e Cabinet on July 6, when the
ministers resolved to announce to the Chamber their determination to
resent and resist the Hohenzollern candidature, that the emperor and
M. de Gramont regarded the understanding with Italy and Austria as
being much more than academic. It is there stated that when Ollivier
hesitated to accept Gramont's assurance that the assistance of these
two Powers, in the event of hostilities with Prussia, had been
virtually secured, the Emperor Napoleon took from a drawer in his
bureau certain letters written in 1869 by the Austrian emperor and the
King of Italy, and, after reading them aloud, told the ministers that
these writings undoubtedly amounted to promises of help in the
circumstances that were then actually under discussion. The Cabinet
accepted these proofs that the alliances might be reckoned upon as
substantial, so that it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bismarck
had drawn the same conclusion from the intimations that had reached
him, and had set himself to provoke a war before the secret
combinations against him should be ready for action. It must be borne
in mind that from 1866 he had been deliberately preparing for it,
being convinced, as he said later, that until France had been defeated
in the field, his grand design of founding a German empire, with its
capital at Berlin, could not be realised.

We may therefore be permitted to suggest that the discussion with
which M. Ollivier closes this volume is to some extent superfluous,
for it is incontestable that Bismarck had reasons for desiring the
war, and that France was inveigled into declaring it. In the final
section he returns to the question whether France or Prussia were
responsible for the rupture; and after summing up the evidence he
pronounces judgment against Prussia. It was Prussia that invented the
Hohenzollern candidature, against which France was bound to protest
forcibly; and even if it be admitted, he says, that the French Cabinet
was wrong in taking mortal offence at the insolent official version of
the king's refusal to receive the French ambassador, there can be no
doubt that this public affront infuriated the French nation, and drove
it to the extremity of war. That the explosion was instantaneous he
regards as a proof that it had not been expected nor premeditated by
France. All these things are, indeed, neither denied nor deniable, for
Bismarck's own arrogant revelations leave no doubt that the war had
been desi