How Bismarck manipulated public opinion with the Ems Dispatch

Since the overthrow of Queen Isabella II of Spain in September 1868, the Spanish throne had been vacant.

The country’s provisional government was led in large part by General Juan Prim, and it had been searching for a suitable monarch.

In early 1870, Spanish officials offered the crown to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who was a Catholic member of the same Hohenzollern dynasty that ruled Prussia.

Leopold agreed to the candidacy, and news of this arrangement soon reached Paris.

For Emperor Napoleon III, a Hohenzollern prince on the Spanish throne raised the alarming possibility of France being strategically encircled, with a dynasty friendly to Prussia on its south-western flank and Prussia itself on its eastern frontier.

On 6 July 1870, the French foreign minister Agenor, Duc de Gramont, publicly raised the stakes and warned that France would not tolerate such a candidature.

The French government then applied heavy diplomatic pressure and demanded that Leopold withdraw.

Under this pressure, and with the quiet encouragement of King Wilhelm I of Prussia, Leopold officially renounced his claim to the Spanish throne on 12 July 1870.

At that point, the immediate crisis appeared to be over.

However, the French government was not satisfied with Leopold’s withdrawal alone.

Gramont wanted an additional guarantee from King Wilhelm himself: a formal promise that no Hohenzollern prince would ever again be put forward as a candidate for the Spanish crown.

Gramont instructed Count Vincent Benedetti, who was the French ambassador to Prussia, to present this demand directly to the Prussian king, who was vacationing at the spa town of Bad Ems in the Rhineland.

On the morning of 13 July 1870, Benedetti approached King Wilhelm during his regular morning walk along the promenade of the Kursaal at Bad Ems.

Benedetti delivered Gramont’s demand: Wilhelm must guarantee, for all future time, that he would never again permit a Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne.

Wilhelm refused to make any such open-ended commitment, and he told Benedetti that he could not bind himself or his successors to a permanent promise, as it was neither reasonable nor possible to guarantee anything that stretched indefinitely into the future.

The exchange was, by all accounts, respectful and courteous. Later that day, after he received confirmation that Leopold’s withdrawal had indeed been finalised, Wilhelm decided he had nothing further to discuss with the French ambassador and sent an aide-de-camp to inform Benedetti of this.

Heinrich Abeken was a Prussian diplomat who was attached to the king’s staff, and he composed a telegram that summarised these events and sent it to Bismarck in Berlin.

This report was often called the Abeken telegram, and it described the encounter in measured, diplomatic language.

It read as an ongoing negotiation that might reasonably continue through further talks at a later date.

When Bismarck received Abeken’s telegram on the evening of 13 July, he was already deeply frustrated, since the withdrawal of Leopold’s candidacy had, in his view, been a diplomatic humiliation for Prussia.

He had even considered resigning as Minister-President of the North German Confederation.

Over dinner that evening with Roon and Moltke, he discussed the situation at length and then turned his attention to the telegram’s wording.

He wanted France to appear as the aggressor in any coming war, which would help draw the southern German states to Prussia’s side and make it harder for the other European powers to back Paris.

Bismarck did not fabricate new content. Instead, he shortened the telegram and removed the polite elements that had conveyed the measured tone of the original exchange.

The key alteration was one of form rather than content. Abeken’s version described an ongoing diplomatic conversation in which Wilhelm had politely declined a request.

Bismarck’s edited version made it appear as though the king had abruptly refused to see the French ambassador and had dismissed Benedetti in a curt manner.

In practical terms, Bismarck cut the passages that showed Wilhelm’s courtesy and his willingness to let the matter end through normal diplomatic channels, and he condensed the message into a blunt rejection.

The original account suggested a polite encounter that was followed by a formal refusal of any further discussion.

The edited version suggested public rejection and personal insult. As he later wrote in his memoirs, the difference lay in the form rather than in the use of stronger words, which made the announcement appear final and dismissive rather than part of an ongoing negotiation.

Bismarck himself acknowledged the calculated nature of his editing when he told Roon and Moltke that the revised text would act, in his own words, like a red rag to the Gallic bull.

Bismarck released his edited version to the press and to Prussian embassies across Europe on the evening of 13 July 1870, and the effect was almost immediate on both sides of the Rhine.

The text quickly appeared in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which helped carry the revised version into public view.

In France, the published dispatch created the impression that King Wilhelm had deliberately humiliated the French ambassador and that he had treated him with open disrespect.

French newspapers seized upon the story with enthusiasm, and public anger erupted across Paris.

Politicians who were reluctant to push for war now found themselves under intense pressure from an outraged public who demanded that France defend its national honour.

Gramont and the war party within Napoleon III’s government used the perceived insult to build an irresistible case for military action.

Across the German states, the reaction was equally fierce, since the edited dispatch made it appear as though the French ambassador had confronted the Prussian king with arrogant demands during a private stroll.

German public opinion turned sharply against France, and nationalist sentiment surged through the independent southern states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt.

For Bismarck, this reaction in the south was particularly valuable, since those states had remained outside the North German Confederation that he had established in 1867 after the Austro-Prussian War.

On 19 July 1870, just six days after Bismarck had published the edited dispatch, France declared war on Prussia.

Because France had been the one to issue the declaration, Bismarck successfully positioned Prussia as the victim of French aggression.

The southern states had signed defensive military treaties with Prussia after the war of 1866, and the French declaration therefore brought Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt into the conflict at Prussia’s side.

The Franco-Prussian War lasted until May 1871, and the outcome was catastrophic for France.

Prussian and German forces won a series of overwhelming victories, and they captured Napoleon III himself along with an entire French field army of more than 80,000 men at the Battle of Sedan on 2 September 1870.

France was then forced to surrender Alsace and most of Lorraine, and to pay an indemnity of five billion francs.

These terms were formally confirmed in the Treaty of Frankfurt, which was signed on 10 May 1871.

On 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, Wilhelm I was proclaimed Kaiser of a newly unified German Empire, which brought together all the German states under Prussian leadership for the first time.

The Ems Dispatch had arguably achieved exactly what Bismarck intended. He had transformed a routine diplomatic exchange into an apparent insult, and he provoked France into a war that united the German states and created the conditions for national unification.

The incident also showed how telegraphy and newspapers, as well as fast political messaging, could turn a private diplomatic exchange into a public crisis within hours, and how carefully controlled information could drive entire populations toward war.