“What a stroke of luck it was that the French committed such a folly!” 1
—BISMARCK REUNION WITH ROON AND MOLTKE, 1877
“At no time has peace ever been so assured.” 2
—PREMIER ÉMILE OLLIVIER BEFORE PARLIAMENT, JULY 1, 1870
Prussia had been an undisguised threat since defeating first the Danes, and then the Austrians (Sadowa, in 1866). Field Marshals Albrecht von Roon at the war office and Helmut von Moltke commanding the army had transformed the provincial Prussian troops into an imposing, well-trained, battle-blooded fighting force that now included the North German Confederation as well. Sweeping new well-coordinated war plans prepared by an efficient, modern general staff left nothing to chance, including the well-rehearsed rapid national mobilization plan using the nation’s railways.
Despite the glorious victories and conquests of Napoléon and his Grand Army resulting in the occupation of Western Europe, which the French people continued to celebrate under the Second Empire, serving in the French military was in fact no more popular in the 1860s than it had been half a century earlier. Louis Napoléon’s demand for better training and arms, expanded reserves, reinforced by an increased military budget, had been voted down. Even before taking office in January 1870 as the new liberal French prime minister and minister of justice, Émile Ollivier had used all his considerable influence and skills of oratory to fight the allocation of any new money for this largely old-fashioned army. By 1870, Prussia had the finest trained army in Central and Western Europe and made little attempt to conceal the possible threat it posed to France, a threat most French politicians chose to ignore. If it came to war, the patriotic French army was invincible. Unlike Premier Ollivier, however, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte had his doubts.
In fact Louis Napoléon was increasingly losing his grip on affairs throughout 1869 and 1870. The few remaining members of the old guard were now startled and troubled by his choice of the republican Émile Ollivier as prime minister in January. This was borne out later in May and June when Ollivier again successfully opposed the emperor’s increased military budget and army reserves in the face of growing Prussian military might. “The Budget of the Ministry of War is always under attack by politically motivated deputies with short-term agendas and aims in order to gain public applause,” Louis Napoléon argued. “They fail to take into consideration the long-term disruption they cause to our army.” As for temporary short-term measures, “they never result in significant budgetary costs.… And now faced as we are with the reality of a Germany capable of mobilizing one million crack troops, these very politicians talk about reducing our army! Clearly they have learned nothing from the experiences of the past.”3 Instead Ollivier demanded the reduction of the army by ten thousand men. He was overwhelmingly supported by Parliament and cousin Jérôme. “At no time has peace ever seemed more assured,” Prime Minister Ollivier informed Parliament and the nation. Three weeks later war was declared.
* * *
New Year’s Eve celebrations at the Tuileries were the quietest since the proclaiming of the Second Empire, and this almost gloomy ambiance deepened when shocking news reached Louis Napoléon on the tenth of January, 1870. Another notoriously troublesome first cousin, Pierre Bonaparte, the son of his late uncle Lucien, had just shot and killed a young man. A French journalist by the name of Victor Noir had arrived on Pierre Bonaparte’s doorstep with a colleague, representing Paschal Grousset, another journalist with the violent anti-Bonapartist paper, La Revanche, demanding a retraction of an earlier abusive article by Pierre Bonaparte.4 An irate Pierre grabbed a pistol and shot the unarmed Noir. No one denied the facts.
The newly installed prime minister–justice minister, Émile Ollivier, personally intervened, ordering the arrest of Pierre Bonaparte, who was locked up in the Conciergerie. The funeral cortège of the left-wing editor Victor Noir, forming at Neuilly on the twelfth of January, promised to be a spectacular occasion, as some 100,000 boisterous left-wing supporters would be led by Auguste Blanqui, Louis Delescluze, and the wildest of them all, the current editor of La Marseillaise, Henri Rochefort, who was also a parliamentary deputy. As the Revolution of February 1848 had begun with just such a very angry crowd turning into a political demonstration, this was something the authorities were most anxious to avoid. Thousands of troops were deployed along the route all the way to the Tuileries. Beyond some scuffles, all passed off reasonably well, but Deputy Henri Rochefort subsequently had his immunity withdrawn, and on the seventh of February was sentenced to six months in prison—not for the first time in his life.
Louis Napoléon had no wish to follow in the steps of the July Monarchy and lose his crown as well. On March 27, 1870, the High Court hearing the case against Pierre Bonaparte pronounced him innocent! There was vigorous national and international consternation, as demonstrators marched through all the large cities of the country. Louis Napoléon lost more political support and no doubt privately cursed his wretched relatives. Although personally wishing to see his cousin put away behind bars, unfortunately Pierre’s name was Bonaparte, and apart from paying an indemnity to the victim’s family, he quite literally got away with murder. But at least the emperor had the right to deport his cousin from France, which he promptly did.5
As it was, there was much unrest in France throughout the new year, including two bloody strikes at the Le Creusot ironworks, which were put down through civil procedure, thanks to their influential owner and president of the Corps Législatif, Eugène Schneider, who promptly fired a hundred of the ringleaders.6 In the meantime, as part of his agreement with Prime Minister Ollivier, Louis Napoléon ordered the official reforms for the 1852 constitution to include additional liberal changes. This he was to cap by a national plebiscite on May 8, 1870, which overwhelmingly approved these reforms—and Louis Napoléon’s Second Empire—by more than seven million three hundred thousand ayes, against one and a half million nays.7 Despite some growing liberal opposition, Louis Napoléon still held overwhelming support, or so it would appear.
* * *
For some time there had been rumors from Madrid that General Juan Prim (1814–1870), Spanish prime minister from 1868 to December 1869, had offered the vacant Spanish throne (to replace Queen Isabella II, whom he had earlier deposed) to a German prince, Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. On the second of July, 1870, Louis Napoléon was informed that Prince Leopold had accepted the offer of the Spanish crown. When the official government organ, Le Journal des Débats, released this information, there were protests and angry demonstrations in the French capital. War Minister Marshal Edmond Leboeuf did not improve the situation by ranting about this “Prussian insult” before the Assembly.
In fact Bismarck, who had been patiently waiting, month after month, year after year, for the right moment to attack and destroy the French army to gain his vengeance once and for all, was now deliberately taunting France by placing a German on the Spanish throne and a German-controlled Spanish army along the French frontier.
* * *
No one could defy history, according to Curzio Malaparte and Leo Tolstoy, and the remorseless momentum toward war continued to build up, day by day, thanks in large part to Prime Minister Ollivier’s feckless newly appointed fifty-one-year-old foreign minister, Antoine Alfred Agénor, the Duke de Gramont. Scion of an ancient family, the haughty Agénor de Gramont enjoyed an idle, undisciplined, luxurious childhood that gave way to a long series of youthful affairs and scandals with society women, resulting in several abrupt changes of habitation. After attending the École Polytechnique, Gramont then briefly served in the army until the age of twenty-one, when he turned to a diplomatic career, serving as minister to various German states, Victor Emmanuel’s Piedmont, and the Vatican. In May 1870 he was recalled from his last embassy in Vienna to take charge of the Quai d’Orsay.
Given Gramont’s wide travel throughout the German states and Europe, and his fluent German and personal familiarity with a dozen German kings and princes, including Prussia’s Wilhelm I and Austria’s Franz Josef, it might be expected that after twenty-five years’ diplomatic experience, Louis Napoléon could rely on this man. What his personnel record did not reveal, however, was a fatuous, self-indulgent, opinionated fossil of the Ancien Régime. This was in fact a man who knew everything and listened to no one, including Prime Minister Ollivier and the Gentleman in the Tuileries. He was thus destined to play a calamitous role in the events to follow in the summer of 1870, even as a much weakened Louis Napoléon faded helplessly into the shadows of his own throne.
* * *
Meanwhile, touring the spa of Bad Ems, just south of Coblenz, with his troupe, Jacques Offenbach, appearing in his famous sky blue jacket, bright yellow trousers, and green Italian peacock hat, was invited by King Wilhelm I, also at Ems, to present the composer’s one-act light opera La Chanson de Fortuno at a special anniversary celebration of the Prussian victory of Sadow on the third of July, to be attended by his guest Tsar Alexander. It was a success and Wilhelm roared with delight, but following that performance, a most uneasy Offenbach departed that resort posthaste.
Back in Paris, international tension continued to grow, and on July 5, 1870, Foreign Minister Gramont complained to British ambassador Lord Lyons of the German “insult,” presented by Prince Leopold’s candidacy for the Spanish throne … “a slap in the face to Louis Napoléon,” Jules Hansen called it.8 The next day he addressed a ministerial statement to the assembly, informing them that if Bismarck’s Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish throne were not withdrawn forthwith, Gramont would know how to defend “French national interests and honor.” An emergency cabinet meeting was held in the Tuileries that same day, with War Minister Marshal Edmond Leboeuf personally assuring Louis Napoléon that “the French Army is ready and prepared for anything.”9 Nevertheless Gramont insisted that “the wisdom of the German people would never possibly permit a war to break out between Prussia and France.”10
That same sixth of July, the Prussian ambassador to the Tuileries, Albrecht Werther, was summoned to Ems for consultations with Wilhelm I. Vincent, Count Benedetti, the French ambassador to Prussia, also at Bad Ems, was personally informed by the seventy-three-year-old Prussian king that he would approve of the withdrawal of the German prince, Leopold, as a candidate if that prince and his father requested it. But the following day, on the seventh of July, Gramont issued new instructions to Benedetti “to insist” on the Prussian king advising Leopold to withdraw. With drunken French mobs clamoring to march on Berlin, the ultra-patriot publisher Émile de Girardin fanned the flames, demanding that the French army drive “the Prussians across the Rhine with the butt of their rifles!” even as the tsar was privately advising “caution and abstention” on the part of the Prussian king.11
“If the [Prussian] king will not advise Prince von Hohenzollern to reject the Spanish throne, then it means war,” a haughty Gramont pronounced. “I have Bismarck to thank for this wretched state of affairs!” Wilhelm I declared angrily on the eighth after learning that Prince Leopold was changing his mind after talking to Bismarck and would now consider accepting the crown after all. But it was not until two o’clock in the afternoon of the twelfth that Ambassador Benedetti finally received Wilhelm’s final response: “The King has consented to give his entire and unreserved approbation to the withdrawal of the Prince of Hohenzollern. He will do nothing beyond that.” And independently that afternoon Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern duly sent a dispatch to General Prim in Madrid, formally renouncing the Spanish crown once and for all. “We have what we want—Peace!” a jubilant Prime Minister Émile Ollivier informed the Assembly.12
While Paris was celebrating Leopold’s renunciation of the Spanish prize, not so the gentlemen at 76 Wilhelmstrasse—the three “vons,” Roon, Moltke, and Bismarck (who afterward related the events of that afternoon of the twelfth of July to his son Herbert). Moltke was angry upon learning of the news “because he had just made the journey [to Berlin] for nothing, finding the war he had long planned now slipping away from him.… [And] Old Roon was depressed as well. Until now,” Bismarck continued in his letter, “I thought I was standing on the verge of the greatest of historical events [his war with France], and instead all I will end up with is the interruption of my spa cure [at Varzin]!” It looks as if there will be “no battlefield promotion for you after all,” he informed his son Herbert.13
Back in Paris on this twelfth of July, everyone was rejoicing over what the normally phlegmatic François Guizot enthusiastically summed up as “the most superb diplomatic victory I have ever seen. We have got our peace!”14 Some in Paris, however, were as disappointed as Bismarck in Berlin, including War Minister Edmond LeBoeuf and General Charles Bourbaki, and in particular the by now hysterical foreign minister Agénor de Gramont, who was at an emotional breaking point. Prince Leopold had renounced the throne, but for the overwrought Gramont that did not suffice. Still on edge and under the influence of the emotional Gramont and patriotic Eugénie, and his aggressive war minister Leboeuf calling for blood, Louis Napoléon now made the most dreadful decision of his life. At ten p.m. that evening, he authorized Gramont to instruct French ambassador Benedetti—still in Bad Ems—to submit a final humiliating ultimatum, insisting on “a guarantee” that Wilhelm I renounce the Spanish throne “for all German princes in the future.” At midnight the relentless Gramont duly dispatched the fatal telegram to Benedetti at Ems.15
When Benedetti attempted to see the Prussian monarch in the Kurgarten at nine a.m. the next morning, the thirteenth of July, to present the Quai d’Orsay’s latest demands, however, he was informed by an aide-de-camp that Wilhelm saw no reason for another meeting as he had nothing to add to what he had already said. The king then sent a dispatch to Bismarck instructing him to respond formally to Benedetti. “Let the Ambassador be told through an adjutant that he had now received from the Prince [Leopold] confirmation of which Benedetti had previously received from Paris and therefore had nothing further to say to the Ambassador.” For the long-plotting Bismarck, this was “the moment,” the opportunity he had been seeking, as he sat down to draft his own edited version of the official Prussian response for the Quai d’Orsay: “His Majesty the King has … refused to receive the French Ambassador again and let him know through an adjutant that His Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the Ambassador.” France was duly insulted, and the Ems Telegram entered history.16
Deliberating at three emergency meetings held at the Tuileries during the course of the fourteenth, a shocked Foreign Minister Gramont, confronted with the rude consequences of his own blunder, now somehow still expected a peaceful solution. He suddenly favored an international congress to act as mediator. A clearly unhappy Louis Napoléon, facing this unanticipated crisis, lost in silent gloom, most definitely wanted to avoid war. By ten o’clock that evening, at the third and final cabinet meeting of the day, after learning of fresh insulting verbal remarks by Bismarck to British ambassador Lord Loftus, a saddened, reluctant, and beaten Napoléon III—with a strong nudging from an arrogantly superior Eugénie at his side—decided on war against Prussia. (She had been indignant at the very idea of a “German king” being foisted upon the Spanish throne.) France had been humiliated and insulted. National honor required it, because of the utterly irresponsible actions of Gramont, and a weak, vacillating Louis Napoléon’s acceptance to go along with it. At this point Louis Napoléon could have stepped in from the shadows and overruled everyone and refused to go to war—he alone had the authority to do so—but he lacked the will and character required at the most critical moment of his life. Later that evening of the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, War Minister Marshal Leboeuf announced the mobilization of the French army.
On the sixteenth, an anguished Wilhelm I, badgered in turn by Bismarck, reluctantly authorized the mobilization of the Prussian army for a war he, too, did not want, but like Louis Napoléon, he lacked the intelligence and moral courage to confront his blustering, warmongering chancellor, not to mention Moltke’s army, already sharpening their swords. Bismarck wanted war, War Minister Roon demanded it, and Moltke would accept nothing less.
On July 19, 1870, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte declared war on Prussia. Otto von Bismarck was a very happy man. “What a stroke of luck it was that the French committed such a folly.” They had taken the bait.