Otto von Bismarck arrived in Berlin on the 22nd of September 1862, the day after his recall from the Prussian embassy in Paris, to find the country in a constitutional crisis it had been unable to solve for four years. The king, Wilhelm I, was sixty-five. He was a soldier by temperament. He wanted to double the size of the army. The parliament — the Prussian House of Representatives, elected on the three-class franchise of 1848 — was dominated by liberals. They refused, repeatedly, to fund the expansion. The king had threatened to abdicate. The crown prince, Frederick, was a liberal himself and would have signed the budget. The whole thing was, in royal terms, on the verge of farce.
The king's war minister, Albrecht von Roon, had finally persuaded the king, against considerable resistance, to send for Bismarck — a forty-seven-year-old Junker from a Pomeranian estate, currently representing Prussia in Paris, before that in St Petersburg, and before that in the German Confederation at Frankfurt. He had spent the previous twelve years as a professional diplomat and, in private letters to his wife and friends, as one of the most cynical, most pragmatic, and most theoretically gifted political thinkers in Europe. He had also been, in his Frankfurt years, the most reactionary deputy in the Prussian Landtag.
On the 30th of September 1862, eight days after his appointment as Minister-President, he gave a speech to the budget committee of the Landtag. He had brought a sprig of olive in his pocket as a peace offering. He did not use it. The speech ran for fifteen minutes. It included the line for which he would, for the rest of European history, be remembered.
"Not by speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided — that was the great error of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood." — Bismarck to the Budget Committee, 30 September 1862
It is universally misquoted, in his lifetime and ours, as "blood and iron." The Prussian Landtag, listening that afternoon, was appalled. The king, reading the speech in Baden-Baden the next morning, considered firing Bismarck on the spot. He did not. And for the next twenty-eight years Bismarck would govern Prussia, and later Germany, with a combination of theatrical bluntness in public and minute, patient, almost obsessive calculation in private — running the most successful diplomatic campaign in modern European history while pretending, at every step, that he was merely improvising.
Denmark
The first war was the Schleswig-Holstein war of 1864. The two duchies — German-speaking Holstein in the south and mixed German-Danish Schleswig in the north — had been ruled in personal union by the King of Denmark since 1460, under an extraordinarily complicated set of medieval treaties that the Danish king had now broken by attempting to incorporate Schleswig directly into Denmark. The German national movement was outraged. The German Confederation was outraged. The previous London Treaty of 1852 had explicitly forbidden it. Bismarck, who had been waiting for an opportunity to make Prussia look like the protector of German national interests, took the opportunity in concert with Austria.
The war lasted six months. The Danish army, outnumbered three to one and equipped with breech-loading rifles that worked badly in winter, was defeated by February at Dybbøl. The duchies were jointly administered, with Austria taking Holstein and Prussia taking Schleswig. This was the trap. Two years later, when Bismarck wanted a pretext for war with Austria, the joint administration of the duchies provided one almost on demand.
Austria
The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 — the Seven Weeks' War, as it became known — is the most consequential short war in European history. It lasted, from the Prussian invasion of Bohemia on the 15th of June to the armistice on the 22nd of July, thirty-seven days. It involved on each side roughly three hundred thousand men. It decided which power would lead the unification of Germany — Catholic Austria, with its historical claim, its larger population, and its imperial title, or Protestant Prussia, with its newer army, its longer-rifled infantry, and its railway-mobilised general staff.
The decisive battle was fought on the 3rd of July at Königgrätz, in Bohemia. The Prussian army, divided into three forces moving on convergent lines under the chief of the general staff Helmuth von Moltke, achieved exactly the textbook envelopment Moltke had been writing about for ten years. The Austrian army, equipped with muzzle-loading rifles where the Prussians had Dreyse breech-loaders, was outshot at every range. By evening it was retreating in disorder toward the Elbe. The casualties were forty-one thousand Austrians and Saxons against ten thousand Prussians. Königgrätz is, in the Prussian military memory, what Austerlitz is in the French: the moment when an army demonstrated that it could fight a faster, smarter war than its enemies.
Within three weeks the Austrians, with the Italians invading their southern flank and the road to Vienna open, sued for peace. Bismarck, against the ferocious objections of his own king and most of the Prussian general staff — who wanted to enter Vienna and demand territory — insisted on a soft peace. Austria would lose no territory. Austria would pay no indemnity worth mentioning. Austria would, however, agree to withdraw permanently from German affairs. Bismarck got his way, by the most operatic threat of resignation in nineteenth-century politics. He understood that Austria, treated leniently in 1866, would be a friendly neutral in 1870. He understood, more generally, that the point of a war is the peace.
The North German Confederation, formed in 1867 with twenty-two German states north of the Main under Prussian leadership, was the dry run for the German Empire. Its constitution was the dry run for the imperial constitution. Its Reichstag — elected by universal manhood suffrage, the first such franchise in any major European country — was the dry run for the imperial Reichstag. Almost everything that Germany would be after 1871 was rehearsed in the North German Confederation of 1867 to 1870.
France
The third war was the one that made the empire. The pretext, in the summer of 1870, was a Hohenzollern candidacy for the vacant Spanish throne. It had been engineered, quietly, by Bismarck. The French foreign minister had objected. The king, Wilhelm I, taking the waters at Ems, had refused to give the assurances the French ambassador demanded. The king's account of the meeting was sent by telegram to Bismarck in Berlin on the 13th of July 1870. Bismarck, at his desk that evening, edited the telegram.
The Ems Dispatch, as published in the German press the next morning, contained nothing factually untrue. It contained, however, the truth presented in such a way that the French could not possibly accept it without national humiliation. Bismarck had compressed the polite Ems exchange into a tight, abrupt summary that read, in any French paper, as an insult to the French ambassador. Paris responded as Bismarck had calculated. The French Emperor Napoleon III declared war on the 19th of July 1870. Within five weeks the French army was destroyed at Sedan and the emperor himself was a prisoner of the Prussian king. By January 1871 the Germans were besieging Paris, and on the 18th of that month, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with the king of Bavaria's letter of acclamation read aloud and the army officers cheering "Long live Kaiser Wilhelm" three times, Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor.
It was the proclamation Bismarck had been working toward for nine years. It was also a deeply strange occasion. The new emperor was furious — he had wanted to be called "Emperor of Germany," not the awkward "German Emperor," which Bismarck had insisted on for diplomatic reasons. The crown prince and his liberal wife Victoria, daughter of the British Queen Victoria, were standing at the back of the hall watching what they regarded as a coup against constitutional politics. The other German princes, several of whom had been bribed or coerced into supporting the proclamation, were thinking about what they had lost. The room was cold. The painting that records the scene, by Anton von Werner, was commissioned years later and is more flattering than the photograph would have been.
The price
The new Reich was Prussian-led. Its constitution gave the King of Prussia the imperial title in perpetuity. Its army was, structurally, the Prussian army with attached Bavarian, Württemberg, and Saxon contingents. Its capital was Berlin. Its Chancellor was the Minister-President of Prussia. Its tax base — until imperial taxes were created in the 1890s — was levied through the Prussian Treasury. The Reich was, for almost every practical purpose of the next forty-seven years, a Prussian-run federation of states.
The French paid an indemnity of five billion francs and lost Alsace and most of Lorraine. The cession of Alsace-Lorraine — a German-speaking province lost to France in the seventeenth century, taken back now in the name of national unity — was the one major decision of 1871 that Bismarck quietly regretted in private. Annexation had been demanded by the German military, by the press, and by the king. He himself had wanted only Strasbourg as a fortress city. The full annexation, he predicted in a private letter, would mean fifty years of bitter French enmity. He was off by only three.
What was Prussia, now?
This is the moment to pause. The Prussia of 1871 was no longer Prussia. It was — though no one yet used the words — Germany. The king of Prussia was the German emperor. The Prussian Minister-President was the German Chancellor. The Prussian army was the German army. The Prussian flag, black and white, was incorporated into the imperial flag, black-white-red. The very Prussianness of the new state was its definitive characteristic. And yet, at the same moment, a curious dilution began. To be Prussian, after 1871, was to be German. To be German, after 1871, was to be partly Prussian. The province had become the metropolis. The metropolis would now begin, slowly, to be ashamed of its province.
The next four decades — the longest sustained peace and prosperity in the modern history of central Europe — would see Germany become the world's leading industrial power, its leading scientific power, the home of the world's first welfare state, and the most-feared power in continental politics. They would also see Prussia gradually become an embarrassment to itself: too conservative, too rural, too eastern, too Junker, too Lutheran, for the modern country it had created. By 1914, the King of Prussia who was also the German Emperor would have spent twenty-five years trying to pretend he was the latter and not the former. He would fail at both.
To that empire — and to its slow, anxious unmaking — we now turn.
End of Chapter VIII