the National Liberals demanded responsible government as a quid pro quo – for another disagreeable feature of the post-Königgrätz period from Bismarck’s point of view was the liberal tendency to seek compensation for the failure to complete unification by laying greater emphasis on constitutional issues. The establishment of the Liberal Empire in France encouraged the belief that constitutional change should not be long delayed in Germany. To that Bismarck was adamantly opposed. When he turned to the princes whose consent to the title was obviously essential, he found no enthusiasm for the elevation of one of their number to the imperial purple.

Anxious as Bismarck was for action of some kind, it is equally clear that he had not the slightest intention of allowing the National Liberals to take the initiative. They were greatly depressed by the bleak prospect lying ahead of them and impatient at the slow progress Prussia was making. Bavarian National Liberals were under no illusion that if the ‘German question’ was not ‘brought to life quickly and decisively then the disintegrating process will continue and in three years Bavaria will be completely in the hands of the priests’.⁴⁴

In February 1870 in an attempt to break the impasse and force Bismarck’s hand, Eduard Lasker moved his celebrated motion requesting the Reichstag to recognize the national aspirations of Baden and facilitate its entry into the Confederation as quickly as possible. The National Liberals calculated that if France tolerated the move, then the other states would join in, bringing Little Germany into being at last. If France chose to make the Baden motion a casus belli – which the National Liberals hoped they would – the southern states would either be swept into union by a wave of patriotic fervour during the ‘national’ war against the ‘hereditary foe’ or at the lowest estimate be intimidated into joining by the big battalions of Prussia.

Bismarck rejected the Lasker motion out of hand. He may well have feared that the incorporation of Baden would alienate Bavaria and Württemberg still further from the north so that in the event of war they might remain neutral, making Prussian expansion much more difficult. But he was probably just as anxious to prevent his liberal enemies dictating the pace of events in 1870 as they had tried to do in the winter of 1863–4. The fact that he spoke of ‘national unification’ did not mean he was working hand in glove with the National Liberals. His objective remained what it had been in 1862: the aggrandisement of the kingdom of Prussia. He was equally determined to uphold the power of the Prussian crown and may well have sensed that the entry of Baden into the Confederation at the request of the National Liberals would strengthen their resolve to seek to revise the 1867 constitution. And that constitution was not negotiable in Bismarck’s view. It represented the maximum he was prepared to concede to liberalism and was intended to be a reassuring signal to the southern rulers that Prussia could be relied upon to resist demands for full-blooded parliamentary government.

Reference was made earlier to the argument that the economic and military ties between north and south were deepening every day despite political opposition, so that without any initiative from Berlin the southern rulers might in the fullness of time have concluded that there was little alternative to union. That is a matter for speculation. On the other hand, as one historian of the period has wisely commented:

The chronological relationship between his [Bismarck’s] adoption of the Hohenzollern candidacy, the resignation of Hohenlohe in Bavaria, the campaign to cut the military budget in Württemberg and the National Liberal revolt, all of which reached a climax in the same month, is more than suggestive. Although it would probably be impossible to demonstrate conclusively the interconnection among these events, to assume that they were mere coincidences stretches the limits of credulity too far.⁴⁵

The war of 1870 did not come out of a clear blue sky but was preceded by a period of mounting international tension. From 1867 onwards the cognoscenti were convinced that war could not be long delayed. Writing at the turn of 1869–70 Ludwig von Gerlach remarked that: ‘since 1866 Europe has been bracing itself nervously for a big war, so nervously that it is being said on all sides that commerce, trade and finance are suffering’.⁴⁶

After Sadowa France, alarmed by the speed and efficiency of the Prussians, made strenuous efforts to re–arm. Napoleon’s objective was a million–strong army to equal that of Prussia. This proved difficult to achieve, partly because of complacency in military circles and partly because of opposition in the Corps Législatif where some deputies feared that Napoleon might be tempted to use an enlarged army for a new Mexican-style adventure. Still, the 1868 law did bring about considerable improvements. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Rhine the Prussian general staff finalized their plans for war against France. By 1869 Britain had grown fearful that the new arms race would lead to war and, still worse, to revolution in France. To reduce the mounting tension Lord Clarendon, the British foreign secretary, acting on a suggestion from French Foreign Minister Count Napoleon Daru, proposed that both France and Germany reduce the annual intake of recruits. The Frenchman was only seeking to embarrass Bismarck, confident that the latter would reject the proposal out of hand, as indeed he did with the comment: ‘We are surrounded by three great empires with arms as large as our own and which can at any time coalesce against us.’⁴⁷

France tried with little success to forge alliances which would sustain her in her hour of need. It is unnecessary to discuss the intricate diplomacy of the late 1860s. Suffice to say that France failed to attain her objective. In part this was due to Bismarck’s astute diplomacy as, for example, during the long drawn-out Cretan crisis when he played a part in preventing a rapprochement between France and Britain. Britain was further alienated from France by the Belgian Railways affair in 1869 when the French Eastern Railway with government encouragement signed agreements to acquire key Belgian railways. The Belgians were annoyed and, encouraged discreetly by Prussia, passed a law preventing the alienation of their railways. Whereupon the Paris press denounced Bismarck’s suspected machinations and talked of war. The crisis blew over but added appreciably to the tension in Europe at the turn of the year.

Nor did desperate attempts to negotiate an alliance à trois with Italy and Austria get very far. As long as Napoleon was committed to a French garrison in Rome, any agreement would be operative only when war obliged Napoleon to remove the French troops. As for Austria, military circles led by Archduke Karl favoured war and Beust, a bitter enemy of Prussia, was ready to flirt with France and discuss plans for a new Germany of roughly equal states. But the Austrians were not prepared to enter into binding military commitments. The truth was that Austria was now more interested in seeking help against Russia, which was of no use to Napoleon. Furthermore, internal problems with Poles, Czechs and Magyars allowed her little room for manoeuvre; the balance of power inside Austria–Hungary was swinging towards the Magyars who were not in the slightest interested in a war of revenge in Central Europe. Certainly, a draft agreement was drawn up in May 1869 guaranteeing the status quo and promising to enter into an offensive–defensive alliance – but only in the event of war. All France could hope for was that when the conflict came Italy and Austria would overcome their hesitancy and join in.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE WAR OF 1870

Finally, we turn to the immediate causes of the war of 1870. No historian today supposes that the Second World War was caused simply and solely by the megalomania of Adolf Hitler. That is not, of course to deny that Hitler’s decision to attack Poland was a factor of crucial importance in September 1939. In the same way the leading figures on the French and German sides played a crucially important role in those events which constitute the proximate causes of the war of 1870.

For nearly a century Bismarck’s role in the outbreak of war has been the centre of attention for historians. This was not so in 1870, when general opinion blamed the war on the reckless behaviour of Napoleon and his advisers who were said to have wantonly plunged Western Europe into a major conflagration for the sake of French prestige. The accused in turn blamed public opinion for driving them to war. Twenty years elapsed before suspicion fell on Bismarck who, at the time of the war, had informed the federal council tongue-in-cheek that he had learned of the Hohenzollern candidacy only on 3 July. But in the autumn of 1892, out of office and anxious to play up the importance of his role in the unification process, he claimed in an interview with a foreign journalist that he had manufactured the war and admitted that by omitting certain passages he had completely altered the tone of the Ems Telegram. In November Chancellor Count Leo von Caprivi sprang to the old man’s defence, declaring in the Reichstag that Bismarck had done no more than carry out the king of Prussia’s suggestion that he make use of the information in the telegram as he saw fit. What Bismarck did was, in Caprivi’s opinion, thoroughly justified in face of provocation from France. Justification by omission was Bismarck’s line in his reminiscences published in 1898; he observed that there had been no more effective way of overcoming the mistrust of the southern states ‘than through a common national war against a neighbour who has been an aggressor for centuries’.⁴⁸ Many historians took a less charitable view of the ex–chancellor’s actions and focused their attention on him as the chief suspect in the investigation into the origins of the war.

Interest in this question was kept alive by the attitude of the German foreign office, aided and abetted by successive chancellors. Scholars were systematically denied access to the secret files and heavy pressure was exerted on several scholars from Heinrich von Sybel to Hermann Oncken who came across incriminating evidence not to publish their findings. The emperor, Caprivi, Hohenlohe and Bethmann Hollweg all did their best to keep the documentation secret. Not that the Germans were exceptional in this matter of secrecy. At the beginning of the century it was only some thirty years since the Franco-Prussian war. And it was long after the end of the Second World War before the British government reduced the fifty-year rule to thirty years in the case of Britain’s Public Records Office. Even now the government reserves the right to withhold any document it chooses from public scrutiny for much longer periods.

However, it was not just the natural conservatism of foreign office officials which made them conceal the truth for so long. Nor was it loyalty to the old man, whose resignation in 1890 was greeted with an audible sigh of relief in official circles. The real reason for the Wilhelmstrasse’s reticence was a growing awareness that the outside world feared and mistrusted Bismarck’s restless Reich. That made it mandatory to preserve as long as possible the image of Bismarck the ‘honest broker’ who had constructed an elaborate alliance system in the 1870s and 1880s with the object of preserving the peace. The truth about the Ems Telegram had unfortunately been revealed by the old man. All the more important to preserve the fiction that Bismarck knew nothing of the candidacy before 3 July 1870. The nearer Imperial Germany moved towards war in the second decade of the new century, the more urgent became the duty of concealing the truth. But as suspicion mounted in the outside world about the general objectives of German foreign policy, the more historians were inclined to see in Bismarck the real villain of the piece in 1870.

Foreign office and imperial government were fighting a losing battle. In 1894 when the second volume of the memoirs of King Carol of Rumania – the younger brother of Leopold of Hohenzollern – were published it confirmed suspicions that Bismarck had known of the candidacy before 3 July.⁴⁹ Then, just before the First World War, the historian Hermann Hesselbarth, much to the chagrin of the foreign office, obtained from the private papers of the former head of the German chancery in Madrid copies of a damaging exchange of telegrams between Bismarck and Eusebio y Mazzaredo Salazar.⁵⁰ After the publication of Richard Fester’s book (also in 1913) containing these telegrams as well as other material from the Spanish, German and French press it was abundantly clear that Bismarck had been involved at an early stage in the proceedings.⁵¹ These revelations did not dampen the enthusiasm of most German historians for Bismarck. On the eve of war they were still arguing that the need to unify Germany and enable her to act as the guardian of the peace in Europe justified acts of duplicity on the old man’s part.

After the defeat of Germany in 1918 the Wilhelmstrasse continued the battle. Two historians of the older generation, Walter Platzhoff and Karl Reinhold, reported on behalf of the foreign office that while publication would doubtless please scholars, it was politically inadvisable. As sole guilt for causing the war of 1914 had just been laid at Germany’s door, could she afford to publish material which could be used to establish Bismarck’s guilt?⁵² The foreign office agreed and consequently the American historian Richard Howard Lord, whose book appeared in 1924 (and who argued that Bismarck had indeed ‘manufactured’ the war), was not given access to the secret files nor to the Sigmaringen archive.⁵³

Not until after the Second World War were the archives at last completely open to scholars. In 1948 Jochen Dittrich used the documentation in the Sigmaringen archive in a doctoral dissertation published as a book in 1962.⁵⁴ Before its appearance Georges Bonnin, a Frenchman working in England on the captured German archives, had published the key foreign office documents and a selection from the Sigmaringen archive, though regrettably in English translation. At the end of the day with all the documents available to historians it is abundantly clear that Bismarck played a major role in promoting the Hohenzollern candidacy from February 1870 onwards.

This does not, of course, explain his motives for seeking to put a Hohenzollern prince on a Spanish throne. Because he concealed his part in the affair and re-edited the Ems Telegram, it does not follow that his objective from the outset was war. Broadly speaking, there are three possible interpretations of his actions in 1870. First, that he was without blame, did not seek war but had it forced on him by the trigger–happy French. Secondly, that he deliberately sought war, believing this to be the only way to achieve final unification, i.e. to extend the boundaries of Prussia down to the Bodensee. And thirdly, that he made use of the candidacy to try to out-manoeuvre the French; his intention was to score a diplomatic victory, throwing them into disarray, and to absorb the southern states when a favourable opportunity presented itself. Only when the manoeuvre misfired did Bismarck opt for war to escape an impasse.

The first position has been upheld by several historians, most notably in Germany, commencing with Sybel who exonerated Napoleon as well as Bismarck and laid all the blame at the door of the Duc de Gramont and warmongering journalists in Paris. A later variation suggested that Bismarck took up the candidacy only to protect Prussia against a threatening diplomatic combination between France, Austria and Italy. War broke out because the French refused to settle for the withdrawal of Prince Leopold.⁵⁵ Another variation suggested that Bismarck was simply seeking to enhance Prussian prestige by persuading a second Hohenzollern to accept a foreign crown as a kind of exercise in glorification by association.⁵⁶ Interestingly enough some French historians, notably on the political left – where the impressive organization of the German Social Democratic Party was greatly admired – were also ready to exonerate Bismarck. Ernest Denis and Jean Jaurès, for example, condemned the opposition of the French to German unification which they believed had forced Bismarck to fight in 1870. And even though Jaurès admitted that Bismarck acted provocatively in the final stages of the crisis, nevertheless he insisted that the stupidity of French diplomacy and the frivolity of the French people had contributed enormously to the outbreak of war.⁵⁷ Since the Second World War supporters of the ‘not guilty’ thesis have included Hans Rothfels, Ludwig Reiners, Werner Richter, Alan Taylor and most recently Eberhard Kolb.⁵⁸ Taylor states the case in characteristically blunt terms: ‘… there is not a scrap of evidence that he worked deliberately for a war with France, still less that he timed it precisely for the summer of 1870’.⁵⁹

The second thesis, that of deliberate intent, was favoured by several French historians though only with significant qualifications. Thus Albert Sorel, Henry Salomon and Henri Welschinger, while conviced that Bismarck had planned the war, still attached much blame to blundering French diplomacy.⁶⁰ Since the Second World War supporters of this interpretation have included Charles Grant Robertson, Friedrich Darmstaedter, George Gooch, Georges Bonnin, Josef Becker and most recently George Kent.⁶¹

This school of thought attaches considerable weight to the damning comments certain highly placed contemporaries made about Bismarck’s intentions. Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden, King William of Prussia’s son-in-law, claimed in a statement (made, however, in 1901) that Bismarck’s Spanish policy was intended ‘to provoke war’. Roggenbach, the grand duke’s minister, was convinced that Bismarck wanted war as much as the French. Prince Karl Anton, head of the Sigmaringen house, accused Bismarck in June 1871 of having used the candidacy ‘in order to win an occasion for war with France’.⁶² According to the memoirs of the Saxon minister of war, Bismarck declared early in 1870 that ‘he regarded war with France in the near future as an unavoidable necessity’.⁶³ Finally, Bismarck himself had spoken in 1869 about the possibility of using the Spanish question or other issues to provoke war with France should an international crisis arise.⁶⁴

Secondly, it is argued that Bismarck felt the only way to break the complete deadlock on unification was to take forward action calculated to lead to war. Thirdly, the law of probability suggests that a man who deliberately precipitated war with Denmark in 1864 and with Austria in 1866 was perfectly capable of doing so again and probably had done so.

The third thesis – that Bismarck aimed in the first instance at the diplomatic defeat of France – has been advanced in its most sophisticated form by Jochen Dittrich. Writing immediately after the Second World War when a devastated Europe had grown weary of national rivalries and a spirit of reconciliation was in the air, Dittrich exonerated both French and Germans from sole responsibility for 1870. War had broken out because Bismarck’s cunning diplomacy, designed to outwit the French and complete German unification by peaceful means, had backfired. Only then did he decide on war and when he did the French were as eager for it as the Germans.

In so far as we can ever be certain about the motivation of this complex and sophisticated political operator, those biographers seem nearer the truth who maintain that he never committed himself whole–heartedly to any one approach to a political problem. In Otto Pflanze’s words:’… it is safe to say that he had more than one possibility in mind. Whatever the result it would bring egress from the impasse of the German question.’⁶⁵ W.N. Medlicott refers to ‘the skilful pursuit of alternative possibilities: either that France would acquiesce in the Hohenzollern election … or France would not, in which case there might be war, for which he was ready’.⁶⁶ One of the latest biographers, Lothar Gall, goes further: ‘a warlike culmination, a peaceful agreement, a clear diplomatic defeat of one side over the other or a surprising resolution of the whole problem as a consequence of internal developments in Spain – all this seemed possible until the very last’. For the special quality of Bismarck’s diplomacy was its extraordinary flexibility. It ‘ran on several lines taking into account all possibilities, not simply in terms of the final result but in the same breath [these became] starting–points for quite new activities and in particular for new configurations’.⁶⁷

THE HOHENZOLLERN CANDIDACY

In September 1868 Queen Isabella of Spain was forced off the throne by revolution. As her son, Alfonso Prince of the Asturias, was unacceptable to the new government and as King Ferdinand of Portugal refused the crown, the Spaniards looked outside Spain for a new ruler whose connections with one or other of the Great Powers would enhance the standing of Spain in Europe. The candidates who were seriously considered were: Duke Antoine of Montpensier, a son of the French Citizen King and married to a daughter of ex–Queen Isabella; Duke Amadeo of Aosta, third son of the king of Italy and likely to succeed to the Italian throne as the crown prince was childless; and Duke Thomas of Genoa, a nephew of the Italian king.⁶⁸ A fourth candidate whose name was actively considered from the very beginning was Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern–Sigmaringen, a junior branch of the royal house. A Catholic married to Princess Antoinette Infanta of Portugal, his claims were enhanced by the possibility that his wife or her children might succeed in Portugal, thus uniting the Iberian Peninsula as it had been from 1580 to 1640.

In April 1869 the Spanish government put out feelers to the Hohenzollern–Sigmaringens via Count Philippe of Flanders who was married to Princess Marie of Hohenzollern. The count wrote to Karl Anton suggesting that if Leopold presented himself as a candidate he might well have prospects of success. Rumours in March of the Spanish interest in Leopold alarmed Napoleon III. When Benedetti saw the undersecretary of state, Hermann von Thile on 31 March (in Bismarck’s absence) he made it plain that ‘such an eventuality interested the Emperor’s government too directly for it not to be my duty to call attention to its dangers in the event of there being grounds for believing that it might come to something’. Thile replied that ‘there had not been and never would be a question of the Prince of Hohenzollern for the Crown of Spain’.⁶⁹ Still dissatisfied, Benedetti saw Bismarck on 8 May. The chancellor admitted that the Hohenzollern–Sigmaringens had been sounded out but declared that Karl Anton with the king’s approval had declined the offer.⁷⁰ In September the Spanish envoy Salazar made the first formal approach to the Hohenzollern–Sigmaringens. Although Karl Anton and Leopold avoided commitment, Salazar formed the impression rightly that they were interested but that rather than take the initiative they wanted King William to order Leopold (a serving officer) to accept the crown. That Karl Anton was well aware of the French dimension is evident from his insistence that a (hypothetical) candidacy must first be cleared in direct negotiations between the French emperor and the Prussian king.

Enough had been said by the French for Bismarck to have realized that France was concerned about the issue and that active support of Leopold’s candidacy would lead to dangerous complications. Nevertheless when Salazar appeared at the Weinburg on the Bodensee in February 1870, this time with a firm offer of the Spanish crown, Bismarck began to advocate acceptance of the offer. King William, however, strongly opposed the candidacy feeling that the unruly Spaniards would soon send a foreign king packing – a shrewd comment as events were to prove. Bismarck bombarded the old man with a variety of arguments: Spain was strategically important; under a Hohenzollern ruler it would be well placed to check French ambitions and help to keep the peace or, if war did break out, France could be intimidated into keeping one or two army corps on the frontier. There would also be trade benefits for Germany. Moreover, was it not essential to prevent Spain becoming a republic and a hotbed of revolutionary activity inimical to the cause of monarchy everywhere? Nor was it in Prussian interests to allow the Bavarian Wittelsbachs to secure the crown, for that would strengthen southern opposition to final unification. Indeed, any candidate other than a Hohenzollern was likely to veer towards France, Austria and the Papacy. And finally, a Spanish crown would bring lustre to the house of Hohenzollern.

These were arguments ad hominem. To take Bismarck at his word and suppose that he had no ulterior motives in urging the king to allow acceptance of the candidacy but, like any good diplomat, was merely seeking to exploit the situation in the interests of his country without any thought of war, is naïve.⁷¹ The impasse over final unification, the mounting political crisis in South Germany and the forthcoming elections in the North German Confederation weighed too heavily on his mind for him to have overlooked the diversionary effects the candidacy would have. There can be little doubt that he appreciated that support of the candidacy entailed a very considerable risk of war. Highly placed circles in Berlin anticipated trouble. Karl Anton told Bismarck that he expected ‘a wild outcry from anti–Prussian Europe’.⁷² Bismarck had also read too many reports from ambassadors not to know that France was likely to act violently if the candidacy was accepted. The newspaper–reading public appreciated this too, for on 1 May a Viennese paper carried a report that Napoleon had told the Spanish ambassador that a successful Hohenzollern candidacy meant war. Of course, one must go on to say that Bismarck was too sophisticated an operator completely to exclude peaceful outcomes equally beneficial to Prussia. He was fond of suggesting that statesmen were not free agents but were utterly dependent on the forward thrust of events. ‘No one will charge me with making history,’ he said on one occasion (admittedly not without a touch of sarcasm). ‘That, gentlemen, I could not even do in company with you … we cannot make history, we can only wait until it fulfils itself.’⁷³ What he omitted to point out was that when an opportunity presented itself to accelerate the pace of events or turn the tables on an opponent, he could be relied upon to take it. This pragmatic approach coupled with a conviction that war would almost certainly be the outcome of the operation is the key to his tactical manoeuvring in the summer of 1870.

At first Bismarck failed to persuade King William to support the candidacy. On 22 April when Bismarck was ill at Varzin Leopold declined the candidacy, as did Friedrich, his younger brother. When Madrid was informed of this on 4 May, the affair seemed at an end. However, the Spaniards had not lost interest in the Hohenzollerns. Neither, it would seem, had Bismarck. His agents, Lothar Bucher and Major Maximilian von Versen, were busy at work reviving the candidacy with the help of Bismarck’s new–found ally, the crown prince. Once Karl Anton and Leopold renewed their interest, Bismarck sprang into action, assuring them that it was in Prussian interests that the Hohenzollerns obtain the crown. Significantly he succeeded in persuading Karl Anton and King William to drop the request for negotiations with Napoleon to secure French agreement – another sign that he was not averse to trouble with the French.⁷⁴ Grudgingly the king acquiesced in the candidacy. On 21 June Salazar sent a telegram to Manuel Zorilla, president of the Cortes, informing him that he (Salazar) would arrive back in Madrid ‘about 26’ bringing with him the formal letter of acceptance. ‘About 26’ was a code phrase which meant that if he indicated a date before 1 July the Cortes should be kept in session to elect Leopold at once and present Europe with a fait accompli. A cipher clerk in the Madrid embassy decoded the phrase incorrectly as ‘towards the 9th’. On receipt of this news Zorilla prorogued the Cortes on 23 June. By the time Salazar arrived in Madrid on 28 June he found the deputies already departed to their homes. On 2 July, when news of Leopold’s candidacy was reported in the Paris press, the crisis broke.⁷⁵

To understand the French reaction we must look at internal developments in France since the Luxemburg crisis. It was soon apparent that the cat–and–mouse reforms in January 1867 were totally insufficient to stifle growing criticism of the regime. At the elections in May 1869 – freer than any since 1849 – government supporters polled 4,438,000 votes and opposition candidates 3,355,000. The rural areas were still supportive of the government, though not the towns. But the government faced a new political situation because over half the members of the Corps Législatif consisted of official candidates who had rejected the official ticket and campaigned for constitutional reform. Emile Ollivier, a leading liberal of centre–right inclinations, organized a group of 116 members to support an interpellation requesting the government to concede the principle of ministerial responsibility. With some help from the Left this group commanded a majority of nine in the chamber. Napoleon read the signs correctly and in July 1869 made further concessions: the Corps Législatif was allowed a share in initiating legislation; it could now elect its own officers, vote on the budget, amend government bills and question ministers. At last Napoleon dropped the old guard – Rouher and Baroche resigned and a caretaker government took over. After months of negotiation the Ollivier government was formed in January 1870. Finally, in May 1870 a plebiscite was held on the new constitution drawn up to formalize the political changes. A total of 7,358,786 Frenchmen (67.5 per cent) voted for, 1,571,939 against and 1,900,000 abstained. This significant victory for the government was a reassuring sign to Napoleon that he still enjoyed considerable popular support.

The 1870 constitution was a curious hybrid mixture of authoritarianism and parliamentary government. Napoleon remained head of state and commander–in–chief of the armed forces; he appointed all ministers, presided over their deliberations, retained the right of veto on legislation and his right to appeal to the people via the plebiscite. On the other hand, he had now agreed to rule ‘with the cooperation’ of ministers and parliament and to share the initiative in legislation with both houses of parliament. Ministers were ‘responsible’ – as was the emperor – but to whom they were ‘responsible’ was left undefined. And although the powers of the Corps Législatif had been increased, these were carefully counterbalanced by provisions that the Senate (still a nominated body) should have a veto over legislation and that the constitution could be altered only by a plebiscite held on the emperor’s initiative. Emile Ollivier, the spiritual father of the new arrangements, was an old–fashioned liberal who, deploring the excesses of both Jacobin–style democracy and Bonapartist dictatorship, had constructed a system analogous to that of seventeenth–century England where the king shared some of his power with the people. One authority has rightly pointed out that the 1870 constitution was no half–way house on the road to full–blooded parliamentary government but should be compared to the constitutional arrangements of 1814, 1848 and 1958 which combined strong government with respect for civil liberty and democratic principles. Ollivier’s political philosophy coincided more or less with Napoleon’s desire to retain as much real power as possible while swimming with the tide.

What would have happened had the Liberal Empire lasted longer is an intriguing question. If urban opposition had become more strident, might Napoleon have yielded to the prompting of reactionaries among whom the empress was a leading light and emerged as the rocher de bronze ‘restoring order’ as in 1851? Possibly. But, on the other hand, a man with his political perception would scarcely have acted in that way unless the dynasty was in deep trouble. More likely, given his mercurial temperament, he would have soldiered on, responding to ‘la force des choses’ but always striving to slow down the pace of change as much as possible and retaining the substance of power as long as he could.

Paradoxically enough, the establishment of the Liberal Empire did not, as one might suppose, lessen the risk of war. On the contrary, it increased it because of a significant shift in the relationship between public opinion and the government. The French ambassador in Karlsruhe observed very shrewdly that any attempt by the Prussians to cross the Main would lead much more easily to war than in the past because previously Napoleon had had to move cautiously abroad to avoid the accusation that he was waging war for dynastic reasons and in order to divert attention from discontent at home. That danger no longer existed. If the new cabinet went to war to defend France’s honour, it would enjoy the whole–hearted support of the French people. Thus when Foreign Minister Daru was replaced on 15 May by Duc Agénor de Gramont, former ambassador in Vienna and a staunch opponent of Prussia, Bismarck concluded correctly – and no doubt with satisfaction – that the chances of war were considerably increased.

Nor was the attitude of Emile Ollivier, Napoleon’s chief minister, conducive to the preservation of peace. True, he declared his wish for peace with Germany so that he could concentrate all his efforts on building up the Liberal Empire. He did not subscribe to the old balance-of-power notion that a weak and divided Germany was the only guarantee of French security. On the contrary, he believed a united Germany would be the friend of France and a bulwark against autocratic Russia. In theory he was not disposed to regard the formal union of North and South Germany as a legitimate reason for war; had not the Customs Union and the offensive – defensive alliances brought them together already? These rational sentiments were far outweighed by his extraordinary sensitivity to any slight, real or imagined, to the honour of France. A man who would not have dreamed of waging war for balance-of-power considerations was perfectly prepared to contemplate it to obtain satisfaction for some insult to the national pride of the French. Equally dangerous and irresponsible was his extraordinary belief that if the whole of the French nation wanted war that would be a sufficient cause for conflict. Lord Loftus summed up Ollivier’s views succinctly in January 1870, stating that (Ollivier):

…was particularly alive to the importance of not exposing France to the appearance of being slighted: in fact he would not conceal from me that under present circumstances a public rebuff from Prussia would be fatal – “un échec (he said) c’est la guerre”. We who have to render an account to Parliament and the country are less than the former government able to put up with any wound to the national pride. Our main object is peace (he added) but we must also show firmness and spirit or we shall not be able to cope with Revolution and Socialism at home.

Yet another indication of the interaction between foreign and domestic policy so characteristic of France in these years.⁷⁶

On 2 July several Paris newspapers reported that a Hohenzollern prince had been offered the Spanish crown. Though uneasy about the situation and inclined to see a Prussian plot behind the candidacy, the editors seemed prepared to wait upon government reactions. It had good reason to be concerned about the strategic implications of a Hohenzollern on a Spanish throne. For in the event of war an entire army corps would have to be stationed along the Pyrenees to keep the Spaniards quiet. But what mattered most to the policy–makers in Paris was not the strategic but the symbolic significance of the candidacy. Was this not a further unpleasant reminder of the extent to which France had forfeited the international status she had enjoyed in 1856? France ought to have been consulted on this issue and had not been. Was this not a slight on her honour? Only a ruling élite thinking primarily in terms of prestige politics could have escalated the crisis the way the council of ministers did in the next fourteen days.

A cooler and more level–headed cabinet might have exerted heavy pressure on Spain to force her to reconsider the offer; if one power wishes to intimidate another it is well advised to choose one of the weaker brethren. However, although Prussia was technically uninvolved, the French government decided – quite correctly – that without prior Prussian approval Leopold would never have accepted the candidacy. It was not, therefore, unreasonable to put out feelers in Berlin. But the French ought surely to have adopted a conciliatory stance and sought via confidential negotiations to persuade Prussia to drop the candidacy without too great a loss of face. There were distinct possibilities of success given King William’s known distaste for the candidacy. Instead of that, Gramont, an impetuous and abrasive ex–diplomat, chose a highly dangerous course with the full consent of Napoleon and Ollivier. They were bent not on conciliation but on securing for France a resounding diplomatic victory over Prussia. This they hoped to achieve by a public declaration expressing their concern and threatening to use force unless the candidacy was withdrawn.

As a first step Paris sought information from Berlin about the extent of the Prussian government’s involvement. On 4 July the French chargé d’affaires was assured by Undersecretary Thile (acting in Bismarck’s absence) that Prussia had no knowledge of the candidacy. This non–commital reply was totally unsatisfactory to Gramont who was only too ready to see the hand of Bismarck behind the whole affair. Whereupon on 6 July the council of ministers unanimously approved a declaration drawn up by Gramont to be read in the Corps Législatif. The council was in a euphoric mood, buoyed up firstly by the conviction that the army could easily defeat Prussia in the event of war, and secondly by high (and misplaced) hopes of active assistance from Italy and Austria–Hungary.

It is difficult to assess the influence of the press and of public opinion in general on the government’s decision to seek confrontation. One can safely say that opinion was divided in July, though the exact balance is hard to determine. On the right wing Legitimists, Catholics and Orleanists, and on the left wing Republicans were anti–Prussian, while some radical–democratic papers were pro–Prussian, and financial circles were generally against war. Nor, despite underlying concern about France’s deteriorating position in Europe, did the war spirit manifest itself at a popular level until late on in the crisis. One must conclude that the council of ministers entered upon their policy not through pressure from press or public opinion but because they knew they could rely on signficant sections of opinion to support a tough line. In reply to an interpellation later that day in the Corps Législatif, Gramont read the declaration. The gist of it was that any attempt to place a foreign prince on the throne of Emperor Charles V – an emotive phrase inserted by Ollivier and calculated to arouse passion – might upset the European balance of power and would certainly jeopardize the interests and honour of France. He concluded with the bellicose remark that if the candidacy was not withdrawn ‘… we shall know how to do our duty without faltering or weakening’. ⁷⁷ This remark, received by right–wing deputies with rapturous applause, was intended to appease critics of the government and reassure their supporters that the government would pursue a tough line with the Prussians. That does not mean that Napoleon, Ollivier or even Gramont was deliberately seeking war at all costs. To calm the fears of left–wing deputies, Gramont neatly encapsulated government policy in the words ‘… peace if that is possible; it is war if that is inevitable’.⁷⁸ Peace with honour was the objective, Ollivier assured the chamber on the same occasion, but war was certainly preferable to another Sadowa. However, this does give an air of coherence to French policy which it probably lacked. As one French historian shrewdly observed: ‘The government was not prepared either to negotiate or go to war; it had no clear intentions nor any agreed plan of action’.⁷⁹ An emotional spasm, not the dictates of cold logic, lay behind the declaration of 6 July.

This maladroit piece of megaphone diplomacy without precedent in the annals of diplomatic history set France on a collision course with Prussia. A purely dynastic affair was transformed overnight into a make-or-break issue for a great country. European chancelleries were filled with foreboding, aware, if the ruling élite in Paris was unaware, that France had placed herself in an untenable position should Prussia refuse to retreat. On receiving the news at breakfast in Varzin on 8 July, Bismarck is reported as exclaiming in surprise: ‘that certainly looks like war. Gramont would not have used this unrestrained language unless war had been decided on. We ought now to mobilize the whole army and attack the French.’⁸⁰ That was not a serious suggestion; it would have been difficult to persuade the king to approve a pre-emptive strike; nor could he have rallied the southern states if Prussia appeared to be the aggressor. But, recovering quickly from his surprise, he instructed Bûcher to stir up the German press against the French, especially against Empress Eugénie who was to be accused of seeking a new war of the Spanish Succession.

Gramont’s next step was to instruct Benedetti to visit King William who was taking the waters at Bad Ems. He was to request that the king advise Leopold to withdraw the candidacy. On 9 July Benedetti had the first of several meetings with the king spread over the next few days. William made it clear that he had authorized acceptance of the offer not as king of Prussia but as head of the Hohenzollern house. But because he had approved Leopold’s candidacy only reluctantly, he was much more conciliatory than Bismarck would have been. Unlike Thile, William admitted that the Prussian government had been informed of the candidacy, thus destroying the fiction that it had been a purely dynastic affair. Moreover, while he refused to try to influence the Hohenzollern–Sigmaringens, he was conscious of the excitement in France and had therefore asked them whether they still intended to go ahead with the Spanish project – a step he had taken, incidentally, without informing Bismarck. He went on to say that if the family did decide on withdrawal, he would certainly approve such a step and inform Benedetti accordingly. They parted company on good terms. The ambassador dined with the monarch and visited the theatre in his company afterwards. Benedetti informed Paris that King William hoped the candidacy would be withdrawn. At the same time common prudence in an experienced diplomat obliged him to add that the interview could be a delaying tactic to allow Prussia to mobilize her forces.

Gramont’s declaration on 6 July had aroused high expectations in Paris that Prussia would soon be cut down to size. When Benedetti’s telegram arrived on 9 July much of it was indecipherable due to atmospheric conditions in the Rhine valley during transmission. What was legible was alarming: the king had indeed endorsed the candidacy and refused to ask Leopold to withdraw; furthermore, Benedetti had warned that this might be a delaying tactic. Ollivier was greatly alarmed, fearing that France now faced either a humiliating defeat or war. He and the colleagues he hurriedly called together considered it essential to obtain a clear answer from the king. Napoleon was also worried and commenced to take preliminary military measures.

Gramont ordered Benedetti to try again.⁸¹ On 10 July the king encountered the ambassador by chance during an evening stroll and told him that he had not heard from the Sigmaringens. Benedetti seized his chance to request an interview to explain in detail why his government, on the eve of making another statement in the chamber, would be in great difficulties if the king had not replied to him. King William readily agreed to see Benedetti the next day.

When the ambassador saw the king on 11 July he requested that William ask Leopold to withdraw in order to satisfy the French government and French public opinion. The king refused; he repeated that he was involved in the affair only as head of the Hohenzollern house, not as king of Prussia – a claim Benedetti contested. In any event, the king saw no earthly reason why a few days’ delay should affect the issue. Taking the offensive, the king observed that if the French refused to wait he would have to assume that they were seeking a pretext for war. And in view of rumours circulating in Germany about French military measures, he wanted to make it absolutely clear that Prussia would not stand idly by. However, the interview ended on a more conciliatory note, for the king said that he expected news from the Hohenzollern–Sigmaringens that very evening and asked Benedetti to inform Gramont of this.⁸² Anxious to the very last for a peaceful outcome, the king, immediately after the interview – and again without consulting Bismarck – sent Baron Karl von Werther, the German ambassador, to Paris to assure the government there of Prussia’s peaceful intentions.

On 12 July the crisis took a turn for the better, followed almost immediately by a turn for the worse. The good news was the withdrawal of the candidacy. Karl Anton, frightened by the prospect of war, withdrew the candidacy on behalf of Leopold, temporarily incommunicado on an Alpine walking tour. On receiving the news the king at once informed Benedetti who was lunching with him and added that written confirmation would arrive the next day. That evening Benedetti dined with the king confident that once William had informed him officially, the crisis would be over. The euphoric mood did not last. Returning to his hotel, he found fresh instructions awaiting him from Gramont which filled him with gloom. The foreign minister now ordered Benedetti to ask William not as head of the Hohenzollerns but as king of Prussia for ‘the assurance that he shall not again authorize this candidacy’.

Why did Gramont escalate the crisis? After all, diplomatic opinion in Paris believed France had won a significant victory. Even Thiers, a bitter critic of the government, commented that ‘… we emerge from an embarrassing dilemma with a victory; Sadowa is almost avenged’.⁸³ Was it because of the pressure of public opinion? Certainly feelings were already running very high in both Senate and chamber; the fact that the father and not the son had made the renunciation statement did not inspire confidence in it. Many deputies were strongly critical of the government’s handling of the situation, considering Gramont’s announcement on 13 July that the candidacy had been withdrawn and negotiations were proceeding with Prussia totally inadequate. Clément Duvernois inquired what guarantees the government intended to secure from Prussia against a renewal of the candidacy. Anticipation of serious trouble for the government unless he went much further may have swayed the decision. But this was really a secondary issue. Basically Gramont believed that if France was to score a really resounding diplomatic victory over Prussia, either the king in person or the Prussian government would have to announce the withdrawal. That Gramont was able to make the running at this point reveals much about the ambiguous relationship between the council of ministers and the emperor. Napoleon possessed very real power and ministers were much more dependent on him than on each other. That was how Gramont was able to take a step of the utmost gravity without consulting his colleagues. Initially Napoleon had been satisfied with the news of the withdrawal though, like Gramont, he was soon worried by adverse public reaction. But he quickly succumbed to Gramont’s arguments, which were supported by the empress who was openly seeking war. With Napoleon’s approval but without consulting Ollivier, Gramont drafted new instructions for Benedetti. On the other hand, when Ollivier met him late that night at the foreign office the prime minister readily agreed to the new course of action. On the basis of a letter from Napoleon confirming his decision prime minister and foreign minister sent off yet another telegram to Benedetti ordering him to obtain guarantees. That three emotionally unstable people should have been thrown together in positions of power at this crucial juncture was a tragedy for France and a revealing comment on the decision–making process in July 1870.

Significantly, Gramont’s colleagues were much less enamoured by his policy. When the council of ministers met on 13 July, according to Ollivier four ministers wanted to drop Gramont’s demand entirely but the minister of war, General Edmond Leboeuf, conscious of mounting tension, urged the calling–up of reservists.⁸⁴ During the debate on Leboeuf’s motion Napoleon suddenly informed the meeting of a message from the British ambassador, Lord Richard Lyons, expressing Britain’s deep concern at the new demands. This evidence of a change in the British attitude from sympathy to hostility may have been decisive. Certainly Leboeuf’s motion was defeated. Finally the council agreed by eight votes to four on a weak – and dangerous – compromise. In principle they supported the request for a guarantee of non–renewal but they insisted that it not be treated as an ultimatum. If the king of Prussia gave the guarantee, well and good; if not, so be it. Either way the affair of the Hohenzollern candidacy would be deemed to be at an end.

On 13 May Benedetti requested an audience with the king. As William had already left for his usual two–hour walk in the Kurgarten, Benedetti contacted Prince Anton Radziwill, the king’s equerry, who, along with Prince Albrecht, had accompanied the monarch on his walk. Benedetti asked Radziwill to inform the king that the French ambassador requested an audience in order to obtain a declaration for use by the French government when it had to face the chamber later in the day. Radziwill returned with the message that the king would receive Benedetti some time in the afternoon.

Benedetti’s reference to a declaration may well have put King William on his guard. Now in receipt of warning messages from Bismarck, the king probably intended to see Benedetti only after consulting Count Fritz zu Eulenburg, due to arrive in Bad Ems later that morning from Berlin. In accordance with the advice from Berlin the king intended to confine himself to the bare statement that Leopold’s decision had been announced to the Paris and Madrid governments. However, the king was handed a copy of the Kölnische Zeitung containing news of the withdrawal. Probably acting on sheer impulse the king sent Radziwill with the paper to Benedetti. After reading the passage Benedetti handed back the paper with thanks, and for the king’s benefit handed Radziwill a telegram stating that Karl Anton had informed the Spanish government the previous evening of the withdrawal. Whether Benedetti was encouraged by the royal gesture to believe he could presume on the king’s good nature and obtain the necessary declaration on the spot we do not know. Perhaps he simply felt the matter so urgent that it brooked no delay. At all events, he stationed himself at the park gate as the king left, clearly hoping for just such an encounter.

The king, out of politeness, took the initiative at this famous meeting which occurred at 11.30 a.m. on 13 July and is still marked by a commemorative stone. ‘Eh bien, voilà donc une bonne nouvelle qui nous sauve de toutes difficultés’, he remarked jovially to Benedetti.⁸⁵ He then thanked the ambassador for the news that the French government knew of the withdrawal, remarking light–heartedly that Benedetti was better informed than he was as he the King had received the news only by private telegram. But thankfully, the affair, which might have landed both countries in difficulties, was now over. And he assured Benedetti that when he received the official communication from Karl Anton he would inform the ambassador at once.

Benedetti seized his opportunity to advance the new demand: Karl Anton’s declaration was insufficient; would the king authorize him to inform Paris that he would use his royal authority to prevent any renewal of the candidacy in the future? The king replied that such a guarantee was out of the question. What would happen, he inquired, if one day Napoleon thought the prince the most suitable candidate? That would never happen, interjected Benedetti; indeed, public opinion in France was deteriorating hour by hour and a calamity might occur if the king refused to make the necessary declaration. To which William retorted that just as Napoleon could never say that he would not approve Leopold’s candidacy, so he (the king) could not say that Karl Anton’s declaration had settled the matter for ever. Benedetti pressed harder still: could he then inform his government that the king would never permit a renewal of the candidacy? At this William bridled and declared that he had made it abundantly clear that he could not make that sort of declaration. As a crowd had begun to gather making further discussion unseemly, the king raised his hat and walked on.

While Benedetti, back at his hotel, was reading the latest telegram from Gramont emphasizing the extreme urgency of obtaining the declaration,⁸⁶ Radziwill appeared, to inform him that Leopold had officially withdrawn according to a letter received at 1 p.m. Benedetti reminded the equerry that he still expected to be received in audience to explain in detail the reasons for the new demand. In fact, after receiving Karl Anton’s letter the king discussed with Eulenburg whether or not to go ahead with the audience. William’s instincts were against it for he felt morally affronted by the demand. Clearly Eulenburg told the king of Bismarck’s dissatisfaction with William’s conciliatory attitude and counselled sterner tones in view of German public opinion.

But when Radziwill conveyed Benedetti’s renewed request to the king, the latter wavered once again. In his reply, while reminding Benedetti of what he had said in the Kurgarten about the impossibility of making a declaration, he did authorize the Frenchman to inform his government that the king of Prussia entirely approved of Leopold’s withdrawal ‘in the same sense and in the same degree in which he had given his approval to the acceptance’. At long last the king had conceded what had been the main French demand. Nevertheless, in desperation Benedetti repeated his request for an audience. Before replying to the ambassador’s renewed request the king received most unwelcome news: Werther reported from Paris that Ollivier and Gramont had demanded a personal letter of apology from the king addressed to Napoleon in order to pacify French public opinion. Whereupon a highly indignant monarch told Benedetti through Radziwill that he flatly refused to grant him an audience and that, if he wished to pursue the matter further, he should address himself to the Prussian minister–president.

The by now thoroughly dejected ambassador made one final attempt on 14 July to reach the king. Fresh instructions had arrived from Gramont – who did not yet know of William’s refusal – urging Benedetti to secure the guarantee. Realizing that the king was virtually certain to refuse him an audience, Benedetti raised the matter with Eulenburg. In vain. Eulenburg reported back to Benedetti that the king had refused. As Benedetti had by now been ordered back to Paris with or without the guarantee, he sought to take formal leave of the monarch. King William was due to leave by the afternoon train for Koblenz. On the platform of Ems railway station Benedetti met the king for the last time. William reiterated that he had nothing to add to his previous statement but repeated that, if desired, negotiations could be continued at government level. Friendly to the last, the king parted from Benedetti with the words: ‘nous deux, nous resterons amis’.⁸⁷

While the king of Prussia had been genuinely affronted by the French demand with its clear implication that a king’s word was not his bond, his resistance – as we have seen – had been stiffened by Bismarck’s intervention. The chancellor was deeply concerned by the king’s conciliatory stance, especially by the damaging admission that the Prussian government had known of the candidacy. Bismarck felt that the time had come to return to Berlin. On the evening of 12 July, while still sitting in his coach outside the foreign office, he learned to his dismay of Leopold’s withdrawal. Since Gramont had elevated the affair into a make-or-break issue on 6 July, the withdrawal signified a loss of face for Prussia.

This was the moment of truth for Bismarck. Thoughts of resignation may have flashed through the head of this highly strung individual who habitually lived on his nerves. If so, he quickly suppressed them and set about plucking victory out of defeat. War was now a near certainty, for he could not expect the French to climb down after their initial triumph. As far as King William was concerned, Bismarck launched an immediate damage–limitation exercise. Further exchanges between the adroit French diplomat and the well–meaning but politically naïve monarch had to be avoided at all costs. Bismarck repeated the advice first tendered on 12 July: the king should not receive Benedetti. If William had to say something, he was urged to confine himself to the bare comment that Leopold would inform the Spanish government of his decision.

Originally Bismarck had intended to proceed at once to Bad Ems. Instead he stayed in Berlin and sent Eulenburg to see the king. Physical exhaustion may have played a part, but it is obvious that from Berlin he could more easily sound out diplomatic opinion and work with might and main to extricate himself from the impasse. To prevent a sense of anti–climax from dampening down the crisis, he instructed Busch to stir up the German press: Leopold’s withdrawal must be presented as the result of advice from London and Brussels, certainly not pressure from Prussia – that would not have been possible after Gramont’s provocative demands to which the king had no intention of agreeing. Busch was also to spread the story that the Reichstag would soon be recalled. This was part of a scheme forming in his fertile mind on 12–13 July: as reports were coming in of threatening military movements in France and of the fresh demands the French were likely to make, Prussia had every right to demand an explanation. If France refused to give a guarantee of her peaceful intentions and to withdraw Gramont’s impertinent demands, then a reconvened Reichstag would be informed of the situation – a step certain to inflame national feeling and make war inevitable. On 13 July Bismarck telegraphed the king to return to Berlin to help draw up an appropriate ultimatum to France. Meanwhile diplomatic soundings confirmed Prussia’s favourable position: Austria would certainly remain neutral; Britain and Russia were both critical of France; and Bavaria declared that in the event of war she would be on Prussia’s side, relieving Bismarck of his anxieties about South German reactions.

Nothing came of the ultimatum project because at 6.05 p.m. on 13 July a telegram arrived from Bad Ems containing a report of the king’s encounter with Benedetti in the Kurgarten. In his notoriously unreliable reminiscences Bismarck gave posterity a highly coloured and mendacious account of the origins of the so-called ‘Ems Telegram’. According to Bismarck, he was dining with Moltke and Roon, and all were in despondent mood when the telegram arrived. After reading it, Bismarck asked the generals if Prussia was ready for war. On receiving an affirmative reply he quickly deleted passages from the telegram so as to present the interview as a calculated insult to German national pride. When this version was given to the press and to all Prussian embassies abroad it would, he calculated, act as a ‘red rag to the Gallic bull’. On hearing Bismarck’s version Moltke exclaimed: ‘It has a different ring; it sounded like a parley, now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’⁸⁸

The truth is quite different. Bismarck and his companions were far from despondent around the dinner table. On the contrary, they were eagerly planning a counter-offensive against France. The telegram simply provided Bismarck with a better pretext for war than the ultimatum project. The original telegram, drafted by Heinrich Abeken on behalf of the king, was short and to the point:

His Majesty the King writes that Count Benedetti stopped me on the promenade to demand of me in a very importunate manner in the end that I should authorize him to send a telegram at once to the effect that I would bind myself in perpetuity never again to give my consent to the Hohenzollern’s renewal of the candidature. I declined in the end somewhat sharply for one should not à tout jamais undertake such commitments nor is it possible to do so. Naturally I told him that I had still received nothing and as he had better information via Paris and Madrid than I did, he would surely realize that my government was not involved in the affair. His Majesty has since then received a letter from the prince [Karl Anton]. As His Majesty told Count Benedetti that he was awaiting word from the prince, All Highest decided in view of the above-mentioned demand and on the advice of Count Eulenburg and myself not to receive Count Benedetti any more but to let him know through an adjutant that His Majesty had now received confirmation from the prince of the news Benedetti had already had from Paris and that he had nothing further to say to the ambassador. His Majesty leaves it to Your Excellency to decide whether our ambassadors and the press should be informed of Benedetti’s new demand.⁸⁹

The Ems Telegram with passages scored through in pencil by Bismarck does not exist, and never did. Bismarck simply dictated a shortened version for press consumption which ran as follows:

After the news of the renunciation of the Prince of Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French Government by the Royal Spanish Government the French ambassador made a further demand of His Majesty the King at Bad Ems that he should authorize him to send a telegram to Paris to the effect that His Majesty undertook in perpetuity never again to give his consent should the Hohenzollerns once more renew the candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the ambassador again and through his adjutant informed the ambassador that he had nothing further to say.⁹⁰

Between them Bismarck and Abeken had turned the truth completely upside down. All references to the king’s conciliatory gestures had been excluded from the final version and the Kurgarten encounter had been transformed into a brusque confrontation between an ambassador who had overstepped the bounds of propriety with his importunate demands and a highly incensed monarch who had rightly refused further dealings with him. Thus was born the ‘Ems legend’. It is significant that Bismarck elaborated upon the alleged rudeness of Benedetti as the crucial point when speaking to the Spanish and Russian ambassadors. He also ensured that the press drove home the same point, so much so that on 14 July even the Times correspondent in Berlin wrote that Benedetti’s ‘insolence’ was possibly intentional. After such an ‘insult to national honour’, to use the parlance of the day, the German public would expect diplomatic relations to be broken off, which was precisely the impression Bismarck sought to convey. By 9 p.m. at his instigation a special supplement to the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung containing only the text of the doctored Ems Telegram printed in large type and suitable for display in public places was being distributed free on the streets of Berlin. It had the desired effect: noisy crowds, infuriated by the ‘insolence’ of the French ambassador, gathered before the royal palace on Unter den Linden cheering the king and shouting ‘To the Rhine. Let us all defend it! ⁹¹

Whether war would break out still depended on French reactions. As the debate in the corridors of power in Paris swayed backwards and forwards, the doubt and uncertainty felt by the principal actors in the drama is painfully apparent. When news of the king’s explicit approval of the withdrawal arrived late on 13 July, Napoleon and Ollivier were greatly relieved. Even Gramont, who – encouraged by sharp criticism of government policy in both Senate and chamber and despite the council of ministers’ decision – had beavered away to obtain the guarantee at all costs, had to admit that ‘approbation entière et sans reserve’ was a big step forward. That was also the view of foreign diplomats in Paris who believed that France had won a considerable victory.

When news of the Ems Telegram arrived, the mood changed abruptly. Its blunt language stung the French to the quick. Gramont burst in on Ollivier, thrust the telegram into his hands and declared dramatically that this was an affront to national honour which France could not tolerate. Ollivier had to admit that the efforts the Germans were making to publicize the telegram through their embassies suggested that they were deliberately driving the French to war. He called in several colleagues and requested that the emperor call a council meeting that afternoon. Against a background of angry street demonstrations the council met at 12.30 p.m. on 14 July. Gramont, always one of the first to respond excitedly to the popular mood, threw his briefcase on to the table and declared dramatically that no foreign minister who opposed war was worthy to remain in office. Leboeuf, reflecting in his self-confidence the martial and ebullient mood of the army, demanded the immediate call-up of reservists so that France could exploit fully the fifteen days’ lead the army allegedly had over the Germans. However, Gramont did not have it all his own way. Several members wanted to defer action, pointing out that the telegram from Benedetti describing the encounter did not reveal any discourteous conduct even though the Ems Telegram published in Berlin was most certainly an affront to France. One of the opposition, more perceptive than most of the council, turned to Napoleon and observed prophetically: ‘Sire, entre le roi Guillaume et vous la partie n’est pas égal. Le roi peut perdre plusieurs batailles; Pour Votre Majesté la défaite, c’est la Révolution!’⁹² But the council was persuaded by Leboeuf’s arguments and decided at 4 p.m. on mobilization.

After Leboeuf departed for the war ministry to draft the necessary mobilization order, Benedetti’s telegram arrived containing details of the final meeting with King William on Bad Ems railway station. Once again the ‘native hue of resolution’ was ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’. So the king had not broken off diplomatic relations after all, as the Ems Telegram implied. An unidentified member of the council suggested that the king’s assurances ought to be accepted and the question of future guarantees turned over to a European congress which would hopefully enable France to save face by agreeing to exclude members of princely houses related to the rulers of Great Powers from accepting crowns going a-begging. Napoleon, with a sudden vision of playing host to a glittering assembly of plenipotentaries as he had done in the good old days, seized upon the suggestion with alacrity, as did Ollivier. At 5 p.m. the council finally agreed to make a statement along these lines the next day. Symptomatic of the muddled thinking in high places was their failure to rescind the decision to call up the reservists. Characteristically Napoleon wrote a note to Leboeuf suggesting that military measures were not as urgent as had been supposed earlier in the day.

As Leboeuf was on the point of dispatching orders to military commands all over France, he urged the emperor to decide the issue one way or another at a reconvened council meeting. Within a few short hours the pendulum swung back to war. Napoleon and Ollivier had already had second thoughts about the congress proposal. The empress warned Napoleon against the proposal while Ollivier’s family and friends, much to his surprise, denounced the proposed declaration when he read it out to them. And as public indignation mounted and crowds clamouring for war demonstrated on the streets, it dawned on both of them that the proposal would be howled down in the chamber.

Though the accounts of the meeting of the reconvened council of ministers held at 10 p.m. conflict, it seems that three considerations were decisive in burying the congress proposal. First, reports were coming in of considerable troop movements in Prussia. Secondly, in what was clearly a concerted campaign to turn opinion against France, the Berne and Munich embassies reported that the Prussian government was informing all other governments of the contents of the Ems Telegram with the addendum that Benedetti had deliberately insulted the king. Quite obviously Bismarck was determined to turn the Kurgarten episode into an official matter. Finally, Werther had informed Gramont that he was going on indefinite leave, an ominous sign that Prussia was probably clearing the decks for action. All thought of calling for a congress was abandoned. At 11 p.m. the decision to recall the reservists was upheld – though no formal vote was taken because of absences. Ollivier and Gramont were charged with the preparation of a new declaration to be discussed next morning before presentation to the chamber. Characteristically the council still did not agree on a declaration of war although it was painfully apparent that war could not now be avoided. As Napoleon ruefully reflected: ‘You see in what a situation a government can sometimes find itself. Even if we had no admissible reason for war we should now be compelled to declare it to obey the will of the country.’⁹³

The new declaration was approved by the full council after a brief meeting at 9 a.m. on 15 July. To carry the chamber into war, Ollivier and Gramont presented Prussian behaviour in the worst possible light. No reference was made to King William’s genuine search for an accommodation and, although grudging reference was made to his approval of the withdrawal, the phrase ‘entière et sans reserve’ was deliberately omitted. Heavy emphasis was laid on the refusal to grant Benedetti an audience, the communication of the Ems Telegram to other governments, the recall of the Prussian ambassador and, finally, on Prussia’s military measures. The declaration ended:

In these circumstances to make a further attempt at conciliation would have been neglectful of dignity and imprudent. We have neglected nothing to escape war; we are preparing to wage the war that is presented to us, leaving each side the share of responsibility that falls upon it. Yesterday we called up our reserves and with your concurrence are going to take at once the measures necessary to safeguard the interests, the security and the honour of France.

Napoleon enthusiastically applauded the declaration and the council agreed unanimously on a declaration of war.⁹⁴

The declaration was received with enthusiasm in the Senate, but in the chamber the government encountered some opposition. No one in that body doubted for an instant that France would win if it came to war. The left feared, however, that in the event of victory Napoleon would set aside the Liberal Empire. War must, therefore, be avoided if at all possible. Criticism was levelled at the government for refusing to be content with the withdrawal of the candidacy. What proof was there that France had really been insulted, the critics wanted to know. Thiers, arguing forcefully that the government had brought the war on itself, demanded that the chamber be informed of the content of the dispatches between the government and the ambassador. The demand was rejected by 159 votes to 84. Nevertheless, in order to mollify the government’s critics a commission was hastily set up to look in confidence at this documentation. In practice little attempt was made to get at the truth. Gramont, called to give evidence, easily persuaded the commission that the government had demanded withdrawal of the candidacy and guarantees of non-renewal simultaneously and not – as the left suspected – one after the other. Gramont’s economical use of the truth was well illustrated at the close of his testimony. When asked what allies France had, he implied that conversations with the British and Russian ambassadors – which he claimed he had broken off to appear before the commission – told their own story. The most notable omission of all was the failure to call Benedetti (now in Paris) to give a first-hand account of the events of 13 July. The commission’s report, which broadly endorsed the government’s position, was debated in the chamber. In the end war credits were voted by 245 to 10 votes, a decision greeted with roars of approval and shouts of ‘à Berlin’ by large crowds outside the chamber. On 15 July when news reached Potsdam that the war credits had been voted, King William, who had resisted the entreaties of Bismarck, Roon, Moltke and the crown prince for immediate mobilization, now agreed to give the necessary order. This was read out to wildly cheering crowds by the crown prince the same day. The French declaration of war was not, in fact, sent to Berlin until 17 July and handed to Bismarck by the French ambassador on 19 July. That was a mere formality. The war machines on both sides of the Rhine were already on the move.

To sum up on the origins of the war of 1870. This, like the war of 1866, was in essence a power struggle fought to determine who should be master in Europe. In one corner stood Prussia who, having consolidated her power north of the Main, wanted to extend her political control over the South German states. In the other corner was France whose objective was the negative one of preventing this drastic alteration in the balance of power and of arresting the gradual decline in France’s standing in Europe. The difference from 1866 was that in 1870 nationalism played a significant role in the outbreak of war. When Austria and Prussia went to war Prussia was almost totally isolated in Germany and did not have National Liberal support. Only after the victory over Austria did many nationalists become whole-hearted supporters of Prussia because a further extension of her power – about which there were few illusions – happened to coincide with their desire to create a Little German Reich. In the process they confidently expected that Bismarck would be swept along on a tidal wave of national feeling so that the new Reich would be a more liberal state than the North German Confederation. This feeling, which had a pronounced anti-French orientation, remained on the surface after 1866 sustained by the activities of the National Society and buoyed up by popular festivals so that it was a formidable psychological force which could be mobilized and manipulated by the Prussian government in 1870. No crowds had gathered outside the royal palace in Berlin in June 1866 when Bismarck declared the German Confederation at an end. Four years later noisy crowds, inflamed by the doctored Ems Telegram, demanded war against the ‘hereditary foe’.

It is important to realize that Bismarck had taken good care to ensure that the causes of war were located in French demands for hegemony in Europe (in effect), not in a German demand for final unification. Only subsequently did Little Germany come into being as a consequence, not a cause, of war. If the National Liberals had been the makers of policy, war would almost certainly have occurred but it would have been fought over the unification issue, over either Luxemburg or the admission of Baden to the North German Confederation. The international dimension was never far from Bismarck’s thoughts. A war fought purely and simply to complete the unification of Germany or to expand the frontiers of Prussia (much the same thing in Bismarck’s eyes ⁹⁵) might have led to international complications. By shifting the responsibility for war on to France through his exploitation of the Hohenzollern candidacy, turning a dynastic dispute into a matter of national honour, Bismarck effectively tied the hands of the Great Powers. Only later in the century did the decisive alteration in the balance of power consequent upon the defeat of France begin to worry them.

Similarly in the case of France, the balance of research suggests that national feeling did not drive the government into confrontation with Prussia. But the existence of strong anti-Prussian sentiments at a popular level ensured massive support for the government when war was declared. Indeed, arguably, the council of ministers’ decision for war preceded the largest and most vociferous demonstrations. By 1870 on both sides of the Rhine governments could rely on large sections of their urban population, aided and abetted by the press, to support whole-heartedly a view of international relations which substituted for rational discussion of disputes the ethos of the duelling match. ‘Honour’ had been ‘outraged’; ‘satisfaction’ was demanded; and when an ‘apology’ was not forth-coming, ‘trial by combat’ was welcomed as the only ‘honourable’ way of resolving the matter. Without the prevalence of that attitude a dispute about guarantees to prevent a German prince who had withdrawn his candidacy to a foreign throne from ever renewing it could not possibly have become an ‘acceptable’ reason for a major war.

THE WAR, THE PEACE OF FRANKFURT AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

On past form the French were the favourites to win the war. Their victories in the Crimea and Northern Italy suggested they were formidable opponents. The furia francesa when charging French infantry overwhelmed the Austrians in Italy was a quality which the Prussians recognized and respected. It was also confidently expected in government circles in Paris that Austria and Italy would fight alongside France, making possible a grand offensive into South Germany where it was also supposed the French would be favourably received. Furthermore France had reorganized her forces since 1866 and possessed new weapons superior to those of Prussia: the chassepot, a rifle capable of accurate fire up to 1600 yards compared with the needle gun’s 600 yards; and the mitrailleuse, a rudimentary machine gun which fired 150 rounds a minute and was effective up to 2000 yards.

The reality was very different. Neither Austria nor Italy joined in, frightened off finally by the Prussian victories on 6 August. And despite past glory in Russia and Italy, the French army was in poor shape. Her officers were poorly trained and lacked the social status of the Prussian officer corps – in the eyes of the French aristocracy the army symbolized Napoleon 1 whom many of them heartily detested while the middle class, busily enriching itself, detested it as a barbarous and costly institution. Only under Napoleon III had the army’s reputation revived. Even so, the general staff was woefully inferior to that of the Prussian army, as indeed were all general staffs at this time. And although France had invented the concept of the ‘nation in arms’ with universal conscription as its characteristic feature, since 1815 she had maintained a small army (because of her legislators’ desire to curtail expenditure) and limited the number of recruits by employing a ballot system to select them. In the 1860s the army was only 288,000 strong.

At first French soldiers consoled themselves with the thought that Napoleon 1 had regularly defeated superior forces with even smaller numbers. But after Sadowa desperate efforts were made by Napoleon and his generals to remedy this situation despite strong opposition from the Corps Législatif. The 1868 army law was designed to produce an army of 800,000 by 1875 supplemented by a Garde Mobile (a type of Landwehr) of 500,000. Unfortunately the organizational structure remained pitifully weak. The ruling principle remained as before: le système D: on se débrouillera toujours. At the outbreak of war mobilization was so chaotic that when Leboeuf arrived at imperial headquarters in Metz, confident that France could take the offensive, he found that only 200,000 of the 385,000 reservists had reported for duty. On these grounds an offensive across the Rhine was ruled out. Instead the French were forced to hold a defensive line running roughly from Metz through Saarbrücken (taken by the French in a rare offensive action) to Strassburg. Nor did they have any clear plan of campaign, partly because they had expected to go on to the offensive and partly because of conflicting views between Napoleon, commander-in-chief of the French armies, the war council in Paris and Marshals François Bazaine and Patrice MacMahon who commanded the army of the Rhine and the army of Chalons respectively.

The Germans were greatly surprised by the French failure to cross the Rhine. But, recovering quickly, Moltke ordered three armies into Lorraine: on the right flank the first army, 50,000 strong, commanded by General Karl Friedrich von Steinmetz; in the centre the second army, 134,000 strong, commanded by Prince Friedrich Karl; and on the left flank the third army, 125,000 strong, commanded by the crown prince. Moltke’s hopes of repeating the Sadowa victory by dealing a devastating blow at the French in a battle of encirclement north of the Saar failed because of the third army’s slowness in advancing and Napoleon’s failure to attack. But battles at Weissenburg and at Worth on 4 August and Spichern on 6 August – into which the German first and third armies blundered contrary to Moltke’s wishes – revealed the edge the Germans had over the French. The latter might have the chassepot and the mitrailleuse but since 1866 the Prussian artillery had improved out of all recognition and more than cancelled out the new weaponry on the French side. These early and bloody engagements finally ended all lingering hopes the French had of carrying the war into Germany.

As Bazaine fell back on Metz, he was surrounded by the Germans after a series of bloody but indecisive engagements on 16 August at Vionville and Mars-la-Tour and on 18 August at Gravelotte and St Privat. When Marshal MacMahon attempted to raise the siege of Metz, where Bazaine’s army was now imprisoned, he was trapped between the Meuse and the Belgian frontier. There followed on 1 September the decisive battle of Sedan. Surrounded by the German third army and pounded by 500 Prussian guns, surrender was the only course open to Napoleon, who had taken his stand with MacMahon. The emperor passed into genteel captivity at Wilhelmshöhe while 104,000 French soldiers were taken prisoner together with 419 cannon. The army of Chalons had ceased to exist. It was also the end of the Napoleonic regime. On 4 September Paris rose in revolt and a republic was proclaimed.

The war was not over. On the contrary, it now assumed the proportions of a national struggle. On the German side news of early victories released a tidal wave of national sentiment. Because of this, as well as the fact that the French declaration of war was a clear casus foederis, the southern states had gone to war promptly. Bavaria and Baden mobilized on 16 July and Württemberg on 17 July. Their contingents, incorporated in the third army, fought on the battlefield as enthusiastically as the Prussians. Demands were soon made in the German press for the punishment of the ‘wicked’ French; moral condemnation of the enemy and demands for her complete humiliation now became a regular feature of the total war situation in which people were pitted against people. It was accompanied by demands for territorial compensation in the shape of Alsace-Lorraine to secure Germany against future ‘aggressors who have ravished German soil for the past two hundred years’.

Similarly, on the French side national feelings were aroused. The government of National Defence promptly declared that France would fight on rather than yield ‘an inch of her soil or a stone of her fortresses’ to the Germans. When Bismarck informed Foreign Minister Jules Favre that Germany must have Alsace, part of Lorraine and Strassburg the government determined on guerre à outrance. Leon Gambetta, escaping from Paris by balloon, threw himself into the task of raising new armies. He also encouraged the formation of partisan bands – the francs-tireurs – a doubtful asset to any side in war time. Their attacks on German troops simply led to savage reprisals, adding a new horror to what was already a bloody conflict.

France was not lacking in manpower but the hurriedly raised and largely untrained Armies of National Defence were no match for disciplined German soldiers. On 28 September after bombarding and assaulting Strassburg, the city capitulated to the Germans. On 29 October Metz was starved into surrender and Bazaine’s army of the Rhine, 154,000 men in all, surrendered. The siege forces were now free to join the two armies which had cut Paris off from the outside world on 20 September. French attempts to relieve Paris during the next three months all failed. Bismarck, anxious to end the war before international complications arose, insisted on the bombardment of the capital city. This began on 5 January. An attempt by 90,000 troops to break out of the city on 19 January failed. On 22 January Paris asked for an armistice. When this came into force on 28 January the Franco-Prussian war had effectively ended. Peace negotiations commenced and peace preliminaries were agreed on 26 February and ratified on 3 March.

The main feature was the cession by France of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, an area once part of the Holy Roman Empire but gradually absorbed by France in the seventeenth century. After the victory at Sedan demands for the annexation of these provinces multiplied very rapidly in the German press. Bismarck encouraged them – another example of his manipulation of national feeling – though, as usual, his motives were not nationalistic. The fact that Alsace and part of Lorraine spoke a German dialect was of little interest to him, though he used the argument when it suited his book. Strategic reasons were decisive. Firmly believing that France was bound to remain an implacable foe, he insisted on securing the fortresses of Strassburg and Metz to protect France in the event of a war of revenge. The military agreed that it was essential to secure the Alsace-Lorraine salient; only because Germany mobilized more quickly than France had a French invasion of Baden been frustrated in July 1870. The popular demand for the provinces was yet another factor that turned the war – which could have ended with the overthrow of the Napoleonic regime – into a bitter national struggle. In the end France had to surrender the whole of Alsace and one-third of Lorraine (the so-called ‘German’ part). But she retained the fortress of Belfort commanding the road from the Jura to the Vosges, although only on condition that she allowed the Germans to march in triumph through Paris, which they did in March 1871.

In addition France was saddled with an indemnity of 5000 million francs, 1000 million to be paid in 1871 and the remainder within three years. German occupation forces were to be progressively withdrawn from most of France when 2000 million francs had been paid. Troops would remain in six departments and in the fortress of Belfort until the last 3000 million francs had been paid. In fact, France paid the indemnity in full by 1873 and all French territory was evacuated.

No account of the war of 1870–1 would be complete without some reference to the last stage in the creation of Little Germany. In July 1870 the wave of anti-French feeling which swept through the cities and towns of South Germany forced the governments – whether they wanted to or not-to order mobilization. In fact, South German troops played their part in the campaign with as much enthusiasm as the North Germans. After Sedan it was clear to the southern states that they would have to come to terms with the new political situation. Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt were ready to join the new Reich, the former with enthusiasm, the latter reluctantly but well aware that with one province already in the North German Confederation she had little option. Predictably Wurttemberg and Bavaria were much less eager to join. Instead they hoped to create a southern confederation only loosely associated with North Germany. To schemes of this sort Bismarck was adamantly opposed and, employing his usual tactics of intrigue, pressure and blandishments, he forced them in the end to abandon these ideas. By the end of November after difficult negotiations, all four states had signed treaties of accession to the new state.

Bismarck was obliged to make a number of concessions to the southern states. The authority of the federal council was extended in formal matters; for example, its consent was now required for declarations of war. Bavaria and Wurttemberg were allowed to keep their own railway network and postal and telegraph systems. And while the Wurttemberg armed forces became part of the Prussian army, the king retained the right to appoint the commander and all officers. Bavaria did even better; her king remained in complete control of the Bavarian army which would pass under Prussian command only in war time. In addition she kept her diplomatic corps; and she was to preside over a special foreign affairs committee of the federal council on which Wurttemberg and Saxony had permanent seats. Although these concessions limited Prussian power they did not seriously weaken it and were a useful foil against the Reichstag whose power Bismarck was determined not to extend.

Once the treaties of accession had been concluded Bismarck arranged for King William to be offered the imperial title. This was in Bismarck’s view essential to give cohesion and lustre to Little Germany. The senior German prince, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was prevailed upon to make the offer in return for a bribe of 300,000 marks a year, a secret arrangement which came to light only years later after King Ludwig’s death and after Bismarck had left office. King William was extremely reluctant to accept a title which might diminish his standing as king of Prussia. Accordingly he held out to the bitter end in his usual obstinate manner for a form of words which subordinated the imperial to the royal title: ‘by the grace of God King of Prussia chosen emperor of Germany’. Just as firmly Bismarck insisted on a formula which gave precedence to the imperial dignity and would on that account be more acceptable to the south: ‘by the grace of God German emperor and King of Prussia’. The issue was resolved only at the very last moment on 18 January when the German empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in a ceremony attended by princes and by 500 officers from the army which had besieged Paris, but from which the Reichstag delegation was carefully excluded.⁹⁶ Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden, the highest-ranking prince present in the absence of the three kings, had the honour of greeting the king with his new title. As neither king nor minister would give way, the grand duke dodged the issue with his own salutation: ‘Long live his imperial and royal majesty Emperor William!’ A furious sovereign ignored his chancellor and shook hands with the other dignitaries. However, he soon made up his petty quarrel with a minister who had become that rare political animal, an indispensable adviser, and who was to preside over the destinies of the new Reich for twenty years and was to outlive his royal master by ten.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Quoted in Rudolf Buchner, Die deutsch–französische Tragödie 1848–1864 (Würzburg, 1965), p. 118.

2. Quoted in R. Poidervin/J. Bariéty, Frankreich und Deutschland (Munich, 1982), p. 73.

3. Quoted in Rudolf Buchner, op. cit., p. 16.

4. Paul Henry, ‘La France et les nationalités en 1848. D’après les correspondances diplomatiques’ Revue historique 188–9 (1940) pp. 244–5.

5. F. Valsecchi, ‘Das Zeitalter Napoleon Ills und Bismarcks 1854–1870’, Historia Mundi Bd. X (Bern, 1961), p. 59.

6. E. Ollivier, L’empire libéral 3, p. 537.

7. Quoted in Lynn M. Case, French opinion on war and diplomacy during the Second Empire (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 178.

8. Ibid., p. 205.

9. Ibid., p. 213.

10. Ibid., p. 210.

11. Quoted in W.A. Fletcher, The mission of Vincent Benedetti to Berlin 1864–1870 (The Hague, 1965), p. 109.

12. Nationalist historians indignantly repudiate the suggestion that Bismarck could have offered to cede German territory. That was not the crown prince’s impression. Cf. Heinrich Otto Meisner, Kaiser Friedrich III: Tagebücher von 1848 bis 1866 (Leipzig, 1926), p. 458 entry 8 July 1866.

13. Writing to Goltz on 8 August he remarked: ‘I do not consider Belgium a viable state in the long run; and we can tolerate the increase in the power of France through French Belgium because it does not disturb our position in Germany and does not render impossible a friendly relationship between Germany and France as a cession of German territory would.’ GW 6, no. 539.

14. The terms of the agreement were as follows:

(i) France would recognize the conquests made by Prussia and the establishment of the North German Confederation.

(ii) The king of Prussia promised to facilitate French acquisition of Luxemburg by negotiating with the king of the Netherlands. The French would pay compensation to him.

(iii) The French emperor would not oppose a federal union between the North German Confederation and the southern states provided that it respected the latter’s sovereignty.

(iv) In the event of French troops being sent to Belgium, the king of Prussia would render assistance to France against any power intervening against her.

(v) France and Prussia would conclude an offensive–defensive alliance. APP 8, no. 10.

15. M. Stürmer, Das ruhelose Reich: Deutschland 1866–1918 (Berlin, 1983), p. 153, believes that Bismarck toyed with the idea of compensation; L. Gall, Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär (Propyläen, 1980), argues that there was no proof (pp. 406–7); Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany: The Period of Unification 1815–1870 (Princeton, 1963), p. 375, believes Bismarck kept his options open.

16. GW 6 no. 684, Bismarck to Robert von Goltz, 15 February 1867.

17. RKN 2 no. 323, 19 December 1866; no. 355, 13 January 1867.

18. OD XIV no. 4014, Moustier to Benedetti, 7 January 1867.

19. E. Ollivier, op. cit., p. 280.

20. Ibid., p. 294.

21. ‘The treaties would serve us as a weapon for repelling attacks on the Main line which will not fail to be made in the Reichstag’; APP 8 no. 288, Bismarck to the missions in Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe.

22. Hermann Oncken, Rudolf von Bennigsen: Ein deutscher liberaler Politiker. Nach seinen Briefen und hinterlassenen Papieren, II (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1910), p. 36.

23. O. Pflanze, op. cit., p. 380.

24. GW 6 no. 740, Telegram to Karl von Werther, 3 April 1867.

25. Ibid. no. 738, telegram to Count Perponcher.

26. Quoted in R. Wilhelm, Das Verhältnis der süddeutschen Staaten zum Norddeutschen. Bund (1867–1870) (Husum, 1978), p. 17.

27. GW 6 no. 515, Bismarck to Robert von Goltz, 31 July 1866.

28. GW 6, telegram to Baron von Manteuffel, 11 August 1866.

29. GW 14 no. 486, Bismarck to Leopold von Gerlach, 20 January 1854.

30. O. Pflanze, op. cit., p. 371. A surprising feature of the treaties was the absence of any time limit in duration or of any provision for a state to contract out.

31. Quoted in Gustav Roloff, ‘Bismarcks Friedenschlüsse mit den Süddeutschen im Jahre 1866’, HZ 146 (1932), p. 32.

32. R. Wilhelm, op. cit., pp. 163–4.

33. Ibid., p. 164.

34. Ibid., p. 163 thinks they would have done so, whereas M. Sturmer, op. cit., p. 160. disagrees.

35. Quoted in Werner Richter, Bismarck (London, 1962), p. 142.

36. GW 6a, Bismarck to Baron von Flemming, 13 November 1867.

37. GW 7 no. 201, Bismarck to General von Suckow, 11 May 1868.

38. Ibid.

39. The Patriotic Party won seventy-nine seats, the liberals fifty-five and the ministerial party twenty.

40. After by–elections in the spring of 1870 the Partriotic Party won an additional three seats.

41. Veit Valentin, Bismarcks Reichsgründung im Urteil englischer Diplomaten (Amsterdam, 1937), p. 409.

42. Quoted in J. Becker, ‘Zum Problem der Bismarckischen Politik in der spanischen Thronfrage 1870’, HZ (212), June 1971, FN pp. 539–40, from the diary of the Baden foreign minister, Freydorf, 3 March 1870 after a conversation with Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden. Bismarck offered military assistance to Stuttgart; R. Wilhelm, op. cit., p. 183, Spitzemberg to Varnbüler, 23 March 1870.

43. GW 6b no. 1327, Bismarck to Georg von Werthern, 26 February 1869. It has to be remembered in this context that he was concerned to allay Bavarian fears about a forward Prussian policy.

44. GW 6b no. 1459, Bucher to Georg von Werthern, 10 December 1869.

45. G. Windell, The Catholics and German Unity 1866–1971 (University of Minnesota, 1954), p. 246.

46. Quoted in J. Becker, ‘Der Krieg mit Frankreich als Problem der kleindeutschen Einigungspolitik Bismarcks 1866–1870’ in M. Stürmer, Das kaiserliche Deutschland: Politik und Gesellschaft 1870–1918 (Düsseldorf, 1970), p. 75.

47. Quoted in M. Stürmer, Das ruhelose Reich, p. 162.

48. GW 15, p. 309.

49. Aus dem Leben des Königs Karl von Rumänien. Aufzeichnungen eines Augenzeugen, vol. 2, passim.

50. H. Hesselbarth, Drei psychologische Fragen zur spanischen Thronkandidatur Leopolds von Hohenzollern. Mit Geheimdepeschen Bismarcks, Prims usw, (Leipzig, 1913).

51. R. Fester, Briefe Aktenstücke und Regester zur Geschichte der Hohenzollernischen Thronkandidatur in Spanien (Leipzig and Berlin, 1913), Hefte 1 and 2.

52. Although they believed French hostility to German unification was the real cause of the war, they had to admit that ‘… it is possible to draw the conclusion that he [Bismarck] wanted to create a casus belli and provoke the conflict’. G. Bonnin, Bismarck and the Hohenzollern candidature for the Spanish throne: The documents in the German diplomatic archives (London, 1957), p. 34.

53. Richard Howard Lord, The Origin of the War of 1870. New documents from the German Archives (Cambridge, Mass, 1924).

54. Jochen Dittrich, Bismarck Frankreich und die spanische Thronkandidatur der Hohenzollern (Munich, 1962).

55. Hans Delbrück in several articles in the Preussische Jahrbücher: ‘Der Ursprung des Krieges von 1870’, vol. 10; ‘Das Geheimnis der Napoleonischen Politik im Jahre 1870’, vol. 17. Delbrück admitted that Bismarck’s strategy had an offensive – but not a belligerent – flavour, whereas Fester considered it purely defensive in Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der Hohenzollernschen Thronkandidatur in Spanien (Leipzig, 1913).

56. H. Hesselbarth, op. cit., p. 60.

57. Ernst Denis, La fondation de l’empire allemand 1852–1870 (Paris, 1906); Jean Jaurès, La guerre franco–allemande (Paris, 1908).

58. H. Rothfels, Bismarck und der Staat. Ausgewählte Dokumente (Darmstadt, 1958); L.Reiners, Bismarck (Munich, 1956–7); W. Richter, Bismarck (London, 1964); Eberhard Kolb, Der Kriegsausbruch 1870: Politische Entscheidungsprozesse und Verantwortlichkeiten in der Julikrise 1870 (Gottingen, 1970); A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck: The man and the statesman (London, 1955).

59. A.J.P. Taylor, op. cit., pp. 115–6.

60. A. Sorel, Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco–allemande (Paris, 1875); Henri Welschinger, La guerre de 1870, causes et responsabilité 2 vols (Paris, 1910); Henry Salomon, L’ Ambassade de Richard de Metternich à Paris (Paris, 1930).

61. C. Grant Robertson, Bismarck (London, 1947); F. Darmstaedter, Bismarck and the Creation of the Second Reich (London, 1948); J. Becker, ‘Zum Problem der Bismarckischen Politik in der spanischen Thronfrage 1870’, HZ 212, June 1971; George Kent, Bismarck and his times (South Illinois University Press, 1978).

62. H. von Holborn (ed.), J.M. von Radowitz: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Botschafters (Berlin, 1925), I, p. 228.

63. H. von Friesen, Richard Freiherr von Friesen: Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben. Aus dem Nachlass (Dresden, 1910), III, p. 106.

64. GW 6b no. 1334, Bismarck to Prince Reuss, 9 March 1869.

65. O. Pflanze, op. cit, p. 447.

66. W.N. Medlicott, Bismarck and Modern Germany (London, 1965), pp. 18–2. Cf. O. Pflanze, op.cit., p. 449: ‘Bismarck’s goal … was a crisis with France. He deliberately set sail on a collision course with the intention of provoking either a war or an internal collapse.’

67. L. Gall, op. cit., p. 425; ibid., p. 426. The exception is E. Engelberg, Bismarck Urpreusse und Reichsgründer (Berlin, 1985), p. 726: while agreeing that Bismarck had begun ‘silent aggression’ in encouraging the candidacy, Engelberg goes on to say that Paris and Berlin were both set on war. Nevertheless ‘historically France put herself in the wrong by opposing the national unification of Germany’. This judgement is explicable in terms of the Marxist–Leninist belief that the economic consequences of unification, i.e. the emergence of a German industrial proletariat, formed an essential step on the road to socialism.

68. In November the duke of Savoy was elected king but abdicated in February 1873. In 1874 the prince of the Asturias finally became king as Alfonso XII.

69. OD XXIV no. 7368, Benedetti to Marquis de La Vallette.

70. Karl Anton asked King William in April to give his permission for the Hohenzollern–Sigmaringens to decline the offer, which the king was only too happy to do.

71. Eberhard Kolb arrives at this conclusion by assuming that, as the possibility of war is not mentioned in the diplomatic correspondence, there is no reason to suppose it was in Bismarck’s mind.

72. G. Bonnin, op. cit., p. 64, Karl Anton to Bismarck, 25 February 1870. And to Abeken he wrote on 8 July – admittedly at the height of the crisis – ‘I not only dimly sensed but clearly foresaw that the whole business would touch France to the quick’ ibid., p. 230.

73. GW II no. 12, to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation, 16 April 1869.

74. When a worried Karl Anton asked Major von Versen on 19 June whether the candidacy would not lead to complications with France, the latter replied: ‘Bismarck says that is just what he is looking for.’ G. Bonnin, op. cit., p. 278; but cf. Eberhard Kolb, op. cit, p. 48.

75. Too much should not be made of the clerk’s mistake. Had the Cortes elected Leopold, France would still have reacted angrily to the news.

76. T. Zeldin, Emile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire of Napoleon III (Oxford, 1963), p. 174.

77. E. Ollivier, op. cit., 14, p. 110.

78. Ibid.

79. A. Sorel, Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco–allemande (Paris, 1875), I, p. 86.

80. Robert von Keudell, Fürst und Fürstin Bismarck: Erinnerungen 1848–1872 (Berlin, 1901), p. 429.

81. It is indicative of Gramont’s excitable and euphoric frame of mind that in a private letter to the ambassador he wrote: ‘If the king won’t advise the prince of Hohenzollern to renounce, well, it’s immediate war and in a few days we’ll be on the Rhine.’ OD XXVIII no. 8382.

82. On 10 July the king sent Colonel Karl von Strantz to inform Karl Anton of French military preparations; though as determined as ever not to influence the Hohenzollern–Sigmaringens, the king was clearly doing all he could to force a withdrawal out of them.

83. Quoted in L. Steefel, Bismarck, the Hohenzollern Candidacy and the Origins of the Franco–German War of 1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 146.

84. Esquirou de Parieu, Charles Plichon, Charles Louvet and Emile Ségris. As there are no protocols of the council’s proceedings, we are dependent on the divergent recollections of those participants who subsequently put pen to paper.

85. GW 6b no. 1613, Telegram to Georg von Werthern, 13 July 1870 FN2.

86. After the council deliberations of 13 July Gramont had, of course, no right to take this line.

87. W.A. Fletcher, op. cit., p. 259.

88. Otto von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen Reden und Briefe (Berlin, 1951), p. 231.

89. Heinrich Abeken, Ein schlichtes Leben in bewegter Zeit (Berlin, 1898), p. 231. It is not certain whose suggestion it was that the press be informed. It may possibly have been Eulenburg. As early as 8 July the king thought that Gramont’s declaration should be publicly repudiated. What is odd is the suggestion that the press be informed about negotiations not yet ended.

90. GW 6b no. 1612.

91. The Times correpondent, commenting on the effect of the supplement, wrote: ‘It was hailed by young and old alike: it was welcome to fathers of families and to beardless youths; it was read and reread by women and girls, and, in an outburst of patriotism, turned over finally to the servants. There was but one opinion concerning the manly and dignified conduct of the king; there was a unanimous determination to follow his example and pick up the glove that had been thrown in the face of the nation …. It was the explosion of long-restrained wrath. ‘Quoted in Emile Ollivier, The Franco–Prussian War and its Hidden Causes (London, 1913), p. 290.

92. Le Lautcourt, Les origines de la guerre de 1870: la candidature Hohenzollern 1868–1870 (Paris, 1912), pp. 498–9.

93. Emile Ollivier, op. cit. 14, p. 373.

94. Pierre de la Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire (Paris, 1903), VI, p. 301. Whether the ministers who opposed war on 14 July were now completely converted or merely thought discretion the better part of valour is an open question.

95. He commented in his reminiscences: ‘The Gordian knot of the German situation cannot be dissolved in mutual love by dualism but only hacked through by military means. The important point was to win the king of Prussia and the Prussian army consciously or unconsciously for the national cause. Whether one considered the main issue from a Borussian angle to be the leading role of Prussia or from a national angle to be the unification of Germany, both objectives coincide.’ GW 15, p. 198.

96. The king, surrounded by princes and generals, received this thirty–strong delegation on 18 December when Simson (who had played the same role on behalf of the Frankfurt Parliament in April 1849) petitioned him to accept the imperial crown.