While Bismarck was dining morosely with the generals, a telegram from the King was brought in. In it Wilhelm described an encounter with Benedetti that had taken place earlier that day in the Cure-Garden at Ems. The King had taken his waters in the Kurhaus, and he was sitting on a bench in the park, reading a newspaper, when Benedetti sent word through one of the King’s aides-de-camp, Prince Radziwill, that he desired an audience of His Majesty. The King responded by sending Radziwill back to Benedetti with a copy of the newspaper he had been reading; in it was printed the news of Charles-Antoine’s letter withdrawing his son’s candidature. What more, the King asked, could Benedetti need to know? A short time later Wilhelm rose from the bench and set out for his lodgings. He was just coming down the promenade when Benedetti appeared in his path. The King, catching sight of the Ambassador, greeted him amiably, and as his adjutants restrained a crowd of onlookers, he indicated that he was pleased that the affair was ended, for, he said, the candidature “might have embroiled us in complications, in view of the way in which it has been regarded in France.”
Benedetti could not be content with this reply; he had his instructions from Paris. How, he asked the King, could the French government be certain that the renunciation of the candidature was definite? The King protested that there was no doubt about that. Benedetti then informed Wilhelm of France’s demand that the King personally guarantee the renunciation. Wilhelm replied that this was impossible. Benedetti persisted. “Well, Sire, I can, then, write to my government that Your Majesty has consented to declare that you will never permit Prince Leopold to renew the candidature in question?”
The King stepped back. “It seems to me, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, that I have clearly and plainly expressed myself to the effect that I could never make such a declaration, and that I have nothing more to add.” He raised his hat and walked on.
Benedetti later in the day pressed for another audience; but Wilhelm declined to receive him. “Be kind enough to inform Count Benedetti,” the King told one of his adjutants, “that there is no reply, and that I cannot receive him again.”
In his dining room in the Wilhelmstrasse, Bismarck read the telegram with dismay. It was true that the King had refused the new French demands; but the withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidature still stood. His own humiliation was unrelieved: and his revolution was not less threatened. The “position of a Foreign Minister,” Bismarck said, “is, at the best of times, the precarious one of a tightrope dancer.” He stood now on one of the highest wires, and he had somehow to recover his balance. He reread the telegram, and as he did so a light flashed in his mind.
He turned to Moltke. Was the army ready for war?
Moltke replied that it was.
Bismarck went to a side table. He might before have speculated about the unripeness of Germany for the revolution he envisioned, but now, in the heat of the moment, he was as ready as Lincoln or Alexander had been to act. “The tug has to come,” Lincoln had said at the beginning of the decade, “& better now, than any time hereafter.” It was precisely Bismarck’s own frame of mind when, on a July night in 1870, he took a pencil and proceeded to mark up what would come to be called the “Ems Telegram.”
In a short time the work was done. The scene which the old King and the French Ambassador had acted out in the Cure-Garden was artfully rewritten. The new edition betrayed the hand of an inspired dramatist. Wilhelm, in his dispatch from Ems, had conveyed something of the mild irritation he had felt in the face of Benedetti’s “importunate manner” on the promenade in the Kurgarten. Yet the King, with the chivalrous spirit of a gentleman of the old school, was conscious that he, too, had spoken “rather sternly at last.” Neither he nor Benedetti seems to have thought that the other had given personal offense; and indeed one witness said that nothing could have been more gentle and forbearing than the conduct of the King towards the Ambassador. Bismarck could not be content with this; in rewriting the Ems Telegram, he made it seem as though the King had coldly and haughtily refused to talk to Benedetti at all. The telegram in its original form implied an ongoing negotiation. In Bismarck’s revised version, Wilhelm appeared to deliver to the Ambassador a definitive rebuke.
EMS, 13 July.
Subsequent to the reception by the French Government of the official communication that Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern had withdrawn his pretensions [to the Spanish throne], the French Ambassador addressed a demand to the King of Prussia to authorise him to telegraph to Paris that he (the King) engages at all future times to refuse his consent, should the Prince of Hohenzollern be again nominated. The King refused to receive the Ambassador again, and sent word to him by His Aide-de-Camp that His Majesty had no further communication to make to him.
“If I not only publish this text at once in the newspapers,” Bismarck told Moltke and Roon, “but also transmit it by telegram to all our embassies, it will be known in Paris before midnight... it will have the effect of a red cloth upon the Gallic bull.”
Washington and Rhode Island, September 1865-December 1871
A romantic revolutionist like Bismarck has this advantage over his free-state counterparts: his object is to create illusions, while the task of the free-state leader is to superintend a process which, by stripping away the comforting distortions of romance, will always be disillusioning. In a free-state revolution, old verities crumble; men lose their way, and so, too, do women.
William Sprague’s family had, in its earlier phases, been the abstemious embodiment of Puritan industry. As much as the Chases represented the idealistic aspirations of Puritanism, the Spragues incarnated its tendency to laborious thrift. But the bloodstock had deteriorated. On the eve of his marriage, Sprague promised his bride that he would forswear whiskey and brandy; but he soon reverted to his old habits. He got drunk, groped the chambermaids, pursued midnight hags in the brothels. When, in 1866, Kate took their little boy, Willie, on a tour of Europe, Sprague remained at home, where he abandoned even the pretense of virtue. “You know I am fond of the ladies,” he wrote to his wife after she sailed, “and you must not blame me for indulging in that fondness. ... I have taken to whiskey since you left also. ... I must I think get some young woman to live with me. ... If I may be permitted to try to love a little in your absence, it will be but to be stronger and stronger in my love to you when you return.”
Kate’s father counseled her to be patient. The “happiness of a wife,” Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase told his daughter, “is most certainly secured by loving submission and loving tact.” Kate must always remember that her husband was the head of his family, and that her marriage vow required her to “acquiesce cheerfully and affectionately” even in his errors. This advice to submit calmly to one’s fate came strangely from a man who was himself tortured by his failure to win the White House, yet Kate took it to heart. Acquiesce she did, and it seemed, at first, as though she did not acquiesce in vain. Sprague knew his mind to be “sadly disconnected,” and he was convinced that unless he changed his habits he would “go down hill fast, or faster than I have.” Little Willie, his son, awakened in him a hope of reformation. Sprague described how Kate sometimes took the child into their bed. She would lay the boy on his arm, and he “would feel a holy feeling come over me.”
But the holiness was fleeting. At a state dinner in the White House, Sprague was visibly drunk. “I would not take more if I were you,” a fellow diner admonished him. “There are a pair of bright eyes looking at you.”
“Damn them,” Sprague said, “they can’t see me!”
“Yes they can see you,” Kate said, “and they are thoroughly ashamed of you.”
She trembled for her family’s reputation. Sprague himself became alarmed. “I will not let you see the newspaper slips,” he wrote to Kate. “I have shown the slips to your father. . . . He does not understand such weakness as mine.” The Senator was now an object of pity or contempt in Washington, but Mrs. Sprague’s own social position remained one of unchallenged splendor. A charming woman
who is both rich and hospitable will always be forgiven a boorish husband. Kate threw the most magnificent balls in the capital, and her afternoon receptions were crowded with the great. She maintained her connections with the august personages who in the summer gathered at Newport, and her husband built for her, at Narragansett, an immense mansard-roofed monstrosity in the latest style. The slouch and furtiveness of the Senator betrayed his habitual vice, but Kate herself remained beautiful; and Mr. Worth, the dressmaker in Paris, confessed that even after childbirth her figure was perfectly developed.
Yet in other ways she was much changed from what she had been before she became a wife and a mother. Kate had once preferred flowers (respectable republican flowers) to intricately cut jewels, and she had fashioned for herself a style of utmost simplicity. But her dress was now as rich and ornamental as her rococo rooms. She blazed with precious gems. Flitting into a ballroom of beaten gold, she seemed to outshine the gilt of a Gilded Age. She and her father had opposed the slave power as fervidly as their ancestors had opposed the royal and the papal power. But Kate now exhibited all the impatience of a frustrated sensuality, an avidity of money and power and pleasure. The viper had cast its skin. Her husband had strayed. Might not she?
On the eve of the fifth anniversary of her marriage, she burned with enmity. “I almost hate this man at times who calls himself my husband,” she wrote in her diary, “and yet has so little title to the name. . . . A wild tumultuous storm is raging without and my heart, in attune with the elements, [is] as turbulent and stormy.”
Henry Adams, preparing for his rôle as pontifex maximus of the Washington well-to-do, mounted his social pulpit to censure Kate’s conduct. Preaching on the text of Judges 11, he pronounced his anathema on “Jephtha’s daughter,” as he called Kate, and on her aspiring father, Chief Justice Chase. Jephtha was a Judge of Israel who sacrificed his daughter to the Lord in order that he might get the children of Ammon into his hands. The Chases, Adams said, made a more bitter bargain. The Chief Justice laid his daughter as a burnt offering on the altar of Sprague’s millions, but in contrast to the Israelite, who really had gotten the children of Ammon into his hands, the American never was able to lay his on the White House.
The decline of the Chases and the Spragues was another sign of disintegration in the aftermath of a revolution that was meant to give the nation a new birth. The combination of virtues possessed by such families as theirs had made the American free state; but revolutions are morally corrosive. They end by consuming the qualities that nourished them.
Paris, July 1870
Evening came, and the domes and palaces of the city glittered in the fading midsummer light. Le Soir, the latest of the evening papers at Paris, went on sale in the kiosks. The headline might have been traced in characters of blood:
Public Insult to Our Ambassador!
Beneath the legend was printed Bismarck’s revised Ems Telegram. People fought over copies, and the edition was soon sold out.
All that day the atmosphere in the city had been tense. Fear and ecstasy blended together in the anticipation of momentous events. The Emperor left Saint-Cloud in the morning and arrived at the Tuileries at a quarter past noon. The sovereign’s presence in the capital on a hot summer day was itself, in the eyes of many, an omen of evil augury. Yet across the Seine, in the Palais Bourbon, the Emperor’s principal Minister still cherished a hope that peace could be preserved. Emile Ollivier was putting the finishing touches on an oration in which he professed himself satisfied with the letter of Charles-Antoine withdrawing his son’s candidature. Then the Duc de Gramont came into the room and showed Ollivier the Ems Telegram. Was it not, Gramont said, a “slap in the face” of France?
Ollivier could but nod his assent. “It is now beyond the power of man to avert this war,” he said.
Still the Emperor hesitated to take the last step. A council of state was convened that day in the Tuileries. The sovereign entered the council chamber—it was hung with red silk and dominated by a painting of Eugénie in her state robes and coronet—and took his seat at the oblong table. He appeared to be under the influence of drugs. His face was waxen, his eyes half-closed. He spoke vaguely of summoning a European Congress to broker a settlement with Prussia. The council broke up without reaching a decision, and Louis-Napoleon withdrew to Saint-Cloud. After dinner the principal dignitaries of the Empire gathered in the château, and sat till a late hour. The sentiment of the council was now manifestly in favor of a resort to arms. “Napoleon has no option,” one observer said, “but between the dangers of a war and the dangers of a revolution.” The “depth of French feeling on this subject,” said another, was such “that it might be dangerous, if not fatal, for the Government to oppose it.”
The next day the Emperor returned to Paris, and France declared war on Prussia.32
In the Place de la Concorde Louis-Napoleon was acclaimed by immense crowds. The words “la Guerre”were on every tongue. The city was reeking hot, too hot to sleep, and at night everyone except the very old and the very young remained out of doors. Snatches of war-filled talk floated through the streets.
“After the first battle . . .”
“It seems that the Prussians . . .”
“He left with his regiment. . .”
Soldiers went about drunk; women shrieked; and when Marie Sass, the soprano who had taken the part of Elisabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861, climbed aloft with a tricolor in her hand and sang the Marseillaise in a voice that rang like a silver trumpet, the ecstasy of the Parisians rose to a new height.
Not every Frenchman could share in this enthusiasm. The day after the declaration of war, Marshal Bazaine, who for the past year had commanded the Garde Impériale at Paris, bid farewell to his bride, Josefa de la Peña, whom he had married during the ill-fated expedition to Mexico. He then went to the Gare de l’Est, carrying with him the emblem of his marshalcy—a baton covered in blue velvet, studded with Golden Eagles, and capped with a vermeil calotte bearing the legend Terror belli, Decus pacis (Terror of war, Ornament of peace). Bazaine’s mandarin gaze was acute as he entered the railway station. Stepping into the train that would take him to the headquarters at Metz, the fortified city on the Moselle, he confessed to a dark premonition.
“Nous marchons à un désastre,” the Marshal said—we march to a disaster.
Chapter 29
DEAD OR VICTORIOUS
Germany, July 1870
A SPECIAL TRAIN conveyed King Wilhelm and the German high command to the front. Bismarck rode luxuriously in a saloon car he had confiscated from King George V, the exiled King of Hanover. The Chancellor, his clerks observed, was in his “rosiest humor.” He was about to consummate one of history’s most memorable revolutions, yet he was almost relaxed. His assistants marveled at their chief’s “incredible napping powers,” and during the journey towards the seat of war they sometimes found the gigantic figure so heavily asleep that only with difficulty could they rouse him.
It was otherwise with King Wilhelm. He kept largely to himself, riding glumly in his own railway carriage, the simplicity of which he preferred to the sumptuous adornments of the Guelphs’ saloon car. In contrast to Bismarck, Wilhelm was perplexed by dark thoughts, and he slept poorly. The Machiavellian qualities of his Minister’s statecraft, though he had reluctantly condoned them, weighed heavily on his conscience. “It is terrible to contemplate what we have before us,” the King said. “No one better than myself, who had to pronounce the decisive word, knows what sacrifice the whole German country must expect.”
The royal train was hailed by vast crowds as it passed through the old towns of western Germany. Here the streets, narrow and winding, still reeked of the Middle Ages. The landed aristocracy paid, as a rule, scant attention to the Städtmenschen, the townspeople; but Bismarck knew the power of the petty bourgeoisie. He was one of the few Junkers who had taken the trouble to learn the language of the plebs. His publicity machine was the most effective of the age, for just as Molt
ke divined the revolutionary potential of telegraph wires and railway lines in the mobilization of armies, so Bismarck perceived the revolutionary potential of telegraph wires and newspapers in the mobilization of public sentiment.
The intensity of feeling displayed in the towns through which the train passed showed that his labors had not been in vain. Already he heard his royal master saluted by the most fervid patriots in the crowd not as König (King) but as Kaiser (Emperor). Bismarck must have smiled at this manifestation of his handiwork, for he had lost no time in preparing the public for the new Empire he intended to found in the event of Prussia’s victory. The propaganda carried on under his auspices was directed at an ugly constellation of passions. Benedetti was the first to be sacrificed on the imperial altars. German newspapers ludicrously distorted the French Ambassador’s conduct on the promenade at Ems. The little Corsican was represented as having behaved like a malignant organ grinder, hectoring the poor old King all the way to his lodgings. Partly as a result of this astute invective, “forty millions of Germany are,” one diplomat reported, “as one man.” Everywhere the people had an “absolute confidence” in Bismarck and Moltke.
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