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Updated: May 28, 2025
The action was spontaneous, emanating from Prince Leopold and his father Prince Antony, not from the Prussian monarch, though, on hearing of their decision, he informed Benedetti that he entirely approved it. If the French Government had really wished for peace, it would have let the matter end there. But it did not do so.
Benedetti sent the revised draft to Paris; it was submitted to the Emperor, accepted in principle, and returned with some small alterations and suggestions. Benedetti sent in the revision to Bismarck and said he would be ready at any time to meet the Minister and finish the negotiations. He himself left Berlin for Carlsbad and there awaited the summons. It never came.
Benedetti had warned the Government that Bismarck would not surrender any German territory; it was no good even asking for this, unless the demand was supported by urgent and threatening language. The result of the considerations was that he was instructed categorically to require the surrender to France of the Palatinate and Mayence.
He had already instructed Goltz to enquire what non-German compensation would be asked; he was much disturbed when Benedetti met his overtures with silence; he feared that Napoleon had some other plan.
Benedetti undertook the task with some reluctance; in order to avoid being present at the explosion of anger which he might expect, he addressed the demand to Bismarck on August 5th, by letter. Two days he waited for an answer, but received none; on the evening of the 7th, he himself called on the Count, and a long discussion took place.
M. Benedetti, the French minister at Berlin, was instructed to take a very haughty tone with the king of Prussia, and to say that if he permitted Prince Leopold to accept the Spanish crown, it would be a cause of war between France and Prussia. The king of Prussia replied substantially that he would not be threatened, and would leave Prince Leopold to do as he pleased.
The magnificent rooms of the Spanish Embassy were crowded with the fashionable world of Rome, which, in the year 1782, included priests and princes of the Church quite as much as painted ladies and powdered cavaliers. A contemporary diary, kept by the page of the Princess Colonna, a certain Abate Benedetti, enables us to form some notion of the assembly.
One of the earliest of the souls so revealed is that of the Blessed Jacopone of Todi. Jacopo dei Benedetti, a fellow-countryman of St. Tradition has it that he turned to the religious life in consequence of the sudden death of his beloved, and the discovery that she had worn a hair-shirt next her delicate body.
The King declines to see Benedetti again, and telegraphs to Bismarck the gist of the interview. That there might be no mistake he made this official by sending it to all the embassies and legations. Moltke exclaimed, 'You have converted surrender into defiance." The altered telegram was also sent to the Norddeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung and to officials.
Prompted, however, no doubt, by his sovereign, Prince Leopold declined the Spanish throne. This was intimated to M. Benedetti, and here the matter might have come to an end. But the Emperor Napoleon, anxious for a casus belli, chose to think that the king of Prussia, in making his announcement to his ambassador, had not been sufficiently civil. A cabinet council was held at the Tuileries.
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