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26 When the Prussian and French armies took to the field in the summer of 1870, they not unnaturally hoped to receive assistance in one form or another from the other powers of Europe. And the point at which our narrative has now arrived—just after the inauguration of hostilities between the two powers —is perhaps not a bad one to look at some of the ulterior preoccupations and to see how the Franco-Prussian War was being affected by them. This exercise—addressed as it is to the 1870–71 period—will necessarily have to reach back in time through the period treated in the previous volume, but this is necessary to throw light on the events still to be described. We have already seen, in the preceding pages, something of the way in which the fears of possible foreign intervention and hopes of the French for it affected the thinking of Bismarck during the early days of the war. The French, for their part, had reason to believe that foreign intervention would be forthcoming. Both their reasons for believing this and Bismarck’s attempts to prevent it therefore merit a glance. On the French side, negotiations had been put in hand in the last months of 1868 and the first ones of 1869 for an alliance that would involve AustriaHungary . France’s proposals were complex, but what they essentially boiled down to was this: a demand for Austrian intervention against Prussia and a promise to assist Austria against Russia in a war over the Near East. The French offer rested on a sound assumption. For the Austrians, there was, over the whole period from 1866 to 1870, no bilateral relationship more signi ficant than that they were obliged to entertain with their new neighbor to the west, the newly formed North Germanic Confederation under the indisputable domination of Prussia. At no time does there seem to have been The Position of the Powers 2 the position of the powers 27 any determination on the part of the Austrians to initiate an armed conflict with Prussia with a view to recovering their position in Germany, from which, as the principal result of the war of 1866, Austria had been excluded. But neither was there any disposition to be reconciled to this exclusion or their intention to end it someday, one way or another. This intention did not preclude the possibility that recovery of this position might one day be achieved by force of arms, but it also did not commit the Austrians to the initiation of such a contest over any particular issue or at any particular time. Still, the Austrians had reason to hesitate. In view of what they had learned in 1866 about the power of Prussian arms, any conflict with that power had to be regarded as at best a risky undertaking. Should it lead to an Austrian defeat, there could be no hope for the political survival of those who had inaugurated it, and it was indeed doubtful if the monarchy itself (in which the Hungarians had now become partners) could withstand such a blow.1 For these and other reasons, the Austrians were decidedly unhappy with the French offer. France, argued Friedrich von Beust, the chancellor of Austria-Hungary, was putting the cart before the horse. Austria’s immediate interests were bound up in the Near East. An alliance involving this region must be concluded first; discussions about Prussia and the Rhine would have to follow. Besides, he pointed out, France had interests in the Near East, as well; there was trouble brewing in Romania, whose king had been placed on the throne at Napoleon III’s insistence. And had it not been France that was the principal author of the Treaty of Paris, which had ended the Crimean War—the last war in the Near East? Did not France have a paramount interest in seeing to it that this treaty was defended?2 Turning to the situation in Western Europe, Austria’s overriding objective, Beust continued, concerned the states of South Germany. Its principal anxiety was that a war between France and Prussia would end in their destruction—as indeed turned out to be the case. With this last point, Beust laid his finger on the dilemma that barred an understanding between the two powers. Neither the German Austrians nor the Hungarians of the Habsburg monarchy could bring themselves to regard Napoleon III as the defender of South German independence, though...

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