Graeco-Turkish difference was smoothed over, and with the spring of the
year 1869 the cold wind of the propaganda whistled less strongly in the
valleys of the Danube and the gorges of the Balkan. There was a sort of
lull; but the combustible matters still remained heaped up, ready to
catch fire from the first spark. The radicals of Roumania were not the
only ones to foresee an offensive action of Russia in the Orient as soon
as serious complications should break out in Occidental Europe; that was
an almost universal conviction, and one which the children of Rourik
shared the very first. The end of the year 1869 was signaled by an
incident which did not fail to gravely impress all serious minds. They
celebrated at St. Petersburg the centennial of the institution of the
Order of St. George, the great military order of Russia, and of which
the first class is only conferred on him who gains a brilliant victory.
The Emperor Alexander II. sent this distinction to King William I., to
the conqueror of Sadowa and the former champion of 1814. "Accept it," he
telegraphed him, "as a new proof of the friendship which unites us, a
friendship founded on the souvenir of that great epoch when our united
armies fought for a sacred cause which was common to us." And the King
of Prussia soon replied by telegraph: "Profoundly touched, and _with
tears in my eyes_, I thank you for the honor which you have done me, and
which I did not expect; but what pleases me still more are the
expressions by which you have announced it to me. I see, in truth, in
these expressions a new proof of your friendship and your remembrance of
the great epoch when our united armies fought for the same sacred
cause."[116]
At the commencement of the same year, and while the conference of Paris
was still sitting, there died at Nice a faithful servant of the
sultan's, one of the last great statesmen of Turkey. Before descending
into the tomb, Fuad-Pacha traced with a faltering hand a memorial for
his august master, which he said was his political testament. The
document was to remain secret, and, in fact, only came to light quite
recently.[117] "When this writing is placed before the eyes of your
majesty," one reads in it, "I will no longer be in this world. You can
therefore listen to me without distrust, and you should imbue yourself
with this great and grievous truth, that _the Empire of the Osmanlis is
in danger_." And after having reviewed the different states of the
Continent, and marked out the conflict more or less near, but
inevitable, between France and Prussia, Fuad-Pacha concluded by these
words: "An intestine dissension in Europe, and _a Bismarck in Russia_,
and the face of the world will be changed."
III.
God alone could contemplate his finished work, and say "that it was
good;" our poor humanity rarely tastes such a pure enjoyment, and the
_party of action_ in the councils of the second empire scarcely
experienced it in consequence of the events of 1866, which it had so
powerfully contributed to create. The ambassador of France at the court
of Berlin was among the number of the disabused; the achievement of
Italian unity only consoled him, very imperfectly in truth, for the
profound blow which the calamity of Sadowa had given his own country.
His disenchantment was great; but there is nothing like a great and
grievous deception to sharpen and refine a mind naturally sagacious; and
if Pascal has spoken of a second ignorance, that which comes after
knowledge, there is also for certain diplomats a second knowledge, and
like a second sight after a passing blindness. One cannot praise too
highly the eminent qualities of observation and of judgment which M.
Benedetti showed during the last four years of his embassy at Berlin,
and, for this epoch of 1867 to 1870, history will fully confirm the
testimony which he once thought proper to testify of himself, while
protesting before his chief,[118] that during his mission in Prussia he
had been "an active, correct, and far-seeing agent."
From 1867, in fact, the ambassador worked with patriotic zeal to
enlighten his government on the state of affairs in Europe, and to
advise it to make a strong resolution, either to resign itself frankly
to the inevitable, or to prepare in good time for a conflict very
imminent and full of great perils. He represented Prussia as working
without cessation to unite all Germany, at the risk of provoking a
conflict with France, inclining only too often to consider such a
conflict as the surest and most direct means of arriving at its ends. In
such a case, he guarded against giving them the least hope from the
_particularists_ of the South. "At the beginning of a national war," he
said, "the most obstinate among them will only be extinguished by the
masses who will regard the struggle, whatever may be the circumstances
in the midst of which it will break out, as a war of aggression of
France against their country; and if the fortune of arms were favorable
to them, their demands would know no limits." He also noticed "the most
active propaganda" which M. de Bismarck maintained in the countries the
other side of the Main: "With the exception of some journals in the pay
of the governments (of Munich and Stuttgart), or belonging to the
ultra-radical party, the press seconds him in all the Southern States."
He also sent word to Paris that the minister of William I. continued
his negotiations with the revolutionary party in Italy; that he received
agents of Garibaldi, unknown to the regular government of King Victor
Emmanuel, the personal friend of the Emperor Napoleon III., who, at the
time of the complications of Mentana, had only sounded Prussia in order
to know "in what measure it could lend it its aid."[119] He was also the
first to give warning concerning the shadowy practices with Prim and the
Spanish candidature of the Hohenzollern. Lastly, one has already seen
that he had recognized from the beginning the alarming character and
true bearing of the mission of General Manteuffel to Russia.
"However difficult it may be for a great country like France to trace in
advance its line of conduct in the actual state of things," said M.
Benedetti to his government at the beginning of the year 1868, "and
however great may be the part which it expects to take in unforeseen
contingencies, the union of Germany under a military government strongly
organized, and which in certain respects has of parliamentary _regime_
only external forms, constitutes, however, a fact which touches too
closely our national security to allow us to dispense with preparations,
and to solve, without longer delay, the following question: Would such
an event endanger the independence or the position of France in Europe,
and would not this danger be conjured up only by war? If the government
of the emperor thinks that France has nothing to fear from such a
radical alteration in the relations of the states situated in the centre
of the Continent, it will be desirable, in my opinion, in the interest
of the maintenance of peace and public prosperity, to shape entirely and
without reserve our attitude according to this conviction. If the
contrary opinion is entertained, let us prepare for war without
cessation, and let us be well assured in advance of what aid Austria can
be to us; let us shape our conduct so as to solve one after the other
the questions of the Orient and that of Italy; all our united forces
will not be too great to render us victorious on the Rhine."
Especially in his manner of judging of the accord established between
the two courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg, M. Benedetti showed a
justness and superiority of judgment truly remarkable. He had the merit
of foreseeing the understanding from the first moment, and of positively
believing in it until the last. In the month of September, 1869, the
Emperor of the French had thought of appointing as ambassador to the
czar one of his most intimate friends, one of his most devoted
cooperators of the 2d December, a general renowned for his bravery and
intelligence, a grand equerry. It was sufficient to indicate that they
wished to enter into relations as intimate and direct as possible, and
in spite of the exchange of telegrams at the festival of St. George,
they were already, at the beginning of the year 1870, full of hope; they
believed that _the affair was progressing of itself_.[120] The French
general, an able man, however, was very quickly taken to the bear hunts,
to journeys on sledges, and shown many other marks of august kindness,
which he had the modesty to credit to the policy of his master, in place
of attributing them with much more reason to his very real and in truth
very fascinating personal charms. The conviction of the grand equerry
was shared by those surrounding him, especially by his aides-de-camp,
who did not delay to praise in their confidential letters addressed to
Paris, "the great results obtained" by their chief, and to speak of "his
growing favor with the Emperor of all the Russias," in terms very strong
and much more military than diplomatic.[121] Without being imposed upon
by all these recitals, full of cheerfulness, M. Benedetti did not the
less persist in his well founded conviction; even on the 30th June,
1870, on the very eve of the war, he expressed it in a lucid dispatch,
from which we will have more than one instructive passage to quote.
Speaking of the recent interview (1st-4th June) of the Emperor Alexander
and the King of Prussia at Ems, the ambassador supposes that M. de
Bismarck had shown himself then, as generally, on one side favorable to
the policy of the cabinet of St. Petersburg in the Orient, and that on
the other he endeavored to excite the susceptibility of the czar in the
questions which agitate the national sentiment in Russia as regards
Austria, Galicia, etc. "While the minister will have undertaken to
reassure the emperor on the first of these two points and to alarm him
on the other, the king will have displayed that good grace of which he
has always known how to make such a marvelous use to capture the
sympathies of his august nephew, and I do not doubt, for my part, that
they have left impressions in conformity with his desire. But whatever
may have been the means which they employed, their object must have been
to strengthen the emperor in the sentiments which they have been able to
inspire in him, and they have attained it more or less."
M. Benedetti was, however, far from admitting an official arrangement
drawn up in due form between the two courts, and above all far from
believing that the minister of Prussia had in all sincerity and candor
made the cession and abandonment of the Oriental heritage to the hands
of his former colleague of Frankfort, and it is precisely in such
estimates that the uncommon perspicacity of the French diplomat shows
itself. M. de Bismarck could for the necessities of the moment, simulate
indifference regarding the affairs of the Levant, affirm that he "never
read the correspondence of Constantinople," and even consider the
pretensions of Russia "to introduce a certain unity in the intellectual
development of the Sclavians, legitimate;"[122] but the extreme care
which he used at the same time to maintain the most intimate relations
with the Hungarians, his allies of 1866, should have already enlightened
the zealots of Moscow concerning the inanity of their dream of a
division of the world between the sons of Teut and those of Rourik. "The
Hungarians regard us, us Prussians, as their mediate protectors against
Vienna in the future," wrote, in a confidential dispatch, Baron de
Werther in the month of June, 1867, on his return from the coronation of
Buda, to reassure the cabinet of Berlin on the recent enthusiasm of the
Magyars reconciled with their "king;" it is not only against Vienna, it
is still much more against Moscow and St. Petersburg, against any
Sclavic preponderance on the banks of the Danube, that the children of
Arpad will in the future have aid from the Hohenzollern. "Prussia has no
rightful interests in the Orient," M. de Bismarck was pleased to say in
the years 1867-1870, and the organ of M. de Katkof did not cease to
repeat this remark so often commented on; but from the day when Prussia
identified itself with Germany, or rather incorporated itself in it, it
remained charged, under pain of forfeiture, with the Germanic interests
and influences in the countries of the Danube and of the Balkan, and the
interest then became greater, much greater, than that of France and
England.
All this was very well understood by the ambassador of France to the
court of Berlin, and from time to time keenly exposed in the dispatches
which he addressed to his government during the last years of his
mission in Prussia. Writing, in his report of the 5th January, 1868, of
the complaisance with which the chancellor of the confederation of the
North always lent himself to the views of Prince Gortchakof, M.
Benedetti added, however: "He (M. de Bismarck) persuades himself without
doubt that other Powers have an interest of the first order in
preserving the Ottoman empire from the covetousness of Russia, and he
abandons the care of it to them; he knows, moreover, that _nothing can
be definitely accomplished there without the aid or the adhesion of
Germany, if Germany is united and strong_; he believes, then, that he
can, for the present, and without peril, himself sharpen the ambition of
the cabinet of St. Petersburg, provided that he obtains in return for
this condescension a kind withdrawal from everything which he undertakes
in Germany."
"In the Orient," wrote the ambassador some time after (4th February,
1868), "M. de Bismarck is careful to preserve a position which does not
bind him in any way, and permits him, according to the necessities of
his own designs, to give the hand to Russia, or to ally himself with
Occidental Powers; but he can only preserve this position by abstaining
from any proceeding which would compromise him with the friends or the
adversaries of Turkey." This reasoning was not long in being fully
justified by the attitude of Prussia, during the conference of Paris, on
the subject of Greece (January, 1869). The cabinet of Berlin did not
share in the ardor of Alexander Mikhailovitch; it did not defend, as he
did, persecuted innocence in the person of "the young Roumania," and of
the Servian _Omladina_, and above all was careful to denounce the great
conspiracy of England, France, and Austria against the peace of the
Levant. In reality the minister of Prussia did not wish the death of the
just Osmanli, still less the collapse of Hungary, the advance guard of
the Germanic "mission" in the East;[123] and his sympathies for a
"certain ideal unity" of the Sclavians grew cold in proportion as the
hour of the real unity of Germany approached. "Any conflict in the
Orient will put it under the influence of Russia," wrote the French
diplomat the 27th January, 1870, "and he will seek to excite it; he
tried it last year at the beginning of the Graeco-Turkish trouble.
_Russia is a card in his game_ for the eventualities which may arise on
the Rhine, _and he is particularly careful not to change the roles_, not
to become himself a card in the game of the cabinet of St. Petersburg."
Some months after, on the very eve of the war with France (30th June,
1870), M. Benedetti, while thinking that the ties between Russia and
Prussia could only have been drawn closer in the recent interview of
Ems, concluded by the following observations: "It must not be supposed,
however, that M. de Bismarck thinks it opportune to connect his policy
closely with that of the Russian cabinet. In my opinion, he has not
contracted and is not disposed to make any engagement which might, while
compromising Prussia in the complications of which Turkey will become
the scene, draw France and England closer together, and create
difficulties for him or weaken him on the Rhine. The kind feelings of
the chancellor of the confederation of the North for Russia will never
be of a nature to limit his liberty of action; _he promises in fact
more than he means to do_, or, in other words, he seeks the alliance
with the cabinet of St. Petersburg to gain for himself the benefit of it
in case of a conflict in the Occident, but with the well-fixed
resolution never to engage the resources or the forces of Germany in the
Orient. I have also always been persuaded that no official arrangement
has been concluded between the two courts, and we can certainly believe
that they did not consider that at Ems."
Everything, in fact, leads us to believe that neither a treaty was
signed there, nor conditions discussed; the commonalty of views and the
harmony of hearts dispensed with a fatiguing discussion of details.
Moreover, it would have been very difficult, in all the useless cases,
to make stipulations _en regle_ for the eventualities, the time of whose
appearance is not known, of which it is impossible to calculate the
distant consequences, or even the immediate effects. They contented
themselves with the conviction that they had no opposite interests;
that, on the contrary, they were congenial and sympathetic, and that it
was understood that at the propitious moment each one would be for
himself and God for all. It must also be acknowledged that the Russians,
in their views concerning the Orient, are not exempt from certain
_mirages_. Europe credits them with much more method than they have in
reality: the sentiment is profound and tenacious, but the plans are as
wavering as they are different and vague. One might say that this great
people suffer in this regard rather from a fascination and almost a
fatality which prevents them from pursuing a systematic conquest; it
advances on the phantom which possesses it only to make it recoil. It
is a matter worthy of notice that Russia is never so far removed from
the goal as when it undertakes to force the _denoument_. In 1829, a few
halting places only separated its armies from Constantinople, and they
turned back. It lost, in 1854, all the fruit of its campaign in Hungary,
and of its ascendency in consequence of the catastrophe of February,
while its prospects were never as brilliant as on the day when the
treaty of Paris expected to close the Black Sea to it. It lost
Sebastopol, but it gained the Caucasus and a whole world on the banks of
the Amour and the Syr-Daria. The temptation became then very natural in
presence of the formidable conflict which since 1867 was preparing in
the centre of Europe, rather to await events than to wish to regulate
them and to prescribe their course. In a war between the two strongest
Powers of the Continent, which promised to be as long as desperate, and
which in the end might well equally exhaust the two adversaries and draw
several other states into the lists, Russia--thus they surely thought on
the banks of the Neva--would always find the opportunity and the means
of saying its word and securing its booty. Such a line of conduct seemed
entirely marked out for a chancellor to whom so much good fortune had
already come while "meditating;" it recommended itself to a policy which
only measured the infinity of its aspirations by the uncertainty of
possible events. The infinity of desires accommodates itself in case one
can do nothing better with the indefinite in the designs, and nothing at
times gives such a false impression of depth as emptiness.
It was cruelly ironic of the founder of German unity to choose in each
of his successive enterprises an accomplice who was to become his victim
in the following undertaking; but he showed, also, his great superiority
in having had each time a very clear aim, a well-defined object marked
out, and, so to speak, tangible, while his partners allowed themselves
to be drawn in, one after the other, in the perilous game, under the
impulse of abstract principles, vague desires, and cloudy combinations.
At the time of the invasion of the Duchies and his first attempt against
the equilibrium of Europe, M. de Bismarck was certainly not at a loss to
show his aim: the prey was in reach of his hands, and the roadstead of
Kiel spread itself in all its splendor before whoever had eyes to see;
but M. de Rechberg is still seeking for it to-day, and to make the
motives of his cooperation in this work of iniquity acceptable. "He
tried to master the demagogic passions, to gain the ascendency over the
revolution,"--these are the pompous and sonorous phrases taken from the
"doctrine" with which later the former Austrian minister was to seek to
cover up before the Austro-Hungarian delegations his fatal and pitiful
policy of 1863. At Biarritz, the president of the Prussian council
demanded in very clear terms the line of the Main for his country, while
the dreamer of Ham recommended "the great war for the German
nationality," and let his undecided glance fall first on the right bank
of the Rhine and Mayence, then on the limits of 1814, and only fixed it
on the winged lion of St. Mark. From 1867 to 1870, the chancellor of the
Northern Confederation resolutely made preparations for the unification
of Germany and the conquest of Alsace and Lorraine, leaving to his
former colleague of Frankfort perfect leisure "to awaken the echoes of
the Orient," and to demand of them the key to the approaching destinies
of Russia. In each of these fatidical circumstances, the same great
_realist_ is always leading the ideologists to different degrees and to
different titles: it is always the same Fortinbras of Shakspere,--the
_fort en bras_ of Germany,--proclaiming his dominion where the
doctrinary, melancholy, or word-making Hamlets have only lost their way
in chimerical and puerile machinations, and, before a "murder which
cries out to heaven," find no other words than,--the time is out of
joint!
"Russia cannot feel any alarm at the power of Prussia,"[124] said Prince
Gortchakof, in reply to the representations which were made him from the
beginning of the Hohenzollern affair on "the danger which would result
to Russia from the aggrandizement of Prussia, and from the extension of
its influence in Europe." As to the Spanish candidature of the Prussian
prince, the chancellor recalled that "when Prince Charles of
Hohenzollern became (in 1866) sovereign of Roumania, with the support of
France and in spite of Russia, this latter had limited itself to
remonstrances, and had then accepted the fact, he did not see why to-day
Prussia could be more responsible for the election of another member of
the royal family to the throne of Spain." Thus spoke the minister of the
czar at the very beginning of the conflict, the 8th July, 1870, before
the renunciation of Prince Anthony, before any exhibition of anger on
the part of the cabinet of the Tuileries, and at the moment when Europe
still thought well of the legitimate susceptibilities of France.
However, when the hour of blindness and giddiness came, and when the
government of Napoleon III. lost all the profit of a great diplomatic
success by its provoking language before the legislative body, by its
demands of Ems, and its fatal declaration of war (15th July), illusions
could no longer be cherished concerning the true sentiments of the
cabinet of St. Petersburg. "With all due deference to General Fleury,"
wrote with humor M. de Beust to Prince de Metternich, the 20th July,
"Russia perseveres in its alliance with Prussia so far, that in certain
eventualities the intervention of the Muscovite arms must be looked upon
not as probable, but as _certain_." Soon after the declarations of war
of the 15th July, the Russian government had addressed to Vienna the
very clear and categorical notice that it would not allow Austria to
make common cause with France. General Fleury was even soon to think
himself lucky with having at least made sure that this invalidating
clause touching the empire of the Hapsburg was not explicitly mentioned
in the declaration of neutrality which the Emperor Alexander II.
published the 23d July.[125]