All the participators in the disarmament negotiation appear to have kept their counsel on the subject, and there is, at all events, no mention of it in the two standard works which deal with Bismarck's career.


CHAPTER VIII

THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR

(1870)

Whilst the barren disarmament negotiations were proceeding, the internal political situation in France had not improved. Though calm on the surface, a section of the people was becoming more socialistic, and socialism produced stagnation in business, a desire on the part of the lower classes for revolution and a corresponding desire on the part of the middle classes for a strong government again. Ministers were uneasy, for although the new Constitution had been well received by the country at large, its weak point lay in the right reserved by the Emperor of appealing to the people, a right which nothing could induce him to abandon, and which he was about to exercise by submitting the recent Constitutional changes to a plébiscite. Theoretically, this should have afforded gratification to the Republicans, as being in conformity with their view that the public should decide everything directly itself, but they were in reality well aware that the French people were not yet Republican in sentiment.


Lord Lyons to Lord Clarendon.

Paris, April 5, 1870.