The provocation was supplied at the right moment by the candidature of the prince of Hohenzollern for the vacant crown of Spain. To bring the Peninsula under French influence had been for centuries the ambition of French statesmen; it was intolerable that it should fall to a "Prussian" prince and that France should be threatened by this new power not only from the east but from the south. High language was used at Paris; and the French ambassador, Count Benedetti, was instructed to demand from the king of Prussia the withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidature. The demand was politely but firmly refused, and Bismarck, judging that the moment had come for applying the match to the powder magazine, published an "edited" version of the telegram from the king describing the episode, a version which "without the addition of a single word" turned the refusal into an insult. The "Ems telegram" made the continuance of peace impossible; on the 14th of July Napoleon III. signed the declaration of war; and on the 2nd of August the affair of Saarbrücken opened the struggle which was to cause the downfall of the French and the creation of the German empire (see FRANCO-GERMAN WAR). On the 18th of January 1871, ten days before the capitulation of Paris, William I., king of Prussia, was proclaimed German emperor in the great hall of the palace of Versailles, on the initiative of the king of Bavaria, the most powerful of the South German sovereigns, the traditional ally of France. The cession of Alsace and the greater part of Lorraine, wrested two centuries before by Louis XIV. from the Holy Empire, was the heaviest part of the price that France had to pay for peace (treaty of Frankfort, May 10, 1871). (W. A. P.)
The foundation of the empire in 1871 begins a new era in the history of Germany. The rivalry of the dynasties to which for so long the interests of the nation had been sacrificed now ceased. By the treaties of Versailles the kingdoms of Bavaria and Württemberg, and the grand-duchy of Baden, as well as the southern provinces of the grand-duchy of Hesse, were added to the North German Confederation. Henceforward all the German states that had survived the struggle of 1866, with the exception of the empire of Austria, the grand-duchy of Luxemburg, and the principality of Liechtenstein, were incorporated in a permanent federal state under the leadership of Prussia. The revision in 1871 made no important alterations in the constitution of 1867. The states retained their autonomy except in those matters which were expressly transferred to the imperial authorities; the princes retained their sovereignty; the king of Prussia, though he now took the title of German emperor, was only _primus inter pares_; he was president of the confederation, but had no suzerainty over the other princes. None the less, from this time the acts of the state governments and parliaments have ceased to have more than a local importance; the history of the nation is centred in Berlin, in the Bundesrat or federal council, in which the interests of the individual states are represented; in the Reichstag, in which the feelings and wishes of the nation are expressed; and above all, in the Prussian government and imperial executive.