the battle of San Martino. Benedek, with magnificent gallantry, held his own all day, and in the end covered the retreat of the rest of the Austrian army to the Mincio. His reward was the commandership of the order of Maria Theresa, and Vienna and many other cities followed the example of Lemberg in 1846. His reputation was now at its highest, and his great popularity was enhanced, in the prevailing discontent with the reactionary and clerical government of previous years, by the fact that he was a Protestant and not of noble birth. He was promoted Feldzeugmeister and in 1860 appointed quartermaster-general to the army, and soon afterwards governor-general and commander-in-chief in Hungary, in succession to the archduke Albert. In 1861 he was made commander-in-chief in Venetia and the adjoining provinces of the empire, and in the following year he received the grand cross of the Leopold order. In 1864 he resigned the quartermaster-generalship and devoted himself exclusively to the command of the army in Italy. In 1861 he had been made a life-member of the house of peers. In 1866 war with Prussia and with Italy became imminent. Benedek was appointed to command the Army of the North against the Prussians, the control of affairs in Italy being taken over by the archduke Albert. For the story of the campaign of Königgrätz, in which the Austrians under Benedek’s command were decisively defeated, see Seven Weeks’ War. Benedek took over his new command as a stranger to the country and to the troops. Only the personal command of the emperor and the requests of the archduke Albert prevailed upon him to “sacrifice his honour,” as he himself said, in a task for which he felt himself ill prepared. When he took the field his despondency was increased by the passive obstruction which he met with amongst his own officers, many of whom resented being placed under a man of the middle class instead of the archduke Albert, and by the general state of unpreparedness which he found existing at the front. Further, his own staff was self-willed to the verge of disloyalty, and his assistants, Lieutenant Field Marshal von Henikstein, and Major-General Krismanic in particular, endeavoured to control Benedek’s operations in the spirit of the 18th-century strategists. Under these circumstances, and against the superior numbers, moral and armament of the Prussians, the Austrians were foredoomed to defeat. A series of partial actions convinced Benedek that success was unattainable, and he telegraphed to the emperor advising him to make peace; the emperor refused on the ground that no decisive battle had been fought; Benedek, thereupon, instead of retreating across the Elbe, determined to bring on a decisive engagement, and took up a position with the whole of his forces near Königgrätz with the Elbe in his rear. Here he was completely defeated by the Prussians on the 3rd of July, but they could not prevent him from making good his retreat over the river in magnificent order on the evening of the battle. He conducted the operations of his army in retreat up to the great concentration at Vienna under the archduke Albert, and was then suspended from his command and a court-martial ordered; the emperor, however, in December determined that the inquiry should be stopped. Benedek from this time lived in absolute retirement, and having given his word of honour to the archduke Albert that he would not attempt to rehabilitate himself before the world, he published no defence of his conduct, and even destroyed his papers relating to the campaign of 1866. This attitude of self-sacrificing loyalty he maintained even when on the 8th of November 1866 the official Wiener Zeitung published an article in which he was made responsible for all the disasters of the war. The history of the campaign from the Austrian point of view as at present known leaves much unexplained, and the published material is primarily of a controversial character. The official Österreichs Kämpfe speaks of the unfortunate general in the following terms: “A career full of achievements, distinction and fame deserved a less tragic close. A dispassionate judgment will not forget the ever fortunate and successful deeds which he accomplished earlier in the service of the emperor, and will ensure for him, in spite of his last heavy misfortune (Last), an honourable memory.” Praise of his earlier career could not well be denied, and the official history is careful not to extend its eulogy to cover the events of 1866; the recognition in these words cannot therefore be set against the general opinion of subsequent critics that Benedek was the victim of political necessities, perhaps of court intrigues. For the rest of his life Benedek lived at Graz, where he died on the 27th of April 1881.
See H. Friedjung, Benedeks nachgelassene Papiere (Leipzig, 1901, 3rd and enlarged ed., 1904), and Der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft in Deutschland 1859–1866 (Stuttgart, 1897, 6th ed., 1904); v. Schlichtling, Moltke und Benedek (Berlin, 1900), also therewith A. Krauss, Moltke, Benedek und Napoleon (Vienna, 1901); and a roman à clé by Gräfin Salburg, entitled Königsglaube (Dresden, 1906). The brief memoir in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie represents the court view of Benedek’s case.
BENEDETTI, VINCENT, Count (1817–1900), French diplomatist, was born at Bastia, in the island of Corsica, on the 29th of April 1817. In the year 1840 he entered the service of the French foreign office, and was appointed to a post under the marquis de la Valette, who was consul-general at Cairo. He spent eight years in Egypt, being appointed consul in 1845; in 1848 he was made consul at Palermo, and in 1851 he accompanied the marquis, who had been appointed ambassador at Constantinople, as first secretary. For fifteen months during the progress of the Crimean War he acted as chargé d’affaires. In the second volume of his essays he gives some recollections of his experiences in the East, including an account of Mehemet Ali, and a (not very friendly) sketch of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. In 1855, after refusing the post of minister at Teheran, he was employed in the foreign office at Paris, and acted as secretary to the congress at Paris (1855–1856). During the next few years he was chiefly occupied with Italian affairs, in which he was much interested, and Cavour said of him he was an Italian at heart. He was chosen in 1861 to be the first envoy of France to the king of Italy, but he resigned his post next year on the retirement of E. A. Thouvenel, who had been his patron, when the anti-Italian party began to gain the ascendancy at Paris. In 1864 he was appointed ambassador at the court of Prussia.
Benedetti remained in Berlin till the outbreak of war in 1870, and during these years he played an important part in the diplomatic history of Europe. His position was a difficult one, for Napoleon did not keep him fully informed as to the course of French policy. In 1866, during the critical weeks which followed the attempt of Napoleon to intervene between Prussia and Austria, he accompanied the Prussian headquarters in the advance on Vienna, and during a visit to Vienna he helped to arrange the preliminaries of the armistice signed at Nikolsburg. It was after this that he was instructed to present to Bismarck French demands for “compensation,” and in August, after his return to Berlin, as a result of his discussions with Bismarck a draft treaty was drawn up, in which Prussia promised France her support in the annexation of Belgium. This treaty was never concluded, but the draft, which was in Benedetti’s handwriting, was kept by Bismarck and, in 1870, a few days after the outbreak of the war, was published by him in The Times. During 1867 Benedetti was much occupied with the affair of Luxemburg. In July 1870, when the candidature of the prince of Hohenzollern for the throne of Spain became known, Benedetti was instructed by the duc de Gramont to present to the king of Prussia, who was then at Ems, the French demands, that the king should order the prince to withdraw, and afterwards that the king should promise that the candidature would never be renewed. This last demand Benedetti submitted to the king in an informal meeting on the promenade at Ems, and the misleading reports of the conversation which were circulated were the immediate cause of the war which followed, for the Germans were led to believe that Benedetti had insulted the king, and the French that the king had insulted the ambassador. Benedetti was severely attacked in his own country for his conduct as ambassador, and the duc de Gramont attempted to throw upon him the blame for the failures of French diplomacy. He answered the charges brought against him in a book, Ma Mission en Prusse (Paris, 1871), which still remains one of the most valuable authorities for the study of Bismarck’s diplomacy. In this Benedetti successfully defends himself, and shows that he had kept his government well informed; he had
