Such being the situation in this decisive month, the ambassador of France to the court of Berlin experienced a violent shock in learning one day of the sudden departure for St. Petersburg of General Manteuffel, the general-diplomat, more diplomat than general, the confidant, par excellence, of King William, and always the man for private missions. "I have asked M. de Bismarck," M. Benedetti hastened to write to Paris, "what I should think of this mission, confided to a general commanding troops in the campaign. After having pretended that he thought he had informed me of it, M. de Bismarck assured me that he had told M. de Goltz, in order that he might instruct you." Strictly speaking, one finds it natural that the king wished to plead before his imperial nephew the extenuating circumstances of a painful situation, which forced him to take the goods and the crowns of several very near relations of the House of Romanoff; but the French ambassador was above all struck by the circumstance that the journey of M. de Manteuffel had been decided the day after he had delivered his project of the treaty. "I asked the president of the council," he continues in the same dispatch, "if this general officer had been informed of our overture; he answered that he had had no occasion to make him a party to it, but that he could not guarantee to me that the king had not told him the substance. I should add, as I have told you by telegraph, that I gave a copy of our project to M. de Bismarck on Sunday morning, and that General Manteuffel, who had scarcely removed his head-quarters to Frankfort, was called to Berlin in the following night." Towards the end of the month of August, when M. de Bismarck for the first time showed his hesitation in signing the secret act concerning Belgium, M. Benedetti wrote, in a letter to M. Rouher, concerning the mission that M. de Manteuffel continued to fill at St. Petersburg. "They have elsewhere obtained assurances which dispense with our aid," said he; "if they decline our alliance, it is because they are already provided, or on the eve of being."[99]
General Manteuffel remained several weeks at St. Petersburg; he stayed there long enough to dissipate a certain sadness caused by the recent misfortunes of the Houses of Hanover, Cassel, Nassau, etc., all allied by blood to the imperial family of Russia, also long enough to communicate such projects and show autographs by which they had treacherously endeavored to turn the Hohenzollern from his loyal, unalterable affection for his relative of the North. Thanks to all these proceedings, and all these attentions, the good harmony between the two courts became greater than ever; they easily explained the past, and arranged for the future, and the ambassador of France at the court of Berlin was not deceived in designating, from this moment, the "bear," whose skin the general-diplomat had gone to sell on the banks of the Neva. To speak in the words of the Marquis La Marmora, it was a bear of the Balkans, which had not been well for a long time, and which the Emperor Nicholas had declared sick twenty years before. One will see in the sequel that Alexander Mikhaïlovitch did not the less miss the deer at the general hunt in 1870, that he scarcely succeeded in getting for himself a handful of hair well fitted to adorn his helmet; that takes nothing from the merit of the perspicacity which the unfortunate negotiator of the secret act concerning Belgium had given proof of on this occasion. M. Benedetti early foresaw the desolating truth, which, for M. Thiers, was not visible until very late, at the bottom of this Russian box which M. de Bismarck allowed him one evening, at Versailles, to rummage with a liberality which was certainly not free from malice.
In endeavoring, after the great disaster of the campaign of Bohemia, to obtain from Prussia compensations first on the Rhine, then on the Meuse, the Emperor Napoleon III., in those months of July and August, 1866, had only facilitated for M. de Bismarck the two great political combinations which were since, in 1870, of such prodigious use: the armed coöperation of the Southern States, and the moral aid of Russia in case of a war with France. The chief fault, however, of the Napoleonic policy the day after Sadowa, was to have so well served Prussia in its desire to escape from all control on the part of Europe, and to have given its sanction from the very first to such an immense derangement of the equilibrium of the world, without the cause being brought before the areopagus of nations. This forgetfulness of the duties towards the great Christian family of states was only too quickly and too cruelly avenged, alas! and Prince Gortchakof, in 1870, only followed a recent and lamentable example in allowing France and Germany to decide their quarrel in the lists, in hindering all common action of the Powers, all European concert. "I see no Europe!" cried M. de Beust, in 1870, in a celebrated dispatch, and no one thought of disputing this dolorous affirmation. A few only observed with sadness that the eclipse had already lasted several years, that it dated from the preliminaries of Nikolsburg and from the treaty of Prague.
V.
ORIENT AND OCCIDENT.
I.
"They have provided themselves elsewhere," the French ambassador at the court of William I. sadly wrote, in the last days of the month of August, 1866, on seeing Prussia so brusquely break off the dilatory negotiations concerning Belgium; and it is just to add that he has never since ceased to clearly appreciate the situation, and to keep his country constantly on its guard as regards the confidential harmony and absolute agreement between the two courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg after the mission of General Manteuffel. If he nevertheless endeavored for some time to obtain a compensation for his country,—a very modest one, it is true, and consonant with the new fortune of France,—if, during the first months of the year 1867, he particularly flattered himself with obtaining from the kindness of M. de Bismarck the permission to buy Luxemburg from the King of Holland, if he even once went so far, during a hasty journey to Paris, as to affirm, in a confidential conversation, that he already had the fortress of Alzette "in his pocket," it was not that he thought it possible to return to the beautiful dream of the head-quarters of Brünn, and to effect that "necessary and fruitful alliance with Prussia" with which at a certain moment some sanguine minds on the banks of the Seine had been deluded. He was only persuaded that the conqueror of Sadowa would not envy France this paltry atonement of Luxemburg, that he would even find it worth while to "indemnify" the Emperor Napoleon III. so cheaply, so that, in the words of the poet, "the lion would only gape before such a little morsel." The lion roared, however, shook his mane with fury, and signified harshly that it had done forever with any politique de pour-boire. But even this only confirmed M. Benedetti in the opinion that they had provided themselves elsewhere, and that henceforward they were on the verge of great trouble. He thought rightly that M. de Bismarck must be very sure of the support, in any case, of his former colleague of Frankfort, to refuse to France even this moderate prize (aubaine), and to give it on this occasion "the measure of its ingratitude."
At the same time with the affair of Luxemburg, the events in Crete showed in their turn to the cabinets of Vienna and the Tuileries how far Prince Gortchakof was already pledged to M. de Bismarck, and how resolved to sacrifice to his friendship with Prussia the most brilliant prospects. Whoever reads attentively the curious exchange of notes which the troubles of Crete had caused, will see that, during the entire epoch from the month of November, 1866, to the month of March, 1867, the two governments of Austria and France had sought to sound the designs of the court of St. Petersburg, and to make very significant advances to it. The insurrection of the Candiots, one will remember, in the autumn of 1866, surprised and moved Europe, scarcely recovered from the violent shock of Sadowa. Immoderately exaggerated by the journalists, who were more or less interested, after having excited lively sympathy in Russia, the insurrection ended by seriously occupying the attention of the chancellors, and seemed for a moment destined to bring before the cabinets the whole question of the Orient in its appalling ensemble. Certain cabinets did not even seem greatly dismayed at the contingency: instead of conforming with the constant traditions of diplomacy in the Ottoman affairs, instead of quelling the disturbance and lessening as much as possible its proportions and bearings, M. de Moustier thought that he ought "to find means to pacify the Orient," and busied himself "in convoking a sort of consultation of doctors to learn the opinion of each one concerning the remedy to be applied to the evil."[100] Still more astonishing was the language used by the government of Vienna, by the Power which up to that time and always had contented itself with sustaining Turkey per fas et nefas, without demanding anything from it, no more for the immediate subjects of the sultan than for the tributary provinces. Resolutely breaking with these habits of the past, M. de Beust, who had at this time just undertaken the direction of affairs in Austria, wrote on the 10th November, 1866, to his ambassador at Paris that, while desiring to preserve the throne of the sultan, "Austria could not refuse its sympathies and its support in a certain degree to the Christian peoples of Turkey who have at times just demands to make, and who are connected with some of the peoples of the Austrian empire by close ties of blood and religion." Questioned some days later (28th November) by the envoy of Russia at the court of Vienna, the Austrian minister did not hesitate to reply that he was disposed to favor amongst the Christians of the Orient "the development of their autonomy and the establishment of a limited self-government by a bond of vassalage." Lastly, in a remarkable dispatch addressed to Prince Metternich and dated the 1st January, 1867, M. de Beust proposed "a revision of the treaty of Paris of the 30th March, 1856, and subsequent acts," announcing in advance his desire to make over, in the arrangement to intervene, the greater part to Russia. He had no trouble in showing that "the remedies through which they had sought, in the course of the last few years, to maintain the statu quo in the Orient, had shown themselves insufficient to subdue the difficulties which grew with each day." "The physiognomy of the Orient taken as a whole," continued the dispatch, "shows itself to-day under an essentially different aspect from that which it had in 1856, and the stipulations of that epoch, exceeded as they are on more than one important point by after events, no longer answer to the necessities of the actual situation." In a word, M. de Beust looked to nothing less than to a joint intervention of the European Powers in the affairs of Turkey, without concealing that in such a situation, "there would be an opportunity to take into consideration, in a fitting degree, the natural rôle which the commonalty of religious institutions would secure for Russia in the Orient," and clearly showing the necessity of relieving the empire of the czars of the onerous conditions which were imposed upon it in the Black Sea, "in order to secure for himself by a conciliating attitude the sincere coöperation of this Power in the questions of the Levant."