Vincent Benedetti

France state institutions 1817–1900 ○ Natural causes

French ambassador to Prussia who put France’s demand for a guarantee to Wilhelm I at Bad Ems in July 1870

Born in 1817 at Bastia in Corsica to a family of Greek origin, he entered the foreign service in 1840, serving as consul at Cairo and Palermo and as first secretary of the embassy at Constantinople. He was secretary of the Congress of Paris in 1856 and in 1861 the first French envoy to the new Kingdom of Italy. Appointed ambassador to Prussia in 1864, he wrote out in his own hand the draft of a treaty by which Prussia would back a French annexation of Belgium; Bismarck kept it and published it in The Times days after war broke out in 1870. In July 1870, on Gramont’s instructions, he asked the king on the promenade at Ems to guarantee that the Hohenzollern candidature would never be renewed, and Bismarck’s published version of the conversation paved the way to war. He defended his conduct in Ma Mission en Prusse (1871).

Also known as: Count Benedetti