6

Power

Bismarck’s position in 1859 depressed him. Though he had not been loyal to Minister-President Otto Freiherr von Manteuffel, Manteuffel had been good to him. Now both the King and Manteuffel had left the stage, the King through illness and Manteuffel through a punctilious sense of duty. In order to give the Regent a free hand, Manteuffel and his ministry tendered their resignations as a group and the Regent accepted them on 6 November 1858. Manteuffel refused the title of count and withdrew to his estate.¹With the change of Minister President and Foreign Minister, Bismarck heard a rumour that he was to be transferred to St Petersburg, which he regarded—not entirely without grounds—as an attempt to put him, literally, out in the cold. It says something about Bismarck’s effrontery or the approachability of Prussian monarchs that Bismarck ‘betook himself’—his exact words in A. J. Russell’s translation—to the Regent and requested an audience. In it he protested that nobody could replace him. He had done eight years of service in Frankfurt and had got to know everybody who mattered. His successor, von Usedom, was a cretin with an impossible wife and for that matter the entire cabinet of the ‘New Era’ lacked distinction. As he put it to the Regent,

After I had expressed myself concerning the post at the Federal Diet, I passed on to the general situation and said: ‘Your Royal Highness has not a single statesman-like intellect in the whole ministry, nothing but mediocrities and limited brains.’

The Regent.—‘Do you consider Bonin’s a limited brain?’

I.—‘By no means; but he cannot keep a drawer in order, much less a ministry. And Schleinitz is a courtier, but no statesman.’

The Regent (irritably).—‘Do you perchance take me for a sluggard? I will be my own Foreign Minister and Minister of War; that I comprehend.’

I apologized, and said: ‘At the present day the most capable provincial president cannot administer his district without an intelligent district secretary, and will always rely upon such a one; the Prussian monarchy requires the analogue in a much higher degree. Without intelligent ministers your Royal Highness will find no satisfaction in the result.’²

Whether Bismarck actually said all that we cannot know. The conversation in question took place thirty-five years before Bismarck wrote his memoirs. Had he taken notes at the time? Yet the text itself still startles me. The idea that a 43-year-old ambassador could slander the entire cabinet and insult the Regent with impunity suggests either that Bismarck could, and did, get away with anything or that the Royal Prussian Court practised a tolerance rather unusual among monarchs. Nobody would have dared to say anything like that to Queen Victoria or Napoleon III.

Bismarck’s documents from the time are more modest. He wrote to Johanna in mid-January 1859 that he had been well received at court by the Prince-Regent and had dined with Hans (von Kleist-Retzow), Oscar (von Arnim, brother-in-law), Alexander von Below-Hohendorf, Moritz von Blanckenburg, Wagener, Eberhard Count zu Stolberg, Somnitz, etc. He was likely to remain in Berlin until 24 January and had asked the Regent to be allowed to remain in his present post at Frankfurt.³ The decision went the other way. On 29 January 1859 Bismarck was named by the Regent the Prussian envoy to the court of Tsar Alexander II.⁴ Rather gloomily Bismarck returned to Frankfurt to arrange his affairs and organize the move.

Roon was also in a bad mood. He had run into hostility from the new Minister of War, Eduard von Bonin, who was ten years older than he and incomparably more distinguished as a field commander. Von Bonin had his own ideas about the fusion of the Line and the Landwehr and had not been impressed by Roon’s memorandum. On 9 January 1859 Roon wrote to Anna that the new minister intended to shove the project to one side as soon as he could.⁵ The next day, he dined with the Prince Regent and afterwards the Princess Augusta asked him to stay a while and report to her on the reform project and the meeting of 22 December.

She discussed my present assignment and sought to cheer me up. I ought not to lose heart. Matters of such importance must be pursued with the greatest eagerness and tenacity … In reply to my remark that the Prince only had to order the changes, she replied evasively. The Prince had been overwhelmed with projects and proposals and his task ought not to be made more difficult if those presenting reports are annoyed or become peevish. In any case it must be obvious that every thing would be better done if the agent carrying it out were convinced of its utility and with that she let me leave.⁶

It cannot have been easy to remain cheerful when the next day Minister von Bonin dismissed him and the project with contempt. Roon wrote angrily to Anna that Bonin had said:

He really had no time, could not occupy himself with the memorandum, which he had just received and not yet read, had not had time to think it through. He babbled on impatiently like a small boy.⁷

Two days later the Regent called a cabinet meeting at which the military reform project appeared on the agenda. Roon had been invited to join the meeting at the end and heard von Bonin announce in the name of the Cabinet that Roon had been named to chair a commission to study the feasibility of the reform proposal. It all sounded very nice but Roon remained sceptical. He was convinced that von Bonin intended to sabotage the reforms by burying them in the commission and that ‘all such commissions threaten to fail on the issue’.⁸

Roon’s fate and that of Bismarck were, in fact, being decided in a different part of the world. On 29 January 1859 a Franco-Piedmontese treaty, ratified by both parties, largely codified the terms agreed between Napoleon III and Count Cavour, the Piedmontese Prime Minister, at Plombières in 1858: in the event of an Austro-Piedmontese war in Italy resulting from Austrian aggression, France would join Piedmont in an effort to drive the Austrians from Italy and establish a Kingdom of Upper Italy under the House of Savoy. A few days later, on 4 February 1859, Napoleon published a pamphlet, ‘L’Empereur Napoléon III et l’Italie’, in which the nephew of the great Napoleon set out his agenda for following in his predecessor’s footsteps. He too would liberate Italy and reduce the power of the reactionary Habsburg Empire. This bold attack on the international order of mid-century Europe would set off tremors that would lift both Roon and Bismarck to power and create the conditions in which Germany too could be unified.

Bismarck had reason to be gloomy as he closed the house in Frankfurt and prepared to hand over the post to Guido Usedom. Before he left, he went to dinner at the sumptuous home of Mayer Carl von Rothschild (1820–86), the head of the Rothschild bank in the family’s home city of Frankfurt. He wrote enthusiastically about the experience in a letter to Johanna: ‘a real, old Jew haggler (Schacherjude) tons of silver, golden spoons and forks.’⁹ The dinner had long-term consequences since, on Meyer Carl’s recommendation, Bismarck appointed Gerson Bleichröder, a banker in Berlin, who operated as a Rothschild correspondent, to be his private banker and handle his affairs while he was away in St Petersburg.¹⁰ The relationship lasted until Bleichröder’s death in 1891 and made a great deal of money for Bismarck. What it did for Bleichröder to be known as ‘Bismarck’s banker’ can easily be imagined and will be described in some detail later in this book.

Bismarck detested moving and even more so when things in remote St Petersburg were so difficult and expensive. On 25 February Bismarck wrote to Karl Freiherr von Werther (1809–82), his predecessor in Russia, about furniture at the St Petersburg residence, which Werther quite naturally wanted to sell. ‘What I am supposed to do with a big empty house for the six months until my wife arrives?’ Bismarck decided to go to a hotel for the first few months.¹¹ As he complained to brother Bernhard, the move to Petersburg was going to be very expensive. Yes, he had a grand new salary of 33,000 thaler ‘with which under normal circumstances one could live quite comfortably’, but Werther had paid 6,400 without furniture for the ambassadorial residence in St Petersburg, a lot more than the 4,500 he was paying in Frankfurt. The Foreign Ministry had promised to give him 3,000 for the move but he reckoned that even with such a subsidy he would in the end be 10,000 thaler out of pocket.¹²

Bismarck left Frankfurt for good on 6 March 1859 and went to Berlin for what he hoped would be a few days. Ten days later, he wrote to Johanna:

I am still here to my great irritation. I don’t know what I should do and what to answer to everybody about my departure. Saturday I had set as a date to leave but now there’s a letter from the Prince to the Tsar, which I am supposed to take which will not be ready until next week.¹³

And then without warning, he suddenly had to depart:

It has turned out exactly as I expected. After keeping me for 16 days without reason, it suddenly turned out yesterday at 5 that I should leave as soon as possible, at the latest tonight. That I am not going to do and will leave tomorrow afternoon.¹⁴

Bismarck’s journey from Berlin to St Petersburg reminds us of the difference between Bismarck’s world and ours. Though railroads had begun to spread and he could travel most of the first leg on the train to Königsberg, thereafter he had to travel in carriages of various kinds, which went from one post house or coach stop to the next. Late March brought heavy snow along the Baltic and Bismarck had to get out of the carriage and push at various points. When he finally reached St Petersburg, he wrote a long letter to his sister about the exhausting but exciting week it had taken to get from Königsberg to St Petersburg, a journey that now takes about an hour on a plane. I quote it at length:

Day before yesterday early in the morning I arrived here at the Hotel Demidoff where I am warm and dry, but it was an effort to get this far. Hardly had we left Konigsberg eight days ago, when a lively snow storm began, and since that I have not seen the natural colour of the surface of the earth. Already at Insterburg, my courier coach took an hour to go one mile. In Wirballen I found a miserable coach whose interior was too small for my length, so I changed places with Engel [his valet—JS] and passed the whole journey in the outer-seat, which is forward and open. There was a small bench with an acute-angled back rest, so, that even apart from the cold which at night went down to minus 12 degrees, it made sleep impossible. I held out in this position from Friday to Monday evening and except for the first and last night on the train, I slept 3 hours in Kovno and 2 hours on a sofa in a station house. My skin peeled off in layers, when I arrived. The journey took so long because the fresh fallen snow covered the sleigh tracks. Several times we had to get out and walk because the eight horses of the carriage simply got stuck. The Düna was frozen but half a mile upstream, there was an open spot where we crossed. The Wilija had wind driven ice floes, the Niemen was open. From time to time we were short of horses, because all the post couriers took eight or ten and instead of the usual 3 or 4. I never had fewer than six and the carriage was not over-weight. Conducteur, Postilion and Fore-rider did their best so that I resisted the temptation to ruin the horses. Smooth hills were the worst obstacle, especially going down hill the four after-horses piled into each other in a tumble. Anyway it is all over and is fun to tell.¹⁵

In spite of his resistance to his assignment Bismarck actually enjoyed St Petersburg very much and the letters have a mellow sense of well-being, which can hardly be found either before or after. His descriptions of the promenades and boulevards of the ‘Venice of the North’ have great charm. He enjoyed watching the oddities of the Russians and wrote at length about the beauties of the palaces, gardens, and parks, the northern light, the colours. The Petersburg letters describe an idyllic intermission in the life of the restless and ambitious genius. Since there was no consular service, Bismarck had a great deal to do as representative of the Prussian King, as he wrote to his brother in May 1859. His main job was to look after the 40,000 Prussians in the Russian Empire: ‘One is lawyer, policeman, district councillor, and claims commissioner for all these people. I often have a hundred documents to sign a day.’¹⁶ He enjoyed matching his skills against those of Prince Gorchakov, the Russian foreign minister, and used even the least promising occasions to do so. On 28 April, he wrote to Johanna

Today we funeralled and buried old Prince Hohenlohe with Tsar and Parade. In the black festooned church, after it emptied, I sat with Gortschakov on the black velvet pew with a covering of skulls and we ‘politicked’, that is, worked, not chatted. The preacher had cited the passing of all things in the psalm (grass, wind, dry) and we planned and plotted as if one would never die.¹⁷

He reported that the Austrian ‘betrayal’ of 1854–5 had not been forgiven:

One cannot imagine how low the Austrians are here. Not even a scabby dog would accept meat from them … the hatred is beyond measure and exceeds all my expectations. Only since I arrived, have I believed in war. The entire Russian foreign policy has no other aim but to find a way to get even with Austria. Even the calm and gentle Emperor spits fire and rage when he talks about it and the Empress, a princess of Darmstadt, and the Dowager Empress are moving when they talk about the broken heart of the Tsar who loved Franz Joseph like a son …¹⁸

One royal relationship in particular gave him a sense of comfort that he himself noted: he was invited to the Peterhof Palace by the Dowager Tsarina, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, widow of the late Tsar Nicholas I, born Princess Charlotte of Prussia, the sister of the late King Frederick William IV. Here is Bismarck’s account

For me she has something in her kindness that is maternal, and I can talk to her as if I had known her from my childhood … I could listen to her deep voice and honest laughter and even her scolding for hours, it was homey. I had come in white tie and cut-away for a formal visit of two hours but toward the end she said she had no desire to say farewell to me and that I must have an awful lot to do. I said in reply, ‘not in the least’ and she said, ‘well then stay until I depart tomorrow’. I accepted the invitation with pleasure as a command, for here it is so delightful and the city of Petersburg is so full of stone and pavement. Imagine the height of Oliva and Zoppot, all bound together in a grand park with a dozen palaces with terraces and fountains and ponds in between, with shaded walks and lawns that run down to the water of the lake, blue sky and warm sun, beyond the sea of tree tops the real sea with gulls and sails, I have not felt so well for ages.¹⁹

Is it reading too much into the text to see this as an intimate meeting between the widowed good Queen Mother and the 44-year-old ambassador son? The language of pleasure and well-being has no parallel in the vast correspondence of Bismarck that I have come to know. He felt at home—loved? Sudden ‘elective affinities’ across the generations are not unknown and here we have one. In early July, he saw the Dowager Tsarina again and accompanied her to the ship taking her to Stettin for a holiday in Prussia: ‘It was so enchanting as we escorted the high lady in Peterhof on board, that I had an urge, in uniform as I was and without luggage, to leap on the ship to travel with her.’²⁰ In general Bismarck’s correspondence gives the impression that the Russian royal family took a shine to the brilliant Prussian ambassador. Bismarck claimed in a letter to a colleague that he was the only diplomat allowed in the Imperial family, ‘which gives me the status of an envoy to the family’.²¹

On the wider European scene, the rumble of war between France and Austria grew louder. During April 1859 the Austrians marched blindly into the trap that Napoleon III and Cavour had set for them. On 20 April the Prince Regent ordered the mobilization of three Prussian Army Corps and the entire line cavalry in preparation for a general European war.²² On 23 April Austria sent an ultimatum to Piedmont-Sardinia to demand that the Piedmontese disarm, which the government of Piedmont rejected on 26 April.²³The following day at the Austrian Crown Council Franz Joseph decided irrevocably for war, calling it ‘a commandment of honor and duty’.²⁴ How sound the Emperor’s judgement may have been can be seen in this letter from Odo Russell to his mother, Lady William, from a few years earlier:

The little Emperor is full of courage and obstinacy! He delights in reviews—and has them at 4 hours notice once or twice a week—much to the disgust of the soldiers and officers in the winter. His Majesty insisted on having a review during the hard frost—he was advised against it, but uselessly—the review was held. Two cuirassiers fell and broke their necks! The Camarilla concealed this event from fear of giving pain to His Majesty. During a review, an anständiger Weisswaschwarenhandlungscommis[a decent employee of a linen and washing powder shop], excited by the sight, passed the Emperor smoking and forgot to take off his hat—he was taken into custody, flogged in prison and condemned to 2 years schweren Kerker [a severe prison sentence]. This created bad blood, of course.²⁵

Under the rule of such an incompetent, absolute monarch, Austria declared war on Piedmont on 29 April, an act of aggression which triggered the Franco-Piedmontese treaty of alliance. The Austrians had had experience of this sort of war before and had smashed the Piedmontese comprehensively in 1848. But Radetzky and Windischgrätz were no longer in command of the Austrian forces in northern Italy. The new military leadership moved too slowly and got caught in heavy rain in the Po Valley. The French army, though much smaller in numbers, had access to railroads and got their forces into place earlier than the Austrians expected. Giuseppe Garibaldi had also organized his nationalist guerrillas into a force called the ‘Hunters of the Alps’, a fast unit which harassed the Austrian flanks. Napoleon III had to work quickly because he could not be sure that the Austrians—as the leading German power—would not mobilize Prussia and the Bund on its side. He knew the Russians would not lift a finger to help Franz Joseph and his government which had betrayed them in 1854. On 20 May French infantry and Sardinian cavalry defeated the Austrian army, which retreated, near Montebello and a week later Garibaldi’s Hunters of the Alps defeated the Austrians at San Fermo and liberated Como. Two big and very bloody battles followed: the Battle of Magenta on 4 June and from 21 to 24 June the Battle of Solferino at which the Franco-Piedmontese Army under Napoleon III defeated an Austrian force under the Emperor Franz Joseph himself. The battle left so many dead and wounded that it moved the Swiss observer Henri Dunant to found the Red Cross.

By this time revolution had broken out in Hungary. The Emperor knew that in this emergency he would not have Russian and Croatian forces to help him suppress the intransigent Magyars and hence had no choice but to sue for peace. On 11 July 1859 he met Napoleon III at Villafranca di Verona in the Veneto. Napoleon III was now in a hurry, because he had lost control of his Italian policy. France had originally planned to take from Austria and give to Piedmont the two northern Italian provinces awarded to Austria in 1815, Lombardy and Venetia. As a result of fighting, the French and Piedmontese had taken Lombardy, but Venetia remained firmly in Austrian hands.²⁶

Cavour resigned as Piedmontese Prime Minister in disgust at Napoleon’s betrayal and in Italy the nationalist forces of various kinds had no intention of letting the Great Powers dictate to them the nature of their glorious revolution. The treaty of Villafranca assumed that Napoleon III would be in a position graciously to restore the Austrian principalities such as the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Duchies of Parma and Modena to their legitimate sovereigns but the Bund and the Prussians might intervene too soon to allow him that luxury. He needed to exit the war and quickly.

Bismarck had from the beginning argued that Prussia must stay neutral in the Austro-French war. ‘We are not rich enough to use up our strength in wars that do not earn us anything,’ he argued.²⁷ On 12 May he wrote a long dispatch to the new foreign secretary, Adolph Count von Schleinitz (1807–85) to demonstrate that the Bund must always oppose Prussia, because

this tendency of middle state policy will emerge with the steadiness of a magnetic needle after any temporary swings, because it is no arbitrary product of individual circumstances or persons but a natural and necessary result of the federal relationships of the small states. We have no means to cope with this in a lasting or satisfactory way within the given federal treaties … I see in our relationship to the Bund an infirmity of Prussia, which we shall sooner or later have to heal with ferro et igni.

‘Iron and fire’ was the precursor of the more famous ‘blood and iron’ phrase from his first speech as Minister-President in September 1862. It certainly had the same meaning. Prussia would have to carve out its own fate by ‘iron and fire’, that is, by war. Prussia must use the present Austrian distress to redesign the Bund, send troops to the Austrian border, and threaten to overrun the small states during the war between France and Austria.²⁸

On 14 June 1859 Moltke convened a meeting of all corps commanders and their chiefs of staff to consider an unexpected problem. The Prussian mobilization had failed. By the time of the armistice between France and Austria,

two-thirds of the Prussian army was mobilized and under way, but it was in no position to do anything. What had happened? When the order to mobilize was given, only half the corps were ready to do so. Railroad transportation was ready: war materials—ammunition, food, wagons and supplies—had been collected and stockpiled all over Germany along three railroad lines. But civilian traffic took precedence; troops crawled to the Rhine … Moltke was stunned.²⁹

A complete reorganization of the General Staff followed. A railroad department was set up and the second division of the General Staff, the mobilization section, was created.

Roon wrote to his friend Perthes to complain that

our Prussian pride is headed for another deep humiliation. We have done too much for us now to do nothing … and now we cannot do anything more because without England the risk would be greater than the reward. It is a horrible dilemma. That comes from too much trembling, timidity and hesitation.³⁰

And there was much truth in that charge. Neither the Regent nor his Foreign Minister von Schleinitz could decide what to do. Bismarck—with his usual lack of discretion—had argued for an active, anti-Austrian, and explicitly ‘German’ policy in alliance with the German national movement, now much encouraged by the Italian example. William, the Prince Regent, could not bring himself to break his natural allegiance to the Habsburgs nor to decide to use the occasion to ‘make’ Germany.

Bismarck’s way of influencing policy, as we saw in the previous chapter, had been to write critical letters to the King’s General Adjutant Leopold von Gerlach, who would pass them on to the King during their daily chat over coffee and cakes. Bismarck became more and more influential and Minister-President Manteuffel had played with the idea of making him Foreign Minister in 1856. Now the situation internationally suited Bismarck’s combative style of politics. The ‘national’ question had blown up again and the stakes were higher. Bismarck still wrote letters but, as he explained in his memoirs, they were ‘absolutely fruitless … The only result of my labours was … that suspicion was cast on the accuracy of my reports.’³¹

By chance Bismarck had returned to Germany in July, this time really ill, because of the treatment a Russian doctor had given to his injured knee.³² He needed to be there and the illness gave him the excuse. While he suffered from a poisoning of the body, rage disturbed his mind; as he wrote to his brother from Berlin in August 1859, ‘I have worked myself into a rage and for three days have not slept and hardly eaten.’³³ Late in 1859, Bismarck spent a period of recuperation on the estate of his old Junker friend, Alexander von Below-Hohendorf. Below noted with alarm the dangerous and destructive power of Bismarck’s terrible rage. In a letter of 7 December 1859 he wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that Bismarck had become deranged by his concentration on his enemies and ‘extreme thoughts and feelings’. The cure was simple and Christian: ‘love thine enemies!’ This was the best ‘door’ through which to release

the mounting pressures from the darkness of his sick body and the best medicine against the amazing visions and thoughts [Vorstellungen] that threaten to draw him to death.³⁴

This advice made sense. Bismarck’s sick soul needed a release and to his Junker friends that release could be found at any moment through penitence, grace, and the love of God. It was Bismarck’s tragedy—and Germany’s—that he never learned how to be a proper Christian, had no understanding of the virtue of humility, and still less about the interaction of his sick body and sick soul.

Bismarck had been told by doctors in Berlin that ‘my growing hypochondria’ arose from worries about his Berlin existence and the expenses caused by regular dinners with nine people at meals, thirteen domestic servants, and two secretaries. He felt he was ‘being plucked at every corner’.³⁵ This is, I think, the first time that he used the word ‘hypochondria’ about himself, and in time others used it of him. ‘Homelessness’, the absence of his stable family life, made him abnormally anxious.

None of this improved Bismarck’s temper. In late September he wrote to his sister that

Now that I have talked myself hoarse to artisans and statesmen, I have almost gone mad from annoyance, hunger and too much business … The left leg is still weak, swells up when I walk on it, the nerves have yet to recover from the iodine poisoning, I sleep badly … flat and embittered and I don’t know why.³⁶

As we shall see again and again, there is a ‘why’. The Prince Regent had rejected him and his advice. Not for the last time Bismarck plunged into a deep despair when his royal master showed displeasure or simply failed to pay sufficient attention to him. A little attention would usually cheer him up and in this case it came from the command to wait upon the Tsar, who had visited Poland to do some serious hunting on the vast Polish royal domains. Bismarck, restored to good spirits, wrote to Johanna from the Lazienki Palace in Warsaw on 19 October:

The whole day ‘en grandeur’ with Tsar Alexander II … I can only tell you in plain words that I am very well. Breakfast with the Emperor, then audience, exactly as gracious as in Petersburg. Visits, dinners with his Majesty, evening theatre, really good ballet and the boxes full of pretty women. Now I have just slept splendidly. Tea stands on the table and as soon as I have drunk it, I shall go out. The aforesaid tea consisted of not only tea but coffee, six eggs, 3 sorts of meat, baked goods, and a bottle of Bordeaux … very comfortable.³⁷

Recognition from the All-Highest authority and lots of food did wonders for Bismarck’s disposition.

On 23 and 24 October a Russo-Prussian summit of the sovereigns took place in Breslau and the Prince Regent had ordered Roon to attend it where he met ‘Otto Bismarck’, who had ‘very serious doubts about the affair’,³⁸ presumably the army reform. The letter does not make clear what the subject of the doubts were, but the next letter, a few days later, makes very clear how unpleasant the whole reform project had become for Roon personally:

How much jealousy and misinterpretation my involvement has aroused even in men who like Steinmetz deserve my respect and recognition. It came to a painful, almost emotional scene. We separated in peace but I had poison in my blood and struggled for a long time to regain my balance.³⁹

Roon had objectively a difficult position. He had been asked to chair a commission as deputy to the Minister of War on which he was by far the most junior officer, no insignificant matter in a military organization. Retired General Heinrich von Brandt (1789–1868), one of the most distinguished military theorists of the previous generation of soldiers, that is, those who fought in the Napoleonic War, watched Roon’s difficulty from the detachment of one who had seen it all before. He had written the classic study on tactics, which had just been reissued in 1859 and had been translated into several foreign languages.⁴⁰ Brandt’s most gifted and devoted pupil was the 41-year-old Major Albrecht von Stosch, later like Schleinitz to become one of Bismarck’s ‘enemies’. He and his former commander, General von Brandt, carried on a private correspondence of remarkable frankness and interest. General von Brandt reported to Stosch on 19 October 1859 what he had heard in Berlin about army reform:

Other than that everything is in the usual confusion. The lack of information about the army organization, plus the nonsense which comes to light begins to be discussed in public. Now they have called on Roon in order to brood further on the project that he came up with in Posen. But he has a difficult problem to solve. He will be expected to patch whereas it really needs a complete break with the old system. Now let God help him. The army is at present in the moulting stage. I believe it would cause unbelievable difficulties if one had to organize it to be able to march.⁴¹

A series of difficult commission meetings then took place at which field marshals and full generals participated. One, old ‘Papa Wrangel’, Field Marshall Friedrich Count von Wrangel, though 75, had not retired like his younger colleague von Brandt. He attended the meetings and on 4 November told Roon in a very emotional conversation that he wanted to see von Roon appointed Minister of War:

I must be Minister of War. I was a firm character, he saw that in the debates … I am the only one who can carry out the reorganization and he had recommended my nomination to the All-Highest gentleman in the most urgent possible terms etc. etc.⁴²

On 29 November 1859 the Prince Regent appointed Albrecht von Roon Minister of War. The official order was dated 5 December. At 56 years old Roon was the most junior Lieutenant General in the Prussian Army. At the formal audience on 4 December, before the official announcement of the appointment, he asked the Prince Regent urgently to reconsider, ‘if he ought not to find a useful man who had his confidence with a more correct constitutional perfume’. Von Bonin had earned the hatred of conservatives because of his ‘craving for popularity and his flirtation with liberalism during his earlier tenure (1852–54) as Minister of War’.⁴³ Roon’s first appearance in his new role created an unfavourable impression on the members of the Prussian Landtag and evoked a variety of comments that he was ‘austere’, ‘as if dressed in stiff iron plates’, had a face of grim severity’ and above all was a ‘reactionary’.⁴⁴ Nobody accused him of being too soft.

The other side of Roon comes out clearly in his correspondence with his friend Clemens Theodor Perthes, a remarkable professor of civil law at the university of Bonn and a founder of the Christian Union for the Inner Mission in 1855 as well as the founder of the first hostel in Bonn for young workers.⁴⁵ Deeply Lutheran, he was also deeply political. He knew almost everybody who counted in Prussian society (the Perthes family owned a distinguished publishing business) and his Christianity never blinded him to the human characteristics of his acquaintances. Roon and Perthes enjoyed an intimate bond that held their friendship stable, even as their stations in life became very different. Perthes, though younger, acted as a kind of confessor to whom Roon confided his thoughts and doubts. Perthes distrusted Bismarck and frequently warned his friend Albrecht von Roon about him. Early in December 1859, Perthes wrote a remarkably prophetic letter to the new Minister of War, warning him not to be too reactionary and advising him to be clear that the Kreuzzeitung ultra-conservatives would try to use him and his appointment. He should remember that he had taken on a historic task and not just for the moment:

The state, on which Germany’s fate in the future will depend, should acquire a new basis for its situation in Europe and in its own internal life through you. A piece of history has been entrusted to your hands. You are not merely placed in the present time before the eyes of Prussia, Germany and Europe but have also become a historic man. Who in future will occupy himself with the history of Prussia will not be able to ignore you.⁴⁶

Dierk Walter points out in his recent book on Prussian army reform that there has never been any serious research on the Roon reforms.⁴⁷ They have become ‘mythical’. Historians see them as ‘important’ because, without exception, soldiers from the 1860s on and scholars since the 1860s have considered them important. But were they? Even the most modern and standard military histories repeat the old story, as Walter points out,

without even an attempt to try to establish, why an increase of the recruitment quota by 23,000 men, the creation of 49 new regiments and the exclusion of the Landwehr from the field army should have such wide-ranging, qualitative consequences.⁴⁸

One reason they became important is that William I made them a top priority. On 12 January 1860 the Regent gave an unusual public lecture before the royal Princes and the senior generals in which he discussed the significance of the reforms. Leopold von Gerlach was impressed and found the lecture ‘outstanding … I learned many new facts … The military reform is a great measure, whose importance will more and more become evident.’⁴⁹ Indeed, the reforms became important because they convinced the King to appoint Albrecht von Roon his Minister of War, and that was really important because Roon had known Bismarck since the latter was a teenager and knew how gifted Bismarck was. Roon constantly urged the King to appoint Bismarck from the first day of his appointment as a minister.

In the second place, the reforms led to a conflict between Crown and Parliament which caused a complete paralysis of the entire government machinery and to generals it seemed to foreshadow Act 2 of the revolutions of 1848. The fear of the Berlin crowd and the memory of the revolutionary unrest—after all, only fourteen years earlier and very well remembered at court and in the army—served as the backdrop to the crisis of 1859–62. In that atmosphere, Roon’s constant advocacy of Bismarck became more urgent and irresistible. Bismarck became Minister-President because of the reform programme and the deadlock that financing it created. Roon exercised this power because as a Prussian general and Minister of War he was not bound by the Cabinet Order of September 1852 to consult the Minister-President before requesting an audience with the King. He had, as did other commanding generals, an ‘immediate’ position. No intermediary could interrupt a Prussian general’s access to his commanding officer, the King.

Roon’s reforms were, of course, important for military reasons. They increased the size of the active army and active reserves by more than 50 per cent and insured that the larger army would be better trained. They established the doctrine that it took three years of active duty to turn a civilian into a Prussian soldier, a matter which aroused parliamentary opposition from 1859 to the outbreak of the First World War. They reduced the traditional militia reserves, which angered the reserve officers and much of the patriotic bourgeoisie. They raised the annual costs of the army but above all they engaged the Crown and Parliament on an issue which went to the heart of Prussian identity: was the army a royal army or what some called a parliamentary army?

The reforms mattered also because the King cared. Of the Hohenzollern monarchs after Frederick the Great, William was the most committed soldier. He saw himself not only as a commander but as a thinker who had general ideas on the future of the army. In 1832 he wrote several long memoranda on the need for three-year service in order to transform a ‘trained peasant into a proper soldier’. The third year made a real difference in creating the Soldatengeist or ‘military spirit’ which in troubled times protected authority. A wave of revolutionary outbreaks had shaken Europe in 1830 and 1831 which made the Prince’s reflections more relevant. As he wrote to Karl Georg von Hake, Minister of War under Frederick William III,⁵⁰ on 9 April 1832:

The tendency of revolutionary and liberal parties in Europe is bit by bit to tear down all the supports, which guarantee the Sovereign’s power and respect and thus assure him security in time of danger. That the armies are the chief of these supports is natural. The more a true military spirit infuses the army, the more difficult it will be to get around it. Discipline, blind obedience, are things which only through long habit can be created, so that in the moment of danger, the Monarch can rely on his troops.⁵¹

The lessons of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau had been forgotten. The soldier Prince wanted to return to the obedience of the corpse as the only way to preserve his absolute rights as a monarch. If the military has to fire on its fellow citizens, too much thinking can only weaken their ability to do that.

Prince William—rather naively—never reckoned with the hostile reaction which the draft bill received when Roon presented it in February 1860. The liberals in parliament were horrified. Here was a huge increase in the budget to create an army which would be quite explicitly a bulwark against parliament and the growth of representative institutions. After a compromise in 1860 in which moderate liberals agreed to pass the army estimates, the parliament simply refused to approve the Roon expansion and voted against all the measures that might finance it. Crown and parliament locked horns and neither side would yield.

While Roon took his place in the Ministry of War, Bismarck waited for something to happen. He could not return to Petersburg nor get a straight answer about his future. On 21 January 1860 Legationsrat von Zschock, a Prussian diplomat in Stuttgart, wrote to Max Duncker, a leading Liberal and a professor of history,

Since yesterday the rumour has spread that Herr von Bismarck is to become foreign minister in place of Herr von Schleinitz who will in turn replace Bernstorff in London … The name Bismarck has a repellent sound not only in the ears of all German governments so that the name alone—as Minister Hügel once said to me—is not only enough to effect a split between Prussia and its previous allies, but the name is at the same time—be it right or wrong—a cause of profound hatred in the depth of the soul of every friend of Prussia …⁵²

Bismarck, idling in furious impatience, wrote an intemperate and bellicose letter to Moritz von Blanckenburg on 12 February 1860:

Russia concedes little to us, England nothing, but Austria and the Ultramontanes are worse for us than the French. France will often be our enemy out of insolence and lack of restraint but it can at least live without fighting us. But Austria and her allies,—Reichensperger⁵³ [a leading Catholic lawyer and politician—JS]—can only flourish on a field where Prussia has been ploughed under as fertilizer. To cling to the Slavic-Romanic mixed state on the Danube and to whore with Pope and Kaiser is just as treasonable against Prussia and the Lutheran faith, indeed against Germany, as the most vile and open Rhenish confederation. The most we can lose to France is provinces and that only temporarily; to Austria the whole of Prussia and for all time.⁵⁴

February turned into March. March passed as did April, and still Bismarck had to wait in Berlin until his royal master made up his mind. On 7 May he wrote to Johanna from Berlin,

I sit here and the wheel of time has forgotten me like Red Beard in Kyffhäuser. After three days of vain efforts I finally ran into Schleinitz by chance at dinner at Rederns … I explained rather drily that I would rather quit than continue this life of hanging about and worrying in suspended anxiety. He urged me then to be calm ‘for a few more days’ and made unclear references to undefined alterations.⁵⁵

During Bismarck’s enforced idleness at Berlin, he and Moritz von Blanckenburg, his childhood friend, met Roon regularly to discuss the business of the new Minister. As Waldemar von Roon, Albrecht’s son and biographer explained, his father sought Bismarck’s advice, and since Bismarck was ‘intimately tied to Moritz von Blankenburg, chief of the Conservative Party in the Landtag, as was Roon himself’, Bismarck ‘lost no occasion’ when he was in Berlin to consult ‘his older friend after Roon had become minister, and in the long conversations that the three had together a growing agreement of political views began to establish itself’.⁵⁶ Roon needed all the help he could get in the beginning of his career as Minister, for he came under attack from the liberals in Parliament, for whom he was too reactionary, and from reactionaries in the army, for whom he was too moderate. Of these the most persistent and best connected to the King was General Edwin von Manteuffel.

Edwin von Manteuffel (1809–85) deserves a biography at least as much as Moltke and Roon; indeed Manteuffel created the triumvirate of general officers which shaped Prussian German military affairs until 1918. Unlike Roon or Bismarck, Manteuffel belonged to an immensely distinguished family with many branches and dozens of famous soldiers and statesmen among his ancestors. Yet his own family circumstances were inglorious. His branch had little money, and he suffered from a delicate constitution. He was nearsighted, and in spite of his name had few contacts in higher circles.⁵⁷ His cousin, Otto, we have met as the Prussian Minister-President from 1850 to the New Era, who protected and promoted Bismarck. Edwin, unlike his dour and reserved cousin, had a flair for drama and knew thousands of lines of his beloved Schiller by heart. Gordon Craig describes him as an ‘incurable romantic’.⁵⁸ He served in the extremely posh Dragoon Guards as a young officer, attended the War Academy, held a variety of commands and came to the attention of Frederick William IV and the camarilla. During 1848 and afterwards, the King used this reliable officer on special diplomatic missions. In the 1840s Manteuffel went to the lectures of the famous historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and became a devoted disciple of the new scientific history which Ranke taught. Ranke reflected years later on Manteuffel and said, ‘He had more understanding of my writings and a greater spiritual sympathy than was granted to me elsewhere in the world.’⁵⁹

Manteuffel took his most important post in early 1857 when Frederick William IV named him Chief of the Section for Personnel Affairs in the Ministry of War. Even before Bismarck came to power, Manteuffel had arranged the transfer of the office from control of the Minister of War to the personal headquarters of the King, where the title became Chief of the Military Cabinet. This was done on 18 January 1861, when King William I issued ‘a notable, if momentarily unappreciated, cabinet order that henceforth army orders deciding personnel, service details or matters of command would not require ministerial countersignature …’⁶⁰ The Chief of the Military Cabinet, in effect, became solely responsible to the King for making suggestions for the assignment of officers of all ranks to their posts. Thirty years later General von Schweinitz reflected bitterly on this development and the way a successor to Manteuffel, General Emil von Albedyll, exercised an almost invisible dictatorship:

The enormous expansion of the army has made it impossible for the Kaiser to follow careers and to know the personnel as precisely as he used to do, and to regulate it as wisely and justly as formerly. The Chief of the Military Cabinet has become in a natural way very powerful and once he had with the help of Bismarck [Manteuffel did it before Bismarck—JS] made himself independent of the Minister of War who has taken an oath to the constitution, General Albedyll has become the second most powerful man in the land. For in our people there are very few families of the upper class who are not represented by a member serving in the army and hence have either something to hope or fear from General Albedyll, the chief of personnel administration.⁶¹

The most pernicious effect lay in the distortion of decision making. Moltke, important as he was, had his office in 66 Behrenstrasse; Roon and his successors sat in the Kriegsministerium on the Leipziger Strasse. Manteuffel sat in an antechamber of the royal palace and as Adjutant-General he saw the King daily in the normal course of his duties. In a semi-autocratic state like the Kingdom of Prussia, the fact of proximity trumped all other facts. After Roon and Moltke had withdrawn to their offices, the head of the Military Cabinet could listen to the Sovereign’s reactions, help him draft his replies, and gently colour the royal response on broad policy matters. The Militärkabinet grew steadily in power and authority until finally on 8 March 1883 the Emperor removed the institution from the rank list of the Ministry, as an official newspaper reported:

This regulation should come to expression in the rank list of the army in such a way that in future under the ‘Adjutancy of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor and King’ the entire Military Cabinet will be listed, whereas under the rank lists of the Ministry of War, a listing of such names shall henceforth cease and the rubric will simply say: ‘See Military Cabinet’.⁶²

Manteuffel started the process that led inexorably to a Hobbesian war of all against all in the German high command, and since under Stosch the new Imperial Navy adopted the structure of its older model, the Prussian Army, the chaos soon settled in at the naval headquarters as well. Thus, the centralization and efficiency that Moltke achieved in 1866 and 1870 never occurred again, and that was Manteuffel’s legacy. More immediately he made Roon’s life difficult by ever more intransigent statements about the conflict between the Ministry of War and parliament. On 10 March 1860, Manteuffel wrote to Roon that ‘the unconditional maintenance of the Military Cabinet, particularly at the present moment, is a necessity.’⁶³ The next day he wrote again to strengthen Roon’s resistance:

When a question of principle arises, all the world counsels concession and compromise and advises against bringing matters to a head, and that when this or that minister has acted upon the rules of prudence and the momentary emergency has passed, then everyone says, ‘how could he have given in like that?’⁶⁴

The new regiments promised in Roon’s plan should be established right away, whether or not parliament had conceded the necessary funds. On 29 May 1860 Manteuffel wrote to Roon to make it absolutely clear where he—and by implication the Prince Regent—stood on this issue:

I consider the state of the army morale and its inner energy imperilled and the position of the Prince Regent compromised if these regiments are not established definitively at once.⁶⁵

On the other hand, Roon, Moltke, and later Bismarck all needed Manteuffel’s help and support. He shared their ends, disagreeing only on means and on style. Manteuffel played a crucial part in convincing the Prince Regent to appoint Moltke as Chief of the General Staff and to give him wide powers. Nor was Manteuffel as reactionary as some of his utterances in the 1860s suggest. When in 1879 he became Governor-General of Alsace, a post which reported directly to the Emperor, he went out of his way to promote and encourage Alsatian personnel. He went to great pains to reconcile these unwilling German subjects with their fate.⁶⁶ The problem that Manteuffel posed for Roon in 1860 arose from his flamboyant temperament, his direct access to the King, his position in the palace, his brilliance and literary flair, and the fact that he had become a general and hence beyond the control of Bismarck, a mere civilian. As early as December 1857 Bismarck complained to Leopold von Gerlach about his treatment by Edwin von Manteuffel, who spoke to him ‘as a teacher gives instruction to a child … Edwin’s behaviour to me is … always disapproving and suspicious.’ Too much ‘servility’ has spoiled Edwin: ‘… all the more I need your assurance that this fanatical corporal, this Edwin, did not act on your instructions when recently he treated me as a doubtful political intriguer who had to be got out of Berlin as soon as possible.’⁶⁷

But that was exactly Bismarck’s position in late 1857 and afterwards, a ‘doubtful political intriguer’ always showing up at the palace uninvited, an ambitious, clever, unstable figure, whom Edwin von Manteuffel had every reason to mistrust. Nevertheless, when it became a question of Bismarck’s appointment to the Minister-Presidency, Manteuffel backed him loyally. Like Roon he saw that nobody could or would do for the army what Bismarck had in mind.

In 1860 all that lay ahead and Bismarck vegetated in Berlin without orders. Apparently the Prince Regent had specifically issued instructions that Bismarck ‘should stay here’,⁶⁸ and simply wait, not an easy order to obey for somebody of Bismarck’s volcanic temperament, but not unusual for the Prince Regent. He combined a genuine concern for his servants with a sovereign disdain for the price his long hesitations would impose on them. The first round of ‘Bismarck as Foreign Minister’, took four months; the next round of ‘Bismarck as Minister-President’ to be played out in 1862 would take longer and be even more nerve-wracking. Still, even the lesser prize attracted the restless Bismarck, as he confessed to his brother, if somebody ‘put a pistol to [his] breast, it would be cowardice to refuse’ the office of Foreign Minister.⁶⁹ Nobody did. In early June 1860, he telegraphed Schlözer from Kovno that he would arrive in a day or two.⁷⁰ And, apparently this suited him. After his return to St Petersburg, he wrote to Legation Councillor Wentzel, a former subordinate in Frankfurt:

I have settled in here at considerable cost for many years to come and could not wish for a more agreeable chief than Schleinitz. I have really got close to him and am rather fond of him. I wish sincerely that his desire to change places with me never happens, I would not last six months as minister.⁷¹

None of this suggests that Bismarck had given up his ambition to be Foreign Minister or Minister-President nor that he had now settled down to enjoy the view over the Neva from his ambassadorial residence. One of his implacable enemies, the Prime Minister of Baden, Franz Freiherr von Roggenbach, wrote on 25 August 1860, to the liberal academic and journalist Max Duncker, that Bismarck was nothing more than ‘an unprincipled Junker who wants to make his career in rabble-rousing’.⁷² There is something in the charge but there was much more to Bismarck than that. He really yearned for peace and contentment in some imagined countryside but, when he had it, it made him restless. He behaved brutally to friends but cared very much for his brother and sister. The other side of him comes to expression in the following letter which he wrote to his sister, one of the most beautiful I have found:

I have to be torn from the clockwork mechanism of work here and through an Imperial summons be commanded to have a few free hours to come to my senses and write to you. Daily life controls my every movement from the breakfast cup to about four with every manner of duty, in paper or person, and then I ride until six. After dinner I approach the inkwell on doctor’s orders only with great care and in the most extreme emergency. Instead I read documents and newspapers that have arrived and about midnight I go to bed amused and thoughtful about all the strange demands that the Prussian in Russia makes of his ambassador. Before dropping off to sleep I think then of the best of all sisters but to write to that angel becomes possible only when the Tsar orders me to appear for an audience at 1 and I have to take the 10 a.m. train. So I have two hours during which the apartment of the most beautiful of all grandmothers, Princess Wjäsemski, is placed at my disposal, where I write you … I look out over the desk and through the window down the hill over birch and maples in whose leaves red and yellow dominate the green, behind them the grass green roofs of the village, to the left of which a church with five onion-shaped domes stands out and that all framed against an endless horizon of bush, meadow and woodland. Behind their brown, grey tints somewhere, visible with a spy-glass could be seen St Isaac’s in Petersburg … After the long wanderings since the beginning of 1859 the feeling of actually living with my family somewhere is so soothing that I tear myself from the home and hearth very unwillingly.⁷³

Both sides of Otto von Bismarck were present at all times: the family man who craved the soothing quiet of his own home, the loving brother who addressed his letter to his kid sister ‘my beloved heart’, and in the same moment he could behave as the tenacious, devious, and utterly ruthless schemer, determined to get power no matter how.

That Bismarck was unhappy struck the young Friedrich von Holstein, who joined the St Petersburg embassy in January 1861 as an unpaid intern, as we would now call him. Years later he recorded his first impressions of the great man whom he idolized and served for thirty years:

When I presented myself, he held out his hand and said, ‘you are welcome’. As he stood there, tall, erect, unsmiling, I saw him as he was later to appear to his family and the rest of the world: A man who allows no one to know him intimately … At that time Bismarck was forty-five, slightly bald, with fair hair turning grey, not noticeably corpulent, sallow complexion. Never gay, even when telling amusing anecdotes, a thing he did only occasionally, in particularly congenial company. I have never known anyone so joyless as Bismarck.⁷⁴

The judgement that Bismarck had no ‘joy’ in life may well reflect Holstein’s own ‘joyless’ last years and his disillusion with the idolized genius he had once adored, but the lack of warmth in the greeting must have made a deep impression on the young diplomat.

On 18 January 1861, thirty-six new infantry regiments, none of which had been authorized by the Landtag, presented their standards at the tomb of Frederick the Great.⁷⁵ Minister-President von Auerswald went to ask Manteuffel to intervene with the King and got a dose of Manteuffel’s arrogance and provocative attitude:

I do not understand what Your Excellency desires. His Majesty has ordered me to arrange a military ceremony. Am I to renounce this because there are a number of people sitting in a house on the Dönhoff Platz, who call themselves a Landtag and who may be displeased with this ceremony? As a general, I have never yet been ordered to take my instructions from these people.⁷⁶

Manteuffel’s outrageous attitude angered a young liberal deputy called Karl Twesten. In April 1861 he published anonymously an 88-page pamphlet entitled ‘What can still save us: a blunt word’.⁷⁷ He attacked Manteuffel personally as a dangerous political general, long out of contact with the army, which distrusted him. ‘Will we have to suffer a Battle of Solferino before we can remove this unwholesome man from an unwholesome position?’⁷⁸ Manteuffel demanded to know the name of the author and Twesten acknowledged it, whereupon Manteuffel challenged Twesten to a duel which took place on 27 May 1861. Twesten’s shot missed Manteuffel, who offered to withdraw the challenge if Twesten would retract. Twesten refused and Manteuffel, a much better shot, shattered Twesten’s right arm. When he offered to shake hands, Twesten apologized for offering his left hand and said, ‘he will have to excuse me that it is not the right hand but that he himself has made impossible.’⁷⁹ The duel made both participants nationally famous and personalized the issues between the army and the nation in an emotional form, exactly what Manteuffel wanted to do. Twesten’s intemperate speeches and vivid language further inflamed the conflict.

The King was beside himself with distress about the duel. He told Roon, ‘I have a bucket full of trouble.’ It was bad enough that the duel, an act forbidden by law, between Deputy Twesten and Military Cabinet Chief von Manteuffel, forced King William to dismiss von Manteuffel and call for a military court martial; but worst of all, was the personal impact:

In just this moment to be without Manteuffel’s service, a triumph for the democracy which managed to chase him out of my presence; the excitement that the affair must cause in my immediate family circle, these are things that look set to rob me of my sanity, because it puts an unhappy new stamp on my government. Where does heaven want to lead me?⁸⁰

Early in June a group of left liberals, with the wounded Twesten foremost among them, formed a new party, the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, the German Progressive Party, committed to a national state, a strong government, full parliamentary authority, and communal self-government. It was the first formal party programme in German history.⁸¹ The new party became at a stroke the largest in the Landtag.

In the meantime another row had blown up about the coronation ceremony for William I as King of Prussia. Liberals insisted that he take an oath on the constitution and the King absolutely refused to countenance any such concession. He intended to have a feudal ceremony of homage. Roon now went into action. The time had come to summon Bismarck to take power. On 28 June 1861 he sent Bismarck a telegram with the following wording: ‘It is “nothing” [English in the original—JS]. Start your planned holiday without delay. Periculum in mora [danger in delay].’ The telegram was signed Moritz C. Henning, which Bismarck would at once recognize as his friend, Moritz Karl Henning von Blanckenburg. The phrase Periculum in mora would recur in the more famous summons of 1862.⁸²

Bismarck took his time in reply, wrote a letter on 1 July, added a paragraph on the 2nd, and sent it with a further addition on the 3rd by the English courier to Berlin. He was in no hurry to take power until his agenda had been accepted. The coronation ceremony was too trivial to topple the Auerswald cabinet and priorities in domestic and foreign policy were exactly the wrong way round—conservative abroad and liberal at home, as Bismarck explained to Roon in a letter in July 1861:

the good royalist mass of voters will not understand the coronation issue and the Democracy will distort it. It would be better to stick firmly to the military question, break with the chamber on it and call new elections to show the nation how the King stands by his people.⁸³

The letter shows that by the summer of 1861 Bismarck had the firm outlines of the policy he was to follow in 1863 and 1864. No concessions to liberalism at home, the battle to be fought over the military question at whatever cost in bad election results, and an aggressive foreign policy to catch the popular imagination. ‘We are almost as vain as the French. If we can convince ourselves that we have respect abroad, we will put up with a lot at home.’⁸⁴ Bismarck went to Berlin and then Schleinitz ordered him to Baden, while Roon travelled in other directions. They simply could not reach each other and coordinate a place to meet, no matter how urgently they needed to talk. How the cell phone simplifies arrangements!

In September on holiday in Stolpmünde, Bismarck wrote a summary of his position on the German question to his close friend, Alexander Ewald von Below-Hohendorf. It is, I think, the clearest account of Bismarck’s contempt for the world of the petty princes and the most drastic statement of his own very unconventional conservatism. Remember that this text was addressed to a dear friend, who had looked after him in 1859 when he was ill and who prescribed Christian love as the remedy for Bismarck’s illness. Imagine how such a devout rural gentleman would have reacted to the cynicism dripping from this prose.

The system of solidarity of the conservative interests of all countries is a dangerous fiction … We arrive at a point where we make the whole unhistorical, godless and lawless sovereignty swindle of the German princes into the darling of the Prussian Conservative Party. Our government is in fact liberal domestically and legitimist in foreign policy. We protect foreign monarchical rights with greater tenacity than our own and wax lyrical about little sovereignties created by Napoleon and sanctioned by Metternich to the point of utter blindness to all the dangers to which Prussia’s and Germany’s independence is exposed as long as the madness of the present federal constitution survives, which is after all nothing but a green house and storage centre for dangerous and revolutionary separatist movements … Beside I cannot see a reason why we coyly shrink from the idea of a popular assembly, whether at the Federal level or in the Zoll Parliament; an institution, which operates in every German state and which we Conservatives in Prussia cannot do without, can hardly be called a revolutionary innovation.⁸⁵

This kind of Realpolitik repelled the pious Christians who were conservatives out of faith and not self-interest. Bismarck no longer hesitated to broadcast his views to all those who might be persuaded and those who might not.

While Bismarck attacked the ‘sovereignty swindle’, the King backed down on the feudal ceremony and was crowned without further friction on 18 October 1861, in Königsberg. Bismarck as a royal servant attended the ceremony and wrote a typical letter to his sister about how the ceremony threatened his health:

Changing clothes three times a day and the draughts in all the halls and corridors still lies in all my extremities. On the 18^TH on the palace grounds in the open air I had as a precautionary device put on a thick military uniform and a wig in comparison to which Bernhard’s is a mere lock of hair, otherwise the two hours bare-headed would have been very bad for me.⁸⁶

Concessions on the homage question had not improved the atmosphere in the classes that voted in Prussia. On 6 December 1861 Prussian voters returned a lower chamber of 352 deputies, of whom 104 were German Progressives who had remained the largest party, 48 other Liberals, and 91 ‘constitutionals’ (moderate liberals who supported the Auerswald government); in other words, 69 per cent of the new Landtag belonged to the liberal persuasion and of those the most extreme wing had become the largest. Bismarck’s conservative friends had shrunk from 47 deputies to a mere 14, a sorry rump for the party of the Junker ruling class.⁸⁷

On 3 April 1862 Edwin von Manteuffel wrote a letter to Roon in which he cheerfully conjured up the threat of revolution:

I recognize no advances in the battle except with weapons in hand, and we are in the midst of the battle. How can the three-year service be given up during his reign without bringing shame to the personal position of the All-Highest? … The army will not understand it; its confidence in the King will slacken and the consequences for the internal condition of the army will be incalculable … We shall see bloody heads and then good election results will come.⁸⁸

Max Duncker, the liberal journalist, quoted Psalm 42 to sum up the situation: ‘As the hart panteth after the water-brooks so the army thirsts for riots.’⁸⁹

In this overheated atmosphere, the kingdom’s voters went to the polls on 6 May 1862. By 18 May, the two stages of the elections had been completed and the government of the King had suffered an unmitigated electoral disaster. The left liberals had gained 29 seats compared to 1861 and at 133 members formed the largest Fraktion, as the parliamentary parties were called, in the Landtag. The other Liberals had doubled their representation from 48 to 96 and the remaining ‘Constitutionals’ who had supported the New Era shrank from 91 to 19 seats. The numbers showed an unequivocal shift to the left. The left liberals now controlled 65 per cent of the seats and the King’s supporters had shrivelled to a mere 11 deputies.⁹⁰

Was Prussia on the eve of revolution? Was this the great ‘turning point where nothing turned’? There are good reasons to think the answer is no. Structural factors suggest that there were no grounds to fear revolution. Let us look at the voting figures. The three-class voting system which the constitutional amendment of 1850 had introduced created an odd electoral system. Class 1 contained the top 5 per cent of taxpayers, Class II the next 13 per cent, and Class III the remaining 81 per cent. It was a universal but very unequal system of suffrage and favoured, as was intended, the well-to-do. If we take the contested election of 6 December 1861, the numbers of those entitled to vote were as follows with figures in percentages showing the share of each class of the total number of those entitled to vote.

The share of power granted by this system to the lower orders meant that the vote in Prussian elections mattered most to those with the most. The taxation basis insured that only a tiny number of people could vote in category I in the electoral districts; sometimes no such voters appeared at all, because nobody in the electoral district paid enough tax. At the other end, the complex two-stage voting system (voters voted for electors called Wahlmänner, who then voted for candidates), and the rigged system of weighting made it impossible for the masses to get involved. Electoral turnout in Category III was always low, usually well under 20 per cent. Thus the hotly contested elections of the Konfliktzeit attracted only the voters in Classes I and II. The German Progressive Party looked threatening to Manteuffel but it represented the well-educated and well-heeled bourgeoisie who were unlikely to erect guillotines on the pavement in front of the royal palace.

We know this now, of course, because the liberals never staged a revolution nor even managed to organize passive resistance such as a tax strike, that is, a refusal to pay taxes until the Landtag’s right to control the army’s budget had been granted. A tax strike had recently brought the reactionary Prince-Elector of Hesse-Cassel to the negotiating table when he tried to rule without his parliament. Could anybody be certain that constant agitation by the progressive liberals might not in the end have brought the masses into the streets? Manteuffel and a few extremists among the senior officers hoped that a ‘bloody heads’ scenario would be the pretext to restore the absolute monarchy, abolish the constitution, and quash electoral activity, creating in effect a military dictatorship. Neither the King nor Roon wanted that kind of outcome; indeed Roon had been willing to compromise for a long time, much to the disgust of Manteuffel.

Now as in 1861 the King began to think about Bismarck and in April 1862 he was summoned from St Petersburg to Berlin for consultations. Bismarck wrote to tell Roon that he would soon be in Berlin to discuss a transfer either to Paris or London.⁹² A few days later he wrote to one of his former staff in Frankfurt that he was still not certain about his next post and must go to Berlin to find out. ‘So I travel without knowing where’, and must sell his Russian furniture and possessions at short notice quite unnecessarily, a certain way to lose a great deal of money.⁹³ When he reached Berlin, he found a characteristic situation: the King could not make up his mind. As he wrote to Johanna on 17 May 1862, ‘our future is as uncertain as ever. Berlin has moved to centre stage [a ministerial post—JS]. I do nothing for and nothing against but will drink myself silly when I have my accreditation for Paris in my pocket.’⁹⁴ We know by now that Bismarck always told Johanna that he had shunned the post he most wanted and it is clear from other sources that Bismarck had been hard at his palace intrigues to become Minister-President. In May 1862, Roon recorded in his notes that ‘Bismarck had been received several times in long audiences by the King. With several ministers he had long discussions and went every day to the Ministry of War. The initiated believed that his appointment to the Ministry must be expected directly.’⁹⁵

In the midst of the ministerial crisis, on 21 May 1862, Roon’s friend Clement Theodor Perthes wrote a very significant assessment of Bismarck on the eve of his possible appointment to high or the highest office:

Bismarck-Schönhausen has great moral courage. A decisive spirit expresses itself in the energetic tone of his voice in all his speeches. He can sweep people along with him. He has no previous political training and lacks a thorough political education … He has a series of contradictions in his character. His wife, a Puttkamer by birth, is a strict Lutheran, related to Thadden-Trieglaff and very respectful of him. Bismarck inclines to a determined Lutheranism too but is irresponsible. There is an absent-mindedness in him and he can easily be stirred by sympathies and antipathies … He is thoroughly honest and straight but his policies can be immoral. By nature he has an unforgiving, vengeful tendency, which his religious sensibility and nobility of character keep under control.⁹⁶

Perthes catches in this short sketch the deep dualism in Bismarck and the powerful contradictions in his nature. I would doubt that ‘thoroughly honest and straight’ ever applied to Bismarck. We know from his own accounts that he always lied to his parents and we have seen him lie regularly to Johanna, nor do I see any evidence that his Christianity had the slightest restraining effect on his vengefulness. Von Below showed us how little Christian love the heart of Bismarck contained. But Perthes foreshadowed the internal struggle that marked Bismarck’s years in power very accurately. Contemporaries intuit aspects of character which subsequent observers may well overlook.

By 23 May 1862, Bismarck could tell his wife that it would be Paris to which he would be sent,

but the shadow still remains in the background. I was almost caught by the cabinet so I will get away as quickly as I can … perhaps they will find another Minister-President as soon as I am out of sight.⁹⁷

Two days later he wrote to his wife and brother that ‘everybody here is sworn to keep me here’ and that if he goes to Paris, it will be for a short time only.⁹⁸ By 30 May he had arrived in Paris and wrote to Roon on 2 June 1862 to say that ‘I have arrived here safely and live like a rat in an empty barn.’ He hoped that the King would find another Minister-President and insisted that he would not accept a position of Minister without Portfolio because

the position is impractical: to have nothing to say and to have to bear everything, to stink about in everything without being asked and to be chewed up by everyone where one has something really to say.⁹⁹

Roon replied two days later that ‘I took the occasion yesterday in influential quarters to raise the minister-president question and found the same leaning toward you and the same indecision. Who can help here? And how will this end?’¹⁰⁰ Roon described in graphic detail the impossible situation in the new Landtag which had assembled for the first time on 19 May 1862. The only majority for a government would put the Democrats in control and that remained unthinkable. ‘Under these conditions, so says my logic, the present government might as well remain in office.’¹⁰¹ And Bismarck replied a few days later. ‘Rest assured that I undertake no counter-moves and manoeuvres … I am not lifting a finger.’¹⁰²

By late June, Roon had become desperate. He expressed it in a passionate outburst to his friend:

More courage! More energetic activity abroad and at home! More action must be brought into this Ifflandish family drama. For that you are irreplaceable … how is it possible that Prussia will not go under?—And nonetheless, we must fight to the last drop of blood. Can that happen with a knife with a blade and which has no grip? Now you are off to London, Vichy, Trouville, I don’t know where and when you will get this letter …¹⁰³

Indeed, as Roon wrote, Bismarck had arrived in London, where he remained until 4 July. It was during this visit that Bismarck met Benjamin Disraeli, at the home of the Russian Ambassador Brunnow. Disraeli, novelist, dandy, brilliant speaker, was the only contemporary of Bismarck’s who could match him in wit and political agility. This was the first occasion that these two remarkable men met. In those years, Disraeli, who had already served as leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1852 government under Lord Derby, was now going through a long period in opposition. He had in the period out of office established his authority over the Conservative Party which would make him Prime Minister by 1868. Disraeli recorded Bismarck’s statement of his political intentions, which he declared in his astonishingly frank way:

I shall soon be compelled to undertake the conduct of the Prussian government. My first care will be to reorganize the army, with or without, the help of the Landtag … As soon as the army shall have been brought into such a condition as to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership. I have come here to say this to the Queen’s ministers.

On the way home, Disraeli accompanied Friedrich, Count Vitzthum von Eckstädt, the Austrian envoy to his residence. As they parted, Disraeli said to Vitzthum: ‘Take care of that man; he means what he says.’ And he did.¹⁰⁴

On 5 July, Bismarck got back to Paris and found Roon’s various letters waiting. He reported briefly on his impressions of London. ‘Just back from London where they know more about China and Turkey than about Prussia … If I am going to live here longer, so I must definitely settle down with wife and horses and servants. I don’t know any longer what and where to have my lunch …’¹⁰⁵ And to his wife he wrote that the ambassador’s house in Paris was ‘awful’ and made some suggestions on how to make it more habitable.¹⁰⁶ His own plan for his future was typically Bismarckian, as he explained to Roon in a letter of 15 July: ‘I will not put pressure on the King by lying at anchor in Berlin and will not go home because I fear that on the journey through Berlin I shall be nailed to the guest house for an uncertain length of time …’

Roon too needed a holiday. Just before leaving Berlin, he wrote a long account of his present political position to his friend and confidante, Perthes:

I am getting determined and poisonous enemies who are a bit frightened of me and warm friends who like to honour my weakness a little. In certain high circles I am la bête and in others I am a pis-aller, the trusty last nail in the structure. In view of this importance of mine now grown beyond my capacities I feel the need in moments of quiet for my amusement to study the histories of Strafford and Latour, both noble counts, who like me had the passion to enlist themselves for the cause of their sovereigns, although one difference among others is that mine serves a better cause than theirs. As a result the prophecy, which I announced myself years ago ‘that I would die by the neck’ has acquired also another significance.¹⁰⁷

In fact, Roon, as he got older, suffered increasingly from asthma and by the end he could have been said to have ‘died by the neck’.

Bismarck went off on holiday by himself to southern France. From 27 to 29 July 1862 he was in Bordeaux, then on to San Sebastian by 1 August. On 4 August he arrived at Biarritz where, as he wrote to Johanna, he could see from his hotel, ‘the charming view of the blue sea, which drives its white foam between wonderful cliffs towards the light house’.¹⁰⁸ He joined the Prince and Princess Orloff for the next fortnight of sea, sun, and walks. The Orloffs were the grandest of Russian grand nobility. Prince Nikolaus, handsome and charming, had been crippled during the Crimean War, lost an eye, and had his arm shattered. His wife, a Princess Trubetskoy, came from an even grander and much richer family. She was 22 when she met Bismarck, about the age that Marie von Thadden had been when Bismarck first met her. There seems little doubt that Bismarck fell in love with the Princess and in the same way as he had with Marie, a forbidden love of a younger woman who was married to another man. They took walks together, bathed, lay in the sun, exchanged books, and Bismarck recovered his joy in life. As he wrote to Johanna,

next to me the most charming of all women, whom you would certainly love if you knew her better, a bit of Marie von Thadden, a bit of Nadi, but original for herself, funny, clever and charming … when you two come together, you will forgive me that I go into such raptures … I am ludicrously healthy and so happy, as I can be far from my loved ones.¹⁰⁹

He wrote to his sister in the same tones and confessed ‘you know how these things occasionally hit me, without doing any harm to Johanna.’¹¹⁰ One wonders what Johanna must have felt when Bismarck compared Katharina to Marie.

What Katharina felt we do not know. Her grandson, who published a collection of letters between his grandmother and Bismarck in the midst of the Second World War, tried to maintain the proprieties and suggested that it was all quite harmless. Bismarck wrote to her as ‘Catty’ and she to him as ‘Uncle’, and he was, after all, twenty-five years older than she. My guess is that she was flattered, fascinated by the magnetism and brilliance of the man, but never remotely in love with him in return. Bismarck left the idyllic surroundings in Biarritz but the correspondence continued over the coming years, the most intense and stressful of Bismarck’s life. They came to an abrupt and—for Bismarck—painful end three years later, when Bismarck now Minister-President of Prussia, tried to recapture the rapture of 1862 by taking his family to the Hotel L’Europe in Biarritz in late September of 1865. He had written to his ‘Catty’ to tell her that he intended to be there. When they arrived, it rained the whole time. Catty never appeared and left no notice. She had forgotten her promise and she and her husband had decided to take a holiday in England. On 3 October 1865 she wrote to apologize. ‘Dear Uncle, What will you say to me now? I have been a bad niece, for I have broken my word to you. This time, alas, we must renounce our dear Biarritz …’¹¹¹ It took Bismarck two weeks to answer and when he did, the bitterness could not be concealed. It begins formally

Dear Catharine,

It is true that you played me a trick which goes well beyond the privileges of a ‘méchante enfant’, since it was entirely adult and grown up bad manners … You would have done me a great service if you had informed me of the change in your plans … That is the reason I wanted to await the departure of an acquaintance to write to tell you freely the entire mischief [English in the original—JS] which you caused by your silence … Although it was very painful to me to see how quickly the poor uncle has been forgotten even in situations where a small sign of life would have meant a great deal, I have now gone too far along my road of life and have now too little chance …¹¹²

The letter breaks off at this point and is allegedly missing. My guess is that Prince Orloff censored the next few sentences because they were too revealing. There is more than enough in the text to show how deeply hurt Bismarck must have been. A man of 50 in love with a woman half his age may look ridiculous but the pain of rejection, if anything, can be more acute. This yearning for the love of a beautiful woman forms part of the portrait of the great Bismarck and not an insignificant one.

On the way back to Paris in September 1862, in Toulouse, Bismarck found a long letter from Roon dated 31 August, in which he set out the present situation and his hopes for an immediate Bismarck ministry.

My dear B! You will more or less be able to guess why I have not answered you before. I hoped and always hoped for a decision or even for a situation which must bring an acute solution … I shall assume your agreement and will counsel that you be named temporarily Minister-President without portfolio, something I have so far avoided. There is no other way! If you absolutely reject this, disavow me or order me to be silent. I have a private audience with the Gentleman on the 7th … You have time to object … The internal catastrophe will not happen now but in the Spring and by then you have to be there.¹¹³

On 12 September Bismarck replied from Toulouse that his present situation had become intolerable. His possessions were scattered all over Europe and much of them would freeze in St Petersburg if he still had no idea where to send them before winter set in. He had reached the point where he would accept anything if it put an end to the uncertainty. ‘If you secure me this certainty or any other certainty, I will paint angels’ wings on your picture.’¹¹⁴

On 17 September 1862 Roon made a conciliatory speech in the Landtag. The government had never in any way speculated on that which had come to be called a ‘conflict’ but on the contrary they really wanted to achieve an agreement over the outstanding questions.¹¹⁵ In his memoirs Bismarck wrote:

In Paris I received the following telegram, the signature of which had been agreed upon:

‘Berlin: le 18 Septembre.

Periculum in mora, Dépêchez-vous.

L’oncle de Maurice,

HENNING.’¹¹⁶

This formula, as we have seen, had been used in Roon’s previous attempt to hoist Bismarck into office and it produced its effect. On 22 September 1862 Roon went to Babelsberg to report that the Landtag by a vote of 308 to 11 had approved the amended budget for 1862 but had rejected by 273 to 68 the entire army reform as part of the budget. Resignation letters had already been submitted by Hohenlohe, Heydt, and Bernstorff. The King asked for Roon’s advice. Roon: ‘Your Majesty, summon Bismarck.’ King: ‘He will not want it and now he will not take it on. Besides he is not here and nothing can be discussed with him.’ Roon: ‘He is here. He will accept your Majesty’s command willingly.’¹¹⁷ Bismarck had arrived in Berlin on 20 September.¹¹⁸ This is his account of what happened next. He was

summoned to the Crown Prince. To his question as to my view of the situation, I could only give a very cautious answer, because I had read no German papers during the last few weeks … The impression which the fact of my audience had made was at once discernible from Roon’s statement that the King had said to him, referring to me: ‘He is no good either; you see he has already been to see my son.’ The bearing of this remark was not at once comprehensible to me, because I did not know that the King, having conceived the idea of abdication, assumed that I either knew or suspected it, and had therefore tried to place myself favourably with his successor.¹¹⁹

In spite of the King’s suspicions, he invited Bismarck to an audience. Here is Bismarck’s account of the occasion:

I was received at Babelsberg on September 22, and the situation only became clear to me when his Majesty defined it in some such words as these: ‘I will not reign if I cannot do it in such a fashion as I can be answerable to God, my conscience, and my subjects. But I cannot do that if I am to rule according to the will of the present majority in parliament, and I can no longer find any ministers prepared to conduct my government without subjecting themselves and me to the parliamentary majority. I have therefore resolved to lay down my crown, and have already sketched out the proclamation of my abdication, based on the motives to which I have referred.’ The King showed me the document in his own handwriting lying on the table, whether already signed or not I do not know. His Majesty concluded by repeating that he could not govern without suitable ministers.

I replied that his Majesty had been acquainted ever since May with my readiness to enter the ministry; I was certain that Roon would remain with me on his side, and I did not doubt that we should succeed in completing the cabinet, supposing other members should feel themselves compelled to resign on account of my admission. After a good deal of consideration and discussion, the King asked me whether I was prepared as minister to advocate the reorganization of the army, and when I assented he asked me further whether I would do so in opposition to the majority in parliament and its resolutions. When I asserted my willingness, he finally declared, ‘Then it is my duty, with your help, to attempt to continue the battle, and I shall not abdicate.’ I do not know whether he destroyed the document, which was lying on the table, or whether he preserved it in rei memoriam.¹²⁰

The decision to appoint Bismarck ensured that King William would have trouble at home. The Crown Princess recorded that the Queen would be desperately unhappy. In a diary entry of 23 September 1862, she wrote,¹²¹ ‘Poor Mama! How the appointment of her arch-enemy will pain her.’ As early as July, Queen Augusta had made her position absolutely clear.

As the envoy to the Bundestag Herr v. B always filled those governments friendly to Prussia with mistrust and affected those houses hostile to Prussia with political views which did not correspond to the position of Prussia in Germany but to its status as a threatening great power.¹²²

The battle between Queen and Minister-President had begun. In this case, unlike the poor stenographers in the Reichstag, the Queen’s hatred was not a figment of Bismarck’s disordered imagination. She really was his enemy and did everything possible to get rid of him.

On 24 September 1862 Bleichröder wrote to Baron James de Rothschild:

We are in the middle of a ministerial crisis. Herr von Bismarck-Schönhausen as Minister-President is occupied with the formation of a new cabinet. Roon, the war minister, remains, and this is proof enough that the conflict between Chamber and Crown will notbe solved by the change of ministry … it appears as if we were to get an entirely reactionary ministry.¹²³

That prospect made even Bismarck’s friends uneasy, but for different reasons. The news that Bismarck had been summoned to Berlin spread quickly. On 20 September, even before Bismarck’s audience, Ludwig von Gerlach wrote to Kleist-Retzow:

However great my reservations are about Bismarck, not only in respect to Austria or France but in respect of God’s commandments, I would not even dare to work against him—because I know no possible person who would be better. If he fails too, we fall into God’s hands. Will you not summon Moritz to Berlin as Roon’s political soul? Also for Bismarck’s sake?¹²⁴

Hans von Kleist replied on 22 September that he had seen his friend: ‘Bismarck is fresh and in good humour. I think we do him an injustice if we mean that he doubts the truth of the Cathecism.’¹²⁵

Bismarck, now in office, had to arrange his affairs. He wrote to Wentzel in Frankfurt to find out if his former cook in Frankfurt, Riepe, would be willing to come to Berlin and asked Wentzel to sound him out. First things first, in Bismarck’s mind. Then he told Wentzel that Count Bernstorff would be leaving for the Prussian Embassy in London sometime between 7 and 10 October, and that he, Bismarck, would then take over the Foreign Ministry.¹²⁶

On the same day, Major Stosch wrote to his friend, Otto von Holtzendorff, a liberal judge in Coburg, that the crisis had really now become acute:

The rumours about the resignation of the King become more and more lively, and who knows if that would not be a politically correct step. If the King gives in and the Progressives win, we shall be plunged into the whirlpool of theoretical revolution, hair-splitting dogmatism, and impractical ambitious democracy. The Crown Prince has done everything to change his father’s mind. My General [Heinrich von Brandt—JS] says, nothing can happen in the army question, because the society of elderly gentlemen whom they use as advisers will take care not to say anything that those in highest circles will not want to hear. Manteuffel is the man who summons the puppets and gives them their roles.¹²⁷

Stosch had yet to reckon with the impact of the new Minister-President, Otto von Bismarck; it was not Manteuffel who ‘summoned the puppets’, but Bismarck. In the meantime Bismarck had to confront the Landtag in its rebellious frame of mind. On the 29th he withdrew the budget altogether, the first of many provocations. Next he prepared to make his first public appearance as Minister-President in a speech which he intended to make to the Budget Committee of the Landtag, the very lion’s den of the opposition. It became the most famous speech he ever made, his first parliamentary appearance as Minister-President, and here is the most famous passage:

Prussia must build up and preserve her strength for the advantageous moment, which has already come and gone many times. Her borders under the treaties of Vienna are not favourable for the healthy existence of the state. The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.¹²⁸

The attentive reader—and I hope there are a few—will not find that text surprising. Over many years Bismarck had said more or less the same thing to all sorts and conditions of listeners. In May 1862 he had advanced exactly the same argument to Foreign Minister von Schleinitz and had even used almost the same phrase, ferro et igni, iron and fire, rather than ‘iron and blood’. Admittedly, Latin is not German and a private letter not public testimony before a committee of a lower house of parliament. What had changed was not Bismarck, nor his ideas, but the atmosphere. For once Bismarck underestimated his own importance.

I have no doubt that he had decided to use that tactic in the relatively restricted forum of a committee hearing. He had—a rare slip—underestimated his ‘old reputation for irresponsible violence’. Liberals in the lower house and in the country believed that the King had appointed Bismarck to provoke the Landtag into ever greater folly at which point Bismarck’s puppet master, von Manteuffel, would get the King to declare martial law and suspend the parliament. The army would occupy Berlin and install a royal military dictatorship. Napoleon III had done exactly that on 2 December 1851, and got away with it, and France had a much greater tradition of revolution and disorder than Prussia. In the overheated imagination of people like Twesten only that could explain the appointment of so notorious, implacable, and unreconstructed a reactionary as Otto von Bismarck. The historically minded could also compare Bismarck’s appointment by the King of Prussia in 1862 to the Bourbon King of France’s appointment in 1829 of Prince Jules Polignac, the most intransigent ultra then available. Charles X used the appointment to signal the end of constitutional monarchy in France and the Revolution of 1830 followed hard on that move. Why not the same scenario in Prussia?

Bismarck’s ‘iron and blood’ speech, his first as Minister-President, could easily have been his last and nearly was. Informed opinion in the country was shocked and outraged. The right-wing liberal, and famous historian, Heinrich von Treitschke wrote to his brother-in-law:

You know how passionately I love Prussia, but when I hear so shallow a country-squire as this Bismarck bragging about the ‘iron and blood’ with which he intends to subdue Germany, the meanness of it seems to be exceeded only by the absurdity.¹²⁹

Much the most important reaction has left no trace but must have happened over the breakfast table or in the royal bedroom, if we assume that the old couple still shared a common bed, at the spa in Baden-Baden, where King William had repaired after his strenuous weeks in Berlin. In any case, no married person will find it hard to understand the impact of Queen Augusta’s ‘I told you so!’ which must have been repeated from every angle. Had she not warned her Lord and Sovereign not to trust Bismarck? Had not the Grand Duke of Baden and the King of Saxony and many other dear relatives not warned the King? etc., etc. And it worked. The King in order to have a little peace and quiet gave in. Yes, he would go to Berlin and have it out with Bismarck and, well, yes, get rid of him.

While we have no record of the conversations in the royal household, we have a fine piece of Bismarck the novelist in his account of what happened next. He was, as always, very careful not to admit fault, let alone that the speech had been a blunder. Bismarck knew he had to see the King urgently so he took the unusual and desperate step of halting the train before it got to Berlin. This account needs to be read with scepticism:

I had some difficulty in discovering from the curt answers of the officials the carriage in the ordinary train, in which the King was seated by himself in an ordinary first-class compartment. The after-effect of his intercourse with his wife was an obvious depression, and when I begged for permission to narrate the events which had occurred during his absence, he interrupted me with the words: ‘I can perfectly well see where all this will end. Over there, in front of the Opera House, under my windows, they will cut off your head, and mine a little while afterwards.’ I guessed, and it was afterwards confirmed by witnesses, that during his week’s stay at Baden his mind had been worked upon with variations on the theme of Polignac, Strafford, and Lewis XVI. When he was silent, I answered with the short remark, ‘Et après, Sire?’ ‘Après, indeed; we shall be dead,’ answered the King. ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘then we shall be dead; but we must all die sooner or later, and can we perish more honourably? I, fighting for my King’s cause, and your Majesty sealing with your own blood your rights as King by the grace of God; … Your Majesty is bound to fight, you can not capitulate; you must, even at the risk of bodily danger, go forth to meet any attempt at coercion.’

As I continued to speak in this sense, the King grew more and more animated, and began to assume the part of an officer fighting for kingdom and fatherland.¹³⁰

The crisis passed and Bismarck stayed in office—just. Two days later, Kurd von Schlözer, Bismarck’s former first secretary in St Petersburg, went to see him. Von Schlözer had clashed with Bismarck in St Petersburg but managed to arrive at a decent understanding with him by the end. Schlözer understood Bismarck’s nature from the start, as he wrote to a friend: ‘He lives politics. Everything bubbles in him, and strains for recognition and status.’¹³¹ The two went out to dinner and the evening became very convivial, as Schlözer recorded:

We drank a lot of champagne, which loosened even more his naturally loose tongue. He exulted about pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. Partly by himself and partly by others, he is seeking to get the king to concede the two-year service period. In the House of Lords he paints the reaction he plans in colours so black that, as he puts it, the lords are becoming anxious about the conditions he says he will bring about if need be. Before the gentlemen of the second chamber he appears at one moment very unbending but in the next hints at his desire to mediate. Finally, he intends to make the German cabinets believe that the king is hard put to restrain the Cavourism of his new minister. There is no denying that until now people are impressed by his spirit and brilliance. C’est un homme!¹³²

The Bismarck who appears in Schlözer’s account played the game of a consummate confidence man, acting a part which varied from scene to scene; yet he needed another audience—the Schlözers, the Disraelis, and other witty and cynical people—to whom he could tell the truth, how he fooled this one or that one. Falsehood and honesty, kindness and vengeance, gargantuan energies and hypochondriac frailty, charm and cold remoteness, frankness and deceit, Bismarck was all those contradictions but one attribute never changed. Anybody who said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing in Bismarck’s opinion would finish in outer darkness. Witty and charming Kurd von Schlözer made one comment about the ‘Pasha’ too many and found himself transferred out of Berlin to be legation secretary in Rome (admittedly not Siberia) before he could pack. As Schlözer ruefully put it, ‘Tannhäuser, end of Act II. Otto sings: “To Rome, thou sinner.”’¹³³