Actually that is far from clear. In all probability France would still have demanded a promise that the Hohenzollern candidature would never be renewed, and Wilhelm I would still have refused. So France most likely still declares war (and still gets creamed) even without the Ems Telegram.
Oh, I agree that the diplomatic exchange about the Hohenzollern candidature would go pretty much like OTL, but I don't believe that France declaring war is at all certain. The multiple misinterpretations of the Prussian's tone, as well as the hillarious series of slight mistranslations that followed (I find the whole "Bismark maneuvered the dummy Frenchies into war cuz he was dat smart!" argument to be too fanboyish) not only had an inflamatory effect in French public opinion, but it was also an extreamly polarizing issue among the political classes. The conservative factions in Parliament were more than content with having the moral highground in front of the international community, but this stance was throughoutly gutted by their opposition, and massive demonstrations demanding war started occuring among the lower clases of Paris.
As for Napoleon III, contrary to what I've seen argued before, he wasn't facing any serious domestic troubles. Actually, just a few months before the war, public support for his program was very favorable, winning a national pleisbicite by a supermayority, so this was not a political "war for glory". One needs to take into account the sheer stupidity of the (alleged) causes for this war to see that: diplomacy is never short of percieved, accidental, and malicious offenses; if Napoleon both wanted war and thought something like this was good enough of an excuse to stage one, he would had waited for a time when he was less diplomaticly isolated. Finally, Geoffrey Wawro's argument (and others around the same vein) that he was disapointed by the terms he obtained from the Austrians a few years back, and thus was eager for a new war (with anyone!) and somehow felt that the Prussians were somewhat of an "easy target" (despite them having trashed the Austrians with much more ease than he did himself), to be shaky at best.
In short, the elites most definitely did NOT want a war and the emperor had NO reason to pursue one. It was the demands for war from the public what made them feel like their seats and throne were in jeopardy if they allowed France to be insulted in such a way, and that reaction is never going to arise from the "insult" of "I'm in no position to demand such a thing from my cousins, sowy, xoxo", which is what you would had gotten if Bismarck had not intervened and edited the telegram, whatever his intentions.
