THE SECOND EMPIRE AND THE FALLOUX LAW — THE WAR OF 1870
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avenging Sadowa. The French army is not ready. "The artillery is out of date. Our cannons are still loaded through the muzzle", wrote Rothan, French minister at Francfort who can see disaster coming. "Prussia knows of her superiority and our lack of preparation", he adds with many other observers. The war instigators are not concerned. The candidature of a Hohenzollern prince for the vacant Spanish throne is the excuse for that conflict; also, Bismark wants it. When he faked the dispatch of Ems, the advocates of war had the game in their hands and they aroused public opinion. France herself declared war. this "war of 1870 which was proved by history to be the work of the Jesuits", as M. Gaston Bally wrote. The composition of the government which sent France to disaster is described as follows by the eminent catholic historian, Adrien Dansette: "Napoleon III started by sacrificing Victor Duruy, then resolved to appoint to his government men from the people's party (January 1870). The new ministers were nearly all sincere catholics, or ecclesiastics believing in social conservatism".(44) It is easy to understand, now, what was inexplicable: the haste of this government to extract a "casus belli" from this faked dispatch, even before receiving a confirmation. "The consequences were: the collapse of the Empire and the countercoup for the papal throne which followed... The imperial edifice and the papal edifice, crowned by the Jesuits, fell in the same mud, in spite of the Immaculate Conception and papal infallibility; but, alas! it was over the ashes of France".(45)
(44) Adrien Dansette: "Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine" (Ed. Flammarion, Paris 1948, I, p.432) (45) Gaston Bally, op.cit., pp.100, 101.