The dispatch concludes thus:
"If Europe is obliged to recognise the de facto governments in America, its whole policy must tend to bring monarchies to life in the New World, instead of these revolutionary republics which will send us their principles together with the products of their soil.
"In reading this dispatch, monsieur le vicomte, you will doubtless, like myself, experience a movement of satisfaction. It is already a great step forward in politics to have forced England to wish to associate herself with us in interests on which she would not have deigned to consult us six months ago. I congratulate myself as a good Frenchman on all that tends to put back our country in the high rank which she should occupy among foreign nations."
Duc de Richelieu.
This letter was the basis of all my ideas and of all the negociations on colonial affairs with which I occupied myself during the Spanish War, almost a year before that war broke out.
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