Such advice was not uncongenial to Louis-Napoleon. Among the Emperor’s projects, during this time, was the formation of a military alliance with Austria. He and Franz Josef would jointly make war on Prussia. But the proposed entente was still, in the summer of 1870, speculative in character, and Louis-Napoleon was far from having resolved on a resort to arms. Even in the flower of youthful vigor his character tended toward vacillation rather than decision; and he was now old and sick. Yet he could not but own that there was something in his Foreign Minister’s argument. If a struggle with Prussia must come, was it not, perhaps, better that it should come now rather than later?
Ollivier, for his part, though he did not positively dissent from these counsels, was less convinced of their wisdom. He however repressed his scruples, and submitted to the policy of Gramont. The next day, the Duc went to the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the legislature. In the Corps Législatif, he read out a declaration which he had composed jointly with Ollivier and the Emperor. France, he told the lawmakers, would never suffer a foreign power to place a prince on the throne of Spain. Such an act would disturb the equilibrium of Europe: it would “imperil the interests and the honour of France.” He relied, he said, on the wisdom of the Germans and the friendship of Spain to avert the calamity; but, in the contrary event, he told the assembly, “with your support and the support of the nation, we shall know how to do our duty without hesitation or weakness.”
Gramont sat down to tumultuous cheers, and Europe shuddered. The declaration in the Corps Législatif made it plain that France regarded the Hohenzollern candidature as a casus belli.
War, it appeared, was imminent.
Saint Petersburg and Moscow, June 1867-May 1871
REVOLUTIONS SUCCEED WHEN rhetoric is taken seriously. Yet Tsar Alexander had not even the rudiments of a verbal art. Those Russians who, like Prince Kropotkin, yearned for poetry and reform looked elsewhere for an inspiration. The Prince had, in his pursuit of the ideal, got as far as China, but he found the dusty plateaus of Manchuria to be as destitute of poetry as the palaces of Saint Petersburg. He must go back, and begin over again.
The Prince returned to European Russia early in 1867. Attaching himself to the Imperial Geographical Society, he devoted himself to science. But other thoughts possessed him. “It often happens,” he said, “that men pull in a certain political, social, or familiar harness simply because they never have time to ask themselves whether the position they stand in and the work they accomplish are right; whether their occupations really suit their inner desires and capacities, and give them the satisfaction which everyone has the right to expect from his work.” The Prince was determined to avoid the fate into which so many of his contemporaries had fallen. He wanted to take a stand in the world crisis.
A visit to Moscow strengthened him in his resolution to break out of the conventional mold. His father lay dying in his house in the Old Equerries Quarter. The Prince went to his bedside. He had not been home for many years, and he was startled by what he found. Henry Adams returning to Boston in the aftermath of Lincoln’s revolution was not more bewildered. However incomplete the Tsar’s statesmanship might have been in some directions, it had changed the face of the Old Equerries Quarter. The noble families that had once dominated the Quarter had almost entirely disappeared. Some had perished after the fashion of aristocratic debauchery, victims of drink, dice, or courtesans. More had been ruined by the emancipation law. The houses of the fallen nobles had been taken by a new class of men. Kropotkin’s father called them “the intruders”—merchants, bankers, men who had made fortunes in the railways or in the new industrial concerns. Genteel dilapidation has never been the style of the nouveaux riches, and Russia’s rising entrepreneurial class conformed to the familiar pattern of parvenu ostentation. The new men enlarged the old aristocratic houses, or tore them down and erected pretentious palazzos in their place. Fifth Avenue was not more gaudy.
Few were left, Kropotkin said, who remembered the Quarter as it was in the old days. The streets were alive for him with ghosts others did not see. He recalled how, when he was a boy, Nicholas I had come to celebrate the silver jubilee of his reign. The gigantic Tsar had made much of the seven-year-old Kropotkin; he had taken him by the arm and presented him to his daughter-in-law, Mary, who was then in the full bloom of her young beauty. She was expecting a child, and was unconscious of the fate that awaited her in her declining years, when as a lonely Empress she would be forsaken by her husband, Nicholas’s son Alexander, for a schoolgirl. Kropotkin still remembered the blush that came into Mary’s cheeks when Nicholas, pointing to him, said, “That is the sort of boy you must bring me.”
It had all passed away. “A couple of retired generals, who cursed the new ways, and who relieved their griefs by predicting for Russia a certain and speedy ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in, were all the company my father had now,” Kropotkin said. The dying man lamented the passing of the old order, but Kropotkin himself shed no tears. The landed gentry into which he had been born was, he believed, a cruel and tyrannical class: it deserved its fate. Yet he did not love the new men who replaced the moribund nobility. Some of the tycoons were, to be sure, distinguished in their way; they were men of force and ability, who by raw strength had made their way to the top. But they bore the stamp of a machine age. In character they were mechanical, uniform—sterile; they lacked tone and nuance; their culture was vulgar, their taste second-rate.
Not long after Kropotkin visited his father’s sickbed, the old man died. His coffin was borne aloft through the narrow streets of the Old Equerries Quarter, and he was buried in the crypt of Saint John the Precursor, the little red church in which he had, many years before, been baptized. Kropotkin could now act as he pleased, and need not worry whether his actions would distress his father. The choices he made would doubtless have appalled the old man, yet they were at the same time true to the highest ideals of his aristocratic training. In the house next door to his family’s in the Old Equerries Quarter—a house he had known from childhood—a group of revolutionists now gathered to meet. The Prince crossed the threshold and entered the conclave.
Wildbad, July 1870
AMBASSAOR BENEDETTI ARRIVED at his hotel in Wildbad to find a telegram from the Quai d’Orsay. “Very grave news from Spain.” Shortly afterward another telegram arrived, ordering him to repair in all haste to Ems, in the Rhineland, where King Wilhelm had gone to drink the waters. His holiday ruined, the hapless Benedetti boarded a train. As the German countryside passed him by, he reflected on his desperate errand, and revolved in his mind every imaginable argument he might use to persuade the King to forbid Prince Leopold to accept the Spanish Crown. At the station at Ems he was met by Prince Radziwill, one of the King’s adjutants, and together the two men went off, in the summer night, to Benedetti’s hotel.
Varzin and Berlin, July 1870
WHEN COUNT BENEDETTI arrived at Ems, Bismarck was at Varzin, the estate in Pomerania which the Prussian Parliament had granted him in gratitude for his services during the war against Austria. There he had secluded himself for some time, putting out that he sought, in this retirement from affairs, a restoration of his health, which the hurry of business had somewhat broken. Yet his rustication also served another purpose, to lull the French into complacency, and to induce them to relax their suspicious vigilance while his machinations ripened at Madrid.
The gathering diplomatic storm recalled him to the capital. Bismarck detrained at the station near the Brandenburg Gate and went at once to his residence in the Wilhelmstrasse. The mansion had once belonged to La Barberina, the dancing courtesan who had beguiled Berlin in the age of Frederick the Great. It was a curious house.31 Bismarck never bothered to furnish it properly; eight years after he moved in, unhung paintings lay against the walls, and the rooms were cluttered with the débris of official life, papers, railway timetables, gifts from foreign governments. This domestic negligence Bismarck excused by saying that wh
oever “is interested in furnishing is not interested in food; the essential thing is to eat well.”
He was in high spirits. Like many great men, Bismarck required the stimulus of a catastrophe. The ends which he had pursued with skill and vigor, though not, perhaps, with real wisdom, were almost in his grasp. At times he was to be seen in the garden of his residence, “repeatedly pacing up and down that evergreen avenue” in a “meditative mood, swinging a big stick.” At other times he was to be found in his office, lying on a dark red sofa, surrounded by newspapers, smoking a Havana cigar. Nearby stood his writing table, covered with green baize and illuminated by two candles. In the porcelain writing stand were four or five large lead pencils, the Chancellor’s usual writing implements, and half a dozen quill pens with the feathers cut short. Every so often an idea would strike him, and he would ring for one of his assistants. Were the French railways being watched? Someone must see to it that they were. Was the General Staff being kept abreast of developments? It was imperative that General von Moltke be given all the latest information. Nor could public opinion be neglected. As "I’affaire Hohenzollern” progressed, Bismarck was studious in fomenting, through a secret patronage of the press, the patriotic fury of Germany. He drew on his “reptile funds” to stimulate the zeal of newspaper editors, and he set members of his own staff (the “Literary Office”) to work preparing articles for publication.
In the final phases of the revolutionary struggle, no subject was too minute to engage the Chancellor’s attention. Bismarck personally dictated to Moritz Busch, one his secretaries, an anonymous op-ed piece in which he argued that French manners were sadly fallen off. “As a matter of fact,” Bismarck said, “the idea that Paris is the home and school of good manners is now only to be met with in other countries, in old novels, and amongst elderly people in the most remote parts of the provinces. . . . Travelers who have visited the country at long intervals are agreed in declaring that the forms of polite intercourse, and even the conventional expressions for which the French language so long served as a model, are steadily falling into disuse. . . . The French show themselves to be a decadent nation, and not least in their manners.”
France, Bismarck believed, was a nation in decline. A people that has ceased to master history must be prepared to be used by her: the degradation of the French would seal the union of the Germans. But. . . was the whole business not possibly premature? Bismarck seemed, for a moment, to draw back. “That the unification of Germany would be enhanced by policies involving force, I think is self-evident,” he wrote in 1869. “But there is quite another question, one that has to do with the precipitation of a violent catastrophe and the responsibility of choosing the time for it. An arbitrary intervention in the course of history, on the basis of purely subjective factors, has never had any other result than the shaking of unripe fruit.” “That German unity is an unripe fruit today is in my opinion obvious,” he asserted. Those who pressed for unification were, he said, novices in the art of statesmanship. They did not understand that a statesman can neither manipulate time nor substitute legerdemain for the slow unconscious processes of history. “We can set our watches,” Bismarck said, “but the time will not go any faster.”
He seemed, for a moment, to tremble before the forces he had unleashed.
Chapter 28
THE VIPER CASTS ITS SKIN
Paris, July 1870
JUST BEFORE THREE O’CLOCK, Emile Ollivier made his way to the Tuileries. The premier found his master seated in an antechamber, surrounded by his officers. Louis-Napoleon was in high spirits. He had in his hands a letter from Prince Leopold’s father, Prince Charles-Antoine, the head of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The father, who trembled at the prospect of a war brought about by his family’s weakness for a scepter, had decided that it would be unseemly for a scion of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens to ascend the throne of Spain in blood and obloquy. The candidature of his son was accordingly withdrawn. “This dispatch of Prince Antoine means peace,” Louis-Napoleon said. “What has happened is a vast relief to me. A war is always a very great risk.”
The exhausted Ollivier, relieved by the peaceful resolution of the crisis, went home to sleep; after all, it had been a close call.
Scarcely had he quitted the Tuileries when the Duc de Gramont was announced. The nobleman was greatly agitated. The withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidature was, he said, altogether inadequate. What, he asked, was to prevent the son from repudiating the act of the father? Prince Leopold, for all they knew, was at this very moment wending his way towards Madrid to claim his crown. The Prussians said that the Prince was on a walking tour in the Alps; but who was to say the story was not a ruse, devised by Bismarck to catch the French offguard?
The weary Emperor sighed. But of course Gramont was right. The French people—the French lawmakers—would never accept so flimsy a thing as Charles-Antoine’s word concerning the withdrawal of his son’s candidature. France must have guarantees from Wilhelm himself. Just before he departed for Saint-Cloud, Louis-Napoleon authorized his Foreign Minister to transmit revised instructions to Benedetti, who remained at Ems.
The imperial carriage swept through the gates of the Tuileries, past the burnished eagles of the Bonapartes, into the Place de la Concorde. Forty-five minutes later, while Gramont was telegraphing the new instructions to Benedetti, the Emperor crossed the threshold of Saint-Cloud. He found his court disappointed by the turn events had taken. Encountering General Bourbaki, a fierce warrior of Cretan ancestry, the Emperor said lightly, “It will not be necessary for you to get ready your war-gear, for every cause of conflict is now removed.”
Bourbaki threw down his sword.
General Lebœuf, the Minister of War, was no less unhappy. Mobilization must begin at once, he said, or France would lose her advantage in the death grapple that must come. The Empress, too, was discontented. Why was the Emperor playing the diplomat? Had he forgotten that he was a Bonaparte?
The Emperor bowed his head, and telegraphed to Gramont. In particular, Louis-Napoleon said, Wilhelm must be made to understand that, until France received the assurances she sought, she would continue her armaments. With these words the Emperor raised the stakes: in effect he declared that he was mobilizing his army. General Lebœuf assured him that the troops were ready. “Never have we been so ready,” the General said, “never shall we be so ready. . . . Not even a gaiter-button is missing.”
In the meantime Ollivier had waked from his sleep. By an uncanny inspiration he went to the Quai d’Orsay. The hour was late, but he found Gramont still busy in his office. The Foreign Minister was telegraphing the Emperor’s latest dispatch to Benedetti at Ems.
Ollivier started. He had thought the crisis over. The main question had been settled, and no reasonable ground for disturbing the peace of Europe remained. In an instant his eyes were opened. The Emperor had acted, in the gravest of matters—a question of war and peace—without consulting him. The premier felt the sinking nausea of a man who has lost contact with power. He had been left out of the secret. His advice concerning the latest French demands had not been sought or even, as a matter of courtesy, asked.
The premier’s first instinct was to drive to Saint-Cloud and beg the Emperor to retract the new instructions. But his courage failed him, and he went instead to his office in the Place Vendôme, where during a sleepless night he debated with himself the line of conduct he should pursue.
A struggle now took place in the soul of the premier. In theory he subscribed to the high Roman theory of public virtue, but in practice he was unable to resist the blandishments of the brilliant and luxurious, but deeply degenerate, court in which he had determined to push his chances. To converse tête-à-tête with the Emperor, and to instruct him in the finer points of liberal political theory, to be on almost familiar terms with the Empress, and to be invited to little supper parties at the Tuileries—men of sterner stuff than Ollivier might have succumbed to so seductive a flattery.
Ha
d he been a greater man, he would at once have thrown up his portfolio and tendered his resignation to the Emperor. But he had grown used to the caresses of the court, and he knew that he would find it painful to descend to the impotence and obscurity of a private station. The fate of a fallen French politician was not, in those days, an enviable one. “My children,” says a mother in one of Balzac’s novels, “so long as a man is in office, adore him; but if he falls, help to drag him to the refuse dump. When he has power he is a minor god, but when he has lost it and is ruined he is viler than Marat, for he is living, and Marat is dead and put away.” Ollivier’s indignation was tempered, too, by the knowledge that he had no place to go. His old comrades among the republican opposition regarded him as an apostate, and in his fall from power they would show him no mercy. He was, he said, “conscious of being ill-served, humiliated, betrayed on all sides.” Nevertheless, he remained in office.
Berlin, July 1870
Bismarck, too, had thoughts of resignation. Dining in his residence in the Wilhelmstrasse with Generals von Roon and von Moltke, the Chancellor was angry. When he was vexed his eyes lit up “with a threatening gleam,” like “sheet lightning across a landscape of a summer’s eve.” The withdrawal of Prince Leopold’s candidature had deranged all his plans. His master, King Wilhelm, had, in his negotiations with Benedetti at Ems, acted as his own Foreign Minister—or rather, Bismarck contended, as Queen Augusta’s Foreign Minister. Their Majesties’ sentimental diplomacy had not only tarnished Prussia’s prestige; it would, Bismarck believed, impede the German revolution. “My first thought was to resign,” he later wrote, “because after the insulting provocations [of the French], I saw in [the King’s] extorted compliance a humiliation for Germany, one for which I did not want to be officially responsible. . . . Given the posture of France, it seemed to me that our national sense of honor obliged us to go to war; and that if we did not accede to the claims of this emotion, we should lose the whole impulse towards national development. . . .”
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