Between Hope and Fear by Michael Kinch

Author:Michael Kinch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

7

Lost in Translation

It is widely known the royal families of Europe are quite inbred, as evidenced by occasional maladies such as hemophilia and porphyria, which have made for rather colorful storytelling over the centuries. Despite and occasionally because of these relationships, European peace was significantly and consistently disrupted over disputes pertaining to royal succession. One such disagreement forever changed the course of history.

As the new year of 1870 dawned in Europe, things were looking up for the relatively new state of Prussia (a territory once ruled by Teutonic knights that remained a paper lion until the 17th century). Just four years before, Kaiser Wilhelm I had appointed Otto von Bismarck as prime minister, and this brilliant, albeit ruthless, strategist had begun a conquest to raise the minor kingdom into a major power.1 The kingdom’s power had grown following a sharp but decisive war with the fading Austrian-Habsburg Empire in that same year of 1866, which had netted the Prussian kingdom additional lands and sway over still-independent territories in its backyard.

In 1868, the Spanish “Glorious Revolution” had deposed and exiled Queen Isabella II as the first step in a process of liberalization that would ensure instability and political uncertainty on the Iberian Peninsula for the next century.2 The provisional government of Spain had lacked leadership and had soon been seeking a new monarch with hereditary ties to the Spanish crown. One candidate had been Leopold, Prince of Hohenzollern, whose wife had also been a princess of Portugal. However, Leopold’s potential ascendency to the throne of Spain had been strongly opposed by the French Napoleon III, who’d threatened war as he’d feared contending with Hohenzollern rivals to the east (Prussia) and west (Spain).

While negotiations among the different candidates by the Spanish Cortes Generales had been underway, the French had continued to pressure Prussia against any consideration of contending for the Spanish throne, culminating in a seemingly innocent encounter on July 13, 1870. During a stroll on his summer vacation in the resort spa in Bad Ems, Kaiser Wilhelm was confronted by Vincent, Count Benedetti, the French ambassador to Prussia.3 Benedetti, working on behalf of Antoine Alfred Agenor, Duke of Gramont and French minister of foreign affairs under Emperor Napoleon III, challenged the Kaiser to renounce all current and future claims to the Spanish throne. During their walk together, the duke implied that a Prussian failure to abandon aspirations for the Spanish crown could trigger war. The Kaiser politely demurred from answering and shared the story with his secretary, Heinrich Abeken, who in turn relayed the account to Otto von Bismarck.

Bismarck, the cunning architect of Realpolitik, comprehended the propaganda value of the encounter at the resort and crafted an accurate but stilted account of the Ems encounter into a dispatch that was shared with the foreign office and later published for all the world to see. In relaying the encounter in what has become known as the “Ems telegram,” Bismarck utilized language that was crafty enough that a translation into French would reveal an insult to the French people by the Kaiser.

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