In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

122 That the collapse of the negotiations at Ferrières had a profound effect on Bismarck has been the subject of considerable discussion in the preceding chapter. The failure of the talks marked the moment of lowest ebb in relations between the French authorities and the Prussian government, the time when the task of establishing relations seemed most delicate and difficult. But Bismarck, always conscious of his personal responsibility for the shaping of peace and always sensitive to other ways of keeping negotiations in hand, soon saw favorable possibilities of doing just that with another actor—Marshal François Achille Bazaine, commander of the Army of the Rhine—an army that had not yet been defeated, that still carried out its duties as the representative of the emperor, and that remained the only symbol of imperial authority in all France. Bazaine himself was sixty years old at the time he caught Bismarck’s eye. Although there were conflicting views among contemporaries, as there have been among historians, with regard to his character, the weight of the evidence reveals him as a healthy, honorable, and diligent figure—the product of a French military education, with all its advantages and drawbacks, full of life, straightforward—in short, in many ways an attractive personality. But an unpleasant experience in Napoleon III’s “Mexican adventure of 1864–66,” where he had been sent to shore up the troops, turned him sour, the more so when he learned that the government was attempting to pin upon his shoulders responsibility for what turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. The shock of this revelation never wore off. Thereafter, Bazaine’s career went downhill, and his experience in the war that broke out in 1870 did absolutely nothing to improve it. After the war, there appeared, in 1873, sensational Bismarck, Bazaine, and Thiers 6 bismarck, bazaine, and thiers 123 charges leveled against Bazaine by the senior officials of the Third Republic. He was alleged to have done nothing when the fortunes of the nation were at stake and, according to materials in the files of the French war ministry, to have contributed in a significant way to the French defeat—an accusation for which the government put him on trial for his life and later set him in condemnation for the remainder of it. The charges were not wholly unjustified. Bazaine’s actions at Sedan were, as Geoffrey Wawro has convincingly demonstrated , confused and bizarre and undoubtedly contributed to the French defeat.1 Perhaps character flaws entered in. Though by no means devoid of talent, Bazaine also possessed unquestionable personal deficiencies, and the most signal of these appears to have been an inability to distinguish the genuine from the false article in the company of those he admitted to his personal entourage. Like many other engaging and prominent personalities, he could easily be satisfied by a professed agreement with his own views and often neglected to look carefully at the person who was doing the agreeing. A somewhat greater interest in people might have warned him against the intentions of hangers-on and flatterers, one of whom, Edouard Regnier, we shall note in due course. Like most other French military men, Bazaine had little sympathy for the provisional government in which such—to him—disreputable men of the left as Gambetta and Favre served, and he could not, he told his colleagues, pledge to it his loyalty until Napoleon III released him from the oath he had sworn to the empire. In any case, whatever sympathies to the new government he might have entertained were dashed by the selection of Trochu as president, a man for whom Bazaine had nothing but contempt, partly no doubt because of a scathing critique of Bazaine’s performance in Mexico that Trochu had authored. In any case, on 16 September, Bazaine finally found himself obliged to address the question of the government’s establishment : “Our military obligations toward the fatherland remain the same. Let us then continue to serve it with devotion and with the same energy: defending its territory against the foreigner and the social order against illconceived and unsuitable passions.”2 The statement was a masterpiece of equivocation. Was Bazaine loyal or independent? No one knew, perhaps not even Bazaine himself. But the declaration ended with words that expressed a belief that the army was a political force to be reckoned with—one from [18.118.227.69] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share