EIGHT
A surprising number of distinguished men worshipped the empress. Among them were the imperial librarian, Octave Feuillet, the Austrian chancellor, Count von Beust, the Italian ambassador Cavaliere Nigra – even if Eugénie ranted at him more than once about Italy’s designs on Rome – and Jacques Offenbach, although this may have been one of the maestro’s jokes. The loyal Filon claimed romantically that Count Bacciochi shot himself ‘to escape from the consuming tortures of a wild passion’ for Eugénie, but he had really done so because of ruining himself on the stock exchange.
The most improbable of all was the Prussian ambassador, Count von der Goltz, who wrote the empress wistful letters of the utmost propriety. She kept them for the rest of her life, calling him, ‘mon pauvre Goltz’. In August 1866 Goltz tried in vain to persuade Bismarck of the benefits of a French alliance, but torn between his affections and his patriotism, while foreseeing war he tried, only once, to warn the empress. This was after visiting Berlin in 1868 when he wrote to her that German journalists in Paris were sending home reports which placed Napoleon III in the worst possible light and that the chauvinist tone of the French press was arousing hostility across the Rhine. A bit later the emperor grumbled to Cowley about rumours in the German press that he was preparing for a war and that when he lost it he would have to ‘restore’ Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, rumours that ‘were doing incredible mischief’.
When Goltz became incurably ill in 1869 Eugénie had him installed in a pavilion in the park at Fontainebleau so that she could see he was properly nursed. ‘One summer’s evening we were sitting by the lake in front of the Chinese Drawing Room when a shadow – a shadow, not a man, appeared,’ recalled Filon. It was Goltz who, unable to speak, looked at the empress with ‘the dumb devotion of a faithful dog’. He died shortly after.
In old age Prince Bismarck boasted that he deliberately provoked a war with France, to make the South German States unite with the North. In fact he blundered into one through tactless diplomacy. Even so, without Bismarck there would never have been a Franco-Prussian War.
Although Napoleon III was scarcely a great soldier, at least he tried to be a realist. ‘He said that it was the superior military organisation of Prussia that had counted in the late war,’ Cowley reported in December 1866. ‘Austria, in fact, had been in the same position as he found himself during the war in Italy with a formidable army on paper, which dwindled to nothing when put to the test of activity.’
He had been seriously alarmed by reports from the French military attaché at Berlin, Baron Stoffel, who warned that highly trained officers and ultra-modern equipment gave the Prussian army overwhelming superiority. Already shocked by the Prussian performance at Königgrätz, the emperor welcomed the sweeping programme of military reform proposed by Marshal Niel, minister for war. Secret discussions during the annual staff conferences at Compiègne alarmed him still more. Niel, who died in 1869, always insisted that by itself even a stronger army was not enough and agreed with Eugénie on the need for an Austrian alliance – only a war on two fronts could defeat the Prussians.
Unfortunately, despite Königgrätz the new liberal France could see no reason for paying more taxes to improve an army that might be wasted on another Mexican adventure. Nevertheless, the army began to modernise early in 1868. It was equipped with a fine new breech-loading rifle, thechassepot, which was better than the Prussian ‘needle-gun’, and the first mass-produced machine-gun, the mitrailleuse (firing 150 rounds a minute), although the Corps Législatif refused to pay for artillery that would match breech-loading Krupp howitzers. Even so, having seen a demonstration of the rapid firepower of what he called ‘the deadly Chassepots’, Whitehurst was convinced that ‘no infantry or cavalry could advance in the face of such a permanent and perpetual discharge of death’. By 1870 France was certainly much readier for war than it had been in 1859 – for war against an army of the same sort as itself.
As Napoleon realised very well, the daunting superiority of the Prussian army lay not only in its numbers, training and equipment, but also in its organisation. Its General Staff could supply commanders with information and advice throughout a battle, while it had learned how to use railways to rush men to the front. And as its commander-in-chief, in all but name, it had Moltke, who had been planning an invasion of France for the last ten years.
‘Six railway lines were now available to bring the forces of the North German Confederation to the Rhineland – a total, in three weeks, of 300,000 men,’ writes Sir Michael Howard. If Austria stayed put and the South German States fulfilled their treaty obligations, the total would be nearer half a million. ‘Railway timetables were drawn up, so that every unit knew the exact day and hour that it would leave its barracks and reach its concentration area. Mobilisation and deployment would follow one another in a single smooth and exactly calculated operation. By July 1870 Moltke knew that he had under his hand one of the greatest engines of war the world had ever known; and he was openly impatient to use it.’
France’s generals put their trust in their troops, now that they were armed with the chassepot. (General du Barail admitted in his memoirs that he told Marshal Canrobert, ‘We beat Russia in the Crimea, Austria in Italy, and I most sincerely believe that these two campaigns have assured our supremacy in Europe.’) They also hoped to find allies among the South German States, who had no wish to be absorbed by Prussia – the Grand Duke of Hesse informed General Ducrot that even a small victory by France would make all the South Germans go over to her side. Encouragingly, the Bavarians elected an anti-Prussian ‘Patriot’ government in the spring of 1870.
There was even a faint possibility the Austrians might help. During a visit to Paris in February 1870 Archduke Albrecht, their best general, proposed an alliance between Austria, France and Italy, but Franz-Joseph, who dared not risk losing a third war, would only say vaguely that if the French invaded South Germany ‘as liberators rather than enemies’ he might come in on their side. Some French generals thought an alliance of this sort had small chance of success, arguing that the Prussians could mobilise too quickly and that South Germans hated Frenchmen more than they did the Protestant Northerners.
The French did not appreciate that since the Dual Monarch’s establishment in 1867 Franz-Joseph had become the prisoner of the Hungarians, who did not want him to become too powerful for them, as he undoubtedly would be if he defeated the Prussians. Budapest would never let him go to war with Berlin.
However, all this talk of a Franco-Prussian war seemed mere theorising in the weeks that followed the plebiscite. Even if the French and the Prussians disliked each other, there was no reason for war. ‘The government has no cause for concern whatever’, Emile Ollivier told the Corps Législatif when discussing foreign affairs. ‘At no period has the maintenance of peace seemed more assured.’ This was on 30 June. Three days later the French ambassador at Madrid telegraphed the Quai d’Orsai: ‘A deputation has offered the throne of Spain to a Hohenzollern prince, who has accepted.’ The prince was Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. He was not even a Prussian, only a remote kinsman of the Prussian king (they shared a mutual thirteenth-century ancestor) and in fact a close cousin of Napoleon III through the Beauharnais, but it made no difference to the French, who were convinced that Prussia was encircling France. The press erupted in hysteria.
Suddenly, in the words of the académicien L.-A. Prévost-Paradol, ‘France and Prussia were hurtling towards each other like two locomotives on the same track.’
On 6 July the Duc de Gramont promised the Corps Législatif that France would not tolerate a Hohenzollern prince or any other Prussian prince on the Spanish throne: ‘We shall know how to do our duty, without the slightest hesitation or weakness.’ The emperor had asked Gramont to speak gently, but Ollivier told him to be as forceful as he liked. Privately the duke informed the Council that Leopold’s accession ‘means war.’
Gramont had made his statement after consulting the minister for war, General Leboeuf, who assured him that the French army was ready for hostilities. It was Ollivier who supplied the phrase, ‘We shall know how to do our duty’. ‘We have had enough of the humiliations that Prussia wants to inflict on us,’ he informed the Austrian ambassador. ‘La Valette and Rouher are no longer running French policy.’ Undoubtedly he had judged the nation’s mood correctly, and in the chamber Gramont’s speech was greeted with cries of ‘Vive la France! Vive l’Empéreur!’ even of ‘A Berlin!’ Everyone agreed, on the left as well as on the right, including Gambetta. ‘Rarely have we seen so much unanimity in the newspapers of all the various parties,’ noted the Figaro.
Reading the foreign minister’s statement to the Corps Législatif, Bismarck commented, ‘this certainly looks like war’. Yet the Prussian chancellor had never intended to set a trap for Napoleon III, as many historians have suggested – and, indeed, as he himself would hint afterwards. Isabella II had abdicated in 1868 and for the last year Bismarck had been trying, in secret negotiations with the Spanish dictator Marshal Prim, to replace her by a Hohenzollern. However unwelcome a German king of Spain might be to the French, if they were presented with a fait accompli he saw no reason why they should go to war once Leopold had been safely installed by the Cortès. It was only by accident that news of the negotiations leaked out before the Cortès was able to give its approval.
The revelation that Bismarck had been intriguing in Spain outraged opinion throughout Europe. In London The Times called his scheme ‘a vulgar and impudent coup d’état in total contradiction to accepted diplomatic practice in handling such matters’. It looked as if Prussia would have to back down, suffering considerable humiliation, while few, if any, observers expected there would be war.
On 7 July the Duc de Gramont sent a telegram to Count Benedetti at the French embassy in Berlin, instructing him to extract a promise at once from King William that he would arrange for Leopold to withdraw his candidature immediately. ‘We have to know whether it is to be peace or a refusal which means war,’ said the duke. ‘If you can persuade the king to prevent the prince from accepting, it will be a great triumph and a great service. On his own initiative, the king will have guaranteed the peace of Europe. But if this does not happen, then there is going to be war.’
‘The speech made by the Duke de Gramont in the Chamber stirred up the whole country into a war-fever which the feeble government of M. Ollivier could not control,’ the Austrian diplomat Baron Vitzthum recalled later. Napoleon was the one man in Paris who kept his head and guessed at Prussia’s military potential. He can scarcely have been reassured by the war minister Marshal Leboeuf, who on behalf of the French army claimed fatuously that in the event of a war lasting for a year, ‘We won’t need to buy a single gaiter-button.’
‘If Prussia doesn’t want to fight, then we shall have to give her a good kick up the backside, by going over the Rhine again and clearing the left bank [of Germans]’, wrote Emile de Girardin in La Presse – and Girardin was no mere hack but one of the most influential journalists in France. The empress shared the general mood. When Prevost-Paradol, minister designate to the United States, came to Saint-Cloud for a farewell audience she gave him a warm welcome, knowing he had always said that a Franco-Prussian war was inevitable. ‘We’ve got to go ahead,’ Eugénie told him. ‘France is on the verge of losing her place in the world – she has to fight or go under.’
On 7 July Gramont instructed Benedetti to obtain a categorical statement from the Prussian king, to the effect that he had ordered Prince Leopold to stand down. William, who had never liked the idea of the candidature, and who in any case did not want a war, politely declined. It was nothing to do with him, said the king – he did not object to Leopold withdrawing just as he had not objected to his accepting. Gramont’s reaction, in a telegram on 9 July, was, ‘If the King won’t order the Prince of Hohenzollern to refuse, then it will be immediate war and within a few days we shall cross the Rhine.’ On 11 July, in yet another frantic telegram, he told the ambassador that the ministry might fall because of popular excitement over the issue – however he did it, Benedetti must obtain William’s formal undertaking.
Yet when Prince Metternich had seen the emperor on the day of Gramont’s speech three days earlier, he had found him relaxed and optimistic. ‘I must say that all this Spanish-Prussian affair seems to have been seized upon as an opportunity to score a diplomatic success and humiliate Prussia,’ he reported, adding that the French thought they could bring it off without endangering the peace. Ignoring both Eugénie and his ministers, Napoleon sent a secret envoy to Prince Leopold’s father, imploring him to stop his son from accepting the Spanish throne. He also wrote to King Leopold II of Belgium, asking him to intervene with the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen family. In addition, he told the French ambassador in London to ask the English foreign secretary Lord Granville to use his influence in Berlin and Madrid.
The emperor’s diplomacy very nearly succeeded in avoiding a war. Horrified at the thought of starting one, and shaken by a stern letter from Queen Victoria, on 12 July Prince Leopold’s father sent telegrams to Berlin, Madrid and Paris, announcing that his son had decided to decline the offer of the Spanish crown. When Napoleon read his telegram, he exclaimed delightedly, ‘This is peace!’
Eugénie’s reaction to the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen telegram was very different, however. ‘Qué verguenza!’ she cried in disgust – ‘How shameful!’ ‘This renunciation just isn’t good enough,’ she continued furiously. ‘The King of Prussia must guarantee that the candidature is never going to be repeated.’
This was also the reaction of the Corps Législatif. When Prince Leopold’s withdrawal was announced, the deputies, especially those on the right, dismissed it angrily as a private message with absolutely no guarantee from Prussia that he might not change his mind. In a panic, Gramont informed the Prussian ambassador Baron von Werther that King William must write a formal letter ‘of explanation’ to the emperor, providing the necessary guarantee.
At this crucial moment Napoleon collapsed with an agonising attack from the stone in his bladder. The only possible relief from the pain was laudanum, which deprived him of the ability to concentrate.
Nevertheless, the duke insisted on seeing the emperor at Saint-Cloud, at 5.00 p.m. on 12 July. The only other person present was the empress. Since Ollivier had excluded her from Council meetings, she excluded him from the meeting that would decide whether there would be peace or war – a decision to be taken by herself and Gramont. The one account of the meeting is that given by Eugénie to Paléologue in 1906 and, despite Paléologue’s unreliability, it is extremely convincing. First, she stressed how all the Second Empire’s leading generals had promised her that in the event of war, despite some fierce fighting to begin with, the French would easily beat the Prussians:
Leboeuf, Canrobert, Ducrot, Vaillant, Frossard, Bourbaki, Lebrun, Gallifet – they all vouched for our victory … and what a victory. I think I can still hear them telling me, at Saint-Cloud: ‘Never has our army been in better condition, better equipped, in better fighting mettle. Nineteen chances out of every twenty are in our favour. Our offensive in Germany will be so shattering that it will cut Prussia in two, and we shall swallow Prussia at one gulp … We’ll soon find the way back to Jena.’
‘Withdraw? Temporise? We could not possibly. We should have had the whole country rising against us … They were already taunting us with our weakness; a terrible remark had reached even our ears. “The Hohenzollern candidature is a second Königgrätz in the making.” For years our ruthless enemies, Orleanists, Legitimists and republicans, had never wearied of flinging it in our faces.’
Eugénie explained to Paléologue that French national pride would not have tolerated further humiliation, and that she had fully agreed with Gramont’s assessment of the situation, recalling how he put it:
Our differences with Prussia cannot be solved merely by the Hohenzollern candidate withdrawing. That is no sort of solution and it is never going to satisfy French public opinion – we should be blamed, and quite rightly so, for having been duped by Bismarck … I have just learned that the right wing in the Corps Législatif intends to question us closely about the guarantees we have demanded from King William – the guarantees to ensure that we shall never again be in danger of seeing a German prince reigning at Madrid. If we don’t secure these vital guarantees, then France will have been humiliated and insulted in the eyes of all Europe. Every Frenchman will be infuriated, heart and soul, by the emperor’s behaviour, and that would mean the end of the Empire.
By her own admission, Eugénie unhesitatingly agreed with the duke’s policy, convinced that extracting public guarantees from Prussia was the sole means of saving the Second Empire. She claims that Napoleon ‘raised no objection’, although historians suspect he was too ill to say anything. ‘All we discussed was the need to put an end to Bismarck’s machinations,’ she insisted. ‘We had no desire for war. Even so, we weren’t frightened of one either because, as I repeat again and again, our army appeared to be invincible, while we also counted on finding powerful allies.’ Presumably by ‘powerful allies’ she meant Austria and Italy. No doubt, if the French army had done what its generals promised, Franz-Joseph and Victor-Emmanuel might have joined in on the emperor’s side. But they would only march to the aid of a victorious France.
As a recently promoted career diplomat, a politician for just nine weeks, Gramont had no parliamentary skills and was unnerved by the fury in the Corps Législatif. The emperor or a veteran minister such as Rouher or La Valette might have defused the situation. But the duke could see no way out other than to humiliate Prussia.
‘Yes, I fully approved Gramont’s policy, and even gave him the full weight of my support when he came to see us,’ was Eugénie’s recollection, according to Paléologue. ‘I was wrong to behave chivalrously (d’être homme galant) to the empress when I should have behaved chivalrously to France,’ is Gramont’s version – a far from chivalrous attempt to shift most of the blame on to Eugénie.
She explained her decision:
I had long been convinced that we were going along a doomed road, that the Liberal Empire was dragging us down into the worst sort of revolution, a revolution of mistrust. You may say I was thinking only of the Empire and not of France, but God is my witness that I never distinguished between France and the Empire. I simply could not conceive of French grandeur or French prosperity except under the Empire. And when my husband’s health was becoming such a worry, I had to concentrate on handing over power to our son intact…. That is why I gave Gramont’s policy such whole-hearted support.
Doubts have been cast on Paléologue’s account of what Eugénie told him, especially by her admirers, and admittedly he is sometimes unreliable. Yet in this case he seems to be borne out by Emile Ollivier, who said, ‘The war was wanted by the empress and [General] Leboeuf, forced on us by Bismarck.’ General du Barail also claimed that she wanted war, because she thought it would be easy to win and wished the reign of ‘Napoleon IV’ to open in an atmosphere of military glory.
Within two hours of Gramont’s discussion with Eugénie, Benedetti received a further cable. ‘To make the renunciation certain,’ instructed the duke, ‘the King of Prussia must endorse it, guaranteeing that he is not going to renew the candidature. Please see the King at once and ask for a confirmation, which he cannot refuse unless he really does have some sort of reservation. Although the repudiation has become widely known, public opinion is so violent that we are not sure we will be able to control it.’
That day debates in the Corps Législatif and the Senate had been interrupted by yells of ‘We’ve got to finish it!’ In the evening crowds marched along the boulevards, singing the ‘Marseillaise’ and bellowing, ‘A Berlin! A Berlin!’ Eugénie was far from being out of step with her people.
On 13 July Count Benedetti waylaid King William in the public gardens at Ems. An official sent a telegram for Bismarck to send, stating that the king had told Benedetti that Prince Leopold had promised to withdraw his candidature, and that there was nothing more to say. It was phrased with such moderation and courtesy that the Prussian chancellor and General von Moltke, hoping for war, were in despair. Bismarck shortened the telegram, however, distorting its message so as to seem insulting – Moltke commented approvingly, ‘You make it sound like a trumpet call answering a challenge.’ The doctored ‘Ems Telegram’ was then sent to Paris and released to the press.
Ironically, on 13 July the Council of Ministers’ meeting at Saint-Cloud had second thoughts, voting against a proposal for immediate mobilisation. They were ready to water down Gramont’s demand for guarantees.
The Ems telegram reached Paris the next day. ‘Here is a man who has been slapped in the face,’ Gramont told Ollivier hysterically. The crowds in the streets were screaming, ‘Au Rhin!’ – ‘To the Rhine!’ At 4.40 p.m. the Council of Ministers agreed to a general mobilisation, yet delayed it again to discuss the possibility of a peace congress.
Afterwards, the duke claimed that Eugénie had put an end to the possibility by observing, ‘I doubt that it will suit the chambers and the country.’ Lord Malmesbury wrote: ‘Gramont told me that the empress, a high-spirited and impressionable woman, made a strong and most excited address, declaring that “war was inevitable if the honour of France was to be maintained”.’ Although Eugénie was not present at the Council, she may perhaps have said something like this elsewhere. But it was Ollivier who killed the idea of a peace congress, telling the emperor – who was beginning to recover from his attack – ‘If we laid the proposal before the chambers, they would pelt our carriages with mud and howl at us.’
That evening the Council decided there was no alternative to war. Next morning Ollivier addressed the Corps Législatif and the Senate, asking them to vote the money with which to fight. Some on the left denounced the war. “You have decided to shed torrents of blood over a mere form of words,’ said Thiers. ‘I accept the need for it with a light heart,’ answered Ollivier. Not only the right and the centre was with him, but the left too. ‘Thus by a tragic combination of ill-luck, stupidity and ignorance France blundered into war with the greatest military power that Europe had yet seen, in a bad cause, with her army unready and without allies,’ is the verdict of Sir Michael Howard in The Franco-Prussian War.
Eugénie may not have said, ‘It was I who wanted this war – it is my war’, as Thiers alleged. She herself denied it. ‘Never, do you hear me,’ she supposedly told Paléologue, ‘did that sacrilegious phrase, nor any like it, come from my lips.’ Yet, like the Mamelukes, she expected a triumphant victory that would bring back a return to direct rule and true Bonapartism.