With the object of prejudicing European opinion against Prussia, the Emperor wrote the well-known letter to Gramont from Metz, on July 28, accusing Bismarck of having proposed to France the annexation of Belgium, but the sole result was that both parties were shown to have played an equally sordid part in the transaction, and they were consequently both induced to agree to the English proposal that they should give a new and formal pledge not to violate Belgian integrity.
In a letter dated July 31, is a dispassionate analysis of the inadequate causes which had brought about a rupture at that particular moment.
Lord Lyons to Lord Granville.
Paris, July 31, 1870.
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I see the public, with their usual tendency to attribute everything to deep-laid plots and schemes, generally suppose that war was a foregone conclusion on the part of France and of Prussia. I don't believe it in the case of Prussia, and I know it not to be the fact as regards France. Prussia threw the first stone, by bringing on the Hohenzollern question. France made a peaceful settlement difficult by Gramont's irritating declaration on the 6th. The cause of the change from a mild to an irritating declaration was the arrival of the report from the Chargé d'Affaires at Berlin, that Thile[21] pooh-poohed the French remonstrance, and said that the question n'existait pas pour le Gouvernement Prussien. Then came the great fault of France in not accepting the renunciation of the Hohenzollern as a final settlement; but, even at the last moment the declaration of the 16th would have concluded with a phrase leaving the door open to the mediation of a Congress, if the article in the North German Gazette had not arrived, and convinced the French that Bismarck had decided upon war. However, it is no use crying over spilt milk.
I understand that the Emperor writes to the Empress that no great action is to be expected for three or four days. At the French Head Quarters there was an apprehension that the Prussians might attempt to turn the right flank of the French Army.
Subsequent revelations have shown how profoundly the course of events was influenced by the action of Bismarck in connection with the tone of the German press, and by his distortion of the celebrated Ems interview between the King of Prussia and Benedetti, but this was of course unknown at the time.