Antoine Alfred Agénor, 10th Duc de Gramont, Prince de Bidache (14 August 181917 January 1880) was a French diplomat and statesman. Early life He was born in Paris to one of the most illustrious families of the old noblesse, a cadet branch of the viscounts of Aure, which took its name from the Seignory of Gramont in Navarre. His grandfather, Antoine VIII de Gramont, duc de Gramont (1755–1836), had emigrated during the French Revolution, and his father, Antoine Héraclius Genevieve Agénor (1789–1855), duc de Gramont and de Guiche, fought under the British flag in the Peninsular War, became a lieutenant-general in the French army in 1823, and in 1830 accompanied Charles X of France to Scotland. The younger generation, however, were Bonapartist in sympathy; Gramont's cousin Antoine Louis Raymond, comte de Gramont (1787–1825), though also the son of an émigré, served with distinction in Napoléon's armies, while Antoine Agénor owed his career to his early friendship for Louis Napoleon. Gramont was educated at the École Polytechnique. Career Gramont early gave up the army for diplomacy. It was not, however, until after the coup d'état of 2 December 1851, which made Louis Napoleon supreme in France, that he became conspicuous as a diplomat. He was successively minister plenipotentiary at Cassel and Stuttgart (1852), at Turin (1853), ambassador at Washington DC (1854), Rome (1857) and at Vienna (1861). In 1854, he was one of the few survivors of the disastrous sinking of the SS Arctic, while en route to Washington DC. De Gramont was observed leaping from the ship into the last lifeboat; he was one of the 85 survivors (61 crewmembers and 24 male passengers). More than 300 people died, including all the women and children on board. Franco-Prussian War On 15 May 1870, he was appointed minister of foreign affairs in the Ollivier cabinet, and was thus largely, though not entirely, responsible for the bungling of the negotiations between France and Prussia arising out of the candidature of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen for the throne of Spain, which led to the disastrous war of 1870-71. The exact share of Gramont in this responsibility has been the subject of much controversy. The last word may be said to have been uttered by Émile Ollivier himself in his L'Empire libéral (tome xii, 1909, passim). The famous declaration read by Gramont in the Chamber on 6 July, the "threat with the hand on