set up a
formidable military power on the frontier of France, that inspired the
whole French people with the suspicion, jealous animosities, and alarm
which rendered a war on the Rhine between the two nations eventually
unavoidable. But Thiers in his speech emphatically repeated his
conviction that sooner or later France must fight Prussia to redress
the balance of military power between the rival countries; and the
whole point of his speech lay in one sentence: 'Je trouve l'occasion
detestablement choisie' ('Your _casus belli_ is ill chosen and utterly
indefensible'). It cannot be denied that in 1870 the public opinion of
Europe was on his side: for England and Austria, whose goodwill toward
France was unquestionable, were foremost in their efforts to deter the
French ministers from war and in deploring their infatuation when it
had been proclaimed. At St. Petersburg the Russian emperor told the
French ambassador plainly that the demand for guarantees was
unreasonable. Nor is it likely that the general judgment of the
time--that Thiers did his best to save the empire from a disastrous
blunder--will have been revoked by posterity, or affected by anything
that has since been pleaded in extenuation.

'If (said Thiers) the Hohenzollern candidature had not been withdrawn,
all France would have rallied to the support of your declaration, and
all Europe would have held you to be in the right; but it _has_ been
withdrawn with the approbation of the Prussian king, and you had
absolutely no pretext for making any further demand. What will Europe
say when you shed torrents of blood on a point of form?' M. Thiers
concluded his speech by urging the ministers to lay before the Chamber
the actual documents which, as they asserted, rendered war inevitable.

M. Ollivier, in his reply, declined to communicate certain documents
which, he said, were confidential and could not be produced without
infringement of diplomatic rules; and he laid stress on the
impossibility of tolerating the affront which had been intentionally
put upon France by Bismarck's circular telegram. And it was at the end
of this speech that he made use of the phrase which has become
historical as the typical expression of the levity and rashness with
which his ministry threw their nation into a tremendous war, insomuch
that it has become one main cause why he is so commonly charged, very
unfairly, with the whole responsibility for the blind haste that led
to the def