We cannot describe here the terrible campaign which followed. In numbers, in equipment, in discipline, in generalship, in everything but bravery, the French were quickly outmatched. When Napoleon groped madly for some friendly hand to stay his fall, he found that Bismarck had cut off succor from him. The South Germans, whom the French had hoped to win over, fought loyally under the command of Prussia; Austria, who might have been persuaded to strike back at her late conqueror, dared not move for fear of Russia, whose friendship Bismarck had secured; and Italy, instead of aiding France, lost no time in completing her own unification by entering Rome when the French garrison was withdrawn. Forsaken and outwitted, the French Empire sank without even an expiring flash of that tinsel glory which had so long bedizened its corruption. And when the French people, lashed to desperation, continued the war which the Empire had brought upon them, they but suffered a long agony of losses before accepting the inevitable defeat. They paid the penalty of their former arrogance in every coin known to the vanquished,--in military ruin, in an enormous indemnity, in the occupation of their land by the victorious Prussians, and in the cession of two rich provinces. Nor was that enough: they had to submit to a humiliation which, to the imagination at least, seems the worst of all,--the proclamation of the Prussian King William as German Emperor in their palace at Versailles, the shrine of French pomp, where two centuries before Louis XIV had embodied the ambition, the glory, and the pride of France. The German cannon bombarding beleaguered Paris paused, while the sovereigns of the German states hailed William as their Emperor.
This consummation of German unity was the logical outcome of an international war, in which all the Germans had been impelled, by mutual interests quite as much as by kinship, to join forces against an alien foe. Twenty years before, Bismarck had opposed German unity, because it would then have made Prussia the plaything of her confederates; in this later scheme he was the chief agent, if not the originator, for he knew that the primacy of Prussia ran no more risk.