otherwise a catastrophe was inevitable. He then concentrated his army on high ground a few miles west of Königgrätz, and prepared for a defensive battle on the grandest scale. In spite of the losses of the past week he could still bring about two hundred thousand men into action. The three Prussian armies were now near enough to one another to combine in their attack, and on the night of July 2nd the King sent orders to the three commanders to move against Benedek before daybreak. Prince Frederick Charles, advancing through the village of Sadowa, was the first in the field. For hours his divisions sustained an unequal struggle against the assembled strength of the Austrians. Midday passed; the defenders now pressed down upon their assailants; and preparations for a retreat had been begun, when the long-expected message arrived that the Crown Prince was close at hand. The onslaught of the army of Silesia on Benedek’s right, which was accompanied by the arrival of Herwarth at the other end of the field of battle, at once decided the day. It was with difficulty that the Austrian commander prevented the enemy from seizing the positions which would have cut off his retreat. He retired eastwards across the Elbe with a loss of eighteen thousand killed and wounded and twenty-four thousand prisoners. His army was ruined; and ten days after the Prussians had crossed the frontier the war was practically at an end. [524]
[Battle of Custozza, June 24.]
[Napoleon’s mediation, July 5.]
[Preliminaries of Nicolsburg, July 26.]
[Treaty of Prague, Aug. 23.]
The disaster of Königgrätz was too great to be neutralised by the success of the Austrian forces in Italy. La Marmora, who had given up his place at the head of the Government in order to take command of the army, crossed the Mincio at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men, but was defeated by inferior numbers on the fatal ground of Custozza, and compelled to fall back on the Oglio. This gleam of success, which was followed by a naval victory at Lissa off the Istrian coast, made it easier for the Austrian Emperor to face the sacrifices that were now inevitable. Immediately after the battle of Königgrätz he invoked the mediation of Napoleon III., and ceded Venetia to him on behalf of Italy. Napoleon at once tendered his good offices to the belligerents, and proposed an armistice. His mediation was accepted in principle by the King or Prussia, who expressed his willingness also to grant an armistice as soon as preliminaries of peace were recognised by the Austrian Court. In the meantime, while negotiations passed between all four Governments, the Prussians pushed forward until their outposts came within sight of Vienna. If in pursuance of General Moltke’s plan the Italian generals had thrown a corps north-eastwards from the head of the Adriatic, and so struck at the very heart of the Austrian monarchy, it is possible that the victors of Königgrätz might have imposed their own terms without regard to Napoleon’s mediation, and, while adding the Italian Tyrol to Victor Emmanuel’s dominions, have completed the union of Germany under the House of Hohenzollern at one stroke. But with Hungary still intact, and the Italian army paralysed by the dissensions of its commanders, prudence bade the great statesman of Berlin content himself with the advantages which he could reap without prolongation of the war, and without the risk of throwing Napoleon into the enemy’s camp. He had at first required, as conditions of peace, that Prussia should be left free to annex Saxony, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and other North German territory; that Austria should wholly withdraw from German affairs; and that all Germany, less the Austrian Provinces, should be united in a Federation under Prussian leadership. To gain the assent of Napoleon to these terms, Bismarck hinted that France might by accord with Prussia annex Belgium. Napoleon, however, refused to agree to the extension of Prussia’s ascendency over all Germany, and presented a counter-project which was in its turn rejected by Bismarck. It was finally settled that Prussia should not be prevented from annexing Hanover, Nassau, and Hesse-Cassel, as conquered territory that lay between its own Rhenish Provinces and the rest of the kingdom; that Austria should completely withdraw from German affairs; that Germany north of the Main, together with Saxony, should be included in a Federation under Prussian leadership; and that for the States south of the Main there should be reserved the right of entering into some kind of national bond with the Northern League. Austria escaped without loss of any of its non-Italian territory; it also succeeded in preserving the existence of Saxony, which, as in 1815, the Prussian Government had been most anxious to annex. Napoleon, in confining the Prussian Federation to the north of the Main, and in securing by a formal stipulation in the Treaty the independence of the Southern States, imagined himself to have broken Germany into halves, and to have laid the foundation of a South German League which should look to France as its protector. On the other hand, Bismarck by his annexation of Hanover and neighbouring districts had added a population of four millions to the Prussian Kingdom, and given it a continuous territory; he had forced Austria out of the German system; he had gained its sanction to the Federal union of all Germany north of the Main, and had at least kept the way open for the later extension of this union to the Southern States. Preliminaries of peace embodying these conditions and recognising Prussia’s sovereignty in Schleswig-Holstein were signed at Nicolsburg on the 26th of July, and formed the basis of the definitive Treaty of Peace which was concluded at Prague on the 23rd of August. An illusory clause, added at the instance of Napoleon, provided that if the population of the northern districts of Schleswig should by a free vote express the wish to be united with Denmark, these districts should be ceded to the Danish Kingdom. [525]
[The South German States.]
[Secret Treaties of the Southern States with Prussia.]
Bavaria and the south-western allies of Austria, though their military action was of an ineffective character, continued in arms for some weeks after the battle of Königgrätz and the suspension of hostilities arranged at Nicolsburg did not come into operation on their behalf till the 2nd of August. Before that date their forces were dispersed and their power of resistance broken by the Prussian generals Falckenstein and Manteuffel in a series of unimportant engagements and intricate manoeuvres. The City of Frankfort, against which Bismarck seems to have borne some personal hatred, was treated for a while by the conquerors with extraordinary and most impolitic harshness; in other respects the action of the Prussian Government towards these conquered States was not such as to render future union and friendship difficult. All the South German Governments, with the single exception of Baden, appealed to the Emperor Napoleon for assistance in the negotiations which they had opened at Berlin. But at the very moment when this request was made and granted Napoleon was himself demanding from Bismarck the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate and of the Hessian districts west of the Rhine. Bismarck had only to acquaint the King of Bavaria and the South German Ministers with the designs of their French protector in order to reconcile them to his own chastening, but not unfriendly, hand. The grandeur of a united Fatherland flashed upon minds hitherto impenetrable by any national ideal when it became known that Napoleon was bargaining for Oppenheim and Kaiserslautern. Not only were the insignificant questions as to the war-indemnities to be paid to Prussia and the frontier villages to be exchanged promptly settled, but by a series of secret Treaties all the South German States entered into an offensive and defensive alliance with the Prussian King, and engaged in case of war to place their entire forces at his disposal and under his command. The diplomacy of Napoleon III. had in the end effected for Bismarck almost more than his earlier intervention had frustrated, for it had made the South German Courts the allies of Prussia not through conquest or mere compulsion but out of regard for their own interests. [526] It was said by the opponents of the Imperial Government in France, and scarcely with exaggeration, that every error which it was possible to commit had, in the course of the year 1866, been committed by Napoleon III. One crime, one act of madness, remained open to the Emperor’s critics, to lash him and France into a conflict with the Power whose union he had not been able to prevent.
[Projects of compensation for France.]
Prior to the battle of Königgrätz, it would seem that all the suggestions of the French Emperor relating to the acquisition of Belgium were made to the Prussian Government through secret agents, and that they were actually unknown, or known by mere hearsay, to Benedetti, the French Ambassador at Berlin. According to Prince Bismarck, these overtures had begun as early as 1862, when he was himself Ambassador at Paris, and were then made verbally and in private notes to himself; they were the secret of Napoleon’s neutrality during the Danish war; and were renewed through relatives and confidential agents of the Emperor when the struggle with Austria was seen to be approaching. The ignorance in which Count Benedetti was kept of his master’s private diplomacy may to some extent explain the extraordinary contradictions between the accounts given by this Minister and by Prince Bismarck of the negotiations that passed between them in the period following the campaign of 1866, after Benedetti had himself been charged to present the demands of the French Government. In June, while the Ambassador was still, as it would seem, in ignorance of what was passing behind his back, he had informed the French Ministry that Bismarck, anxious for the preservation of French neutrality, had hinted at the compensations that might be made to France if Prussia should meet with great success in the coming war. According to the report of the Ambassador, made at the time, Count Bismarck stated that he would rather withdraw from public life than cede the Rhenish Provinces with Cologne and Bonn, but that he believed it would be possible to gain the King’s ultimate consent to the cession of the Prussian district of Trèves on the Upper Moselle, which district, together with Luxemburg or parts of Belgium and Switzerland, would give France an adequate improvement of its frontier. The Ambassador added in his report, by way of comment, that Count Bismarck was the only man in the kingdom who was disposed to make any cession of Prussian territory whatever, and that a unanimous and violent revulsion against France would be excited by the slightest indication of any intention on the part of the French Government to extend its frontiers towards the Rhine. He concluded his report with the statement that, after hearing Count Bismarck’s suggestions, he had brought the discussion to a summary close, not wishing to leave the Prussian Minister under the impression that any scheme involving the seizure of Belgian or Swiss territory had the slightest chance of being seriously considered at Paris. (June 4-8.)
[Demand for Rhenish territory, July 25-Aug. 7, 1866.]
[The Belgian project, Aug. 16-30.]
Benedetti probably wrote these last words in full sincerity. Seven weeks later, after the settlement of the Preliminaries at Nicolsburg, he was ordered to demand the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate, of the portion of Hesse-Darmstadt west of the Rhine, including Mainz, and of the strip of Prussian territory on the Saar which had been left to France in 1814 but taken from it in 1815. According to the statement of Prince Bismarck, which would seem to be exaggerated, this demand was made by Benedetti as an ultimatum and with direct threats of war, which were answered by Bismarck in language of equal violence. In any case the demand was unconditionally refused, and Benedetti travelled to Paris in order to describe what had passed at the Prussian headquarters. His report made such an impression on the Emperor that the demand for cessions on the Rhine was at once abandoned, and the Foreign Minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, who had been disposed to enforce this by arms, was compelled to quit office. Benedetti returned to Berlin, and now there took place that negotiation relating to Belgium on which not only the narratives of the persons immediately concerned, but the documents written at the time, leave so much that is strange and unexplained. According to Benedetti, Count Bismarck was keenly anxious to extend the German Federation to the South of the Main, and desired with this object an intimate union with at least one Great Power. He sought in the first instance the support of France, and offered in return to facilitate the seizure of Belgium. The negotiation, according to Benedetti, failed because the Emperor Napoleon required that the fortresses in Southern Germany should be held by the troops of the respective States to which they belonged, while at the same time General Manteuffel, who had been sent from Berlin on a special mission to St. Petersburg, succeeded in effecting so intimate a union with Russia that alliance with France became unnecessary. According to the counter-statement of Prince Bismarck, the plan now proposed originated entirely with the French Ambassador, and was merely a repetition of proposals which had been made by Napoleon during the preceding four years, and which were subsequently renewed at intervals by secret agents almost down to the outbreak of the war of 1870. Prince Bismarck has stated that he dallied with these proposals only because a direct refusal might at any moment have caused the outbreak of war between France and Prussia, a catastrophe which up to the end he sought to avert. In any case the negotiation with Benedetti led to no conclusion, and was broken off by the departure of both statesmen from Berlin in the beginning of autumn. [527]
[Prussia and North Germany after the war.]
The war of 1866 had been brought to an end with extraordinary rapidity; its results were solid and imposing. Venice, perplexed no longer by its Republican traditions or by doubts of the patriotism of the House of Savoy, prepared to welcome King Victor Emmanuel; Bismarck, returning from the battle-field of Königgrätz, found his earlier unpopularity forgotten in the flood of national enthusiasm which his achievements and those of the army had evoked. A new epoch had begun; the antagonisms of the past were out of date; nobler work now stood before the Prussian people and its rulers than the perpetuation of a barren struggle between Crown and Parliament. By none was the severance from the past more openly expressed than by Bismarck himself; by none was it more bitterly felt than by the old Conservative party in Prussia, who had hitherto regarded the Minister as their own representative. In drawing up the Constitution of the North German Federation, Bismarck remained true to the principle which he had laid down at Frankfort before the war, that the German people must be represented by a Parliament elected directly by the people themselves. In the incorporation of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and the Danish Duchies with Prussia, he saw that it would be impossible to win the new populations to a loyal union with Prussia if the King’s Government continued to recognise no friends but the landed aristocracy and the army. He frankly declared that the action of the Cabinet in raising taxes without the consent of Parliament had been illegal, and asked for an Act of Indemnity. The Parliament of Berlin understood and welcomed the message of reconciliation. It heartily forgave the past, and on its own initiative added the name of Bismarck to those for whose services to the State the King asked a recompense. The Progressist party, which had constituted the majority in the last Parliament, gave place to a new combination known as the National Liberal party, which, while adhering to the Progressist creed in domestic affairs, gave its allegiance to the Foreign and the German policy of the Minister. Within this party many able men who in Hanover and the other annexed territories had been the leaders of opposition to their own Governments now found a larger scope and a greater political career. More than one of the colleagues of Bismarck who had been appointed to their offices in the years of conflict were allowed to pass into retirement, and their places were filled by men in sympathy with the National Liberals. With the expansion of Prussia and the establishment of its leadership in a German Federal union, the ruler of Prussia seemed himself to expand from the instrument of a military monarchy to the representative of a great nation.
[Hungary and Austria, 1865.]
To Austria the battle of Königgrätz brought a settlement of the conflict between the Crown and Hungary. The Constitution of February, 1861, hopefully as it had worked during its first years, had in the end fallen before the steady refusal of the Magyars to recognise the authority of a single Parliament for the whole Monarchy. Within the Reichsrath itself the example of Hungary told as a disintegrating force; the Poles, the Czechs seceded from the Assembly; the Minister, Schmerling, lost his authority, and was forced to resign in the summer of 1865. Soon afterwards an edict of the Emperor suspended the Constitution. Count Belcredi, who took office in Schmerling’s place, attempted to arrive at an understanding with the Magyar leaders. The Hungarian Diet was convoked, and was opened by the King in person before the end of the year. Francis Joseph announced his abandonment of the principle that Hungary had forfeited its ancient rights by rebellion, and asked in return that the Diet should not insist upon regarding the laws of 1848 as still in force. Whatever might be the formal validity of those laws, it was, he urged, impossible that they should be brought into operation unaltered. For the common affairs of the two halves of the Monarchy there must be some common authority. It rested with the Diet to arrive at the necessary understanding with the Sovereign on this point, and to place on a satisfactory footing the relations of Hungary to Transylvania and Croatia. As soon as an accord should have been reached on these subjects, Francis Joseph stated that he would complete his reconciliation with the Magyars by being crowned King of Hungary.
[Deák.]
In the Assembly to which these words were addressed the majority was composed of men of moderate opinions, under the leadership of Francis Deák. Deák had drawn up the programme of the Hungarian Liberals in the election of 1847. He had at that time appeared to be marked out by his rare political capacity and the simple manliness of his character for a great, if not the greatest, part in the work that then lay before his country. But the violence of revolutionary methods was alien to his temperament. After serving in Batthyány’s Ministry, he withdrew from public life on the outbreak of war with Austria, and remained in retirement during the dictatorship of Kossuth and the struggle of 1849. As a loyal friend to the Hapsburg dynasty, and a clear-sighted judge of the possibilities of the time, he stood apart while Kossuth dethroned the Sovereign and proclaimed Hungarian independence. Of the patriotism and the disinterestedness of Deák there was never the shadow of a doubt; a distinct political faith severed him from the leaders whose enterprise ended in the catastrophe which he had foreseen, and preserved for Hungary one statesman who could, without renouncing his own past and without inflicting humiliation on the Sovereign, stand as the mediator between Hungary and Austria when the time for reconciliation should arrive. Deák was little disposed to abate anything of what he considered the just demands of his country. It was under his leadership that the Diet had in 1861 refused to accept the Constitution which established a single Parliament for the whole Monarchy. The legislative independence of Hungary he was determined at all costs to preserve intact; rather than surrender this he had been willing in 1861 to see negotiations broken off and military rule restored. But when Francis Joseph, wearied of the sixteen years’ struggle, appealed once more to Hungary for union and friendship, there was no man more earnestly desirous to reconcile the Sovereign with the nation, and to smooth down the opposition to the King’s proposals which arose within the Diet itself, than Deák.
[Scheme of Hungarian Committee, June 25, 1866.]
Under his influence a committee was appointed to frame the necessary basis of negotiation. On the 25th of June, 1866, the Committee gave in its report. It declared against any Parliamentary union with the Cis-Leithan half of the Monarchy, but consented to the establishment of common Ministries for War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs, and recommended that the Budget necessary for these joint Ministries should be settled by Delegations from the Hungarian Diet and from the western Reichsrath. [528] The Delegations, it was proposed, should meet separately, and communicate their views to one another by writing. Only when agreement should not have been thus attained were the Delegations to unite in a single body, in which case the decision was to rest with an absolute majority of votes.
[Negotiations with Hungary after Königgrätz.]
[Federalism or Dualism.]
[Settlement by Beust.]
[Francis Joseph’s Coronation, June 8, 1867.]
The debates of the Diet on the proposals of King Francis Joseph had been long and anxious; it was not until the moment when the war with Prussia was breaking out that the Committee presented its report. The Diet was now prorogued, but immediately after the battle of Königgrätz the Hungarian leaders were called to Vienna, and negotiations were pushed forward on the lines laid down by the Committee. It was a matter of no small moment to the Court of Vienna that while bodies of Hungarian exiles had been preparing to attack the Empire both from the side of Silesia and of Venice, Deák and his friends had loyally abstained from any communication with the foreign enemies of the House of Hapsburg. That Hungary would now gain almost complete independence was certain; the question was not so much whether there should be an independent Parliament and Ministry at Pesth as whether there should not be a similarly independent Parliament and Ministry in each of the territories of the Crown, the Austrian Sovereign becoming the head of a Federation instead of the chief of a single or a dual State. Count Belcredi, the Minister at Vienna, was disposed towards such a Federal system; he was, however, now confronted within the Cabinet by a rival who represented a different policy. After making peace with Prussia, the Emperor called to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Count Beust, who had hitherto been at the head of the Saxon Government, and who had been the representative of the German Federation at the London Conference of 1864. Beust, while ready to grant the Hungarians their independence, advocated the retention of the existing Reichsrath and of a single Ministry for all the Cis-Leithan parts of the Monarchy. His plan, which pointed to the maintenance of German ascendency in the western provinces, and which deeply offended the Czechs and the Slavic populations, was accepted by the Emperor: Belcredi withdrew from office, and Beust was charged, as President of the Cabinet, with the completion of the settlement with Hungary (Feb. 7, 1867). Deák had hitherto left the chief ostensible part in the negotiations to Count Andrássy, one of the younger patriots of 1848, who had been condemned to be hanged, and had lived a refugee during the next ten years. He now came to Vienna himself, and in the course of a few days removed the last remaining difficulties. The King gratefully charged him with the formation of the Hungarian Ministry under the restored Constitution, but Deák declined alike all office, honours, and rewards, and Andrássy, who had actually been hanged in effigy, was placed at the head of the Government. The Diet, which had reassembled shortly before the end of 1866, greeted the national Ministry with enthusiasm. Alterations in the laws of 1848 proposed in accordance with the agreement made at Vienna, and establishing the three common Ministries with the system of Delegations for common affairs, were carried by large majorities. [529] The abdication of Ferdinand, which throughout the struggle of 1849 Hungary had declined to recognise, was now acknowledged as valid, and on the 8th of June, 1867, Francis Joseph was crowned King of Hungary amid the acclamations of Pesth. The gift of money which is made to each Hungarian monarch on his coronation Francis Joseph by a happy impulse distributed among the families of those who had fallen in fighting against him in 1849. A universal amnesty was proclaimed, no condition being imposed on the return of the exiles but that they should acknowledge the existing Constitution. Kossuth alone refused to return to his country so long as a Hapsburg should be its King, and proudly clung to ideas which were already those of the past.
[Hungary since 1867.]
The victory of the Magyars was indeed but too complete. Not only were Beust and the representatives of the western half of the Monarchy so overmatched by the Hungarian negotiators that in the distribution of the financial burdens of the Empire Hungary escaped with far too small a share, but in the more important problem of the relation of the Slavic and Roumanian populations of the Hungarian Kingdom to the dominant race no adequate steps were taken for the protection of these subject nationalities. That Croatia and Transylvania should be reunited with Hungary if the Emperor and the Magyars were ever to be reconciled was inevitable; and in the case of Croatia certain conditions were no doubt imposed, and certain local rights guaranteed. But on the whole the non-Magyar peoples in Hungary were handed over to the discretion of the ruling race. The demand of Bismarck that the centre of gravity of the Austrian States should be transferred from Vienna to Pesth had indeed been brought to pass. While in the western half of the Monarchy the central authority, still represented by a single Parliament, seemed in the succeeding years to be altogether losing its cohesive power, and the political life of Austria became a series of distracting complications, in Hungary the Magyar Government resolutely set itself to the task of moulding into one the nationalities over which it ruled. Uniting the characteristic faults with the great qualities of a race marked out by Nature and ancient habit for domination over more numerous but less aggressive neighbours, the Magyars have steadily sought to the best of their power to obliterate the distinctions which make Hungary in reality not one but several nations. They have held the Slavic and the Roumanian population within their borders with an iron grasp, but they have not gained their affection. The memory of the Russian intervention in 1849 and of the part then played by Serbs, by Croats and Roumanians in crushing Magyar independence has blinded the victors to the just claims of these races both within and without the Hungarian kingdom, and attached their sympathy to the hateful and outworn empire of the Turk. But the individuality of peoples is not to be blotted out in a day; nor, with all its striking advance in wealth, in civilisation, and in military power, has the Magyar State been able to free itself from the insecurity arising from the presence of independent communities on its immediate frontiers belonging to the same race as those whose language and nationality it seeks to repress.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Napoleon III.–The Mexican Expedition–Withdrawal of the French and death of Maximilian–The Luxemburg Question–Exasperation in France against Prussia–Austria–Italy–Mentana–Germany after 1866–The Spanish candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern–French declaration–Benedetti and King William–Withdrawal of Leopold and demand for guarantees–The telegram from Ems–War–Expected Alliances of France–Austria–Italy– Prussian plans–The French army–Causes of French inferiority– Weissenburg–Wörth–Spicheren–Borny–Mars-la-Tour–Gravelotte–Sedan– The Republic proclaimed at Paris–Favre and Bismarck–Siege of Paris–Gambetta at Tours–The Army of the Loire–Fall of Metz–Fighting at Orleans–Sortie of Champigny–The Armies of the North, of the Loire, of the East–Bourbaki’s ruin–Capitulation of Paris and Armistice– Preliminaries of Peace–Germany–Establishment of the German Empire–The Commune of Paris–Second siege–Effects of the war as to Russia and Italy–Rome.
[Napoleon III.]
The reputation of Napoleon III. was perhaps at its height at the end of the first ten years of his reign. His victories over Russia and Austria had flattered the military pride of France; the flowing tide of commercial prosperity bore witness, as it seemed, to the blessings of a government at once firm and enlightened; the reconstruction of Paris dazzled a generation accustomed to the mean and dingy aspect of London and other capitals before 1850, and scarcely conscious of the presence or absence of real beauty and dignity where it saw spaciousness and brilliance. The political faults of Napoleon, the shiftiness and incoherence of his designs, his want of grasp on reality, his absolute personal nullity as an administrator, were known to some few, but they had not been displayed to the world at large. He had done some great things, he had conspicuously failed in nothing. Had his reign ended before 1863, he would probably have left behind him in popular memory the name of a great ruler. But from this time his fortune paled. The repulse of his intervention on behalf of Poland in 1863 by the Russian Court, his petulant or miscalculating inaction during the Danish War of the following year, showed those to be mistaken who had imagined that the Emperor must always exercise a controlling power in Europe. During the events which formed the first stage in the consolidation of Germany his policy was a succession of errors. Simultaneously with the miscarriage of his European schemes, an enterprise which he had undertaken beyond the Atlantic, and which seriously weakened his resources at a time when concentrated strength alone could tell on European affairs, ended in tragedy and disgrace.
[The Mexican Project.]
There were in Napoleon III., as a man of State, two personalities, two mental existences, which blended but ill with one another. There was the contemplator of great human forces, the intelligent, if not deeply penetrative, reader of the signs of the times, the brooder through long years of imprisonment and exile, the child of Europe, to whom Germany, Italy, and England had all in turn been nearer than his own country; and there was the crowned adventurer, bound by his name and position to gain for France something that it did not possess, and to regard the greatness of every other nation as an impediment to the ascendency of his own. Napoleon correctly judged the principle of nationality to be the dominant force in the immediate future of Europe. He saw in Italy and in Germany races whose internal divisions alone had prevented them from being the formidable rivals of France, and yet he assisted the one nation to effect its union, and was not indisposed, within certain limits, to promote the consolidation of the other. That the acquisition of Nice and Savoy, and even of the Rhenish Provinces, could not in itself make up to France for the establishment of two great nations on its immediate frontiers Napoleon must have well understood: he sought to carry the principle of agglomeration a stage farther in the interests of France itself, and to form some moral, if not political, union of the Latin nations, which should embrace under his own ascendency communities beyond the Atlantic as well as those of the Old World. It was with this design that in the year 1862 he made the financial misdemeanours of Mexico the pretext for an expedition to that country, the object of which was to subvert the native Republican Government, and to place the Hapsburg Maximilian, as a vassal prince, on its throne. England and Spain had at first agreed to unite with France in enforcing the claims of the European creditors of Mexico; but as soon as Napoleon had made public his real intentions these Powers withdrew their forces, and the Emperor was left free to carry out his plans alone.
[The Mexican Expedition, 1862-1865.]
[Napoleon compelled to withdraw, 1866-7.]
[Fall and Death of Maximilian.]
The design of Napoleon to establish French influence in Mexico was connected with his attempt to break up the United States by establishing the independence of the Southern Confederacy, then in rebellion, through the mediation of the Great Powers of Europe. So long as the Civil War in the United States lasted, it seemed likely that Napoleon’s enterprise in Mexico would be successful. Maximilian was placed upon the throne, and the Republican leader, Juarez, was driven into the extreme north of the country. But with the overthrow of the Southern Confederacy and the restoration of peace in the United States in 1865 the prospect totally changed. The Government of Washington refused to acknowledge any authority in Mexico but that of Juarez, and informed Napoleon in courteous terms that his troops must be withdrawn. Napoleon had bound himself by Treaty to keep twenty-five thousand men in Mexico for the protection of Maximilian. He was, however, unable to defy the order of the United States. Early in 1866 he acquainted Maximilian with the necessities of the situation, and with the approaching removal of the force which alone had placed him and could sustain him on the throne. The unfortunate prince sent his consort, the daughter of the King of the Belgians, to Europe to plead against this act of desertion; but her efforts were vain, and her reason sank under the just presentiment of her husband’s ruin. The utmost on which Napoleon could venture was the postponement of the recall of his troops till the spring of 1867. He urged Maximilian to abdicate before it was too late; but the prince refused to dissociate himself from his counsellors who still implored him to remain. Meanwhile the Juarists pressed back towards the capital from north and south. As the French detachments were withdrawn towards the coast the entire country fell into their hands. The last French soldiers quitted Mexico at the beginning of March, 1867, and on the 15th of May, Maximilian, still lingering at Queretaro, was made prisoner by the Republicans. He had himself while in power ordered that the partisans of Juarez should be treated not as soldiers but as brigands, and that when captured they should be tried by court-martial and executed within twenty-four hours. The same severity was applied to himself. He was sentenced to death and shot at Queretaro on the 19th of June.
[Decline of Napoleon’s reputation.]
Thus ended the attempt of Napoleon III. to establish the influence of France and of his dynasty beyond the seas. The doom of Maximilian excited the compassion of Europe; a deep, irreparable wound was inflicted on the reputation of the man who had tempted him to his treacherous throne, who had guaranteed him protection, and at the bidding of a superior power had abandoned him to his ruin. From this time, though the outward splendour of the Empire was undiminished, there remained scarcely anything of the personal prestige which Napoleon had once enjoyed in so rich a measure. He was no longer in the eyes of Europe or of his own country the profound, self-contained statesman in whose brain lay the secret of coming events; he was rather the gambler whom fortune was preparing to desert, the usurper trembling for the future of his dynasty and his crown. Premature old age and a harassing bodily ailment began to incapacitate him for personal exertion. He sought to loosen the reins in which his despotism held France, and to make a compromise with public opinion which was now declaring against him. And although his own cooler judgment set little store by any addition of frontier strips of alien territory to France, and he would probably have been best pleased to pass the remainder of his reign in undisturbed inaction, he deemed it necessary, after failure in Mexico had become inevitable, to seek some satisfaction in Europe for the injured pride of his country. He entered into negotiations with the King of Holland for the cession of Luxemburg, and had gained his assent, when rumours of the transaction reached the North German Press, and the project passed from out the control of diplomatists and became an affair of rival nations.
[The Luxemburg question, Feb.-May, 1867.]
Luxemburg, which was an independent Duchy ruled by the King of Holland, had until 1866 formed a part of the German Federation; and although Bismarck had not attempted to include it in his own North German Union, Prussia retained by the Treaties of 1815 a right to garrison the fortress of Luxemburg, and its troops were actually there in possession. The proposed transfer of the Duchy to France excited an outburst of patriotic resentment in the Federal Parliament at Berlin. The population of Luxemburg was indeed not wholly German, and it had shown the strongest disinclination to enter the North German league; but the connection of the Duchy with Germany in the past was close enough to explain the indignation roused by Napoleon’s project among politicians who little suspected that during the previous year Bismarck himself had cordially recommended this annexation, and that up to the last moment he had been privy to the Emperor’s plan. The Prussian Minister, though he did not affect to share the emotion of his countrymen, stated that his policy in regard to Luxemburg must be influenced by the opinion of the Federal Parliament, and he shortly afterwards caused it to be understood at Paris that the annexation of the Duchy to France was impossible. As a warning to France he had already published the Treaties of alliance between Prussia and the South German States, which had been made at the close of the war of 1866, but had hitherto been kept secret. [530] Other powers now began to tender their good offices. Count Beust, on behalf of Austria, suggested that Luxemburg should be united to Belgium, which in its turn should cede a small district to France. This arrangement, which would have been accepted at Berlin, and which, by soothing the irritation produced in France by Prussia’s successes, would possibly have averted the war of 1870, was frustrated by the refusal of the King of Belgium to part with any of his territory–Napoleon, disclaiming all desire for territorial extension, now asked only for the withdrawal of the Prussian garrison from Luxemburg; but it was known that he was determined to enforce this demand by arms. The Russian Government proposed that the question should be settled by a Conference of the Powers at London. This proposal was accepted under certain conditions by France and Prussia, and the Conference assembled on the 7th of May. Its deliberations were completed in four days, and the results were summed up in the Treaty of London signed on the 11th. By this Treaty the Duchy of Luxemburg was declared neutral territory under the collective guarantee of the Powers. Prussia withdrew its garrison, and the King of Holland, who continued to be sovereign of the Duchy, undertook to demolish the fortifications of Luxemburg, and to maintain it in the future as an open town. [531]
[Exasperation in France against Prussia.]
Of the politicians of France, those who even affected to regard the aggrandisement of Prussia and the union of Northern Germany with indifference or satisfaction were a small minority. Among these was the Emperor, who, after his attempts to gain a Rhenish Province had been baffled, sought to prove in an elaborate State-paper that France had won more than it had lost by the extinction of the German Federation as established in 1815, and by the dissolution of the tie that had bound Austria and Prussia together as members of this body. The events of 1866 had, he contended, broken up a system devised in evil days for the purpose of uniting Central Europe against France, and had restored to the Continent the freedom of alliances; in other words, they had made it possible for the South German States to connect themselves with France. If this illusion was really entertained by the Emperor, it was rudely dispelled by the discovery of the Treaties between Prussia and the Southern States and by their publication in the spring of 1867. But this revelation was not necessary to determine the attitude of the great majority of those who passed for the representatives of independent political opinion in France. The Ministers indeed were still compelled to imitate the Emperor’s optimism, and a few enlightened men among the Opposition understood that France must be content to see the Germans effect their national unity; but the great body of unofficial politicians, to whatever party they belonged, joined in the bitter outcry raised at once against the aggressive Government of Prussia and the feeble administration at Paris, which had not found the means to prevent, or had actually facilitated, Prussia’s successes. Thiers, who more than any one man had by his writings popularised the Napoleonic legend and accustomed the French to consider themselves entitled to a monopoly of national greatness on the Rhine, was the severest critic of the Emperor, the most zealous denouncer of the work which Bismarck had effected. It was only with too much reason that the Prussian Government looked forward to an attack by France at some earlier or later time as almost certain, and pressed forward the military organisation which was to give to Germany an army of unheard-of efficiency and strength.
[France and Prussia after 1867.]
There appears to be no evidence that Napoleon III. himself desired to attack Prussia so long as that Power should strictly observe the stipulations of the Treaty of Prague which provided for the independence of the South German States. But the current of events irresistibly impelled Germany to unity. The very Treaty which made the river Main the limit of the North German Confederacy reserved for the Southern States the right of attaching themselves to those of the North by some kind of national tie. Unless the French Emperor was resolved to acquiesce in the gradual development of this federal unity until, as regarded the foreigner, the North and the South of Germany should be a single body, he could have no confident hope of lasting peace. To have thus anticipated and accepted the future, to have removed once and for all the sleepless fears of Prussia by the frank recognition of its right to give all Germany effective Union, would have been an act too great and too wise in reality, too weak and self-renouncing in appearance, for any chief of a rival nation. Napoleon did not take this course; on the other hand, not desiring to attack Prussia while it remained within the limits of the Treaty of Prague, he refrained from seeking alliances with the object of immediate and aggressive action. The diplomacy of the Emperor during the period from 1866 to 1870 is indeed still but imperfectly known; but it would appear that his efforts were directed only to the formation of alliances with the view of eventual action when Prussia should have passed the limits which the Emperor himself or public opinion in Paris should, as interpreter of the Treaty of Prague, impose upon this Power in its dealings with the South German States.
[Negotiations with Austria, 1868-69.]
The Governments to which Napoleon could look for some degree of support were those of Austria and Italy. Count Beust, now Chancellor of the Austrian Monarchy, was a bitter enemy to Prussia, and a rash and adventurous politician, to whom the very circumstance of his sudden elevation from the petty sphere of Saxon politics gave a certain levity and unconstraint in the handling of great affairs. He cherished the idea of recovering Austria’s ascendency in Germany, and was disposed to repel the extension of Russian influence westwards by boldly encouraging the Poles to seek for the satisfaction of their national hopes in Galicia under the Hapsburg Crown. To Count Beust France was the most natural of all allies. On the other hand, the very system which Beust had helped to establish in Hungary raised serious obstacles against the adoption of his own policy. Andrássy, the Hungarian Minister, while sharing Beust’s hostility to Russia, declared that his countrymen had no interest in restoring Austria’s German connection, and were in fact better without it. In these circumstances the negotiations of the French and the Austrian Emperor were conducted by a private correspondence. The interchange of letters continued during the years 1868 and 1869, and resulted in a promise made by Napoleon to support Austria if it should be attacked by Prussia, while the Emperor Francis Joseph promised to assist France if it should be attacked by Prussia and Russia together. No Treaty was made, but a general assurance was exchanged between the two Emperors that they would pursue a common policy and treat one another’s interests as their own. With the view of forming a closer understanding the Archduke Albrecht visited Paris in February, 1870, and a French general was sent to Vienna to arrange the plan of campaign in case of war with Prussia. In such a war, if undertaken by the two Powers, it was hoped that Italy would join. [532]
[Italy after 1866.]
[Mentana, Nov. 3, 1867.]
The alliance of 1866 between Prussia and Italy had left behind it in each of these States more of rancour than of good-will. La Marmora had from the beginning to the end been unfortunate in his relations with Berlin. He had entered into the alliance with suspicion; he would gladly have seen Venetia given to Italy by a European Congress without war; and when hostilities broke out, he had disregarded and resented what he considered an attempt of the Prussian Government to dictate to him the military measures to be pursued. On the other hand, the Prussians charged the Italian Government with having deliberately held back its troops after the battle of Custozza in pursuance of arrangements made between Napoleon and the Austrian Emperor on the voluntary cession of Venice, and with having endangered or minimised Prussia’s success by enabling the Austrians to throw a great part of their Italian forces northwards. There was nothing of that comradeship between the Italian and the Prussian armies which is acquired on the field of battle. The personal sympathies of Victor Emmanuel were strongly on the side of the French Emperor; and when, at the close of the year 1866, the French garrison was withdrawn from Rome in pursuance of the convention made in September, 1864, it seemed probable that France and Italy might soon unite in a close alliance. But in the following year the attempts of the Garibaldians to overthrow the Papal Government, now left without its foreign defenders, embroiled Napoleon and the Italian people. Napoleon was unable to defy the clerical party in France; he adopted the language of menace in his communications with the Italian Cabinet; and when, in the autumn of 1867, the Garibaldians actually invaded the Roman States, he despatched a body of French troops under General Failly to act in support of those of the Pope. An encounter took place at Mentana on November 3rd, in which the Garibaldians, after defeating the Papal forces, were put to the rout by General Failly. The occupation of Civita Vecchia was renewed, and in the course of the debates raised at Paris on the Italian policy of the Government, the Prime Minister, M. Rouher, stated, with the most passionate emphasis that, come what might, Italy should never possess itself of Rome. “Never,” he cried, “will France tolerate such an outrage on its honour and its dignity.” [533]
[Napoleon and Italy after Mentana.]
[Italy and Austria.]
The affair of Mentana, the insolent and heartless language in which General Failly announced his success, the reoccupation of Roman territory by French troops, and the declaration made by M. Rouher in the French Assembly, created wide and deep anger in Italy, and made an end for the time of all possibility of a French alliance. Napoleon was indeed, as regarded Italy, in an evil case. By abandoning Rome he would have turned against himself and his dynasty the whole clerical interest in France, whose confidence he had already to some extent forfeited by his policy in 1860; on the other hand, it was vain for him to hope for the friendship of Italy whilst he continued to bar the way to the fulfilment of the universal national desire. With the view of arriving at some compromise he proposed a European Conference on the Roman question; but this was resisted above all by Count Bismarck, whose interest it was to keep the sore open; and neither England nor Russia showed any anxiety to help the Pope’s protector out of his difficulties. Napoleon sought by a correspondence with Victor Emmanuel during 1868 and 1869 to pave the way for a defensive alliance; but Victor Emmanuel was in reality as well as in name a constitutional king, and probably could not, even if he had desired, have committed Italy to engagements disapproved by the Ministry and Parliament. It was made clear to Napoleon that the evacuation of the Papal States must precede any treaty of alliance between France and Italy. Whether the Italian Government would have been content with a return to the conditions of the September Convention, or whether it made the actual possession of Rome the price of a treaty-engagement, is uncertain; but inasmuch as Napoleon was not at present prepared to evacuate Civita Vecchia, he could aim at nothing more than some eventual concert when the existing difficulties should have been removed. The Court of Vienna now became the intermediary between the two Powers who had united against it in 1859. Count Beust was free from the associations which had made any approach to friendship with the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel impossible for his predecessors. He entered into negotiations at Florence, which resulted in the conclusion of an agreement between the Austrian and the Italian Governments that they would act together and guarantee one another’s territories in the event of a war between France and Prussia. This agreement was made with the assent of the Emperor Napoleon, and was understood to be preparatory to an accord with France itself; but it was limited to a defensive character, and it implied that any eventual concert with France must be arranged by the two Powers in combination with one another. [534]
[Isolation of France.]
At the beginning of 1870 the Emperor Napoleon was therefore without any more definite assurance of support in a war with Prussia than the promise of the Austrian Sovereign that he would assist France if attacked by Prussia and Russia together, and that he would treat the interests of France as his own. By withdrawing his protection from Rome Napoleon had undoubtedly a fair chance of building up this shadowy and remote engagement into a defensive alliance with both Austria and Italy. But perfect clearness and resolution of purpose, as well as the steady avoidance of all quarrels on mere incidents, were absolutely indispensable to the creation and the employment of such a league against the Power which alone it could have in view; and Prussia had now little reason to fear any such exercise of statesmanship on the part of Napoleon. The solution of the Roman question, in other words the withdrawal of the French garrison from Roman territory, could proceed only from some stronger stimulus than the declining force of Napoleon’s own intelligence and will could now supply. This fatal problem baffled his attempts to gain alliances; and yet the isolation of France was but half acknowledged, but half understood; and a host of rash, vainglorious spirits impatiently awaited the hour that should call them to their revenge on Prussia for the triumphs in which it had not permitted France to share.
[Germany, 1867-1870.]
Meanwhile on the other side Count Bismarck advanced with what was most essential in his relations with the States of Southern Germany–the completion of the Treaties of Alliance by conventions assimilating the military systems of these States to that of Prussia. A Customs-Parliament was established for the whole of Germany, which, it was hoped, would be the precursor of a National Assembly uniting the North and the South of the Main. But in spite of this military and commercial approximation, the progress towards union was neither so rapid nor so smooth as the patriots of the North could desire. There was much in the harshness and self-assertion of the Prussian character that repelled the less disciplined communities of the South. Ultramontanism was strong in Bavaria; and throughout the minor States the most advanced of the Liberals were opposed to a closer union with Berlin, from dislike of its absolutist traditions and the heavy hand of its Government. Thus the tendency known as Particularism was supported in Bavaria and Würtemberg by classes of the population who in most respects were in antagonism to one another; nor could the memories of the campaign of 1866 and the old regard for Austria be obliterated in a day. Bismarck did not unduly press on the work of consolidation. He marked and estimated the force of the obstacles which too rapid a development of his national policy would encounter. It is possible that he may even have seen indications that religious and other influences might imperil the military union which he had already established, and that he may not have been unwilling to call to his aid, as the surest of all preparatives for national union, the event which he had long believed to be inevitable at some time or other in the future, a war with France.
[The Spanish candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern.]
[Leopold accepts the Spanish Crown, July 3, 1870.]
Since the autumn of 1868 the throne of Spain had been vacant in consequence of a revolution in which General Prim had been the leading actor. It was not easy to discover a successor for the Bourbon Isabella; and after other candidatures had been vainly projected it occurred to Prim and his friends early in 1869 that a suitable candidate might be found in Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, whose elder brother had been made Prince of Roumania, and whose father, Prince Antony, had been Prime Minister of Prussia in 1859. The House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was so distantly related to the reigning family of Prussia that the name alone preserved the memory of the connection; and in actual blood-relationship Prince Leopold was much more nearly allied to the French Houses of Murat and Beauharnais. But the Sigmaringen family was distinctly Prussian by interest and association, and its chief, Antony, had not only been at the head of the Prussian Administration himself, but had, it is said, been the first to suggest the appointment of Bismarck to the same office. The candidature of a Hohenzollern might reasonably be viewed in France as an attempt to connect Prussia politically with Spain; and with so much reserve was this candidature at the first handled at Berlin that, in answer to inquiries made by Benedetti in the spring of 1869, the Secretary of State who represented Count Bismarck stated on his word of honour that the candidature had never been suggested. The affair was from first to last ostensibly treated at Berlin as one with which the Prussian Government was wholly unconcerned, and in which King William was interested only as head of the family to which Prince Leopold belonged. For twelve months after Benedetti’s inquiries it appeared as if the project had been entirely abandoned; it was, however, revived in the spring of 1870, and on the 3rd of July the announcement was made at Paris that Prince Leopold had consented to accept the Crown of Spain if the Cortes should confirm his election.
[French Declaration, July 6.]
At once there broke out in the French Press a storm of indignation against Prussia. The organs of the Government took the lead in exciting public opinion. On the 6th of July the Duke of Gramont, Foreign Minister, declared to the Legislative Body that the attempt of a Foreign Power to place one of its Princes on the throne of Charles V. imperilled the interests and the honour of France, and that, if such a contingency were realised, the Government would fulfil its duty without hesitation and without weakness. The violent and unsparing language of this declaration, which had been drawn up at a Council of Ministers under the Emperor’s presidency, proved that the Cabinet had determined either to humiliate Prussia or to take vengeance by arms. It was at once seen by foreign diplomatists, who during the preceding days had been disposed to assist in removing a reasonable subject of complaint, how little was the chance of any peaceable settlement after such a public challenge had been issued to Prussia in the Emperor’s name. One means of averting war alone seemed possible, the voluntary renunciation by Prince Leopold of the offered Crown. To obtain this renunciation became the task of those who, unlike the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, were anxious to preserve peace.
[Ollivier’s Ministry.]
The parts that were played at this crisis by the individuals who most influenced the Emperor Napoleon are still but imperfectly known; but there is no doubt that from the beginning to the end the Duke of Gramont, with short intermissions, pressed with insane ardour for war. The Ministry now in office had been called to their places in January, 1870, after the Emperor had made certain changes in the constitution in a Liberal direction, and had professed to transfer the responsibility of power from himself to a body of advisers possessing the confidence of the Chamber. Ollivier, formerly one of the leaders of the Opposition, had accepted the Presidency of the Cabinet. His colleagues were for the most part men new to official life, and little able to hold their own against such representatives of unreformed Imperialism as the Duke of Gramont and the War-Minister Leboeuf who sat beside them. Ollivier himself was one of the few politicians in France who understood that his countrymen must be content to see German unity established whether they liked it or not. He was entirely averse from war with Prussia on the question which had now arisen; but the fear that public opinion would sweep away a Liberal Ministry which hesitated to go all lengths in patriotic extravagance led him to sacrifice his own better judgment, and to accept the responsibility for a policy which in his heart he disapproved. Gramont’s rash hand was given free play. Instructions were sent to Benedetti to seek the King of Prussia at Ems, where he was taking the waters, and to demand from him, as the only means of averting war, that he should order the Hohenzollern Prince to revoke his acceptance of the Crown. “We are in great haste,” Gramont added, “for we must gain the start in case of an unsatisfactory reply, and commence the movement of troops by Saturday in order to enter upon the campaign in a fortnight. Be on your guard against an answer merely leaving the Prince of Hohenzollern to his fate, and disclaiming on the part of the King any interest in his future.” [535]
[Benedetti and King William at Ems, July 9-14.]
Benedetti’s first interview with the King was on the 9th of July. He informed the King of the emotion that had been caused in France by the candidature of the Hohenzollern Prince; he dwelt on the value to both countries of the friendly relation between France and Prussia; and, while studiously avoiding language that might wound or irritate the King, he explained to him the requirements of the Government at Paris. The King had learnt beforehand what would be the substance of Benedetti’s communication. He had probably been surprised and grieved at the serious consequences which Prince Leopold’s action had produced in France; and although he had determined not to submit to dictation from Paris or to order Leopold to abandon his candidature, he had already, as it seems, taken steps likely to render the preservation of peace more probable. At the end of a conversation with the Ambassador, in which he asserted his complete independence as head of the family of Hohenzollern, he informed Benedetti that he had entered into communication with Leopold and his father, and that he expected shortly to receive a despatch from Sigmaringen. Benedetti rightly judged that the King, while positively refusing to meet Gramont’s demands, was yet desirous of finding some peaceable way out of the difficulty; and the report of this interview which he sent to Paris was really a plea in favour of good sense and moderation. But Gramont was little disposed to accept such counsels. “I tell you plainly,” he wrote to Benedetti on the next day, “public opinion is on fire, and will leave us behind it. We must begin; we wait only for your despatch to call up the three hundred thousand men who are waiting the summons. Write, telegraph, something definite. If the King will not counsel the Prince of Hohenzollern to resign, well, it is immediate war, and in a few days we are on the Rhine.”
[Leopold withdraws, July 12.]
[Guarantee against renewal demanded.]
[Benedetti and the King, July 13.]
Nevertheless Benedetti’s advice was not without its influence on the Emperor and his Ministers. Napoleon, himself wavering from hour to hour, now inclined to the peace-party, and during the 11th there was a pause in the military preparations that had been begun. On the 12th the efforts of disinterested Governments, probably also the suggestions of the King of Prussia himself, produced their effects. A telegram was received at Madrid from Prince Antony stating that his son’s candidature was withdrawn. A few hours later Ollivier announced the news in the Legislative Chamber at Paris, and exchanged congratulations with the friends of peace, who considered that the matter was now at an end. But this pacific conclusion little suited either the war-party or the Bonapartists of the old type, who grudged to a Constitutional Ministry so substantial a diplomatic success. They at once declared that the retirement of Prince Leopold was a secondary matter, and that the real question was what guarantees had been received from Prussia against a renewal of the candidature. Gramont himself, in an interview with the Prussian Ambassador, Baron Werther, sketched a letter which he proposed that King William should send to the Emperor, stating that in sanctioning the candidature of Prince Leopold he had not intended to offend the French, and that in associating himself with the Prince’s withdrawal he desired that all misunderstandings should be at an end between the two Governments. The despatch of Baron Werther conveying this proposition appears to have deeply offended King William, whom it reached about midday on the 13th. Benedetti had that morning met the King on the promenade at Ems, and had received from him the promise that as soon as the letter which was still on its way from Sigmaringen should arrive he would send for the Ambassador in order that he might communicate its contents at Paris. The letter arrived; but Baron Werther’s despatch from Paris had arrived before it; and instead of summoning Benedetti as he had promised, the King sent one of his aides-de-camp to him with a message that a written communication had been received from Prince Leopold confirming his withdrawal, and that the matter was now at an end. Benedetti desired the aide-de-camp to inform the King that he was compelled by his instructions to ask for a guarantee against a renewal of the candidature. The aide-de-camp did as he was requested, and brought back a message that the King gave his entire approbation to the withdrawal of the Prince of Hohenzollern, but that he could do no more. Benedetti begged for an audience with His Majesty. The King replied that he was compelled to decline entering into further negotiation, and that he had said his last word. Though the King thus refused any further discussion, perfect courtesy was observed on both sides; and on the following morning the King and the Ambassador, who were both leaving Ems, took leave of one another at the railway station with the usual marks of respect.
[Publication of the telegram from Ems, July 13.]
[War decided at Paris, July 14.]
That the guarantee which the French Government had resolved to demand would not be given was now perfectly certain; yet, with the candidature of Prince Leopold fairly extinguished, it was still possible that the cooler heads at Paris might carry the day, and that the Government would stop short of declaring war on a point on which the unanimous judgment of the other Powers declared it to be in the wrong. But Count Bismarck was determined not to let the French escape lightly from the quarrel. He had to do with an enemy who by his own folly had come to the brink of an aggressive war, and, far from facilitating his retreat, it was Bismarck’s policy to lure him over the precipice. Not many hours after the last message had passed between King William and Benedetti, a telegram was officially published at Berlin, stating, in terms so brief as to convey the impression of an actual insult, that the King had refused to see the French Ambassador, and had informed him by an aide-de-camp that he had nothing more to communicate to him. This telegram was sent to the representatives of Prussia at most of the European Courts, and to its agents in every German capital. Narratives instantly gained currency, and were not contradicted by the Prussian Government, that Benedetti had forced himself upon the King on the promenade at Ems, and that in the presence of a large company the King had turned his back upon the Ambassador. The publication of the alleged telegram from Ems became known in Paris on the 14th. On that day the Council of Ministers met three times. At the first meeting the advocates of peace were still in the majority; in the afternoon, as the news from Berlin and the fictions describing the insult offered to the French Ambassador spread abroad, the agitation in Paris deepened, and the Council decided upon calling up the Reserves; yet the Emperor himself seemed still disposed for peace. It was in the interval between the second and the third meeting of the Council, between the hours of six and ten in the evening, that Napoleon finally gave way before the threats and importunities of the war-party. The Empress, fanatically anxious for the overthrow of a great Protestant Power, passionately eager for the military glory which alone could insure the Crown to her son, won the triumph which she was so bitterly to rue. At the third meeting of the Council, held shortly before midnight, the vote was given for war.
In Germany this decision had been expected; yet it made a deep impression not only on the German people but on Europe at large that, when the declaration of war was submitted to the French Legislative Body in the form of a demand for supplies, no single voice was raised to condemn the war for its criminality and injustice: the arguments which were urged against it by M. Thiers and others were that the Government had fixed upon a bad cause, and that the occasion was inopportune. Whether the majority of the Assembly really desired war is even now matter of doubt. But the clamour of a hundred madmen within its walls, the ravings of journalists and incendiaries, who at such a time are to the true expression of public opinion what the Spanish Inquisition was to the Christian religion, paralysed the will and the understanding of less infatuated men. Ten votes alone were given in the Assembly against the grant demanded for war; to Europe at large it went out that the crime and the madness was that of France as a nation. Yet Ollivier and many of his colleagues up to the last moment disapproved of the war, and consented to it only because they believed that the nation would otherwise rush into hostilities under a reactionary Ministry who would serve France worse than themselves. They found when it was too late that the supposed national impulse, which they had thought irresistible, was but the outcry of a noisy minority. The reports of their own officers informed them that in sixteen alone out of the eighty-seven Departments of France was the war popular. In the other seventy-one it was accepted either with hesitation or regret. [536]
[Initial forces of either side.]
[Expected Alliances of France.]
[Austria preparing.]
How vast were the forces which the North German Confederation could bring into the field was well known to Napoleon’s Government. Benedetti had kept his employers thoroughly informed of the progress of the North German military organisation; he had warned them that the South German States would most certainly act with the North against a foreign assailant; he had described with great accuracy and great penetration the nature of the tie that existed between Berlin and St. Petersburg, a tie which was close enough to secure for Prussia the goodwill, and in certain contingencies the armed support, of Russia, while it was loose enough not to involve Prussia in any Muscovite enterprise that would bring upon it the hostility of England and Austria. The utmost force which the French military administration reckoned on placing in the field at the beginning of the campaign was two hundred and fifty thousand men, to be raised at the end of three weeks by about fifty thousand more. The Prussians, even without reckoning on any assistance from Southern Germany, and after allowing for three army-corps that might be needed to watch Austria and Denmark, could begin the campaign with three hundred and thirty thousand. Army to army, the French thus stood according to the reckoning of their own War Office outnumbered at the outset; but Leboeuf, the War-Minister, imagined that the Foreign Office had made sure of alliances, and that a great part of the Prussian Army would not be free to act on the western frontier. Napoleon had in fact pushed forward his negotiations with Austria and Italy from the time that war became imminent. Count Beust, while clearly laying it down that Austria was not bound to follow France into a war made at its own pleasure, nevertheless felt some anxiety lest France and Prussia should settle their differences at Austria’s expense; moreover from the victory of Napoleon, assisted in any degree by himself, he could fairly hope for the restoration of Austria’s ascendency in Germany and the undoing of the work of 1866. It was determined at a Council held at Vienna on the 18th of July that Austria should for the present be neutral if Russia should not enter the war on the side of Prussia; but this neutrality was nothing more than a stage towards alliance with France if at the end of a certain brief period the army of Napoleon should have penetrated into Southern Germany. In a private despatch to the Austrian Ambassador at Paris Count Beust pointed out that the immediate participation of Austria in the war would bring Russia into the field on King William’s side. “To keep Russia neutral,” he wrote, “till the season is sufficiently advanced to prevent the concentration of its troops must be at present our object; but this neutrality is nothing more than a means for arriving at the real end of our policy, the only means for completing our preparations without exposing ourselves to premature attack by Prussia or Russia.” He added that Austria had already entered into a negotiation with Italy with a view to the armed mediation of the two Powers, and strongly recommended the Emperor to place the Italians in possession of Rome. [537]
[France, Austria, and Italy.]
Negotiations were now pressed forward between Paris, Florence, and Vienna, for the conclusion of a triple alliance. Of the course taken by these negotiations contradictory accounts are given by the persons concerned in them. According to Prince Napoleon, Victor Emmanuel demanded possession of Rome and this was refused to him by the French Emperor, in consequence of which the project of alliance failed. According to the Duke of Gramont, no more was demanded by Italy than the return to the conditions of the September Convention; this was agreed to by the Emperor, and it was in pursuance of this agreement that the Papal States were evacuated by their French garrison on the 2nd of August. Throughout the last fortnight of July, after war had actually been declared, there was, if the statement of Gramont is to be trusted, a continuous interchange of notes, projects, and telegrams between the three Governments. The difficulties raised by Italy and Austria were speedily removed, and though some weeks were needed by these Powers for their military preparations, Napoleon was definitely assured of their armed support in case of his preliminary success. It was agreed that Austria and Italy, assuming at the first the position of armed neutrality, should jointly present an ultimatum to Prussia in September demanding the exact performance of the Treaty of Prague, and, failing its compliance with this summons in the sense understood by its enemies, that the two Powers would immediately declare war, their armies taking the field at latest on the 15th of September. That Russia would in that case assist Prussia was well known; but it would seem that Count Beust feared little from his northern enemy in an autumn campaign. The draft of the Treaty between Italy and Austria had actually, according to Gramont’s statement, been accepted by the two latter Powers, and received its last amendments in a negotiation between the Emperor Napoleon and an Italian envoy, Count Vimercati, at Metz. Vimercati reached Florence with the amended draft on the 4th of August, and it was expected that the Treaty would be signed on the following day. When that day came it saw the forces of the French Empire dashed to pieces. [538]
[Prussian Plans.]
Preparations for a war with France had long occupied the general staff at Berlin. Before the winter of 1868 a memoir had been drawn up by General Moltke, containing plans for the concentration of the whole of the German forces, for the formation of each of the armies to be employed, and the positions to be occupied at the outset by each corps. On the basis of this memoir the arrangements for the transport of each corps from its depot to the frontier had subsequently been worked out in such minute detail that when, on the 16th of July, King William gave the order for mobilisation, nothing remained but to insert in the railway time-tables and marching-orders the day on which the movement was to commence. This minuteness of detail extended, however, only to that part of Moltke’s plan which related to the assembling and first placing of the troops. The events of the campaign could not thus be arranged and tabulated beforehand; only the general object and design could be laid down. That the French would throw themselves with great rapidity upon Southern Germany was considered probable. The armies of Baden, Würtemberg, and Bavaria were too weak, the military centres of the North were too far distant, for effective resistance to be made in this quarter to the first blows of the invader. Moltke therefore recommended that the Southern troops should withdraw from their own States and move northwards to join those of Prussia in the Palatinate or on the Middle Rhine, so that the entire forces of Germany should be thrown upon the flank or rear of the invader; while, in the event of the French not thus taking the offensive, France itself was to be invaded by the collective strength of Germany along the line from Saarbrücken to Landau, and its armies were to be cut off from their communications with Paris by vigorous movements of the invader in a northerly direction. [539]
[German mobilisation.]
The military organisation of Germany is based on the division of the country into districts, each of which furnishes at its own depôt a small but complete army. The nucleus of each such corps exists in time of peace, with its own independent artillery, stores, and material of war. On the order for mobilisation being given, every man liable to military service, but not actually serving, joins the regiment to which he locally belongs, and in a given number of days each corps is ready to take the field in full strength. The completion of each corps at its own depôt is the first stage in the preparation for a campaign. Not till this is effected does the movement of troops towards the frontier begin. The time necessary for the first act of preparation was, like that to be occupied in transport, accurately determined by the Prussian War Office. It resulted from General Moltke’s calculations that, the order of mobilisation having been given on the 16th of July, the entire army with which it was intended to begin the campaign would be collected and in position ready to cross the frontier on the 4th of August, if the French should not have taken up the offensive before that day. But as it was apprehended that part at least of the French army would be thrown into Germany before that date, the westward movement of the German troops stopped short at a considerable distance from the border, in order that the troops first arriving might not be exposed to the attack of a superior force before their supports should be at hand. On the actual frontier there was placed only the handful of men required for reconnoitring, and for checking the enemy during the few hours that would be necessary to guard against the effect of a surprise.
[The French Army.]
The French Emperor was aware of the numerical inferiority of his army to that of Prussia; he hoped, however, by extreme rapidity of movement to penetrate Southern Germany before the Prussian army could assemble, and so, while forcing the Southern Governments to neutrality, to meet on the Upper Danube the assisting forces of Italy and Austria. It was his design to concentrate a hundred and fifty thousand men at Metz, a hundred thousand at Strasburg, and with these armies united to cross the Rhine into Baden; while a third army, which was to assemble at Châlons, protected the north-eastern frontier against an advance of the Prussians. A few days after the declaration of war, while the German corps were still at their depots in the interior, considerable forces were massed round Metz and Strasburg. All Europe listened for the rush of the invader and the first swift notes of triumph from a French army beyond the Rhine; but week after week passed, and the silence was still unbroken. Stories, incredible to those who first heard them, yet perfectly true, reached the German frontier-stations of actual famine at the advanced posts of the enemy, and of French soldiers made prisoners while digging in potato-fields to keep themselves alive. That Napoleon was less ready than had been anticipated became clear to all the world; but none yet imagined the revelations which each successive day was bringing at the headquarters of the French armies. Absence of whole regiments that figured in the official order of battle, defective transport, stores missing or congested, made it impossible even to attempt the inroad into Southern Germany within the date up to which it had any prospect of success. The design was abandoned, yet not in time to prevent the troops that were hurrying from the interior from being sent backwards and forwards according as the authorities had, or had not, heard of the change of plan. Napoleon saw that a Prussian force was gathering on the Middle Rhine which it would be madness to leave on his flank; he ordered his own commanders to operate on the corresponding line of the Lauter and the Saar, and despatched isolated divisions to the very frontier, still uncertain whether even in this direction he would be able to act on the offensive, or whether nothing now remained to him but to resist the invasion of France by a superior enemy. Ollivier had stated in the Assembly that he and his colleagues entered upon the war with a light heart; he might have added that they entered upon it with bandaged eyes. The Ministers seem actually not to have taken the trouble to exchange explanations with one another. Leboeuf, the War-Minister, had taken it for granted that Gramont had made arrangements with Austria which would compel the Prussians to keep a large part of their forces in the interior. Gramont, in forcing on the quarrel with Prussia, and in his negotiations with Austria, had taken it for granted that Leboeuf could win a series of victories at the outset in Southern Germany. The Emperor, to whom alone the entire data of the military and the diplomatic services of France were open, was incapable of exertion or scrutiny, purposeless, distracted with pain, half-imbecile.
[Causes of French military inferiority.]
That the Imperial military administration was rotten to the core the terrible events of the next few weeks sufficiently showed. Men were in high place whose antecedents would have shamed the better kind of brigand. The deficiencies of the army were made worse by the diversion of public funds to private necessities; the looseness, the vulgar splendour, the base standards of judgment of the Imperial Court infected each branch of the public services of France, and worked perhaps not least on those who were in military command. But the catastrophe of 1870 seemed to those who witnessed it to tell of more than the vileness of an administration; in England, not less than in Germany, voices of influence spoke of the doom that had overtaken the depravity of a sunken nation; of the triumph of simple manliness, of Godfearing virtue itself, in the victories of the German army. There may have been truth in this; yet it would require a nice moral discernment to appraise the exact degeneracy of the French of 1870 from the French of 1854 who humbled Russia, or from the French of 1859 who triumphed at Solferino; and it would need a very comprehensive acquaintance with the lower forms of human pleasure to judge in what degree the sinfulness of Paris exceeds the sinfulness of Berlin. Had the French been as strict a race as the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae, as devout as the Tyrolese who perished at Königgrätz, it is quite certain that, with the numbers which took the field against Germany in 1870, with Napoleon III. at the head of affairs, and the actual generals of 1870 in command, the armies of France could not have escaped destruction.
[Cause of German Success.]
The main cause of the disparity of France and Germany in 1870 was in truth that Prussia had had from 1862 to 1866 a Government so strong as to be able to force upon its subjects its own gigantic scheme of military organisation in defiance of the votes of Parliament and of the national will. In 1866 Prussia, with a population of nineteen millions, brought actually into the field three hundred and fifty thousand men, or one in fifty-four of its inhabitants. There was no other government in Europe, with the possible exception of Russia, which could have imposed upon its subjects, without risking its own existence, so vast a burden of military service as that implied in this strength of the fighting army. Napoleon III. at the height of his power could not have done so; and when after Königgrätz he endeavoured to raise the forces of France to an equality with those of the rival Power by a system which would have brought about one in seventy of the population into the field, his own nominees in the Legislative Body, under pressure of public opinion, so weakened the scheme that the effective numbers of the army remained little more than they were before. The true parallel to the German victories of 1870 is to be found in the victories of the French Committee of Public Safety in 1794 and in those of the first Napoleon. A government so powerful as to bend the entire resources of the State to military ends will, whether it is one of democracy run mad, or of a crowned soldier of fortune, or of an ancient monarchy throwing new vigour into its traditional system and policy, crush in the moment of impact communities of equal or greater resources in which a variety of rival influences limit and control the central power and subordinate military to other interests. It was so in the triumphs of the Reign of Terror over the First Coalition; it was so in the triumphs of King William over Austria and France. But the parallel between the founders of German unity and the organisers of victory after 1793 extends no farther than to the sources of their success. Aggression and adventure have not been the sequels of the war of 1870. The vast armaments of Prussia were created in order to establish German union under the House of Hohenzollern, and they have been employed for no other object. It is the triumph of statesmanship, and it has been the glory of Prince Bismarck, after thus reaping the fruit of a well-timed homage to the God of Battles, to know how to quit his shrine.
[The frontier, Aug. 2.]
[Saarbrücken, Aug 2.]
[Weissenburg, Aug 4.]
[Battle of Wörth, Aug. 6.]
At the end of July, twelve days after the formal declaration of war, the gathering forces of the Germans, over three hundred and eighty thousand strong, were still some distance behind the Lauter and the Saar. Napoleon, apparently without any clear design, had placed certain bodies of troops actually on the frontier at Forbach, Weissenburg, and elsewhere, while other troops, raising the whole number to about two hundred and fifty thousand, lay round Metz and Strasburg, and at points between these and the most advanced positions. The reconnoitring of the small German detachments on the frontier was conducted with extreme energy: the French appear to have made no reconnaissances at all, for when they determined at last to discover what was facing them at Saarbrücken, they advanced with twenty-five thousand men against one-tenth of that number. On the 2nd of August Frossard’s corps from Forbach moved upon Saarbrücken with the Emperor in person. The garrison was driven out, and the town bombarded, but even now the reconnaissance was not continued beyond the bridge across the Saar which divides the two parts of the town. Forty-eight hours later the alignment of the German forces in their invading order was completed, and all was ready for an offensive campaign. The central army, commanded by Prince Frederick Charles, spreading east and west behind Saarbrücken, touched on its right the northern army commanded by General Steinmetz, on its left the southern army commanded by the Crown Prince, which covered the frontier of the Palatinate, and included the troops of Bavaria and Würtemberg. The general direction of the three armies was thus from northwest to south-east. As the line of invasion was to be nearly due west, it was necessary that the first step forwards should be made by the army of the Crown Prince in order to bring it more nearly to a level with the northern corps in the march into France. On the 4th of August the Crown Prince crossed the Alsatian frontier and moved against Weissenburg. The French General Douay, who was posted here with about twelve thousand men, was neither reinforced nor bidden to retire. His troops met the attack of an enemy many times more numerous with great courage; but the struggle was a hopeless one, and after several hours of severe fighting the Germans were masters of the field. Douay fell in the battle; his troops frustrated an attempt made to cut off their retreat, and fell back southwards towards the corps of McMahon, which lay about ten miles behind them. The Crown Prince marched on in search of his enemy, McMahon, who could collect only forty-five thousand men, desired to retreat until he could gain some support; but the Emperor, tormented by fears of the political consequences of the invasion, insisted upon his giving battle. He drew up on the hills about Wörth, almost on the spot where in 1793 Hoche had overthrown the armies of the First Coalition. On the 6th of August the leading divisions of the Crown Prince, about a hundred thousand strong, were within striking distance. The superiority of the Germans in numbers was so great that McMahon’s army might apparently have been captured or destroyed with far less loss than actually took place if time had been given for the movements which the Crown Prince’s staff had in view, and for the employment of his full strength. But the impetuosity of divisional leaders on the morning of the 6th brought on a general engagement. The resistance of the French was of the most determined character. With one more army-corps–and the corps of General Failly was expected to arrive on the field–it seemed as if the Germans might yet be beaten back. But each hour brought additional forces into action in the attack, while the French commander looked in vain for the reinforcements that could save him from ruin. At length, when the last desperate charges of the Cuirassiers had shattered against the fire of cannon and needle-guns, and the village of Froschwiller, the centre of the French position, had been stormed house by house, the entire army broke and fled in disorder. Nine thousand prisoners, thirty-three cannon, fell into the hands of the conquerors. The Germans had lost ten thousand men, but they had utterly destroyed McMahon’s army as an organised force. Its remnant disappeared from the scene of warfare, escaping by the western roads in the direction of Châlons, where first it was restored to some degree of order. The Crown Prince, leaving troops behind him to beleaguer the smaller Alsatian fortresses, marched on untroubled through the northern Vosges, and descended into the open country about Lunéville and Nancy, unfortified towns which could offer no resistance to the passage of an enemy.
[Spicheren, Aug. 6.]
On the same day that the battle of Wörth was fought, the leading columns of the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles crossed the frontier at Saarbrücken. Frossard’s corps, on the news of the defeat at Weissenburg, had withdrawn to its earlier positions between Forbach and the frontier: it held the steep hills of Spicheren that look down upon Saarbrücken, and the woods that flank the high road where this passes from Germany into France. As at Wörth, it was not intended that any general attack should be made on the 6th; a delay of twenty-four hours would have enabled the Germans to envelop or crush Frossard’s corps with an overwhelming force. But the leaders of the foremost regiments threw themselves impatiently upon the French whom they found before them: other brigades hurried up to the sound of the cannon, until the struggle took the proportion of a battle, and after hours of fluctuating success the heights of Spicheren were carried by successive rushes of the infantry full in the enemy’s fire. Why Frossard was not reinforced has never been explained, for several French divisions lay at no great distance westward, and the position was so strong that, if a pitched battle was to be fought anywhere east of Metz, few better points could have been chosen. But, like Douay at Weissenburg, Frossard was left to struggle alone against whatever forces the Germans might throw upon him. Napoleon, who directed the operations of the French armies from Metz, appears to have been now incapable of appreciating the simplest military necessities, of guarding against the most obvious dangers. Helplessness, infatuation ruled the miserable hours.
[Paris after Aug. 6.]
The impression made upon Europe by the battles of the 6th of August corresponded to the greatness of their actual military effects. There was an end to all thoughts of the alliance of Austria and Italy with France. Germany, though unaware of the full magnitude of the perils from which it had escaped, breathed freely after weeks of painful suspense; the very circumstance that the disproportion of numbers on the battle-field of Wörth was still unknown heightened the joy and confidence produced by the Crown Prince’s victory, a victory in which the South German troops, fighting by the side of those who had been their foes in 1866, had borne their full part. In Paris the consternation with which the news of McMahon’s overthrow was received was all the greater that on the previous day reports had been circulated of a victory won at Landau and of the capture of the Crown Prince with his army. The bulletin of the Emperor, briefly narrating McMahon’s defeat and the repulse of Frossard, showed in its concluding words–“All may yet be retrieved”–how profound was the change made in the prospects of the war by that fatal day. The truth was at once apprehended. A storm of indignation broke out against the Imperial Government at Paris. The Chambers were summoned. Ollivier, attacked alike by the extreme Bonapartists and by the Opposition, laid down his office. A reactionary Ministry, headed by the Count of Palikao, was placed in power by the Empress, a Ministry of the last hour as it was justly styled by all outside it. Levies were ordered, arms and stores accumulated for the reserve-forces, preparations made for a siege of Paris itself. On the 12th the Emperor gave up the command which he had exercised with such miserable results, and appointed Marshal Bazaine, one of the heroes of the Mexican Expedition, General-in-Chief of the Army of the Rhine.
[Napoleon at Metz. Aug. 7-11.]
[Borny, Aug 14.]
After the overthrow of McMahon and the victory of the Germans at Spicheren, there seems to have been a period of utter paralysis in the French headquarters at Metz. The divisions of Prince Frederick Charles and Steinmetz did not immediately press forward; it was necessary to allow some days for the advance of the Crown Prince through the Vosges; and during these days the French army about Metz, which, when concentrated, numbered nearly two hundred thousand men, might well have taken the positions necessary for the defence of Moselle, or in the alternative might have gained several marches in the retreat towards Verdun and Châlons. Only a small part of this body had as yet been exposed to defeat. It included in it the very flower of the French forces, tens of thousands of troops probably equal to any in Europe, and capable of forming a most formidable army if united to the reserves which would shortly be collected at Châlons or nearer Paris. But from the 7th to the 12th of August Napoleon, too cowed to take the necessary steps for battle in defence of the line of Moselle, lingered purposeless a id irresolute at Metz, unwilling to fall back from this fortress. It was not till the 14th that the retreat was begun. By this time the Germans were close at hand, and their leaders were little disposed to let the hesitating enemy escape them. While the leading divisions of the French were crossing the Moselle, Steinmetz hurried forward his troops and fell upon the French detachments still lying on the south-east of Metz about Borny and Courcelles. Bazaine suspended his movement of retreat in order to beat back an assailant who for once seemed to be inferior in strength. At the close of the day the French commander believed that he had gained a victory and driven the Germans off their line of advance; in reality he had allowed himself to be diverted from the passage of the Moselle at the last hour, while the Germans left under Prince Frederick Charles gained the river farther south, and actually began to cross it in order to bar his retreat.
[Mars-la-Tour, Aug. 15.]
From Metz westwards there is as far as the village of Gravelotte, which is seven miles distant, but one direct road; at Gravelotte the road forks, the southern arm leading towards Verdun by Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, the northern by Conflans. During the 15th of August the first of Bazaine’s divisions moved as far as Vionville along the southern road; others came into the neighbourhood of Gravelotte, but two corps which should have advanced past Gravelotte on to the northern road still lay close to Metz. The Prussian vanguard was meanwhile crossing the Moselle southwards from Noveant to Pont-a-Mousson, and hurrying forwards by lines converging on the road taken by Bazaine. Down to the evening of the 15th it was not supposed at the Prussian headquarters that Bazaine could be overtaken and brought to battle nearer than the line of the Meuse; but on the morning of the 16th the cavalry-detachments which had pushed farthest to the north-west discovered that the heads of the French columns had still not passed Mars-la-Tour. An effort was instantly made to seize the road and block the way before the enemy. The struggle, begun by a handful of combatants on each side, drew to it regiment after regiment as the French battalions close at hand came into action, and the Prussians hurried up in wild haste to support their comrades who were exposed to the attack of an entire army. The rapidity with which the Prussian generals grasped the situation before them, the vigour with which they brought up their cavalry over a distance which no infantry could traverse in the necessary time, and without a moment’s hesitation hurled this cavalry in charge after charge against a superior foe, mark the battle of Mars-la-Tour as that in which the military superiority of the Germans was most truly shown. Numbers in this battle had little to do with the result, for by better generalship Bazaine could certainly at any one point have overpowered his enemy. But while the Germans rushed like a torrent upon the true point of attack–that is the westernmost–Bazaine by some delusion considered it his primary object to prevent the Germans from thrusting themselves between the retreating army and Metz, and so kept a great part of his troops inactive about the fortress. The result was that the Germans, with a loss of sixteen thousand men, remained at the close of the day masters of the road at Vionville, and that the French army could not, without winning a victory and breaking through the enemy’s line, resume its retreat along this line.
[Gravelotte, Aug. 18.]
It was expected during the 17th that Bazaine would make some attempt to escape by the northern road, but instead of doing so he fell back on Gravelotte and the heights between this and Metz, in order to fight a pitched battle. The position was a well-chosen one; but by midday on the 18th the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles were ranged in front of Bazaine with a strength of two hundred and fifty thousand men, and in the judgment of the King these forces were equal to the attack. Again, as at Wörth, the precipitancy of divisional commanders caused the sacrifice of whole brigades before the battle was won. While the Saxon corps with which Moltke intended to deliver his slow but fatal blow upon the enemy’s right flank was engaged in its long northward détour, Steinmetz pushed his Rhinelanders past the ravine of Gravelotte into a fire where no human being could survive, and the Guards, pressing forward in column over the smooth unsheltered slope from St. Marie to St. Privat, sank by thousands without reaching midway in their course. Until the final blow was dealt by the Saxon corps from the north flank, the ground which was won by the Prussians was won principally by their destructive artillery fire: their infantry attacks had on the whole been repelled, and at Gravelotte itself it had seemed for a moment as if the French were about to break the assailant’s line. But Bazaine, as on the 16th, steadily kept his reserves at a distance from the points where their presence was most required, and, according to his own account, succeeded in bringing into action no more than a hundred thousand men, or less than two-thirds of the forces under his command. [540] At the close of the awful day, when the capture of St. Privat by the Saxons turned the defender’s line, the French abandoned all their positions and drew back within the defences of Metz.
[McMahon is compelled to attempt Bazaine’s relief.]
The Germans at once proceeded to block all the roads round the fortress, and Bazaine made no effort to prevent them. At the end of a few days the line was drawn around him in sufficient strength to resist any sudden attack. Steinmetz, who was responsible for a great part of the loss sustained at Gravelotte, was now removed from his command; his army was united with that under Prince Frederick Charles as the besieging force, while sixty thousand men, detached from this great mass, were formed into a separate army under Prince Albert of Saxony, and sent by way of Verdun to co-operate with the Crown Prince against McMahon. The Government at Paris knew but imperfectly what was passing around Metz from day to day; it knew, however, that if Metz should be given up for lost the hour of its own fall could not be averted. One forlorn hope remained, to throw the army which McMahon was gathering at Châlons north-eastward to Bazaine’s relief, though the Crown Prince stood between Châlons and Metz, and could reach every point in the line of march more rapidly than McMahon himself. Napoleon had quitted Metz on the evening of the 15th; on the 17th a council of war was held at Châlons, at which it was determined to fall back upon Paris and to await the attack of the Crown Prince under the forts of the capital. No sooner was this decision announced to the Government at Paris than the Empress telegraphed to her husband warning him to consider what would be the effects of his return, and insisting that an attempt should be made to relieve Bazaine. [541] McMahon, against his own better judgment, consented to the northern march. He moved in the first instance to Rheims in order to conceal his intention from the enemy, but by doing this he lost some days. On the 23rd, in pursuance of arrangements made with Bazaine, whose messengers were still able to escape the Prussian watch, he set out north-eastwards in the direction of Montmédy.
[German movement northwards, Aug 26.]
[Battle of Sedan, Sept. 1.]
[Capitulation of Sedan, Sept. 2.]
The movement was discovered by the Prussian cavalry and reported at the headquarters at Bar-le-Duc on the 25th. Instantly the westward march of the Crown Prince was arrested, and his army, with that of the Prince of Saxony, was thrown northwards in forced marches towards Sedan. On reaching Le Chesne, west of the Meuse, on the 27th, McMahon became aware of the enemy’s presence. He saw that his plan was discovered, and resolved to retreat westwards before it was too late. The Emperor, who had attached himself to the army, consented, but again the Government at Paris interfered with fatal effect. More anxious for the safety of the dynasty than for the existence of the army, the Empress and her advisers insisted that McMahon should continue his advance. Napoleon seems now to have abdicated all authority and thrown to the winds all responsibility. He allowed the march to be resumed in the direction of Mouzon and Stenay. Failly’s corps, which formed the right wing, was attacked on the 29th before it could reach the passage of the Meuse at the latter place, and was driven northwards to Beaumont. Here the commander strangely imagined himself to be in security. He was surprised in his camp on the following day, defeated, and driven northwards towards Mouzon. Meanwhile the left of McMahon’s army had crossed the Meuse and moved eastwards to Carignan, so that his troops were severed by the river and at some distance from one another. Part of Failly’s men were made prisoners in the struggle on the south, or dispersed on the west of the Meuse; the remainder, with their commander, made a hurried and disorderly escape beyond the river, and neglected to break down the bridges by which they had passed. McMahon saw that if the advance was continued his divisions would one after another fall into the enemy’s hands. He recalled the troops which had reached Carignan, and concentrated his army about Sedan to fight a pitched battle. The passages of the Meuse above and below Sedan were seized by the Germans. Two hundred and forty thousand men were at Moltke’s disposal; McMahon had about half that number. The task of the Germans was not so much to defeat the enemy as to prevent them from escaping to the Belgian frontier. On the morning of September 1st, while on the east of Sedan the Bavarians after a desperate resistance stormed the village of Bazeilles, Hessian and Prussian regiments crossed the Meuse at Donchéry several miles to the west. From either end of this line corps after corps now pushed northwards round the French positions, driving in the enemy wherever they found them, and, converging under the eyes of the Prussian King, his general, and his Minister, each into its place in the arc of fire before which the French Empire was to perish. The movement was as admirably executed as designed. The French fought furiously but in vain: the mere mass of the enemy, the mere narrowing of the once completed circle, crushed down resistance without the clumsy havoc of Gravelotte. From point after point the defenders were forced back within Sedan itself. The streets were choked with hordes of beaten infantry and cavalry; the Germans had but to take one more step forward and the whole of their batteries would command the town. Towards evening there was a pause in the firing, in order that the French might offer negotiations for surrender; but no sign of surrender was made, and the Bavarian cannon resumed their fire, throwing shells into the town itself. Napoleon now caused a white flag to be displayed on the fortress, and sent a letter to the King of Prussia, stating that as he had not been able to die in the midst of his troops, nothing remained for him but to surrender his sword into the hands of his Majesty. The surrender was accepted by King William, who added that General Moltke would act on his behalf in arranging terms of capitulation. General Wimpffen, who had succeeded to the command of the French army on the disablement of McMahon by a wound, acted on behalf of Napoleon. The negotiations continued till late in the night, the French general pressing for permission for his troops to be disarmed in Belgium, while Moltke insisted on the surrender of the entire army as prisoners of war. Fearing the effect of an appeal by Napoleon himself to the King’s kindly nature, Bismarck had taken steps to remove his sovereign to a distance until the terms of surrender should be signed. At daybreak on September 2nd Napoleon sought the Prussian headquarters. He was met on the road by Bismarck, who remained in conversation with him till the capitulation was completed on the terms required by the Germans. He then conducted Napoleon to the neighbouring château of Bellevue, where King William, the Crown Prince, and the Prince of Saxony visited him. One pang had still to be borne by the unhappy man. Down to his interview with the King, Napoleon had imagined that all the German armies together had operated against him at Sedan, and he must consequently have still had some hope that his own ruin might have purchased the deliverance of Bazaine. He learnt accidentally from the King that Prince Frederick Charles had never stirred from before Metz. A convulsion of anguish passed over his face: his eyes filled with tears. There was no motive for a prolonged interview between the conqueror and the conquered, for, as a prisoner, Napoleon could not discuss conditions of peace. After some minutes of conversation the King departed for the Prussian headquarters. Napoleon remained in the château until the morning of the next day, and then began his journey towards the place chosen for his captivity, the palace of Wilhelmshöhe at Cassel. [542]
[The Republic Proclaimed, Sept. 4.]
[Circular of Jules Favre, Sept. 6.]
Rumours of disaster had reached Paris in the last days of August, but to each successive report of evil the Government replied with lying boasts of success, until on the 3rd of September it was forced to announce a catastrophe far surpassing the worst anticipations of the previous days. With the Emperor and his entire army in the enemy’s hands, no one supposed that the dynasty could any longer remain on the throne: the only question was by what form of government the Empire should be succeeded. The Legislative Chamber assembled in the dead of night; Jules Favre proposed the deposition of the Emperor, and was heard in silence. The Assembly adjourned for some hours. On the morning of the 4th, Thiers, who sought to keep the way open for an Orleanist restoration, moved that a Committee of Government should be appointed by the Chamber itself, and that elections to a new Assembly should be held as soon as circumstances should permit. Before this and other propositions of the same nature could be put to the vote, the Chamber was invaded by the mob. Gambetta, with most of the Deputies for Paris, proceeded to the Hôtel de Ville, and there proclaimed the Republic. The Empress fled; a Government of National Defence came into existence, with General Trochu at its head, Jules Favre assuming the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Gambetta that of the Interior. No hand was raised in defence of the Napoleonic dynasty or of the institutions of the Empire. The Legislative Chamber and the Senate disappeared without even making an attempt to prolong their own existence. Thiers, without approving of the Republic or the mode in which it had come into being, recommended his friends to accept the new Government, and gave it his own support. On the 6th of September a circular of Jules Favre, addressed to the representatives of France at all the European Courts, justified the overthrow of the Napoleonic Empire, and claimed for the Government by which it was succeeded the goodwill of the neutral Powers. Napoleon III. was charged with the responsibility for the war: with the fall of his dynasty, it was urged, the reasons for a continuance of the struggle had ceased to exist. France only asked for a lasting peace. Such peace, however, must leave the territory of France inviolate, for peace with dishonour would be but the prelude to a new war of extermination. “Not an inch of our soil will we cede”–so ran the formula–“not a stone of our fortresses.” [543]
[Favre and Bismarck, Sept. 29.]
The German Chancellor had nothing ready in the way of rhetoric equal to his antagonist’s phrases; but as soon as the battle of Sedan was won it was settled at the Prussian headquarters that peace would not be made without the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Prince Bismarck has stated that his own policy would have stopped at the acquisition of Strasburg: Moltke, however, and the chiefs of the army pronounced that Germany could not be secure against invasion while Metz remained in the hands of France, and this opinion was accepted by the King. For a moment it was imagined that the victory of Sedan had given the conqueror peace on his own terms. This hope, however, speedily disappeared, and the march upon Paris was resumed by the army of the Crown Prince without waste of time. In the third week of September the invaders approached the capital. Favre, in spite of his declaration of the 6th, was not indisposed to enter upon negotiations; and, trusting to his own arts of persuasion, he sought an interview with the German Chancellor, which was granted to him at Ferrières on the 19th, and continued on the following day. Bismarck hesitated to treat the holders of office in Paris as an established Government; he was willing to grant an armistice in order that elections might be held for a National Assembly with which Germany could treat for peace; but he required, as a condition of the armistice, that Strasburg and Toul should be surrendered. Toul was already at the last extremity; Strasburg was not capable of holding out ten days longer; but of this the Government at Paris was not aware. The conditions demanded by Bismarck were rejected as insulting to France, and the war was left to take its course. Already, while Favre was negotiating at Ferrières, the German vanguard was pressing round to the west of Paris. A body of French troops which attacked them on the 19th at Châtillon was put to the rout and fled in panic. Versailles was occupied on the same day, and the line of investment was shortly afterwards completed around the capital.
[Siege of Paris, Sept. 19.]
[Tours.]
[Gambetta at Tours.]
The second act in the war now began. Paris had been fortified by Thiers about 1840, at the time when it seemed likely that France might be engaged in war with a coalition on the affairs of Mehemet Ali. The forts were not distant enough from the city to protect it altogether from artillery with the lengthened range of 1870; they were sufficient, however, to render an assault out of the question, and to compel the besieger to rely mainly on the slow operation of famine. It had been reckoned by the engineers of 1840 that food enough might be collected to enable the city to stand a two-months’ siege; so vast, however, were the supplies collected in 1870 that, with double the population, Paris had provisions for above four months. In spite therefore of the capture and destruction of its armies the cause of France was not hopeless, if, while Paris and Metz occupied four hundred thousand of the invaders, the population of the provinces should take up the struggle with enthusiasm, and furnish after some months of military exercise troops more numerous than those which France had lost, to attack the besiegers from all points at once and to fall upon their communications. To organise such a national resistance was, however, impossible for any Government within the besieged capital itself. It was therefore determined to establish a second seat of Government on the Loire; and before the lines were drawn round Paris three members of the Ministry, with M. Crémieux at their head, set out for Tours. Crémieux, however, who was an aged lawyer, proved quite unequal to his task. His authority was disputed in the west and the south. Revolutionary movements threatened to break up the unity of the national defence. A stronger hand, a more commanding will, was needed. Such a hand, such a will belonged to Gambetta, who on the 7th of October left Paris in order to undertake the government of the provinces and the organisation of the national armies. The circle of the besiegers was now too closely drawn for the ordinary means of travel to be possible. Gambetta passed over the German lines in a balloon, and reached Tours in safety, where he immediately threw his feeble colleagues into the background and concentrated all power in his own vigorous grasp. The effect of his presence was at once felt throughout France. There was an end of the disorders in the great cities, and of all attempts at rivalry with the central power. Gambetta had the faults of rashness, of excessive self-confidence, of defective regard for scientific authority in matters where he himself was ignorant: but he possessed in an extraordinary degree the qualities necessary for a Dictator at such a national crisis: boundless, indomitable courage; a simple, elemental passion of love for his country that left absolutely no place for hesitations or reserve in the prosecution of the one object for which France then existed, the war. He carried the nation with him like a whirlwind. Whatever share the military errors of Gambetta and his rash personal interference with commanders may have had in the ultimate defeat of France, without him it would never have been known of what efforts France was capable. The proof of his capacity was seen in the hatred and the fear with which down to the time of his death he inspired the German people. Had there been at the head of the army of Metz a man of one-tenth of Gambetta’s effective force, it is possible that France might have closed the war, if not with success, at least with undiminished territory.
[Fall of Strasburg, Sept. 28.]
[The army of the Loire.]
[Tann takes Orleans, Oct. 12.]
Before Gambetta left Paris the fall of Strasburg set free the army under General Werder by which it had been besieged, and enabled the Germans to establish a civil Government in Alsace, the western frontier of the new Province having been already so accurately studied that, when peace was made in 1871, the frontier-line was drawn not upon one of the earlier French maps but on the map now published by the German staff. It was Gambetta’s first task to divide France into districts, each with its own military centre, its own army, and its own commander. Four such districts were made: the centres were Lille, Le Mans, Bourges, and Besançon. At Bourges and in the neighbourhood considerable progress had already been made in organisation. Early in October German cavalry-detachments, exploring southwards, found that French troops were gathering on the Loire. The Bavarian General Von der Tann was detached by Moltke from the besieging army at Paris, and ordered to make himself master of Orleans. Von der Tann hastened southwards, defeated the French outside Orleans on the 11th of October, and occupied this city, the French retiring towards Bourges. Gambetta removed the defeated commander, and set in his place General Aurelle de Paladines. Von der Tann was directed to cross the Loire and destroy the arsenals at Bourges; he reported, however, that this task was beyond his power, in consequence of which Moltke ordered General Werder with the army of Strasburg to move westwards against Bourges, after dispersing the weak forces that were gathering about Besançon. Werder set out on his dangerous march, but he had not proceeded far when an army of very different power was thrown into the scale against the French levies on the Loire.
[Bazaine at Metz.]
[Capitulation of Metz, Oct. 27.]
In the battle of Gravelotte, fought on the 18th of August, the French troops had been so handled by Bazaine as to render it doubtful whether he really intended to break through the enemy’s line and escape from Metz. At what period political designs inconsistent with his military duty first took possession of Bazaine’s thoughts is uncertain. He had played a political part in Mexico; it is probable that as soon as he found himself at the head of the one effective army of France, and saw Napoleon hopelessly discredited, he began to aim at personal power. Before the downfall of the Empire he had evidently adopted a scheme of inaction with the object of preserving his army entire: even the sortie by which it had been arranged that he should assist McMahon on the day before Sedan was feebly and irresolutely conducted. After the proclamation of the Republic Bazaine’s inaction became still more marked. The intrigues of an adventurer named Regnier, who endeavoured to open a negotiation between the Prussians and the exiled Empress Eugénie, encouraged him in his determination to keep his soldiers from fulfilling their duty to France. Week after week passed by; a fifth of the besieging army was struck down with sickness; yet Bazaine made no effort to break through, or even to diminish the number of men who were consuming the supplies of Metz by giving to separate detachments the opportunity of escape. On the 12th of October, after the pretence of a sortie on the north, he entered into communication with the German headquarters at Versailles. Bismarck offered to grant a free departure to the army of Metz on condition that the fortress should be placed in his hands, that the army should undertake to act on behalf of the Empress, and that the Empress should pledge herself to accept the Prussian conditions of peace, whatever these might be. General Boyer was sent to England to acquaint the Empress with these propositions. They were declined by her, and after a fortnight had been spent in manoeuvres for a Bonapartist restoration. Bazaine found himself at the end of his resources. On the 27th the capitulation of Metz was signed. The fortress itself, with incalculable cannon and material of war, and an army of a hundred and seventy thousand men, including twenty-six thousand sick and wounded in the hospitals, passed into the hands of the Germans. [544]
[Bazaine.]
Bazaine was at a later time tried by a court-martial, found guilty of the neglect of duty, and sentenced to death. That sentence was not executed; but if there is an infamy that is worse than death, such infamy will to all time cling to his name. In the circumstances in which France was placed no effort, no sacrifice of life could have been too great for the commander of the army at Metz. To retain the besiegers in full strength before the fortress would not have required the half of Bazaine’s actual force. If half his army had fallen on the field of battle in successive attempts to cut their way through the enemy, brave men would no doubt have perished; but even had their efforts failed their deaths would have purchased for Metz the power to hold out for weeks or for months longer. The civil population of Metz was but sixty thousand, its army was three times as numerous; unlike Paris, it saw its stores consumed not by helpless millions of women and children, but by soldiers whose duty it was to aid the defence of their country at whatever cost. Their duty, if they could not cut their way through, was to die fighting; and had they shown hesitation, which was not the case, Bazaine should have died at their head. That Bazaine would have fulfilled his duty even if Napoleon III. had remained on the throne is more than doubtful, for his inaction had begun before the catastrophe of Sedan. His pretext after that time was that the government of France had fallen into the hands of men of disorder, and that it was more important for his army to save France from the Government than from the invader. He was the only man in France who thought so. The Government of September 4th, whatever its faults, was good enough for tens of thousands of brave men, Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, who flocked without distinction of party to its banners: it might have been good enough for Marshal Bazaine. But France had to pay the penalty for the political, the moral indifference which could acquiesce in the Coup d’État of 1851, in the servility of the Empire, in many a vile and boasted deed in Mexico, in China, in Algiers. Such indifference found its Nemesis in a Bazaine.
[Tann driven from Orleans, Nov. 9.]
[Battles of Orleans, Nov. 28-Dec. 2.]
[Sortie of Champigny, Nov. 29-Dec. 4.]
[Battle of Amiens, Nov. 27.]
The surrender of Metz and the release of the great army of Prince Frederick Charles by which it was besieged fatally changed the conditions of the French war of national defence. Two hundred thousand of the victorious troops of Germany under some of their ablest generals were set free to attack the still untrained levies on the Loire and in the north of France, which, with more time for organisation, might well have forced the Germans to raise the siege of Paris. The army once commanded by Steinmetz was now reconstituted, and despatched under General Manteuffel towards Amiens; Prince Frederick Charles moved with the remainder of his troops towards the Loire. Aware that his approach could not long be delayed, Gambetta insisted that Aurelle de Paladines should begin the march on Paris. The general attacked Tann at Coulmiers on the 9th of November, defeated him, and re-occupied Orleans, the first real success that the French had gained in the war. There was great alarm at the German headquarters at Versailles; the possibility of a failure of the siege was discussed; and forty thousand troops were sent southwards in haste to the support of the Bavarian general. Aurelle, however, did not move upon the capital: his troops were still unfit for the enterprise; and he remained stationary on the north of Orleans, in order to improve his organisation, to await reinforcements, and to meet the attack of Frederick Charles in a strong position. In the third week of November the leading divisions of the army of Metz approached, and took post between Orleans and Paris. Gambetta now insisted that the effort should be made to relieve the capital. Aurelle resisted, but was forced to obey. The garrison of Paris had already made several unsuccessful attacks upon the lines of their besiegers, the most vigorous being that of Le Bourget on the 30th of October, in which bayonets were crossed. It was arranged that in the last days of November General Trochu should endeavour to break out on the southern side, and that simultaneously the army of the Loire should fall upon the enemy in front of it and endeavour to force its way to the capital. On the 28th the attack upon the Germans on the north of Orleans began. For several days the struggle was renewed by one division after another of the armies of Aurelle and Prince Frederick Charles. Victory remained at last with the Germans; the centre of the French position was carried; the right and left wings of the army were severed from one another and forced to retreat, the one up the Loire, the other towards the west. Orleans on the 5th of December passed back into the hands of the Germans. The sortie from Paris, which began with a successful attack by General Ducrot upon Champigny beyond the Marne, ended after some days of combat in the recovery by the Germans of the positions which they had lost, and in the retreat of Ducrot into Paris. In the same week Manteuffel, moving against the relieving army of the north, encountered it near Amiens, defeated it after a hard struggle, and gained possession of Amiens itself.
[Rouen occupied, Dec. 6.]
[Bapaume, Jan. 3.]
[St. Quentin, Jan 19.]
After the fall of Amiens, Manteuffel moved upon Rouen. This city fell into his hands without resistance; the conquerors pressed on westwards, and at Dieppe troops which had come from the confines of Russia gazed for the first time upon the sea. But the Republican armies, unlike those which the Germans had first encountered, were not to be crushed at a single blow. Under the energetic command of Faidherbe the army of the North advanced again upon Amiens. Goeben, who was left to defend the line of the Somme, went out to meet him, defeated him on the 23rd of December, and drove him back to Arras. But again, after a week’s interval, Faidherbe pushed forward. On the 3rd of January he fell upon Goeben’s weak division at Bapaume, and handled it so severely that the Germans would on the following day have abandoned their position, if the French had not themselves been the first to retire. Faidherbe, however, had only fallen back to receive reinforcements. After some days’ rest he once more sought to gain the road to Paris, advancing this time by the eastward line through St. Quentin. In front of this town Goeben attacked him. The last battle of the army of the North was fought on the 19th of January. The French general endeavoured to disguise his defeat, but the German commander had won all that he desired. Faidherbe’s army was compelled to retreat northwards in disorder; its part in the war was at an end.
[The Armies of the Loire and of the East.]
[Le Mans, Jan. 12.]
[Bourbaki.]
[Montbéliard, Jan. 15-17.]
[The Eastern army crosses the Swiss Frontier, Feb. 1.]
During the last three weeks of December there was a pause in the operations of the Germans on the Loire. It was expected that Bourbaki and the east wing of The Armies of the French army would soon re-appear at Orleans and endeavour to combine with Chanzy’s troops. Gambetta, however, had formed another plan. He considered that Chanzy, with the assistance of divisions formed in Brittany, would be strong enough to encounter Prince Frederick Charles, and he determined to throw the army of Bourbaki, strengthened by reinforcements from the south, upon Germany itself. The design was a daring one, and had the two French armies been capable of performing the work