With Germany broken up, he argued, Austria would not dare move. Giers, gathering his courage in the face of this unexpected statement, put the obvious question to his sovereign:
"But what would we gain by helping the French to destroy Germany ?" "Why, what indeed?" replied the Czar. "What we would gain would be that Germany as such would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be." [9]
Franco-Russian plans were put on hold indefinitely by the untimely death of Alexander III at forty-nine years of age on November 2, 1894. Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales had not been idle. His offer to deliver letters of friendly advice from the British Government to the Emperor Napoleon III and to King William of Prussia were ignored while his views about methods of effecting a settlement between Prussia and France were dismissed as "royal twaddle." On November 18, Lord Granville reported to Gladstone that the Prince had been "more than usually unwise in his talk." [10] After the war, the Prince again angered his mother when he offered the beautiful Empress Eugenie (and later the Emperor Napoleon III) the Chadwick House in which to live in comfortable exile without consulting her or the Cabinet.
A truly alarming sign of the Prince's evolving anti-German political predilections came with his first meeting with Leon Gambetta. If there was one man in France who symbolized the eventual return of Alsace-Lorraine after a successful war with Germany. It was the squat, disheveled firebrand Leon Gambetta - the French war hero who in 1870 inspired the nation with his spectacular escape from besieged Paris in a hot-air balloon and combined the Interior and War Departments to organize the Government of National Defence. With his fiery oratory, he roused the nation to an all-out guerre outrance with these stirring words:
"We must set all our resources to work - and they are immense. We must shake the countryside from its torpor, guard against stupid panic, increase partisan warfare and, against an enemy so skilled in ambush and surprise, ourselves employ ruses, harass his flanks, surprise his rear - in short inaugurate a national war . . . Tied down and contained by the capital, the Prussians, far from home, anxious, harassed, hunted down by our awakened people, will gradually be decimated by our arms, by hunger, by natural causes." [11]
In the post-war years Gambetta had kept the flame of the lost provinces burning in French hearts with his famous slogan: "Speak of it never! Think of it always!" This oddest of odd couples, "Two men, whom birth and social context could hardly have been set further apart, the one destined to a crown, the other the apostle of republicanism," [12] were in fact well matched by a common goal. Gambetta himself put it this way: "It is no waste of time to talk with him even over a merry supper at the Cafe Anglais. He loves France both in a gay and a serious sense, and his dream of the future is an entente with us." [13]
Many of the top-secret meetings between the Prince and Gambetta were arranged by the Marquis Henri-Charles Breteuil who described Gambetta at one such meeting (12 March, 1881), in his memoirs: "One had to admit that this short, fat man, with his red shining face, his Cyclops eye, his long hair and his heavy, vulgar walk, seemed to spread himself across the elegant floor of our drawing-room like an oil-stain on a piece of silk." [14]
When Gambetta died unexpectedly (on 31 December, 1882) the Prince resumed his quest for an entente with a one-time journalist and life-long French patriot, Theophile Delcasse, who was even more impassioned about Alsace-Lorraine and who would become Foreign Minister in 1898. As with Gambetta, and for the same reason - Le Prussianisme, voil l'ennemi - the political marriage of minds with Delcasse was instantaneous. For the rest of his long apprenticeship, these were the influences that shaped and strengthened the political aims that the Prince of Wales would later pursue as King:
"The empathy which grew up over the years between the Prince of Wales and France was a total one, enveloping his body, mind and spirit. It was to have a strong influence on his political thinking as, in the opposite sense, did all that gradually accumulated distaste for the Prussia of his German relatives, with its puritanical, military pipe-clay capital . . . The country to which he was most devoted and where he felt most at home happened to be the mortal enemy of Prussia, the country he came most to dislike and where, despite all the blood links, he felt least at ease. The equation had lethal balance about it." [15]
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