5

Bismarck as Diplomat, 1851–1862

Bismarck had been appointed envoy to a very odd institution: the German Confederation. The German Confederal Treaty of June 1815 (revised by the Final Act of 1820) re-created Napoleon’s Confédération du Rhin with Austria in the place of France as guiding power. To do that, Metternich had to accept the way Napoleon had transformed Europe and to make a pact with ‘revolution’. He had to abandon the Austrian Habsburgs’ justified claims on states which had stolen territory under Napoleon and ignore the claims of disposed princes to get their lands back. He did all that and more to secure the Habsburg Monarchy its rightful place as arbiter of Europe.

The German Confederation or Deutscher Bund, which the Congress of Vienna designed, was a loose confederation of thirty-nine states. The Federal Assembly in Frankfurt represented the sovereigns, not the people of those states. The Austrian Emperor and the Prussian King had one vote in the Federal Assembly. Three member states were ruled by foreign monarchs: the Kings of Denmark, the Netherlands, and Great Britain (until 1837 when Queen Victoria could not as a woman succeed to the throne of Hanover). All three foreign kings were members of the German Confederation; each of them had a vote in the Federal Assembly. Six other kings or grand dukes had one vote each in the Federal Assembly: the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, the Prince-Elector of Hesse-Kassel, the Grand Duke of Baden, and the Grand Duke of Hesse. Twenty-three smaller and tiny member states shared five votes in the Federal Assembly. The four free cities Lübeck, Frankfurt, Bremen, and Hamburg shared one vote in the Federal Assembly.

The new German Confederation enshrined in the Final Act of 1820 put the capstone of the Metternichian system into place by ‘solving’ the German problem.

Article 1 of the Treaty declared that the

deutscher Bund [the German Confederation] is an international association of German sovereign princes and free cities to preserve the independence and inviolability of the member states and to preserve the inner and outer security of Germany.¹

Article 5 declared that the Bund was permanent and no state was ‘free’ to leave it—as we shall see, an important provision for Bismarck in 1866. Articles 6 and Article 11 established a general assembly of the Bund as the decision-making body but in addition created a ‘narrower’ Council where decisions would be taken by absolute majority vote. Article 20 allowed the General Assembly to take action on behalf of member states which had been subject to improper violence or force by another member or members. A large number of the articles concerned the danger of revolution and the means for intervention to suppress it. There was a Federal Court to decide cases of conflict among member states. Article 58 forbade the sovereign prince of each state to allow any existinglandständische Verfassung (constitution based on the ‘estates of the realm’) to overrule his obligations to the Bund.

The structure and arrangement of the Final Act of 1820 have the charm and clarity of the Lisbon Treaty of the European Union of 2007. Nobody but experts ever really cared to understand it, just as today very few outside Brussels can explain how the EU works. In 1858 the Deutsches Staats-Wörtebuch, the leading German legal dictionary, could not define the relationship between the ‘narrower Council’ and the General Assembly or Plenum: ‘The narrower Council is not a senate, there are no chambers or houses … There is only one organ of the Bund, the Bundesversammlung [Federal Assembly]’.² The editors could not define precisely what ‘the narrower Council’ was supposed to do and simply gave up. The Deutscher Bund differed in several fundamental respects from its descendent, the European Union. In the Bund nobody pretended that it represented the ‘people’; the EU claims exactly that though with what justice arouses fierce debate. In the second place, the two leading German powers, Austria and Prussia, had retained much greater independence than the European states have today. Not all their territories belonged to the Bund. Their armies remained under the command of their Emperor and King and their domestic tax and spending policies, their internal legislation, and religious establishments had nothing to do with the Bund.

The main difficulty which faced Bismarck on his appointment as Prussian ambassador to the Bund in 1851 lay in the inequality of the two great Powers. The Bund had been revived after the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 because it suited Austria, as it had in 1815, to control Germany in a loose federal scheme. The small states had less to fear from a rambling, decentralized, and multinational empire under the Habsburgs than they had from much more tightly governed and much more single-minded Kingdom of Prussia. The appointment—in spite of the oddity of the institution to which he had been accredited—placed Bismarck in the perfect arena: the place where the two great German powers confronted each other face to face.

In the immediate future the new job made a huge difference to Otto and Johanna von Bismarck. On 3 May he wrote his wife a letter which contains the amazing statement that he had not done a thing to get the promotion:

Weigh the anchor of your soul and prepare yourself to leave the home port. I know from my own feelings how painful the thought must be to you to leave, how sad your parents are. But I repeat I have not with a syllable wished or sought this appointment. What ever happens, I am God’s soldier and where he sends me I must go.³

Why did he lie to his wife so blatantly? All the evidence shows that he had been intriguing and scheming to get a proper diplomatic job for months. His efforts had been crowned with more success than he dared to hope, as he admitted in the slightly more honest, excited letter he wrote when he heard the news. He had ended up with the perfect job for him and his talents. Why not rejoice with her on his success? One answer is that he had always lied in personal matters, to his mother and to his father. It had become habitual to avoid the truth in his personal affairs and, as we have seen, he resorted to lies to cover his mistakes. He had to pretend that God had worked in mysterious ways to get her to accept the new life. If God had called, that would be something that Johanna as an evangelical would not be able to contradict or question.

In the second place, the appointment to Frankfurt must have brought home to him with dismay that he had a problem with his wife. She was not beautiful, spoke no languages, had no dress sense, and no experience of the grand world of courts. She would never be a society lady capable of moving gracefully across the grand stage of European high society and Johanna would not make an effort to become one. An old friend from the Pietist circle, Hedwig von Blanckenburg, wrote to Johanna a few days later and warned her about her attitude:

One thing really pains me, that is that you still see everything the way you did five years ago and that I can hardly understand … Everything that belongs to those days lives on in me, but I now have other things to do, more serious things, but do not lack the inner glow. Johanna, dear Johanna! We cannot stay children, who play and fool about, we must become serious people in the service of the Lord.⁴

Bismarck certainly begged her to make that effort. Shortly after he arrived in Frankfurt on 14 May 1851, he wrote:

It now looks certain that I shall take over Rochow’s post here this summer. Then I shall have, if the amount remains constant, 21,000 Reichsthaler salary, but must maintain a considerable staff and household, and you, my poor child, must sit stiffly and nobly in a salon, be called Excellency and be wise and clever with Excellencies … One request I do have but please keep it to yourself and please do not let Mother hear it or she will make a fuss worrying about it, occupy yourself with your French as much as you can in the time but do it as if it occurred to you on your own. Read as much French as you can but not by candle light and not if your eyes hurt … I did not marry you in order to have a society wife for others, but in order to love you in God and according to the requirements of my own heart, to have a place in this alien world that no barren wind can cool, a place warmed by my own fireplace, to which I can draw near while it storms and freezes outside. And I want to tend my own fire and lay on wood, blow the flames, and protect it and shelter it against all that is evil and foreign.⁵

It is a beautiful peace of prose but it conceals the problem. He may not have married Johanna ‘in order to have a society wife for others’ but he needed her to become one now, and that she absolutely refused to concede. She never did learn French and never provided him with the glamour he needed professionally. As she grew older, she did it less and less. By the time Bismarck had been in the diplomatic service for a decade, she had become what Holstein as a young attaché in St Petersburg described as ‘a peculiar person’. Nobody can know the secrets of a marriage but we can see with great clarity that he simply gave up after a certain point. The Bismarcks dined unfashionably at 5.00 in the late afternoon, a custom which everybody in Frankfurt and Berlin thought odd. The Prussian Embassy in Frankfurt and later the official residence at 76 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin looked as if a rural squire and his ‘churchy’ wife had settled into the Chancellor’s palace. My hunch is that Johanna refused to make an effort to become what Bismarck needed because of resentment. He proposed to her ‘on the rebound’ from Marie von Thadden and her refusal to make herself attractive was a form of mute protest. For his part, marriage had clearly not satisfied his physical needs, as he wrote in distress to Hans von Kleist from his solitary, bachelor life in Frankfurt during June 1851:

The chief weapon with which evil assaults me is not desire for external glory, but a brutal sensuality which leads me so close to the greatest sins that I doubt at times that I will gain access to God’s mercy. At any rate I am certain that the seed of God’s word has not found fertile ground in a heart laid waste as it was from youth. Otherwise I could not be so much the plaything of temptation, which even invades my moments of prayer … Comfort me, Hans, but burn this without speaking of it to anyone.⁶

Four years after his marriage, he confessed to his closest friend a ‘brutal sensuality’ and his temptation to commit ‘the greatest sins’. Whatever Bismarck did in secret, we simply do not know but the letter suggests that his marriage had not removed those urges.

On the other hand, Hans had got engaged to his Protestant nun, Countess Marie von Stolberg-Wenigerode, as Bismarck wrote:

Hans is unbearably happy, won’t go to bed and behaves like a kid. It is still supposed to be confidential but Hans cannot keep it to himself. He wants to carve it in every pavement and tells everybody, friend and foe, in the blissful certainty that all conflict in the world will now cease and everybody will be happy. He has a completely different face, dances and sings the strangest songs when he is alone in his room. In short the old sour puss is no longer recognizable and, if he in his joy would let me sleep at night, that would be nice.⁷

On 8 May the King received Bismarck and promoted him to Geheimer Legationsrat (Privy Legation Councillor); as Bismarck remarked it was ‘an irony with which God punishes me for my blasphemy against all Privy Councillors’.⁸ Ludwig von Gerlach was not enthusiastic about Bismarck’s sudden promotion to the top of the diplomatic service and doubted the wisdom of ‘violent promotions’. After all, Bismarck’s official career amounts up to now to that of a failed Referendar.⁹ The new post transformed his economic situation: 21,000 Reichstaler amounted to over £3,134 at the 1871 conversion rate. This was a very handsome stipend even by English standards. In Barchester Towers, published in 1857 by Anthony Trollope, Bismarck’s exact contemporary, Wilfred Thorne, Esq. the Squire of St Ewold’s, had an income of £4,000, which allowed him to be a sportsman with the horses, grooms, and hounds that such pursuits required.¹⁰ And, of course, England was much more expensive than Germany. In comparison to his fellow Prussians, Bismarck had shot up the income table. The Prussian income tax distribution lists taxpayers by tax category and shows the percentage of the population paying each amount. Fortunately there are figures for 1851, which show that Bismarck had now joined the very top of the income pyramid. Prussian incomes as well as income taxes were very low at that time so he had for the first time in his life a handsome annual salary:

On 10 May 1851 Bismarck left Berlin for Frankfurt by train, a trip which he accomplished in the amazingly quick time of twenty-five hours.¹² A week on the job, Bismarck had begun to complain about it and the other envoys:

Frankfurt is horribly boring … In essence nothing but spying on each other as if we had something worth finding out and worth revealing. Life here is almost entirely pure trivialities with which people torture themselves. I am making astonishing progress in the art of using lots of words to say nothing. I fill pages with nice round script which reads like leading articles in the papers and, if Manteuffel, after he has read them, can say what’s in them, then he knows a lot more than I do.¹³

In early June, he wrote to Herman Wagener, editor of the Kreuzzeitung, to say that letters were systematically opened by the Austrians and to ask him to send correspondence to Hochstrasse 45, Frankfurt am Main, but addressed to ‘Mr Wilhelm Hildebrand’, Bismarck’s man-servant. Frankfurt diplomacy was ridiculous:

The Austrians are constantly engaged in intrigue behind a mask of jolly bonhomie … and are always trying with smallish matters of form to cheat us, which so far has been our entire occupation. The envoys from the little states are caricatures of old-fashioned, be-wigged diplomats who immediately put on their ‘report-face’ if you ask for a light for your cigar and look as if they are about to make a speech before the old Imperial Aulic Court if you ask for the key to the t——.¹⁴

The chief Austrian intriguer was a grand aristocrat, Friedrich Franz Count von Thun und Hohenstein (1810–81), a member of one of the oldest dynasties in the Habsburg monarchy. He had heard about the new Prussian envoy and wrote to Vienna about his first impressions:

In all fundamental issues, which concern the conservative principle, Herr von Bismarck is perfectly correct and will cause damage more by his overly great zeal than by hesitation or indecision. On the other hand, he seems to me, as far as I can judge, to belong exclusively to that party which has its eye only on Prussian interests and places no great confidence in what the Bundestag can accomplish in that cause.¹⁵

Bismarck sent his impressions of Thun in a private letter to General Leopold von Gerlach:

He is a mixture of rough-hewn bluntness, which can easily pass for honest openness, aristocratic nonchalance and slavic peasant cunning. He always has ‘no instructions’ and on account of ignorance of the business he seems to be dependent on his staff and entourage … Insincerity is the most striking feature of his character in his relationship to us … There isn’t a single man among the diplomats of any intellectual significance. Most of them are self-important pedants filled with little business, who take their letters patent and certificate of plenipotentiary power to bed with them and with whom one cannot have a conversation.¹⁶

Though he might complain about his colleagues, in fact, Bismarck liked the job and nervously awaited official confirmation of his permanent appointment. It finally came in mid-August 1851. He had received the formal appointment but the ministry had without explanation cut 3,000 Reichsthaler from his salary and had provided no money for setting up his residence. He admitted that 18,000 Reichsthaler would be fine to live ‘well and elegantly’ but he would need to find a place for the family. He absolutely had to have a garden and a house with large rooms. In early September he found a fine house, 1,200 feet from the city gate, which had a large garden, and cost 4,500 Reichsthaler, which for Frankfurt was cheap. His letter to Johanna on 9 September concluded with the grumble: ‘It annoys me that his Excellency the Royal Bavarian Envoy keeps looking over my shoulder as I write.’¹⁷ He would not have had the annoyance, had he not ostentatiously and regularly done his private correspondence during boring speeches in the chamber. And he really did work hard. In a tone of amazement, he told Bernhard in a letter of his present routine:

From 7 in the morning to dinner about 5 I seldom have an independent minute … Who would have believed it six months ago that I could afford 5000 thaler rent and employ a French chef in order to give dinners on the King’s birthday. I can get used to anything but Johanna will find it hard to get accustomed to the pointed and cold contacts in this sort of world.¹⁸

Bismarck used the time in Frankfurt for other purposes. He continued to travel to Berlin to take his seat in the Prussian Lower House of Parliament. His ruthless and relentless ambition came out in a constant stream of private letters to General Leopold von Gerlach on domestic Prussian matters which he hoped the General would discuss during his daily chat over coffee and cake with the King. The private talk between the King and his General Adjutant made Leopold von Gerlach the most powerful subject in the kingdom. Bismarck’s actual superior as Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs was Otto Theodor Freiherr von Manteuffel (1805–82), a dry, reactionary but highly competent civil servant. Manteuffel had inherited his job when General Count Brandenburg suddenly died on 6 November 1850, in the midst of the crisis with Austria. He had courageously carried the government through the ‘shame of Olmütz’ and had been shrewd enough to accept the camarilla’s pressure to appoint Bismarck as ambassador to the newly reconstituted Bund. During his years in an ambassadorial capacity, Bismarck corresponded regularly around and behind the back of the Minister, his formal chief. Active disloyalty to Manteuffel seems not to have deterred him. By 1853 this double game had become a system as a letter of 25 February 1853 to Leopold von Gerlach makes clear. Manteuffel had requested that Bismarck submit two formal ambassadorial reports monthly on the first and fifteenth of every month. Manteuffel had not made his name as a financial expert for nothing. Bismarck offered to send his dispatches—but first to von Gerlach:

I will send you these as originals with a plea to send them right back via Cologne and commend this indiscretion of mine to your most careful precautions since any discovery of this would have a disturbing effect on my relationship to Manteuffel. That would be not only officially but personally disagreeable since I have a sincere affection for his person and would be ashamed if he were to think that I played him false, even if it were, as here, without foundation.¹⁹

The sheer effrontery of Bismarck in claiming that he had not played false with Manteuffel when he so obviously had, seems not to have upset the recipient. That the very pious, very Christian, very ‘born again’ General Leopold von Gerlach accepted the offer shows that camarilla needs trumped Christian morality. Gerlach overlooked a contemptible betrayal by Bismarck of his duty as diplomat toward his chief and an act of gross disloyalty personally to Otto von Manteuffel, who had helped to arrange his appointment. Gerlach’s connivance in duping the Minister-President suggests that life in the camarilla had corrupted his ethical sensibilities.

Early in 1852, Bismarck wrote to Leopold von Gerlach and described himself as, ‘your diplomatic adopted child’.²⁰ Johannes Willms compares this and the dozens and dozens of letters which Bismarck addressed to his ‘dear Patron and Friend’ to ‘finger exercises, thought games, which offer fascinating insights into the way his political understanding and knowledge of the European constellations of power grew by leaps and bounds’.²¹ Many have the quality of sketches but I see them as much more the pupil showing the master how brilliantly he can describe realities, people, places, conflicts. He also makes certain week by week that his ideas, his energy, and his imagination would flow through the ‘dear Patron and Friend’ to the King.

Two threats to Bismarck’s future emerged early in his Frankfurt years. A group of enemies of Manteuffel and Gerlach had formed in and outside the diplomatic service. In his memoirs, Bismarck describes them and their motives quite accurately:

The party, or more correctly, coterie, subsequently named after Bethmann-Hollweg, found its original mainstay in Count Robert von der Goltz, a man of unusual competence and energy …²²

Robert von der Goltz always regarded himself as the natural choice as foreign minister and loathed Bismarck. Holstein records in his Memoirs a delightful moment in their rivalry:

Bismarck was fond of relating how Goltz visited him in Frankfurt one day while he was still a free agent, just to inveigh against everybody and everything. As he left, Goltz had to cross the courtyard, where an extremely fierce watch-dog barked furiously at him. Bismarck, still under the influence of their conversation, called down from a window, ‘Goltz, don’t bite my dog’ …²³

The second threat arose directly from Bismarck’s personality. In March 1852 he got involved in a duel. The story is bizarre. Early on in Bismarck’s appointment to the Bund, Count Thun as President had pulled out a cigar and lit it during a session of the narrower Council. Only the President of the Federal Council, the Austrian envoy, had by custom the right to smoke in meetings. Bismarck in order to show the equal status of Prussia immediately lit up a cigar as well. He had told the story to Georg Freiherr von Vincke (1811–75), a deputy from Hagen in Westphalia in the Prussian lower house. Vincke, a fiery character, was widely regarded as the ‘greatest Prussian parliamentary orator’ of his generation and like Bismarck had been ‘a dashing swordsman’ as a student.²⁴Vincke loved to goad Bismarck. As Hermann von Petersdorff described him, ‘on his full, fleshy and sly face, surrounded by a bright red beard, there played a mocking smile. Self-confidence and ease of manner radiated from his body … Battle was his life’s element.’²⁵ Bismarck explained the story to his mother-in-law. In a debate in the Prussian Lower House,

He [Vincke] accused me of lacking diplomatic discretion and said that so far my only achievement had been the ‘burning cigar’. He referred to an incident in the Bund Palace which I had recounted to him in private ‘under four eyes’ as something trivial but rather funny. I replied to him from the podium that his remark exceeded not only the boundaries of diplomatic discretion but even the normal discretion that one had a right to expect from every properly educated man. The next day through his second, Herr von Saucken-Julienfelde he sent me a challenge to a duel of four bullets. I accepted after Oscar’s proposal to use sabres had been rejected. Vincke asked for a 48 hour postponement which I agreed to. At 8 on the morning of the 25th [of March] we drove out to Tegel to a lovely spot on the lakeside. The weather was so beautiful and the birds sang so merrily that all sad thoughts disappeared as soon as I got there. I had forcibly to avoid thoughts of Johanna for fear of weakening. With me I had brought Arnim and Eberhard Stolberg and my brother, who looked very depressed, as witnesses … Bodelschwingh (a cousin of the minister’s and Vincke’s) served as neutral witness. He suggested that the challenge had been set too high and proposed that the duel be reduced to a shot each. Saucken speaking in Vincke’s name accepted that and further announced that they would be prepared to withdraw the challenge if I apologized for my remarks. Since I could not in good conscience do that, we both took our pistols, shot on the command of Bodelschwingh and both missed … Bodelschwingh shed tears … the reduction of the challenge annoyed me and I would have preferred to continue the fight. Since I was not the person insulted, I could say nothing. That was it; everybody shook hands.²⁶

The life of Otto von Bismarck might have come to an end on 25 March 1852, if Carl von Bodelschwingh had not lowered the stakes or Bismarck might have killed Vincke, which would have almost certainly damaged his career. Nothing happened. Bismarck survived, but it was a close thing.

Bismarck continued to enjoy his position and in letters to his patron, Leopold von Gerlach, he admitted as much. In August 1852 Bismarck began a letter by writing, ‘I live here like God in Frankfurt’. Bismarck played with the original aphorism ‘to live like God in France’, a common German aphorism which means ‘I love it here’, by substituting Frank-furt for Frank-reich.²⁷ (The editors of the Collected Works of Bismarck, with perfect German humourlessness, write: ‘so in the original—possibly a misprint’.)

and this mixture of powdered wigs, railroads, country squire from Bockenheim [Bismarck lived at 40 Bockenheimer Allee—JS], diplomatic Republicanism, cameralist Federal Diet squabbling, suits me so well that in the whole world I would only change it for that post occupied by my All-Highest Lord if the entire Royal Family were to put me under unbearable pressure to accept.²⁸

In a letter to his sister, he mocked it by quoting the little verse by Heine: ‘O Bund, Du Hund, du bist nicht Gesund’ (O Bund! you hound, you are not sound) and predicted that ‘the little verse will soon become by unanimous vote the German national anthem.’²⁹While he made fun of the Bund, he also observed carefully the behaviour of the small states and concluded that Prussia would always be a greater threat to them than Austria and hence the little states would gather round the Habsburgs for security. A weak protector would be less inclined to gobble them up than a strong one, an assumption entirely justified by Bismarck’s later actions.

On 2 December 1851 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the elected president of the Second French Republic, carried out a well-planned and bloodless coup d’état against the constitution of the Second Republic. The coup d’état changed the entire diplomatic situation in Europe. Without it Bismarck could never have unified Germany. Louis Napoleon was as much a prisoner of memory as the conservatives in Prussia. He had to re-create the empire of his uncle in order to fulfil the myth behind his election, in other words, as Article 1 of the new constitution asserted: ‘La Constitution reconnaît, confirme et garantit les grands principes proclamés en 1789, et qui sont la base du droit public des Français.’ So the great principles of the revolution—‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’—had to be asserted but denied at the same time. Above all, he needed the Imperial crown and on 7 November 1852 the Senate re-established the title of Emperor. The dictator became Napoléon III, and ceased to be called Louis-Napoléon. The next step for the Emperor Napoleon III would follow as surely as night follows day. He had to adopt a Napoleonic posture in foreign affairs and overturn the balance, which Austria had only just restored.

With the emergence of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Bismarck’s subsequent career became possible. No other conceivable French ruler could have played so perfectly into Bismarck’s hands as Napoleon III. No other great state had a reason to destroy Austrian power in Europe, exactly the goal that Bismarck had come to Frankfurt to pursue. Bismarck’s reaction shows his unconventional and acute sense of political possibilities: he advocated an accommodation with the new Bonaparte to discomfit Austria and the small German princes. As early as January 1853 Bismarck wrote this to Leopold von Gerlach:

I am convinced that it would be a great misfortune for Prussia if her government should enter into an alliance with France, but, even if we make no use of it, we ought never to remove from the consideration of our allies the possibility that under certain conditions we might choose this evil as the lesser of the two.³⁰

This argument had nothing to do with principle but with realities of power or the appearance of such realities. If Prussia gave the impression to the smaller German states that a deal between Berlin and Paris over their heads might be possible, they would suddenly and in an undignified rush head for Berlin to get assurances that nothing of theirs might have been promised to the French emperor. They would be good little German states and obey Prussia’s wishes. In fact, in the period from 1862 to 1870 that is precisely what Bismarck threatened to do and it had the anticipated pleasing effects. A potential alliance with Imperial France would alarm Austria and strengthen Prussia’s hand in the game. For Prussia, the enemy could only be Austria, as he wrote to Leopold von Gerlach in late 1853:

Our politics have no other exercise room than Germany, not least because of the way we have grown and intertwined with it and Austria hopes desperately to use this fact for itself. There is no room for us both as long as Austria makes its claims. In the long run we cannot coexist with each other. We breathe the air out of each others’ mouths; one must yield or must be ‘yielded’ to the other. Until then we must be enemies. I regard that as an ‘un-ignorable’ fact (if you will pardon the word), however unwelcome it might be.³¹

Courtesy required him to go to Vienna early in his tenure of office. He was presented to the Emperor and he met the new rulers of Austria, who took over after the sudden death of Prince Schwarzenberg on 5 April 1852. In his report to Prime Minister von Manteuffel he commented about the Jews who ran the country and who were, as always for Bismarck and most Junkers, a persistent nuisance:

People indicated to me that the bearers of the hostile attitude to us, especially in trade matters, was the ‘Jew Clique’ which the late Prime Minister had elevated to power (Bach, Hock and Jewish newspaper writers, although Bach is not Jewish).³²

A new Austrian president of the Bundestag had arrived, the formidable scholar-soldier, orientalist, and travel writer, Anton Prokesch Count von Osten (1795–1876). His history of the Greek Revolt of 1821, his travel books, and multi-volume memoirs of his period in the Turkish Empire had made him famous throughout German-speaking Europe.³³ Bismarck loathed him: ‘His military appearance, which he affects, is striking. He never appears other than buttoned up in uniform and even in meetings he never removes his sabre.’³⁴ Metternich who had promoted him wrote of him: ‘I adore him, I love Prokesch but if you make him Sultan of Turkey, he would not be satisfied. He is eccentric and vain.’³⁵ In his reply on 28 January 1853, Leopold von Gerlach expressed a less unfavourable view of Prokesch than Bismarck and insisted in opposition to Bismarck’s argument that ‘Bonaparte and Bonapartism is our worst enemy.’³⁶ Nor could he accept that Austria must be the enemy. In a diary entry of 27 July 1853, he wrote:

I have told Ludwig and others a thousand times the true nature of the Union is that Prussia has a singularly odd relationship to Germany and with it a claim to domination, independent of Austria … Just as important is the union of Prussia with Germany and in this union it must unite first with Austria.³⁷

This attitude to Austria did not please Bismarck but he would, in fact, do exactly that in the mid-1860s—ally with Austria against the German princes and then isolate Austria in order to cause a war.

The emergence of a conflict in the Balkans suddenly changed the prospects of the ambitious young diplomat in Frankfurt. In 1853 the conservative alliance of Russia, Prussia, and Austria began to come apart, as Russia and France clashed over the right to act as protectors of the holy sites in Palestine. In May–June 1853 Turkey rejected the Russian claim to be protector of all Christians in the Turkish Empire. On 31 May 1853 a Russian army crossed the Pruth river and occupied the two Danubian principalities ofMoldavia and Wallachia. War broke out between Russia and Turkey in October 1853. This put the Habsburg Monarchy into a difficult dilemma. The presence of Russian troops on the lower Danube threatened the Monarchy, often called the Danubian monarchy, after the river that served it as central artery. Something had to be done to halt Russian advances. On the other hand, conservative politics had united the two courts from 1815 and Russian intervention to help the Habsburgs suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–9 had created a debt that the Russians regarded as self-evident.

On 12 April 1852 Karl-Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein became Foreign Minister in place of Prince Schwarzenberg, whose death had removed the one leader of real stature in the post-Metternichian era. Boul was not that. The weakness of Russia tempted Buol to use the occasion to establish Austrian hegemony over the Balkans. The court circles and the Emperor had doubts and so Austrian policy managed to antagonize all parties without any substantial gain.

Bismarck immediately began to urge Manteuffel to use Austrian weakness to expand Prussian power. ‘The great crises provide the weather for Prussia’s growth,’³⁸ he wrote, and later in 1854 he urged King Frederick William IV to mobilize 200,000 troops in Upper Silesia where they could be used either against Austria or Russia.

With 200,000 men your majesty would at this moment become the master of the entire European situation, would be able to dictate the peace and win for Prussia a worthy position in Germany.

The King reacted with surprise: ‘A man of Napoleon’s sort can commit such acts of violence, I cannot.’³⁹ Like Buol, the King found himself torn between his close family ties to the Tsar’s court (Nicholas I had married Frederick’s sister Charlotte), his loyalty to Austria, his emotional commitment to the conservative principles of the old Holy Alliance of 1815, and his own inability to act with decisiveness.

The situation worsened as the Russo-Turkish War dragged on. Britain and France, together with Cavour’s Piedmont, formed an alliance of the Western states and Turkey against the Russian empire. Austria now looked to the Bund for support and Prussian-Austrian tension moved beyond clashes over cigars in the conference chamber to issues of war, and peace. On 22 March 1854 Prokesch-Osten, Austrian Ambassador to the Bund, wrote to Buol, the Austrian Foreign Secretary:

I have never expected an honest game from the Prussian side and often ask myself whether we could not put together a coalition, and, when we have it, use it with help of the sea powers to reduce Prussia to a harmless size. We shall never get rid of this rival as long as it has its strength, and still less when it grows. Kaunitz’s policies aimed at the insolence of Frederick II, and the Prussia of today is nothing other than Frederick’s old state.⁴⁰

Hardly. The Prussia of 1854 had at its head a King who could not make up his mind. As the Tsar wrote contemptuously of him: ‘My dear Brother-in-Law goes to bed as a Russian and wakes up as an Englishman.’⁴¹ Bismarck was determined to use the crisis to strengthen Prussia’s international standing and that meant refusing to be drawn into an alliance with Austria. He also had to watch the manoeuvres of the smaller German states; as he wrote to Gerlach in April, the smaller German states

want to secure their further existence by joining the stronger powers. In the last few years they went along with Prussia-Austria-Russia as long as they were united, with Austria-Russia as soon as their policies separated from the Prussian.⁴²

On 28 March 1854 France and Great Britain declared war on the Russian Empire and joined Turkey in its battle by sending naval units and ground troops to the eastern Mediterranean. On 5 April British troops arrived at Gallipoli. Against this background, on 20 April 1854, Prussia and Austria signed an offensive-defensive alliance, which gave Austria the backing to demand on 3 June 1854 that Russia evacuate the Danubian Principalities. A few days later, on 7 June, the Emperor Franz Josef and King Frederick William IV met in Teschen to coordinate policy. On 24 June 1854 the small and middle-sized German states acceded to the Austro-Prussian alliance. Bismarck opposed all of this, as he wrote to his brother on 10 May 1854:

That at the sound of the first shot against the Russians we shall turn ourselves into the whipping boy for the Western Powers and let them dictate to us the terms of peace while we carry the main burden of war is as clear as a school arithmetic exercise.⁴³

A series of defeats shook Russian self-confidence and on 28 July the Russians withdrew behind the line of the Pruth River. The Western Powers had now assembled an amphibious operation and planned to land on the Black Sea coast. Bismarck breathed a sigh of relief, as he observed in a letter of 10 July to his brother:

In grand politics, peace perspectives have begun to pop up. One seems to have calmed down in Vienna, or, rather, one no longer behaves with that impatience they believe they need to impress us.⁴⁴

On 8 August France, Britain, and Austria agreed to present the Russians with four points as the basis for peace negotiations. Russia was asked:

(1) to abandon the protectorate over the Danubian Principalities;

(2) to recognize the freedom of all shipping on the Danube;

(3) to accept a revision of the Treaty of 13 July 1841;

(4) to abandon the protectorate over subjects of the Supreme Porte.⁴⁵

On 2 December a Triple Alliance of France, Britain, and Austria was signed and the three Powers invited Prussia to join them. Bismarck wrote to Gerlach at once:

The text of the Treaty of 2 December arrived the day before yesterday … I would absolutely not join the coalition, because everybody will see that we did it out of fear and conclude that the more they frighten us, the more they get from us. Decorum alone forbids it in my view … The moral is that in all German cabinets from the tiniest to the greatest, fear is the only thing that determines decisions; each is afraid of the other, all are afraid of France …⁴⁶

By the end of the month, Bismarck heard good news from Berlin, as he wrote to Leopold von Gerlach,

Three days ago I got a letter from Manteuffel which made me very happy. He too thinks that we should not join the 2 December … As long as we show relaxed self-confidence, the others will have respect for us. As soon as we betray fear, they will use this ignoble weakness and try to increase and exploit it … In order to fill the Federal states with sufficient fear, as they have of Austria, we have to show ourselves capable, if others make us desperate, to join with France and even Liberalism. As long as we behave well, nobody takes us seriously and then all go where the threat is greater …⁴⁷

Here for the first time Bismarck shows an aspect of his technique: create fear and uncertainty in a crisis, so that opponents cannot be certain how Prussia will act, and be absolutely unscrupulous in the choice of means. Prussia can ally with any force or state if it needs to do so. These techniques, instrumental and unprincipled as they are, marked his diplomatic approach from the Crimean War to the moment he fell from power.

Early in the new year the Austrian Foreign Minister Buol wrote to Count Leo Thun:

If it comes to a war, I prefer that Prussia does not stay on our side. A war with Prussia against Russia is a great embarrassment for us. If Prussia sides with Russia, so we wage war with France against Prussia. Then we take Silesia. Saxony will be restored and we have peace at last in Germany. For that price France can gladly take the Rhineland.⁴⁸

On 10 January 1855 Bismarck was summoned to Berlin for consultations where he stayed until 18 January. Relations at Frankfurt between Bismarck and Prokesch had entirely broken down. On 20 February 1855 Herr von Buol-Schauenstein wrote to Manteuffel to inform the Prussian government of the forthcoming recall of Prokesch and to announce his replacement, Johann Bernhard Graf von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen. Buol took the occasion to ask whether in view of Herr von Bismarck’s ‘remarks that have become notorious and especially in conversation with non-German envoys [which] show implacable enmity against Austria’ it might not be ‘feasible’ to substitute Herr von Bismarck, a request which Manteuffel rejected ‘decisively’.⁴⁹ Bismarck remarked in a letter to his brother that he would like Prokesch to stay, because ‘such a clumsy opponent I shall never get again.’⁵⁰ In this crisis about an Austrian alliance, Bismarck had his first real diplomatic triumph. The excitement among the small states was growing, he wrote:

More or less all of them want to mobilize, with Austria against Russia, we are to protect Germany’s frontiers. That the French will march through our territory, everybody here takes for granted.⁵¹

Complex negotiations followed about military mobilization. The intricacies of the rules, the status of votes in the Military Committee as opposed to the Plenum or Narrower Council, seem to have been as incomprehensible to outsiders in 1855 as the proceedings of EU Council of Ministers or the Commission are today. On 30 January 1855 the Bund rejected Prokesch’s motion to mobilize and the Austrians withdrew it. Bismarck’s counter-motion used the word ‘neutrality’ and, in reply to a further Austrian request of the Bund to mobilize, Bismarck agreed but added the clause that mobilization must be a deployment ‘in every direction’ (that is, mobilization against France), which removed the anti-Russian thrust and comprehensively outmanoeuvred the Austrians. Bismarck had used the fear of the small German states that they might find a French invading force marching over their borders, to make neutrality universal, that is, against all possible belligerents, which, of course, included Austria and Britain. Engelberg concludes that ‘the Prussian Envoy had delivered his diplomatic master’s thesis; his apprenticeship and journeyman period had come to an end.’⁵² Prokesch wrote bitterly to Buol:

Austria today seems to have been put under a ban by the Bund, and there are loud boasts that they have tamed it under Prussia’s lead and they must force it to negotiate. ‘Armed neutrality’ as a rule against France and Austria is now praised as the ni plus ultra of diplomatic wisdom, and that we helped to bind us ourselves that way is the stuff of laughter.⁵³

Years later, Bismarck told his personal assistant Christoph Tiedemann that he had outsmarted his Austrian counterpart in 1865 by doing exactly the opposite. He challenged Count Blome, the Austrian envoy at Gastein in 1865, to a game of cards and played so wildly and recklessly that Blome assumed that he had the same attitude to his diplomacy.⁵⁴ Sir Robert Morier, for many years the British ambassador to several German courts, wrote perceptively of Bismarck’s divided self. In a letter to Odo Russell, British ambassador to Prussia, he summed Bismarck up in these words:

Do not forget that Bismarck is made up of two individuals, a colossal chess player full of the most daring combinations and with the quickest eye for the right combination at the right moment and who will sacrifice everything even his personal hatred to the success of his game—and an individual with the strangest and still stronger antipathies who will sacrifice everything except his combinations.⁵⁵

And these ‘combinations’ had worked at Frankfurt. Now Bismarck urged Leopold von Gerlach to stiffen the spines of decision-makers in Berlin:

For the matter seems to me so obvious and straightforward that the French must know we shall react to troops with troops. That’s the only way to avoid complications with France.⁵⁶

The Crimean War ground to its inglorious end and Napoleon III called for a Peace Conference in Paris in 1856, which opened on 24 February. A new young Tsar Alexander II had come to the throne and realized that the Russian defeats represented systemic rather than individual failure. The Tsarist regime needed reform, modernization, and the inclusion of the growing educated middle class. In a way, the defeat in the Crimean War had the same effect on Russia in 1856 that the battle of Jena had on Prussia exactly fifty years before. The Tsar had to infuse the system with patriotism and ‘intelligence’ without undermining autocracy. The serfs had to be emancipated. Village and county schools had to be introduced, towns had to have municipal governments. The scale and risks of the reform programme confirmed the truth of de Tocqueville’s wise remark that ‘the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it decides to reform.’⁵⁷ It also meant that Russia, defeated and preoccupied with its internal institutions, would withdraw from great power politics for the foreseeable future. Without Russia’s defeat in the Crimea, Bismarck could never have fought his three wars of unification. The rule of central European power had been constant since 1700 (and in a way still is): when Russia is up Germany is down; when Germany is up, Russia is down. Equally important, Prussia had stayed neutral and managed to maintain its cordial ties to Moscow. The Austrians had ‘betrayed’ Russia and could expect nothing from its former ally. When the time came, Bismarck knew exactly how to exploit Russian resentment to destroy Austrian authority in Germany.

Another international event affected Bismarck equally powerfully but less happily. On 29 September 1855 Queen Victoria wrote in her Leaves from our Journal in the Highlands, ‘Our dear Victoria was this day engaged to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, who had been on a visit to us since the 14th.’⁵⁸ In March 1856 the famous radical British politician, Richard Cobden, wrote to a friend that

Mr Buchanan, the American Minister … sat next to the Princess Royal. He was in raptures about her and said she was the most charming girl he had ever met: ‘All life and spirit, full of frolic and fun, with an excellent head and a heart as big as a mountain’.⁵⁹

Bismarck disliked the English marriage from the start. The Prussian sons-in-law of her

‘Her Gracious Majesty’ will find no sort of respect in England … Among us, on the other hand, British influence will find the most fruitful soil in the stupid admiration of the German ‘Michel’ for Lords and Guineas, in the anglo-mania of parliament, the newspapers, sportsmen, landlords and presiding judges. Every Berliner even now feels himself elevated if a real English jockey from Hart or Lichtwald talks to him and gives him the chance to grind out the crunched fragments of the Queen’s English. How much worse will that be when the First Lady of the Land is an English woman.⁶⁰

In 1856 and 1857, another and very important issue began to strain Bismarck’s friendship with his patrons, the two brothers Gerlach. Bismarck had begun to think hard and utterly unconventionally about the usefulness of Napoleon III for the achievement of Prussian aims. To think such thoughts, let alone to express them to either of the Gerlach brothers, amounted to an attack on their fundamental principles. Napoleon III embodied ‘revolution’ and must be quarantined, not accepted. His regime was ‘illegitimate’. He was a ‘red’, ‘a usurper’, and a ‘democrat’. Bismarck disagreed. Possibilities must be matters of rational calculation of forces and counter-forces; the player needs to know the rules of the game, the psychologies of the other players, and the number of moves open to him. As he observed years later,

My entire life was spent gambling for high stakes with other people’s money. I could never foresee exactly whether my plan would succeed … Politics is a thankless job because everything depends on chance and conjecture. One has to reckon with a series of probabilities and improbabilities and base one’s plans upon this reckoning.⁶¹

The metaphors that Bismarck began to use in the 1850s came from his experiences in games of chance, cards, dice, and the like.⁶² Politics had, he asserted more and more openly, nothing to do with good and evil, virtue and vice; they had to do with power and self-interest. The exchange of letters between Bismarck and his patrons about Prussia’s attitude to Napoleon III marked a turning point in Bismarck’s career and the first serious break with the Christian Conservatives to whom he owed his official position. In the summer of 1856 Bismarck visited Paris and received a lecture from Leopold von Gerlach on that account. He replied:

You scold me that I have been to Babylon but you can hardly expect from a diplomat eager to learn the rules this sort of political chastity … I have to get to know the elements in which I have to move from my own direct observation when the opportunity arises. You need not fear for my political health. I have a nature like a duck and water runs off my feathers and there is a long way between my skin and my heart.⁶³

By 1857 Bismarck had stopped joking and wrote two letters to Leopold von Gerlach, which offer us the first sight of the mature Bismarck in full power and clarity. These letters announce the emergence of a new diplomatic style, the birth of what came to be known as Realpolitik, for which—interestingly—there is no apt English translation. Langenscheidt’s two-volume German–English dictionary suggests ‘practical politics, politics of realism’ but neither catches the complete idea. The following exchange of letters between Bismarck and Leopold von Gerlach constitutes a kind of practical definition of the term; do what works and serves your interests. Bismarck quoted these letters in full in his memoirs written nearly forty years later, which suggests that he continued to see them as fundamental even in his retirement and old age. The tone had changed. Bismarck had ceased to be the apprentice, the ‘diplomatic child’, and had become one of the grand masters of the game of international relations. The first letter is dated 2 May 1857. In it Bismarck wrote his declaration of independence from his patron. The issue was again what stance should Prussian foreign policy take towards Napoleon III. This letter, perhaps the most important he wrote to Gerlach, needs to be quoted at some length:

You begin with the assumption that I sacrifice my principles to an individual who impresses me. I reject both the first and the second phrase in that sentence. The man does not impress me at all. The ability to admire people is but moderately developed in me, not unlike a defect of vision that gives me a sharper eye for weaknesses than strengths. If my last letter had a rather lively colouring, I ask you to attribute that to a rhetorical mechanism with which I hoped to influence you. What the principle is that I am supposed to have sacrificed, I cannot correctly formulate from what you write … France only interests me as it affects the situation of my Fatherland, and we can only make our policy with the France that exists … Sympathies and antipathies with regard to foreign powers and persons I cannot reconcile with my concept of duty in the foreign service of my country, neither in myself nor in others. There is in them the germ of disloyalty to the lord or the land which one serves … As long as each of us believes that a part of the chess board is closed to us by our own choice or that we have an arm tied where others can use both arms to our disadvantage, they will make use of our kindness without fear and without thanks.⁶⁴

On 6 May 1857 Leopold von Gerlach replied in an unusually defensive and uncertain style:

If you feel a need to remain in agreement with me on a matter of principle, it is incumbent upon us to seek out this principle, first of all, and not to content ourselves with negations, such as ‘ignoring facts’ and the ‘exclusion of France from the political combinations’ … My political principle is, and remains, the struggle against the Revolution. You will not convince Napoleon that he is not on the side of the Revolution. He has no desire either to be anywhere else, for his position there gives him his decided advantages. There is thus no question either of sympathy or of antipathy here. This position of Bonaparte is a ‘fact’ which you cannot ‘ignore.’ … You say yourself that people cannot rely upon us, and yet one cannot fail to recognize that he only is to be relied on who acts according to definite principles and not according to shifting notions of interests, and so forth.⁶⁵

Gerlach, in what was for him an unusually long and systematic letter, put the counter-argument very clearly. Politics must rest on principle, because only principle provided the steady foundation for alliances and initiatives. A principled state is a reliable state. Bismarck replied at even greater length in a letter of 30 May 1857.

The principle of struggle against revolution I recognize as mine as well but I consider it mistaken to make Louis Napoleon the only … representative of revolution … How many existences are there in today’s political world that have no roots in revolutionary soil? Take Spain, Portugal, Brazil, all the American Republics, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden and England which bases itself on consciousness of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 … And even when the revolutionary appearances of the past have not reached that degree of superannuation that like the witch in Faust with her drink from hell ‘here I have a bottle out of which I take a nip from time to time which no longer stinks at all’, states did not show the necessary modesty to withdraw from loving contact. Cromwell was called ‘dear brother’ by very anti-revolutionary potentates and his friendship was sought when they needed it. Very honourable potentates had alliances with the Estates of the Netherlands before their independence had been recognized by Spain. William of Orange and his successors in England were recognized as thoroughly kosher by our forefathers, even while the Stuarts still claimed the throne, and we forgave the Unites States of America their revolutionary origins in the Treaty of the Hague in 1785 … The present form of government in France is not arbitrary, a thing that Louis Napoleon can correct or alter. It was something that he found as a given and it is probably the only method by which France can be ruled for a long time to come. For everything else the basis is missing either in national character or has been shattered and lost. If Henry V were to come to the throne he would be unable, if at all, to rule differently. Louis Napoleon did not create the revolutionary conditions; he did not rebel against an established order, but instead fished it [power] out of the whirlpool of anarchy as nobody’s property. If he were now to lay it down, he would greatly embarrass Europe, which would more or less unanimously beg him to take it up again.⁶⁶

Throughout 1857, Leopold von Gerlach tried to maintain that ‘from my side, there’s not the slightest reason for bad feeling between us.’⁶⁷ In January 1858, he ended a long letter with the pathetic words, ‘do come here; it is so necessary that we fix our positions. With old love, yours, L.v.G.’⁶⁸ A long break followed until in May 1860 when he wrote,

You will be surprised to get a political letter from me and even from Sanssouci as in the old days … I write as if things were as they used to be in the old days … It depresses me especially that through your bitterness against Austria you have allowed yourself to be diverted from the simple choice between Right and Revolution. You play with the idea of an alliance with France and Piedmont, a possibility, a thought, that for me lies far away as it should be, dear Bismarck, for you. Forgive me that I have closed this letter ‘at random’ [English in original—JS]. I do not count on a meeting, but remain always with sincere love your old friend, L.v.G.⁶⁹

Bismarck replied to his old mentor and patron on 2 May 1860, and it cannot have done much to raise the old man’s spirits. He put the differences between them very clearly:

You want to have nothing to do with Bonaparte or Cavour as a matter of principle. I want to avoid France and Sardinia, not because I think it wrong, but because in the interests of our security I consider them very dubious allies. Who rules in France or Sardinia, once the Powers have been recognized, is absolutely unimportant to me, a matter of fact not right or wrong … France would be of all possible allies the most questionable, although I must keep the possibility open, because one cannot play chess if 16 of the 64 squares are forbidden from the beginning.⁷⁰

That was the last letter Bismarck wrote to his ‘loving’ patron. Leopold von Gerlach died on 10 January 1861 of a cold he picked up at the funeral of Frederick William IV, which Bismarck described in his memoirs.

Moreover, he was devoted body and soul to the King, even when, in his opinion, the monarch erred. This was plain from the fact that he may be said to have ultimately met his death of his own free will by following behind the dead body of his King bareheaded, helmet in hand, and that in a high wind and very cold weather. This last act of an old servant’s devotion to his master’s body ruined an already much enfeebled health. He came home ill with erysipelas, and died in a few days. His end reminded me of the way in which the followers of the old Germanic princes used voluntarily to die with them.⁷¹

This cold farewell to a person to whom Bismarck owed much of his success and almost certainly the appointment to Frankfurt as ambassador in 1851 was typical. Gerlach had been useful but Bismarck in the memoirs made no mention of that. Old Gerlach was a throwback to an earlier age. It may be too crude to note that after October 1857, when King Frederick William IV had a stroke and could no longer govern,⁷² Leopold von Gerlach lost his immediate usefulness to Bismarck in any case. Bismarck had used him and his closeness to the King to get ideas and suggestions to the Monarch without censorship by Otto von Manteuffel, the Minister-President and Foreign Minister. The following year, on 7 October 1858, a year after the King’s severe stroke, it became clear that Frederick William IV would not recover. His younger brother, William Prince of Prussia, became Regent in his name and formed the government of the so-called ‘New Era’, which was influenced by the Wochenblattpartei, the conservative liberals among whom Bismarck’s pet hate, Robert von der Goltz, played a leading role. As Leopold von Gerlach reminded him in his last letter to Bismarck, from 1 May 1860:

There is another thing that I would like to say to you. You stand entirely alone against the whole Ministry. That is an untenable position … Could you not rely on R von der Goltz? After the ‘New Era’ he spoke openly to me in a way that gained my confidence. Even Bernstorff might be useful.⁷³

Bismarck ignored that advice. The last thing he wanted was an alliance with moderate conservatives. He had another ally in mind which would have shocked Leopold von Gerlach. Bismarck proposed to play the Bonapartist game, as he said in the summer of 1859 to the nationalist liberal Victor Unruh:

Prussia is completely isolated. There is but one ally for Prussia if she knows how to win and handle them … the German people! I am the same Junker of ten years ago … but I would have no perception and no understanding if I could not recognize clearly the reality of the situation.⁷⁴

Bismarck had seen that the ‘masses’ in France voted for order not radicalism and had given Louis Napoleon Bonaparte an overwhelming mandate. Would not the German people play the same role in Bismarck’s scheme to strength the position of Prussia? He intended to use nationalism as he had used the camarilla, to achieve his goals. He had come to understand that

politics is less a science than an art. It is not a subject that can be taught. One must have the talent for it. Even the best advice is of no avail if improperly carried out.⁷⁵

Other changes took place against the background of the Crimean War which strengthened Prussia. The first half of the 1850s saw a very rapid expansion of railroad building which transformed the mobilization of the Prussian army. General Karl Friedrich Wilhelm von Reyher, chief of the General Staff in the 1850s, designated vital operational lines; worked out obligatory building codes for rail cars and railway stations to service cavalry and artillery; drew up a handbook of military regulations for all Prussian railroad companies; and coordinated timetables that acknowledged railroads as the principle mode of transport in wartime. Although Prussia never tested these plans in a full-scale mobilization in the 1850s, an operational timetable was in place by 1856.⁷⁶

In October 1857 the Chief of the Great General Staff Karl von Reyher died and Prince William, whom King Frederick William IV had appointed as Regent for three months on 23 October 1857, appointed Helmuth von Moltke to be his successor, one of the two most important appointments William ever made. The other, on 22 September 1862, was to appoint Bismarck. Moltke was as remarkable as Bismarck but temperamentally and socially his exact opposite. He was born on 26 October 1800 in Parchim in Mecklenburg, the son of an improvident father, who could not manage the family estates and had, as a result, to take a commission in the Royal Danish Army. Modest family circumstances ‘decided that Moltke together with his two brothers, Wilhelm and Fritz, without any concern for their own desires, had to become soldiers’.⁷⁷ Lack of money led Moltke all his life to a certain obvious frugality. Even as a Field Marshall and the greatest general in Prussian history he travelled second class and usually took a sandwich in a paper bag. In 1822 he transferred from the Royal Danish to the Prussian army and from 1823 to 1826 he studied at the Kriegsakademie (War College). As Arden Bucholz describes it, the Kriegsakademie had developed a new way to train officers, theKriegsspiel or war game:

War games originated with two Prussian officers, the Reisswitzes between 1810 and 1824. Originally played with plaster terrain and porcelain models at a scale of 26 inches to the mile, it evolved into metal symbols—blue for Prussia and red for the enemy … A set of rules, an umpire—the conductor—who mediated between the opposing sides, and dice standing for the element of chance in war. War gaming was practised at three or four distinct levels. One was indoors around the map or sand table. The other three were all done outdoors.⁷⁸

Moltke graduated top in his class. He was always effortlessly the best at everything but was too poor to take the position he had earned in the Great General Staff because he lacked the private income needed to pay for his horses. As a result, like Albrecht von Roon, Moltke joined the topography section and became a ‘land artist’. Moltke took part in the great topographic project under Chief of the General Staff Karl Freiherr von Müffling and spent three years doing this work from 1826 to 1829.

To do this he [Moltke] lived with local families … He became virtually a member of the family for the old Silesian nobility who took until noon for the grande toilette and did not always say what they thought. They lived in beautiful castles set in wonderful parks with French-style gardens and paintings by old masters on the walls. Moltke sketched the counts and countesses, wrote poetry and met all the neighbours …⁷⁹

Moltke painted and drew superbly, spoke six or seven languages (sources disagree on the number), and had immaculate manners. He had every grace and virtue (including discretion) to be the ideal courtier.

In 1833 he finally had enough cash to join the General Staff but in 1835 asked for six months of travel on which he made his way through the Balkans to Constantinople. In 1836 the ambassador of the Sultan asked the Prussian government for a training officer and Moltke, who was already there, got the job. He served as military adviser to the Turkish army for three years, travelled all over the Balkans and middle East, wrote and published his memoirs in 1841, and became instantly famous.⁸⁰ The book continues to be reprinted as Under the Half-Moon in our own times. In 1842 he married an English woman, Marie Burt, with whom he had no children.

As Arden Bucholz observes,

Within the age cohort which included hundreds of field grade officers, Molte had now achieved uniqueness. None of his colleagues had any practical military experience. None had served as responsible adviser to an army commander or been decorated with the order Star and Honour Sword by the Ottoman sultan and the Pour le mérite by the Prussian king. Such fame for an officer within the general literate public went back two generations—to the wars of liberation. But this was peace-time and more significant for now he had caught the attention of the royal family. And what they found surprised them: a very bright officer, graceful and adept at court, with the additional cachet as an artist. In a society of deference, rife with patron-client relationships, this was gold. His next three appointments put him into close, daily contact with three of them: the king’s nephew and most military relative, Prince Frederick Charles, the king’s younger brother Prince Henry and the king’s other nephew, Prince Frederick Wilhelm. Moltke got along well with the royals. This was certainly one key to his success. Elegantly turned out, perfectly tempered, he fitted in everywhere.⁸¹

His assignment as adjutant to Prince Heinrich, who lived a solitary life as an art lover in Rome, gave him an opportunity to learn Italian and to draw the great architectural treasures of the Eternal City.⁸² Moltke was that rare human being, a universal man. There seemed to be nothing, especially in the arts, that he could not do. Of these appointments by far the most important was that of Adjutant to Prince Frederick William. There he got to know William Prince of Prussia. They had a lot in common. ‘Moltke and King Wilhelm were the same kind of people: economical and simplicity loving, moderate and unpretentious. Both used the unwritten parts of letters to make notes and disliked replacing old clothes with new.’⁸³ Moltke had another qualification, indeed, was the first to have it: he himself had been a product of the General Staff as an educational institution. His predecessors: Grollman, Rühle von Lilienstern, Müffling, Krauseneck and Reyher, belonged to the Napoleonic generation and had had careers before the General Staff formally began to function in 1817. Moltke was an alumnus of the institution he now commanded.⁸⁴

Stories of Moltke’s calm detachment circulated throughout his career. In July 1870 Holstein reports that

Colonel Stiehle [Gustav von Stiehe, chief of staff to Prince Friedrich Karl] also told me that he had found Moltke on the sofa with a novel of Sir Walter Scott in his hand. When the colonel passed some remark about such reading matter at such a moment, the General replied placidly: ‘Why not? Everything’s ready. We’ve only got to press the button.’⁸⁵

During the Franco-Prussian War, Lieutenant Colonel Julius Verdy du Vernois was one of the chief staff officers. On 9 January 1871 he wrote his assessment of Moltke as a boss in his private diary. It is remarkable testimony to the great general’s character:

Moltke […] lives entirely with his staff, and is as kind as ever to everyone of us. No one has ever heard a single harsh word from him during the whole campaign. With us, he is even merry in his simple, cheerful and modest way. We all feel happy in his company, and absolutely love and worship him. But outside of our small circle, there is only one feeling and that is admiration towards him; everyone says he is a truly ideal character.⁸⁶

On the evening of the battle of Sedan, the greatest victory of Prussian arms in the nineteenth century, the King gave dinner for the top commanders. Alfred Count von Waldersee, then a young staff officer, recorded the following passage in his diary:

At dinner were Roon, Moltke and Bismarck. The King raised his glass and drank to the health of ‘the man who sharpened the sword for me, the man who used it, and the man who successfully directed my policies.’ These words have been frequently quoted differently but I can guarantee that this is what he said.⁸⁷

On the 25 January 1858 the Crown Prince of Prussia Prince Frederick Wilhelm married the Princess Royal Victoria of Great Britain in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace. Bismarck was not yet grand enough for Windsor but did get invited to the various dinners for the Royal Wedding in Berlin and noted in a letter to a friend that ‘in the evening there was a grand gala ball with supper, where the unpractical cut of the civil uniform and the cold corridors gave me a catarrh of the stomach’.⁸⁸ As we shall see, Bismarck regarded the palaces as dangerous places, full of germs, draughts, and bossy women. The young Princess was a very young woman of 17 and looked even younger.

As Walburga Countess von Hohenthal, commented in 1858:

The princess appeared extraordinarily young. All the childish roundness still clung to her and made her look shorter than she really was. She was dressed in a fashion long disused on the continent, in a plum coloured silk dress fastened at the back. Her hair was drawn off her forehead. Her eyes were what struck me most; the iris was green like the sea on a sunny day and the white had a peculiar shimmer which gave them the fascination that, together with a smile that showed her beautiful white teeth, bewitched those who approached her.⁸⁹

During 1858 Frederick William IV had a series of strokes which damaged the speech centres of his brain and made it increasingly impossible for him to conduct the business of the monarchy. On 7 October 1858 he gave his royal powers to his younger brother, Prince William, who took on the role of Regent.⁹⁰ The Crown Prince as Regent dismissed the conservative Manteuffel and appointed a new government composed of members of the Wochenblattpartei, many of whom Bismarck regarded as ‘enemies’. The so-called ‘New Era’ received the enthusiastic support of Prussian liberals but for Bismarck it spelled disaster. English influence and the so-called ‘New Era’ under the Regent were in Bismarck’s view equally dangerous. Pflanze sums up the change very neatly. ‘To shrewd observers, the change did not appear very drastic. Instead of feudal conservatives, aristocratic whigs were now in power.’⁹¹ This assessment is undoubtedly right but at the time Bethmann Hollweg, Rudolf von Auerswald, and the others in the group, including the Hohenzollern prince, Karl Anton of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who became Minister-President, and those members of the new cabinet who had been Liberals in 1848, seemed to promise a new start. The Princess Regent Augusta, a princess of Saxe-Weimar and a hearty liberal, welcomed the ‘New Era’. The Prince Regent had doubts. ‘What have I done to merit praise from that crowd?’ he asked irritably.⁹²

The New Era ministry produced one change early in its tenure. On 2 February 1859 it allowed the Jewish owner of a knightly estate, a certain Herr Julius Silberstein of Breslau, the right to vote in the Breslau district diet, that is, to exercise precisely thoseständische (traditional) rights which Bismarck had successfully helped to close to Jews in 1847. The leading noblemen in the diet protested and refused to accept the decision. A campaign to defend those rights against usurping Jews raged over the next two years.⁹³ The dreadful prophesy of Burke had been fulfilled: the land had been turned into a commodity. A Jewish plutocracy would replace the true representatives of tradition and honour.

The New Era also meant that Bismarck had lost his direct connection to power and it made him depressed and ill. On 20 February 1859 he wrote to Leopold von Gerlach,

In foreign affairs I have nothing to write and feel depressed. When, as now in Berlin there are neither pre- nor post-considerations, neither plans nor signs of a stirring of the will, so the awareness of an entirely purposeless and planless employment lowers the spirits. I do nothing more than what I am directly ordered to do and let things simply slide …⁹⁴

To his brother, he complained about his health:

In the meantime I have been so overworked and so ill that I was happy to find a few minutes for the necessary physical exercise. Because of the lack of that I suffer very much in the form of blood stoppage, congestion and susceptibility to colds.⁹⁵

Hypochondria, illnesses of all sorts, and depression regularly accompanied changes in Bismarck’s political situation. With age and—oddly—success they would get worse.

While Bismarck fretted at the loss of influence, Albrecht von Roon had been invited to a ceremony to mark his admission to the Knightly Order of St John. As the Regent gave him the robe and insignia of his knighthood, he said to him, as Roon reported to his wife Anna,

‘These are the new robes (that is, the cloak) of the gentlemen who are Division Commanders and of those who will become Divisional Commanders. You (shaking my hand vigorously) are not yet one but will be in the near future.’ This ‘in the near future’, I interpret to mean at least within the year.⁹⁶

Roon came from a very modest background and probably from Dutch bourgeois stock. Certainly ‘de Ron’ had no claims to nobility, and his paternal grandfather had a wine business in Frankfurt. During the Nazi period, the existence of a significant number of ‘Noahs’ and ‘Isaacs’ in his Dutch ancestry gave cause for a certain amount of alarm and they touched up his geneaology.⁹⁷ After Roon had served as tutor to the Prince’s nephew in 1846 and 1847, General von Unruh informed him on 1 November 1848 that Prince William and Princess Augusta wanted Major von Roon to be military governor of their son, the 17-year-old Frederick William, their eldest child and future Emperor Frederick III.⁹⁸ We have seen how rapidly the career of Moltke had been transformed by such royal favour. The General handed the Major a letter from the Princess Augusta in which she explained that with respect to his purity of heart, truthfulness and piety, she could want nothing more of the young Prince. ‘Strength of character and intellectual ability, namely sharpness and logic, are not on the same level.’ She wanted her son to be brought up to date. ‘He belongs to the present and future. He must, as a result, absorb new ideas and learn to digest them, so that he develops a clear and lively awareness of his own time and lives not outside it but within and of it.’⁹⁹

Five days after receipt of this invitation, Roon replied to this remarkable letter with unusual frankness. He declared his

inability to concede inner truth or outer justification to all the so-called, up-to-date views … I feel myself too old, too rusted into my prejudices, too lame. Will the touch of ‘reactionary essence’ which is inherent in me, not be harmful to the young gentleman?¹⁰⁰

Not only did a humble and not very well-heeled Major turn down a golden ladder to a brilliant career but he also had the nerve to suggest to the Princess that the young Prince ‘should be removed from Court and all its influences’.¹⁰¹ Roon had in a sense taken a huge risk with his career prospects by his frankness and he and Anna must have been relieved when a letter of 10 December arrived from the Princess in which she wrote that her choice of him as military governor had

been perfectly confirmed by your open and honest answer … With respect to separating my son from Court and his parents, our views are far apart and for the moment and for the immediate future we shall not let him go away from us for that reason.¹⁰²

Early in January Prince William courteously informed Roon that Lieutenant Colonel Fischer from the Ministry of War had been appointed military governor to the Prince. The Prince added his own regrets:

Today I can only say how much I regret that our first choice could not have been permitted to stand and to assure you that our respect for you has not changed in any way.¹⁰³

During 1849, when the Prussian Army suppressed the revolution in Baden, Major von Roon served as chief of staff to I Army Corps of the ‘Operation Army of the Rhine’, under Lieutenant General von Hirschfeld. The whole operation was under the command of Prince William of Prussia, which allowed Roon to solidify his position with the future King.¹⁰⁴ He became part of the group around the Prince together with Adjutant-General von Kirchfeldt, Lieutenant Colonel Fischer, and one or two others. This group disliked the direction of Prussian politics. It met in the Prince’s temporary residence in Koblenz.¹⁰⁵ In December 1850 von Roon was promoted to lieutenant colonel and made commanding officer of the 33rd Reserve Infantry in Thorn; as his wife put it on 31 December 1850, ‘this assignment [to command an unfashionable reserve regiment in a remote Polish town—JS] is an expression of the highest disfavour on the part of the Minister of War.’¹⁰⁶ In the following December, he was in spite of the disfavour promoted colonel and the regiment happily transferred from remote Thorn to Cologne, near the royal couple in their residence in Koblenz, where the Prince of Prussia often inspected the 33rd Regiment and saw Roon regularly.¹⁰⁷

Koblenz was not far from Frankfurt but relations between Roon and Bismarck seem to have been still on a formal basis, as in the letter of 14 July 1852 in which Colonel Roon writes to his ‘honoured Friend’, as the heading has it, but within the text he addresses Bismarck as ‘honoured Excellency’, as part of a formal letter in which he asks Bismarck as ambassador to make arrangements for his general to visit the Fortress of Nancy and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He passes on greetings from their mutual friends, Kleist-Retzow and Moritz von Blanckenburg, and hopes that the gracious lady will, perhaps, remember him from 1847 and Venice.¹⁰⁸ Roon must have felt his inferiority. After all, he was still a regimental commander of a not very fashionable regiment at nearly 50, while the young Bismarck, still under 40, had shot onto the political firmament with the brilliance of a comet. The Rooms still had to live off his modest salary. Five years later, his career had not advanced much as he wrote to his friend Clemens Theodor Perthes, the Bonn professor, on 9 November 1857: ‘I still cannot do more in fact than enlist recruits and send letters without content from above to below and from below to above.’ But he reports on a trip to Berlin and ‘plans for my future’. A note mentions an exchange of letters with Bismarck about his possible transfer to Frankfurt as Federal Military Plenipotentiary.¹⁰⁹

On 25 June 1858, the day after Roon was initiated as a Knight of the Order of St John, Prince William summoned him to a private audience and asked for his ‘thoughts and plans in writing’ for army reform. The Regent wanted Roon to make suggestions for a more efficient management of the recruitment and personnel procedures. In principle, every adult male was subject to military service; in practice a small number actually served as recruits for two years. Recruitment in the 1850s stood at about 40,000 per year. A better army meant more recruits, trained better and serving for longer. It also meant doing something serious about the Landwehr, the local militias, who served seven-year terms and could re-enlist for another seven.

Roon submitted his Bemerkungen und Entwürfe zur vaterländischen Heeresverfassung (Notes and Drafts for a Structure for an Army for the Fatherland) on 18 July 1858.¹¹⁰ Roon began his survey by asserting categorically that

1.   The Landwehr is a politically false institution, because it no longer impresses foreigners and for foreign and domestic politics is of doubtful significance;

2.   The Landwehr is at the same time a militarily false and weak institution because it lacks

a) a genuine, firm soldierly spirit and

b) a secure disciplinary control without which no reliable military organization can be conceived.

A reconstruction must, therefore, occur in that:

1.   a tight fusion of the Landwehr with the Line units takes place and that

2.   the lack of suitable leadership be remedied.¹¹¹

Roon argued that three-year service was essential and that the intake must be greater.

The former Landwehr ‘first mobilization’ must be completely incorporated into the line units in peacetime … If one wishes, the name ‘Landwehr’ can be preserved. Indeed, the whole army could be called ‘Landwehr’ if that were preferable.¹¹²

Ultimately the plan foresaw an annual recruitment of 63,000 men with an eight-year military obligation, three of which were to be active and five in the active reserve. The new Prussian army would have at any time an instant force of over 300,000 fully trained troops, as opposed to the present slack system which could at most generate some 200,000 indifferently prepared soldiers.

The scheme was very radical and not only in its sharp expansion of the army, but also because the Landwehr represented two important principles, which Roon utterly rejected. The right to bear arms had always been the sign of the free man. That faith found expression in the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, part of the Bill of Rights, ratified on 15 December 1791, which makes it absolutely clear that the free citizen has a right to bear arms:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.¹¹³

Prussia was not a free state. It had no citizens, only subjects. Neither the Regent nor his military adviser intended to alter that. Hence Roon called the Landwehr a ‘politically false’ institution, in that it gave its soldiers ideas beyond their station. It was false in a second sense because it went back to the ‘people’s rising’ of 1813 to 1815, which had for the first time enlisted volunteer units to fight alongside the Royal Prussian Army. The legend of the heroic young men fighting in their stylish black uniforms in a war for freedom comforted a bourgeoisie who could not get commissions in the proper army and who claimed their share of the patriotic War of Liberation. Bismarck had outraged precisely those sentiments by his very first speech in the Prussian United Diet of 1847 when he rejected the idea that there had been a War of Liberation at all. To incorporate the ‘free’ militia into the traditional Prussian army’s Kadavergehorsam (obedience of the corpse) attacked the entire self-image of the liberal middle classes. The financial costs would be high and the Prussian Landtag was unlikely to agree to them.

That Prussia could easily afford such costs had not yet entirely penetrated the consciousness of the tax-paying classes. The Customs Union or Zollverein, which Prussia founded in 1819, had become a powerful internal market, from which Austria had been excluded. In the 1860s Prussia accounted for nine-tenths of all the pig iron and coal produced inside the Zollverein, two-thirds of the iron ore, and almost all the steel and zinc.¹¹⁴ Less evident but at least as important was the revolution in education that had spread through Prussia from 1815 to the 1860s. In 1833 Victor Cousin, French minister of education, called Prussia ‘the land of the barracks and the school room’. In the 1840s, Horace Mann, the famous American educational reformer, toured Prussian schools and noted how free they were:

Though I saw hundreds of schools and … tens of thousands of pupils I never saw one child undergoing punishment for misconduct. I never saw one child in tears from having been punished or from fear of being punished.¹¹⁵

Literacy rates in Prussia in 1850 averaged about 85 per cent, a standard of literacy consisting of both reading and writing skills, whereas in France reading only amounted to 61 per cent and in England reading and writing only reached 52 per cent of the population.¹¹⁶

The educated workforce found employment in industries which had begun to exploit science and technology. The Prussian universities turned out scientific pioneers and the system of technical colleges trained generations of engineers who could apply the science to industry. The German university with its doctorates, seminars, research agendas and the technical colleges pushed Germany farther ahead in the struggle for dominance in Europe.

Friedrich Engels, who returned to Prussia for the first time a generation after the Revolution of 1848, was astonished by the change.

Whoever last saw the Prussian Rhineland, Westphalia, the kingdom of Saxony, upper Silesia, Berlin and the seaports in 1849 found them unrecognizable in 1864. Everywhere machines and steam-power had spread. Steamships gradually replaced sail-ships, first in the coastal trade, then in maritime commerce. The railways multiplied in length many times. In the dockyards, collieries, and iron works there prevailed an activity of the kind the ponderous German had previously thought himself incapable.¹¹⁷

As Albrecht von Roon drafted his memorandum for the Regent in July 1858, the Kingdom of Prussia presented a paradox. Frederick the Great still provided the model. The old Frederician absolute monarchy was there in spirit, modified a little by the Constitution of 1850. The Prussian aristocracy still monopolized power in the army and civil service, while society had begun the rapid modernization that accompanies very sudden industrialization. It brought with it the rise of a wealthy middle class and a large industrial working class that demanded more representation and genuine parliamentary politics. Prussia remained Frederick the Great’s military state but one with huge factories, big cities, and advanced technology. Yet Roon’s army had not changed one iota. In 1862, 85 per cent of cadets entering the Prussian army came from ‘old Prussian’ territories and 79 per cent came from traditional Prussian families (officers, civil servants, and landowners). In the same period, while 35 per cent of the officer corps was bourgeois, the upper ranks were resolutely aristocratic with 86 per cent of all colonels and generals from the nobility.¹¹⁸ In other words, Frederick’s aristocracy still ruled Prussia but the Prussia they ruled had become utterly different. This paradox framed the careers of Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke. Bismarck’s success, if that is the word, lay in his preservation of that paradox to the end of the nineteenth century.