Vincent Benedetti

Vincent Benedetti

Vincent Benedetti

Count Vincent Benedetti (born April 29, 1817 in Bastia on Corsica , † March 28, 1900 in Paris ) was a French diplomat . He became particularly well known for the events in connection with the Ems audience , which led to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in the summer of 1870 .

Early career

Benedetti entered the service of the French Foreign Ministry in 1840 after studying law and received a post under the Marquis de la Valette , who was consul general in Cairo . He spent eight years there (as consul since 1845 ), became consul in Palermo in 1848 and succeeded the Marquis, who had been appointed French ambassador to Constantinople , as first secretary in 1851 .

During the Crimean War he was fifteen months the French charge d'affaires . In the second volume of his Essais diplomatiques he gives some memories of his activities in the East, including a portrait of Mehmed Ali and a (not very advantageous) sketch of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe , the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte . He refused a post as envoy in Tehran , and so he returned to the Foreign Ministry in Paris in 1855, where he took part in the Paris Congress in 1856 as secretary . In the following years he devoted himself mainly to Italian affairs, which interested him personally - the Italian statesman Cavour characterized him as an "Italian in spirit". In 1861 he became the first ambassador of France to the newly formed Kingdom of Italy , but resigned from this post the next year after his sponsor Édouard Thouvenel had retired and the anti-Italian party had gained influence in Paris. In 1864 he went to Prussia as an ambassador .

As an ambassador in Prussia

Benedetti stayed in Berlin until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 . It was during this period that the events that made it go down in the history of European diplomacy occurred. His position was difficult because his own government did not inform him sufficiently about the course of Napoleon's III policy . When the German war broke out between Prussia and the Austrian Empire in 1866 , it followed the Prussian headquarters on its march against Vienna . He played a decisive role in France's attempts to intervene and participated in mediating the pre-peace of Nikolsburg .

After the end of the war he was commissioned to present the Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck with the French demands for “compensation” for the neutrality of France during the war: the Prussian agreement to the French annexation of Belgium and Luxembourg . After his return to Berlin in August 1866, he drafted a treaty in which Prussia agreed to tolerate the expansion of French power. The treaty was never signed, but the draft, in Benedetti's handwriting, remained in Bismarck's possession and was published a few days after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War on July 25, 1870, to the detriment of French diplomacy in the London newspaper The Times .

During 1867 Benedetti studied the French attempt to acquire the Duchy of Luxembourg from the Netherlands . This led to the so-called Luxembourg crisis . German nationalists were indignant at this intention, and Prussia seemed inclined to declare war on France. The plan was thwarted by the London Treaty of 1867 , in which Luxembourg's independence from the major European powers was confirmed and guaranteed.

When the candidacy of a Prussian prince for the Spanish throne became known in July 1870 , the French Foreign Minister Gramont Benedetti instructed King Wilhelm I of Prussia to convey France's demand for the House of Hohenzollern to permanently renounce the Spanish throne. The king was in Bad Ems , and Benedetti visited him on July 13 for an informal conversation on the promenade; but the king refused to make the required declaration. The events of that day were communicated to Bismarck in the Emser Depesche . Bismarck gave his own version of the events to the public, and the offensive nature of the presentation became the stumbling block for the Franco-Prussian War, which ended catastrophically for France. Benedetti's approach as ambassador was subject to violent attacks, and Foreign Minister Gramont tried to blame him for the failure of French diplomacy.

Benedetti responded to these accusations with his book Ma Mission en Prusse , which to this day can be counted among the most important studies of Bismarckian diplomacy. He defends himself successfully and shows that he always kept his government adequately informed; he had even warned of the Hohenzollern candidacy a year in advance. Even if Bismarck outsmarted him in the matter of the draft treaty of 1866, the policy on which the treaty was based did not go back to Benedetti, but to Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys . The idea of ​​the appropriation of Wallonia and Belgium had first been suggested to him by Bismarck, and he could not foresee that Bismarck would ultimately use the draft treaty to undermine French prestige.

Further life

After the fall of the empire, Benedetti withdrew to Corsica . He saw his account being corroborated by later publications that shed more light on the secret history of diplomacy. In 1895 he published the first volume of his Essais diplomatiques , which contains a complete report on his trip to Bad Ems, which he had already written in 1873; In 1897 he had a second volume followed, dealing with the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire . He died on March 28, 1900 while visiting Paris.

Works

• Vincent Benedetti: Ma mission en Prusse . 2nd edition. Plon, Paris 1871. Internet Archive

Web links

Commons : Vincent Benedetti  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

predecessor	Office	successor
?	French envoy in Turin 1861–1862	?
Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord	French envoy in Berlin 1864–1870	- see German Empire