7

‘I have beaten them all! All!’

In June 1862 Otto von Bismarck explained to Benjamin Disraeli, Baron Brunnow, the Russia ambassador, and the Austrian envoy, Vitztuhm, at the Russian ambassador’s residence in London what he intended to do when he took power. Nine years later—almost to the day, Freifrau Hildegard Hugo von Spitzemberg, wife of the Württemberg minister, watched the victory parade pass through Berlin. Otto von Bismarck had accomplished much more than in 1862 he had impudently promised his astonished listeners in the ambassador’s parlour in London.

These nine years, and this ‘revolution’, constitute the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries, for Bismarck accomplished all this without commanding a single soldier, without dominating a vast parliamentary majority, without the support of a mass movement, without any previous experience of government, and in the face of national revulsion at his name and his reputation. This achievement, the work of a political genius of a very unusual kind, rested on several sets of conflicting characteristics among which brutal, disarming honesty mingled with the wiles and deceits of a confidence man. He played his parts with perfect self-confidence yet mixed them with rage, anxiety, illness, hypochondria, and irrationality.

He created a system of rule that expressed his power over others—his capacity to manipulate King William I, to neutralize the royal family by inserting himself between father and son, between husband and wife, between father-in-law and daughter-in-law with what Russell quite rightly called ‘demonic’ power. He outmanoeuvred all the generals except Moltke, with whom he eventually arrived at a truce of mutual respect. He undermined and destroyed the power of the sovereign princes of the German states and simply abolished several German states, including a venerable kingdom, when it suited him. He managed to keep all the ‘flanking’ powers—the Tsarist Empire, Napoleon’s France, and Great Britain—out of the German civil war until they had to accept the achievements of his mastery or face destruction as Napoleon III foolishly chose. He used democracy when it suited him, negotiated with revolutionaries and the dangerous Lassalle, the socialist who might have contested his authority. He utterly dominated his cabinet ministers with a sovereign contempt and blackened their reputations as soon as he no longer needed them. He outwitted the parliamentary parties, even the strongest of them, and betrayed all those of the Kreuzzeitungspartei who had put him into power. By 1870 even his closest friends, Roon, Moritz von Blanckenburg, and Hans von Kleist, realized that they had helped a demonic figure seize power.

As early as 1864, Clemens Theodor Perthes wrote to Roon to warn him that Bismarck had no principles. Perthes objected strongly to the way the Kreuzzeitung and the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung

have buried under a mound of mockery, contempt and ridicule the Princes and all those who—truly not without justification—regard them as their legal sovereigns. Where the Kreuzzeitung like a revolutionary of the purest kind disregards all justice, because the persons with legitimate entitlement do not please it, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in a series of articles with an unmistakable semi-official stamp which began on 16 April, proclaims the essential principle of the Revolution suffrage universel.¹

Roon knew what he had done and took the risk to preserve the Prussian crown from the rise of popular sovereignty. On 27 July, he replied to his friend in a letter which I quoted in the Chapter 1 but deserves to be read here:

B. is an extraordinary man, whom I can certainly help, whom I can support and here and there correct, but never replace. Yes, he would not be in the place he now has without me, that is an historical fact, but even with all that he is himself … To construct the parallelogram of forces correctly and from the diagonal, that is to say, that which has already happened, then assess the nature and weight of the effective forces, which one cannot know precisely, that is the work of the historic genius who confirms that by combining it all.²

Bismarck’s first gambit—one he had mentioned to Roon on several occasions and to von Schlözer over champagne—was ‘to get the king to concede the two-year service period’.³ Once the deadlock had been removed by a deal of this kind, he could move swiftly to the rest of his plan. From the purely military side, there had never been a need for the three-year service requirement and a commission of fifteen generals (including Moltke) had conceded in April 1862 that it could accept two-and-a half years or even two years.⁴ On 10 October Roon presented a compromise proposal which would have allowed those with means to purchase release from the obligation to serve a third year. The money thus raised would help to attract volunteers. The plan also set the size of the future army at 1 per cent of the population and established a fixed sum per soldier to defray costs.⁵ The bill would, in effect, divide liberals on the issue of equity among conscripts but also limit the power of parliament by establishing in future the fixed number of soldiers and the fixed sum for their support.

On 9 November 1862 Adolf Count von Kleist (1793–1866) wrote to Hans von Kleist-Retzow, Bismarck’s friend, in some alarm:

Strange rumours have been circulating for the last four days that mediation and concessions to the Chamber of Deputies are being considered. One wants to promise that three-year service will be allowed to lapse in five years in exchange for approval for the rest of the military reorganization. Heydt is supposed to plan mediation. … you are the only one who can work beneficially on Otto. You must [in the original] be here to prevent careless measures beforehand, afterwards it will be too late.⁶

Count August had no reason to worry. The plan failed. William I disliked it because it violated the principle of universal service and Manteuffel, who as always had the last military word through his proximity to the King, rejected it because it limited the Crown’s command prerogatives. As Mantueffel put it to Roon, ‘the game must be played to the end.’⁷ Even the Landtag voted against it by 150 to 17. Bismarck, who had no scruples about means, realized that he had to outflank Manteuffel by being more intransigent than the general. He withdrew all compromise proposals and prepared to rule by the iron fist.⁸ He began with an attack on the civil service, a category much wider than in the English-speaking world: judges, assessors, referendars, university professors, grammar school teachers, and all the provincial government employees plus employees in state monopolies belonged to the civil service as well as those who worked in central state agencies. Here was a substantial, often liberal, constituency which Bismarck could crush, as he wrote to Prince Henry VII of Reuss on 23 November:

In domestic affairs we are going to carry out a sharp raid on the civil servants of all types … I am for going easy on the Chambers but am intent on bringing the civil service back into discipline at any price.⁹

On 10 December 1862 Count Fritz Eulenburg, Minister of Interior, issued the relevant order to all members of the Prussian civil service

to be supporters of the constitutional rights of the Crown. In the administration unity of spirit and will, decisiveness and energy will be evident … and the distinction which your position lends you is not to be misused to promote political movements which run counter to the views and the will of the government of the state.¹⁰

The office which Bismarck assumed on 23 September 1862 was that of Minister-President. It had emerged in March 1849 from the confusions of the revolution of 1848 and the sudden need to have a cabinet able to cope with a legislature.¹¹ Helma Brunck in her study of the Prussian State Ministry shows that even as late as the year 1862 no very clear constitutional basis for the rights and duties of ministers or, indeed, for the cabinet as a whole had been established. No such office had been foreseen in the Constitution of 1850. The one irrefutable power that Bismarck’s predecessor, Otto von Manteuffel, had forced through was the Cabinet Order of 8 September 1852, which gave the Minister-President primacy among the ministers. Ernst Huber, author of a multi-volume constitutional history, argues that the order which forbade ministers to go to the King directly and without notice to the Minister-President made the office something like that of an English prime minister.¹² On the other hand, all the ministers remained servants of the King and the Cabinet Order could not prevent the King from consulting ministers. The Emperor William II in 1890 exercised that right and forced Bismarck to resign, even though Bismarck insisted that the Cabinet Order of 1852 forbade royal interference. On 24 September 1862 Bismarck simply showed up, took the chair, and explained the circumstances of his appointment, as the minutes show:

In the meeting today of the State Ministry the chair was taken by State Minister von Bismarck-Schönhausen, who gave an account of the negotiations which had led to his nomination as a State Minister and also expressed his regrets at the departure of the two State Ministers von Bernstorff and von der Heydt.¹³

This was not a cabinet which Bismarck had chosen; ministerial nomination remained the prerogative of the King. In time Bismarck’s growing dominance of affairs gave him influence but never control over the State Ministry’s personnel.

Bismarck wrote to his wife on 7 October that he was having trouble getting used to ‘life in the shop window’, which he found ‘rather uncomfortable and that he ate every day at the good Roons’.¹⁴ Presumably the new Minister-President walked, unaccompanied by a security detail, from his temporary office to the Roons’ apartment each evening. Pflanze describes the modest surroundings in which the new Minister-President had his office:

In 1862 he moved into the narrow two-story building at Wilhelmstrasse 76 that housed the foreign ministry. Constructed at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a private home, it was, inside and out, the least pretentious building in the Wilhelmstrasse. Bismarck often made fun of its plainness, but instigated no changes. On the first floor were the offices and cubicles of the counsellors and clerks of the foreign office, and on the second were the minister’s office, reception rooms and private quarters of the Bismarck family. In the rear was an extensive private garden shaded by old trees where the chancellor frequently walked. Visitors were astonished at the simplicity of their reception. No porter in dress uniform with ‘Cerebus demeanour’ guarded the portals. ‘One must ring just as one does at the homes of ordinary mortals’. In the antechambers were no lackeys in gold and silver of the kind favoured by diplomats and ministers. Bismarck received his visitors in a plain, sparsely furnished office of medium size dominated by a large mahogany desk. ‘No provincial prefect in France would have been satisfied with such modest surroundings’.¹⁵

This modesty and absence of show continued to mark the Bismarcks throughout their lives. Visitors could not believe how simple and unpretentious their habits were. Show and possession never mattered to Bismarck. He worried about money and expenses all his life but spent as little possible on himself. Johanna shared these puritanical attitudes. As Holstein unkindly put it, ‘Princess Bismarck [Johanna], although she looked like a cook all her life, had not the slightest idea of how to cook or at any rate how to give dinner parties.’¹⁶

Immanuel Hegel, who worked in the Foreign Ministry, recalled his first impressions of Bismarck as a boss:

all of us had the impression when he took office that he regarded us with mistrustful eyes, speculating whether we had been bought or were otherwise under someone else’s influence. Once he became convinced that we who worked in the cabinet secretariat were all honest people and good Prussians, we enjoyed his confidence. Still, we were just instruments for his will. There was no room for a pleasant relationship … Whenever I entered to deliver an oral report, I gathered all my wits firmly together, in order to be equal to anything unexpected. A relaxed, self-satisfied air was not appropriate with him, for one was in that case in danger of being bypassed or run over.¹⁷

That too would not change over the years. Bismarck worked at a very intense level and expected no less from the staff. Neither clerks nor cabinet officers could expect thanks and almost none got any. In 1884 Lothar Bucher observed bitterly, ‘I have worked under him now for twenty years, and yet he has only once (during the constitutional conflict) told me that something I wrote (a newspaper article) was good; and yet I believe I have written many better ones.’¹⁸ And in spite of the way Bismarck treated them, his immediate staff worshipped him, as Albrecht von Stosch wrote to his friend von Normann after his first visit to the Foreign Ministry:

I arrived between 11 and 12 in the morning. I was told that he was still sleeping. He had worked through the night until morning. The gentlemen of the Foreign Office speak of their chief with a holy awe, as believers do about the Prophet. It sounded really odd. After an hour he received me. He was in his dressing gown but endlessly polite and charming, as he heard from whom I had come.¹⁹

Nor was he kinder to his cabinet colleagues and in his memoirs he devotes an entire chapter to the members of his first cabinet in which hardly anyone escapes his scorn. Fritz Count zu Eulenburg (1815–81), who served him for more than fourteen years, gets just about the best report which reads like this:

Eulenburg was indolent and fond of pleasure, but on the other hand he was judicious and ready, and if as Minister of the Interior he should by-and-by be called upon to stand foremost in the breach, the need of defending himself and returning the blows which he received would spur him into activity … when he was in the mood for work, he was an able coadjutor, and he was always a well bred gentleman, though not entirely devoid of jealousy and touchiness in regard to me. When he was called upon for more continuous, more self-denying, more strenuous exertions than ordinary, he would fall a prey to nervous disorders.²⁰

Another unfortunate aspect of Eulenburg’s character was his tolerance of Jewish liberals, as Bismarck wrote furiously to Roon on 1 March 1863. Eulenburg was

unwilling to burn all his bridges … Noah, Wolfsheim, Jacobi and the other scoundrels with or without foreskin will betray him and leave him in the lurch. You, I and Bodelschwingh are the most deeply involved in this business, and I would not want to go on living if we suffer a fiasco out of impotence.²¹

The others get poor marks: the Minister of Commerce Itzenplitz (Count Heinrich Friedrich August von Itzenplitz (1799–1883)) was ‘unfit … lacked energy’; the Minister of Agriculture von Selchow, who served in the cabinet for a decade (Werner Ludolph Erdmann von Selchow (1806–84)) was ‘unequal to the demands of office’; the Minister of Religion Heinrich von Mühler (1813–74) was ‘influenced by the energy and amateur participation in affairs of his clever and, when she saw fit, amiable wife’; the Minister of Justice, Leopold Graf zur Lippe-Biesterfeld-Weißenfeld (1815–89) and his ‘supercilious air of superiority … gave offence in parliament and to his colleagues’.²² Bismarck omits the fact that he sacrificed Count zur Lippe, the most reactionary (and that is saying something!) of all the members of the ‘conflict’ ministry to the Liberals in the Landtag when in 1866 Bismarck decided to turn 180 degrees and make peace with them. Count zur Lippe did not welcome this form of dismissal and spent the rest of his life as one of Bismarck’s most implacable foes. Cabinet officers, no matter how useful, belonged, as did all those who worked for Bismarck, to a group of collaborators who might fairly be labelled as ‘use and discard’.

In foreign affairs, Bismarck confronted the Austrian ambassador, Count Karolyi, on 4 December 1862, as he put it in his memoirs:

I had openly shown my hand to Count Karolyi, with whom I was on confidential terms. I said to him: ‘Our relations must become either better or worse than they now are. I am prepared for a joint attempt to improve them. If it fails through your refusal, do not reckon on our allowing ourselves to be bound by the friendly phrases of the Diet. You will have to deal with us as one of the Great Powers of Europe.’²³

Nobody in the Austrian Foreign Ministry expected anything other than the uncomfortable mix of threats and blandishments from Bismarck, and, of course, nobody trusted him.

On 14 January 1863 the new Landtag session opened and Bismarck continued his policy of dramatic confrontation and provocation. He rejected Liberal claims that he was governing by unconstitutional procedures:

Whatever the constitution grants you as rights, you shall receive in full; anything that you demand beyond that, we shall refuse … The Prussia monarchy has not yet fulfilled its mission. It is not yet ready to become a purely ornamental jewel in your constitutional structure, nor yet ripe to be inserted as a dead piece of machinery in the mechanism of a parliamentary regime.²⁴

He announced that in a case of conflict between the Crown and parliament—a matter on which the constitution left a ‘hole’—residual powers remained with the Crown. Hence the Crown had a perfect right to carry on the business of government, to collect taxes and make expenditures, even if the legislature refused to approve such acts. This theory, which has come to be called the ‘theory of the hole in the constitution’ or in German Lückentheorie, gave Bismarck the confidence to push on with his almost certainly unconstitutional activities.

A week later, he startled the ‘narrower council’ of the Bund by having Usedom read a statement announcing that the Prussian government favoured a ‘German parliament’:

The German nation can find a competent organ through which to influence the course of common affairs only in a representative body chosen directly by the people of each confederate state according to its population.²⁵

This, the first occasion when Bismarck reached for the ‘people’ as a weapon against the Princes, shows how his complete absence of fixed principle allowed him a flexibility denied to his opponents. The small German states feared universal suffrage more than anything else, for it would simply whip away their legitimacy. If the people spoke, they would not cry aloud to preserve the sovereignty of Reuss Elder Line or Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen about which, for the most part, they were indifferent, if not overtly hostile. Even solid states like Catholic Bavaria or the Kingdom of Saxony would not easily be able to resist the German people in their demand for unity. Bismarck had seen, as we noticed in his correspondence with Leopold von Gerlach, that the ‘people’ could be persuaded to vote for the King against the posturing of the liberal middle classes or the presumptions of the smaller princes.

A different people caused the first international crisis of his tenure of office. On 21 January 1863 a revolt against Russian rule broke out in Russian Poland. Bismarck immediately asked the army to mobilize four army corps in Prussian Poland, though the Poles under the King of Prussia had remained quiet. Bismarck, who knew the Russian scene and the actors intimately, also understood that the ‘reform’ party at court favoured constitutional rights for the Poles. It was, as he put it, ‘simple common sense’ to strengthen the reactionaries and to ensure that the Russian Empire did not ‘fall into the possession of our enemies, whom we might discern in the Poles, the philo-Polish Russians, and, ultimately, probably in the French’.²⁶ The Austrians, who like the Prussians ruled a substantial part of historic Poland, had joined with the British and French to propose a new constitutional arrangement for the Poles. Bismarck, who would have done the opposite out of anti-Austrian calculations, wasted no time in supporting the militants at the Tsarist court and sent General von Alvensleben to arrange an agreement on joint action against Polish rebels. On 8 February Alvensleben and the Tsar concluded a military convention which allowed both Powers to cross the borders of the other in hot pursuit of Polish armed units. Whether Alvensleben exceeded his brief cannot be established and for Bismarck it did not matter. As he wrote,

The Prussian policy embodied in the military convention concluded by General Gustav von Alvensleben in February 1863 had a diplomatic rather than a military significance. It stood for the victory in the Russian cabinet of Prussian over Polish policy, the latter represented by Gortchakoff, Grand Duke Constantine, Wielopolski, and other influential people.²⁷

Nor did it matter that the Western Powers put pressure on the Prussian government not to ratify it and that the Convention never came into effect. Pflanze argues that it was ‘a rare lapse of judgement’ by Bismarck and ‘a bad mistake’ to have made the agreement,²⁸ because it got Napoleon III off the horns of a dilemma between his dynasty’s historic commitment to Polish independence and his need for a Russian alliance; in my view that was a small price to pay for the certainty that Russia would stay neutral in a Prussian–Austrian final reckoning. Bismarck’s immediate support for the reactionary Russian party at court had the further useful aspect that it reinforced his reputation as a latter-day Polignac.

On 27 January 1863 Robert Lucius von Ballhausen (1835–1914), who later became one of Bismarck’s closest collaborators and one of the sharpest observers of the great man, attended a debate in the Prussian Landtag and got his first look at the new Minister-President:

He still wore civilian clothes then, his full moustache was still red-blond as was the thinning hair on his head. His tall broad shouldered figure seemed at the minister’s table mighty and impressive, whereas a certain casualness in stance, movement and speech had something provocative about it. He kept his right hand in the pocket of his light-coloured trousers and reminded me of the ‘crowing second’ at the Heidelberg duelling fraternities. He already had a certain way in which in hesitant sentences he seemed to search for words and always found the most penetrating and showed his knack for sharp crushing responses. He looked to me very ‘junkerish’, and had the gruffness of the old corps student, especially his manner of good-naturedly pumping malice into his excited opponents. That was the stormy session in which he developed the idea the state would and could live without a budget because it had to. That aroused the fury of the members, and Count Schwerin-Putzar, then leader of the opposition, a square, rather peasantish figure, who looked like a decent chap, accused Bismarck of developing the principle ‘that power takes precedence over justice.’²⁹

This posture and attitude had been typical of Bismarck from his first speech in the United Diet of 1847 when he had caused uproar, treated the members with disdain, and pulled a newspaper from his pocket. The ‘conflict ministry’ had found a perfect ‘conflict Minister-President’ or, more accurately, Bismarck played that role with his accustomed adroitness. His defence of the Alvensleben Convention—universally condemned by liberals all over Europe—shows him at his impudent best.

The previous speaker (Henrich von Sybel) observed that I have defended my views today with less than normal certainty. I would regret it most sincerely if the opinion spread that I had in some way seen my opinions as doubtful. I see myself compelled by the statement to make the following declaration, that I have been ill for four days and today against the will of my doctor appear before you because I could not bear to forgo the delights of these deliberations (laughter) … I have often noticed the phenomenon in the press that when the newspapers report a new, hitherto unknown and surprising story they usually add the phrase ‘as is well known’ such and such is the case. I believe that the previous speaker finds himself in the same position when he says that opinion of Europe on the Convention is absolutely unanimous. The opinion of Europe cannot be unanimous about something of which it knows nothing.³⁰

By the end of March, Bismarck had survived six months and opinions about him had now begun to harden. Ludwig von Gerlach welcomed Bismarck’s performance with relief, as he wrote to Hans von Kleist:

Have we ever had such a man at the top? Bismarck has exceeded my expectations. So much calm firmness I had not foreseen. Therefore Bismarck for ever! [English in orginal] Against the whole world and abroad!³¹

Bismarck’s own reaction to his first half-year in office comes out in a letter to his old Göttingen friend, John Motley. On his 48th birthday, 1 April 1863, he wrote to Motley that

I never dreamed that in my riper years I would be forced to practise so unworthy a profession as that of parliamentary minister. As an ambassador, although a civil servant, I maintained the feeling that I was a gentleman … As a minister I am a helot. The deputies are not dumb in general; that is not the right expression. Looked at individually these people are in part very shrewd, mostly educated, regular German university culture … as soon as they assemble in corpore, they are dumb in the mass, though individually intelligent. [The letter continues in English—JS]These drops of my own ink will show you at least that my thoughts, when left alone, readily turn to you. I never pass by old Logier’s house in the Friedrichstrasse without looking up at the windows that used to be ornamented by a pair of red slippers sustained on the wall by the feet of a gentleman sitting in the Yankee way, his head below and out of sight. I then gratify my memory with remembrance of ‘good old colony times, when we were roguish chaps’. Poor Flesh (Graf Hermann Keyserlingk) is travelling with his daughter. I do not know where in this moment. My wife is much obliged for the kind remembrance, and also the children … Deine Hand sieht aus wie Krähenfüsse ist aber sehr leserlich, meine auch? (your handwriting looks like crow’s feet but is very readable. Is mine?)³²

Motley had in the meantime become US Ambassador to Vienna and at the end of May 1863 he wrote to Lady William Russell, the formidable mother of the future British ambassador in Berlin, Odo Russell, about his old college friend:

I am just now much interested in watching the set to between Crown and Parliament in Berlin. By the way, Bismarck Schönhausen is one of my oldest and most intimate friends. We lived together almost in the same rooms for two years—some ages ago when we were both juvenes imberbes, and have renewed our friendship since. He is a man of great talent, and most undaunted courage. He is the most abused man by the English newspapers I believe just now going, and I like him the better for that. Don’t believe a word of all the rubbish you read. He is a frank reactionaire and makes no secret about it. Supports the King in his view that the House of Commons majority is not the Prussian form of government, whatever may be the case in England … I am a great Liberal myself, but I believe that Prussia is by the necessary conditions of its existence a military monarchy, and when it ceases to be that, it is nothing. You as a despot ought to sympathize with Bismarck.³³

In the Ministry, Bismarck had drafted a press edict which limited the freedom of the Prussian press but had not found a formula which would work. Although Article 27 of the constitution forbade censorship and guaranteed freedom of expression, there was an escape clause: ‘every other restriction upon freedom of the press shall be made only by way of legislation’ and there was a Press Law of 1851 which gave the government power to license and control all media of printed expression. On 1 June 1863 the King signed a press edict to silence the opposition press by bureaucratic order and to eliminate any recourse to the courts. Henceforth the only appeal would be to the cabinet.³⁴

The Crown Prince Frederick William had for some time been aware of the way Bismarck went about perverting the constitutional structures of the kingdom. The press edict was the final straw. He had an engagement in Danzig and had determined to express his disquiet at the violation of the constitution. The host introduced him and said that he regretted that the visit could not be an occasion for complete joy, to which the Prince replied,

I also lament that I should have come here at a time when a variance has occurred between the government and the people which has occasioned me no small degree of surprise. Of the proceedings which have brought it about I knew nothing. I was absent. I have had no part in the deliberations which have produced this result. But we all, and I especially, I who best know the noble and fatherly intentions and magnanimous sentiments of his Majesty the King, we all, I say, are confident that, under the scepter of his Majesty the King, Prussia will continue to make sure progress towards the future which Providence has marked out for her.³⁵

The King flew into a rage, no doubt increased by his own uneasy feeling that by agreeing to Bismarck’s press edict, he had indeed violated the constitution. He announced his intention to arrest the Crown Prince on a charge of treason and could only be slowly talked out of that by a nervous Bismarck who saw his whole edifice wobble in the battle between father and son.

The Crown Princess wrote a few days later to her mother, Queen Victoria and expressed her own fury:

I told you on the 5th that Fritz had written twice to the King, once, warning him of the consequences that would ensue if the constitution was falsely interpreted in order to take away the liberty of the press. The King did it all the same and answered Fritz with a very angry letter. Fritz then sent his protest to Bismarck on the 4th, saying he wished to have an answer immediately. Bismarck has not answered … The way in which the government behave, and the way they have treated Fritz, rouse my every feeling ofindependence. Thank God I was born in England where people are not slaves, and too good to allow themselves to be treated as such.³⁶

Had Fritz continued his battle, he might have won and the King might have abdicated. That, however, was rather a lot to ask of a Prussian prince who, in spite of his wife’s pressure, mainly shared the assumptions of his father about kingship.

The King had already shown signs of agitation about the long-planned meeting with the Austrian Emperor in Bad Gastein. As Bismarck told Roon in a letter from Carlsbad in early July 1863, he wanted to get away on holiday, ‘but the King absolutely refused to hear hints that I might go away and I don’t want to upset him. He wants me here when the Emperor arrives any day now but he fears that contact with me will upset the western powers and affront the liberals.’³⁷ On the way Bismarck wrote to his wife to say how ‘tedious it was to be stared at like a Japanese … [and to be] the object of general ill-will.’³⁸ Even Bismarck found his national unpopularity uncomfortable. On 24 July he settled into his hotel at Bad Gastein, where on 2 August the Emperor Franz Joseph arrived with an unpleasant surprise. The Austrian ‘success’ in facing down the Russians over Poland encouraged Anton Schmerling (Anton Ritter von Schmerling (1805–1893)), the ex-revolutionary of 1848 now ‘State Minister’ of the Habsburgs, to propose a reform of the Bund as a preparatory stage to the voluntary unification of Germany under Austrian auspices. On 3 August 1863, while King William took the waters at Baden-Baden, the Emperor Franz Joseph summoned the German princes to a Congress of Princes to be held in a fortnight in Frankfurt am Main, capital of the German Confederation, the Bund.³⁹ This posed by far the most serious challenge to Bismarck’s plans. The King, a loyal vassal, had received a summons from his liege lord, the Emperor Franz Joseph; all the other German kings had agreed to attend. How could William not do so? This marks the first absolutely unavoidable clash of personalities between the King and Bismarck. Here is his version of the crisis:

At Gastein, on August 2, 1863, I was sitting under the fir-trees in the Schwarzenberg gardens by the deep gorge of the Ache. Above me was a nest of titmice, and watch in hand I counted the number of times in the minute the bird brought her nestlings a caterpillar or other insect. … Queen Elizabeth [widow of Frederick William IV—JS], whom we met at Wildbad on our journey from Gastein to Baden, was urgent with me to go to Frankfort. I replied: ‘If the King does not otherwise decide I will go and perform his business there, but I will not return as minister to Berlin.’ The prospect seemed to disturb the Queen, and she ceased to contest my view. It was not an easy task to decide the King to stay away from Frankfort. I exerted myself for that purpose during our drive from Wildbad to Baden, when, on account of the servants on the box, we discussed the German question in the small open carriage in French. By the time we reached Baden I thought I had convinced my master. But there we found the King of Saxony, who was commissioned by all the princes to renew the invitation to Frankfort (August 19). My master did not find it easy to resist that move. He reflected over and over again: ‘Thirty reigning princes and a King to take their messages!’ Besides, he loved and honoured the King of Saxony, who moreover of all the princes had personally most vocation for such a mission. Not until midnight did I succeed in obtaining the King’s signature to a refusal to the King of Saxony. When I left my master, both he and I were ill and exhausted by the nervous tension of the situation; and my subsequent verbal communication with the Saxon minister, von Beust, bore the stamp of this agitation. But the crisis was overcome.⁴⁰

This struggle for the King’s soul in August 1863 made Bismarck’s subsequent career possible. He ‘persuaded’ or ‘forced’ the King of Prussia to refuse an invitation which every fibre in his long, royal frame told him to accept. The intense emotions which both experienced during the confrontation and tears and exhaustion afterwards suggest that a profound struggle, not unlike that between a father and son, took place between the King and Bismarck over the Frankfurt Princes’ Congress. Bismarck prevailed because the King must have felt in the depth of his soul that this impossible Bismarck mattered to him. He could not do without him. It has occurred to me that in some way Bismarck might have played the role of the ‘good son’ which the Crown Prince Frederick William under the influence of the English princess less and less resembled. A kind of love triangle of two sons for the approval of the father may explain this triumph of Bismarck’s will over the desires of the King of Prussia in August 1863, the most important achievement of Bismarck’s entire career. If he had failed then, as he explained to the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, he could not have remained as minister. In this crucial confrontation, the ultimate fate of Germany rested on the mysterious power of Bismarck’s ‘sovereign self’ and on no other, not office, not command of armies, not prestige. The ‘shallow Junker’ of Treitschke exerted the force of that self on the King and it worked in August 1863 and continued to work until the day twenty-five years later that William I, by then German Emperor and King of Prussia, died. My explanation of how it worked may not convince the reader; that some mysterious personal power worked on the King cannot be denied. Had Bismarck resigned then because the King felt a duty to attend the Congress of Princes, the history of Germany and the world would have run a different course; that too cannot be denied.

On 29 August 1863 he wrote to Johanna that the King was besieged by ‘intrigue’ and added that

I wish that some sort of intrigue or other would install another ministry, so that I could with honour turn my back on this uninterrupted stream of ink and withdraw to the quiet of the country. This restless life is unbearable. For ten weeks I have been doing nothing but secretarial service in a coaching inn.⁴¹

This too forms part of the emotional pattern. After the spiritual exertions to get the ‘old gentleman’ to bend to his will, he would feel irritable, exhausted, and depressed. The regularity of the pattern—emotional crisis with the King, terrible struggle, success followed by despair, resignation threats, or dreams of peace in the countryside—suggests that some deep psychic behaviour pattern had become established between the two men, one which was also to last until the King died in March 1888. The odd thing is that on each occasion the King really believed that Bismarck would retire and ‘leave’ him.

The Princes at Frankfurt had insisted on a reply from Prussia and on 1 September 1863 twenty-four kings and princes wrote to William I to ask him to join them in their project to reform the German Confederation. The King very correctly passed it to the State Ministry, which replied on 15 September 1863 with a list of conditions, of which the most insistent concerned reform of the system of representation. There must be

a true national assembly which emerges from direct participation of the entire nation. Only such a representative system will grant Prussia the security that it has nothing to sacrifice which will not benefit the whole of Germany. No artificially conceived organism for the Federal departments can exclude the move and counter-move of dynastic and particular interests, which must find a counterweight and corrective in a national assembly.⁴²

The threat of universal suffrage for the German people finished the Austrian project. If the nation spoke, it would put an end to the power of the small states in the Bund and, in addition, universal suffrage in the Habsburg lands would empower the subject nationalities in their struggles for representation and autonomy. No Austrian government could accept universal suffrage in the nineteenth century and none did. Here again we see Bismarck’s tactical adroitness. By playing off people against princes, nationalities against the Habsburg monarchy, he put Prussia—that is, Bismarck—at the perfect point of leverage. If the princes cooperated, the people would threaten them less, if not, more.

He also used this technique in his sudden interest in the new working-class movement under the leadership of the charismatic and flamboyant Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64). The liberal bourgeoisie, the owners of capital and disciples of Adam Smith and believers in what the Germans called ‘Manchestertum’, caused Bismarck difficulties in the Prussian parliament. If the ‘nation’ could disarm the German princes, the organized working class could outflank the Liberal middle classes, a classic Bismarckian strategy of alternatives. Lassalle suited Bismarck because he had a flair for publicity and dramatic gestures like nobody else in Prussia. Herman Oncken in his biography of Lassalle sees the logic of the Bismarck–Lassalle alliance in the common enemy—the Progressive Party—with its doctrinaire commitment to free trade and Manchestertum. ‘What could be for Bismarck more desirable than if the Progressives lost mass support for the party especially in the lower strata of society … So the government found the movement [Lassalle’s socialists] not unwelcome on tactical grounds and even in principle was by no means opposed to all its points.’⁴³

On 11 May 1863 Bismarck wrote to Lassalle, ‘In connection with current deliberations on working-class conditions and problems, I wish to obtain considered opinions from independent quarters. I would therefore be glad to have your views on these issues.’ The message was brought by an intermediary of Bismarck, Konrad Zitelmann, the writer (1814–89), who had instructions to arrange the meeting. Lassalle accepted and the first meeting took place within forty-eight hours.⁴⁴ The next day a flattered Lassalle had been converted to Bismarck, as he wrote to a colleague: ‘Workers who allow themselves to be led astray by abuse and slanders of Bismarck, are not worth much. Such workers must be pretty dumb.’⁴⁵ The new partnership between the Junker reactionary and the flamboyant Jewish agitator brought two of the most dramatic figures of the nineteenth-century together.

The story of Lassalle defies the imaginative powers of a common-or-garden historian to capture. George Meredith, the now forgotten novelist, as popular in his day as Trollope and Dickens, devoted one of his most successful novels to Lassalle’s story, The Tragic Commedians: A Study in a Well Known Story,⁴⁶ but only concentrated on the mad love affair which ended in a fatal duel. According to Neil Roberts, ‘apart from one article on Lassalle, Meredith appears to have done no research on the subject.’⁴⁷ Instead he used the memoir of the woman about whom the duel was fought, Helene von Racowitza, entitled Meine Beziehungen zu Ferdinand Lassalle. The novel contains, on the other hand, several speeches which appear verbatim in the respectable biographies of Lassalle, so Meredith may have concealed the extent of his use of historical sources.

The real story is much madder than Meredith’s Victorian comic temper imagined. Meredith concentrates on Lassalle’s infatuation with Helene, called Clotilde von Rüdiger, a 17-year-old coquette, and builds in the true story of Lassalle’s liaison with Sophie Countess von Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg (1805–81), mother of Bismarck’s ambassador Paul, and a woman twenty years older than Lassalle. The Lassalle character Alvan declares to Clothilde that his relationship with Sophie was not an affair. ‘As far as matters of the heart, we are poles apart.’⁴⁸ Sophie, a Princess von Hatzfeldt-Trachtenburg by birth, had been forced to marry a descendant of the ‘count’ line of Hatzfeldts, Edmund Count von Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg, who abused and mistreated her.⁴⁹ Out of the depths of his romantic soul the 23-year-old Ferdinand Lassalle absolutely quixotically decided to defend the honour of Countess Hatzfeldt, when he saw how her sadistic husband had imprisoned her. On 11 August 1848 Lassalle was charged at the Assize Court in Cologne with complicity in the theft from Count Hatzfeldt of a cash box. The theft gave Lassalle the pretext he needed to ‘try’ Count Hatzfeldt before the bar of public opinion. In this case and in thirty-six (!) subsequent trials and in his later career Lassalle used the defendant’s bench as an actor uses the stage to present his romantic personality and spread his ideas. He defended the honour of Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt before the court with romantic flair:

The family was silent, but we know that when men hold their peace, the stones will cry out. When every human right is outraged, when even the ties of kinship are silent and a helpless being is abandoned by its natural protectors, then the first and last relation of such a being has the right to rise in the person of another member of the human race.⁵⁰

Lassalle then challenged Count Edmund to a duel, who ignored ‘this silly Jewish boy’.⁵¹ Lassalle went to jail, of course, which was part of the plot, but he won a moral victory when in 1854 the Count settled a very large sum on the Countess. Since Lassalle had paid the Countess’s expenses from his parental allowance, she in turn agreed by written consent to contract to pay him 4,000 thaler a year if he won.⁵² The two remained together as an odd couple. Lassalle had endless affairs which he discussed with Sophie and got her approval. Lassalle’s liaison with a grand German aristocrat had made him famous when in 1862 he and Lothar Bucher made a pilgrimage to London to see Marx. Marx wrote to Engels about it and explained that ‘to maintain a certain elegance, my wife had to take everything not nailed or welded down to the pawn shop … And so it was established that he [Lassalle—JS] is not only the greatest scholar, the deepest thinker, the most brilliant researcher etc but also Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu.’⁵³ Does one catch the whiff of jealousy in Marx’s attitude to Lassalle?

Lassalle’s family, a modest bourgeois Jewish, commercial family, lost control of him as a teenager. He decided at the age of 14 that he had a great future:

I believe myself to be one of the best Jews in existence. Like the Jew in Bulwer’s Leila I could risk my life to rip the Jews out of their present depressing situation. I would not shun the scaffold, could I make them again a respected people. When I cling to my childish dreams, so my favourite idea is to place myself at their head and with weapon in hand to make the Jews independent.⁵⁴

Instead of saving the Jews, he converted to Hegel and went to Berlin to study, where he wrote with characteristic megalomania, ‘here is no new phase for me. I have reached the highest level of the contemporary spirit and can develop within this framework only quantitatively.’⁵⁵ Hegel had revealed all truth and had given him ‘everything: clarity, self-consciousness about content, the absolute powers of the human spirit, the objective substances of human morality’.⁵⁶ He must have been an astonishing student if Alexander von Humboldt could call him a Wunderkind (wonder child).⁵⁷

After a series of dramatic escapades during Italian unification and a close friendship with Garibaldi, Lassalle returned to Berlin in January 1862. There he met the socialist revolutionary Lothar Bucher (1817–1892) to discuss whether Germany could be transformed in a Garibaldian way. Bucher denied it:

All the measures you suggest are again only political and legal, one can say they stand on the old basis, and simply create more bourgeois. And these new relations of property, new through a change of persons, not, to use a metaphor, through a change in the chemical properties of property, can only be maintained through a ceaseless war, a terrorism of a tiny minority.⁵⁸

Lassalle and Bucher created a kind of think tank to work through the implications of the industrialization process and the emergence of a new class: the proletariat. Lassalle began a campaign of flamboyant lectures, designed to get himself arrested and to offer him, as in the Hatzfeldt case, a free public platform. Bucher had doubts about the theoretical soundness of his new partner, whose Hegelianism misled him, as he wrote to Bismarck, years later when he had changed sides and become Bismarck’s closest collaborator and journalistic assistant:

This error was not new to me. I had met it in other Hegelians and it can be explained by the essence of Hegelian philosophy which, as is well known, attempts to show a parallelism or an identity, between the development of concepts in pure thought (similar to algebra) and the appearances in nature and the events of history (similar to calculations with known quantities).⁵⁹

Meanwhile, Lassalle attacked liberalism in his speeches as, for example, in one called ‘On the special relationship between the present historical period and the idea of the Arbeiterstand’, delivered at the Manual Workers’ Association of Oranienburg:

If we were all equally, equally shrewd, equally educated, and equally rich, the Idea would be considered as a comprehensive and moral one, but since we are not and cannot be, so the idea is not sufficient and leads in its consequences, therefore, to a deep immorality and to exploitation … You are the rock on which the church of the present will be built … From the high peaks of scientific knowledge, we can see the early morning red of a new day earlier than below in the turmoil of daily life. Have you ever watched the sun rise from the height of a mountain? A purple seam slowly turns colour and bloodies the distant horizon, proclaiming the coming of new light. Mist and clouds stir and move, ball themselves together and throw themselves against the dawning red, casting a shroud momentarily on the rays. But no power on earth can prevent the slow majestic rising of the sun, which an hour later all can see, brightly lighting and warming the firmament. What is an hour in the natural drama of each day, are the one or two decades in which the much more imposing drama of a world historical sunrise will occur?⁶⁰

A few days later Lassalle made a speech to a Berlin District Citizens meeting, ‘Concerning the nature of constitutions’. What determined a constitution, he argued, was not the piece of paper but the power relationships that actually exist in a given country. Hence the Constitution of 1850 with its three-class voting and its special Articles 47 and 108 securing the separateness of the army reflected the realities of Prussian society:

The princes are much better served than you are. The servants of the princes are not fine talkers as the servants of the people often are, but they are practical men who have an instinct for what really matters … Constitutions are not originally questions of law but questions of power. Written constitutions only have value and last if they express the real power relations in society.⁶¹

Lassalle’s ideas attracted unusual enthusiasts. On 12 September 1862 General Albrecht von Roon quoted Lassalle in the Prussian Landtag: ‘According to his analysis of history, the main content of history is not only that between states but also within states there is nothing more than a struggle for power and the extension of power among the various individual factors.’⁶² By November 1862 Karl Eichler, a speaker at one of Lassalle’s Workers’ Meetings in Berlin, told the assembly that Bismarck was on the workers’ side. The meeting voted overwhelmingly to hold a workers’ congress in Leipzig.⁶³ On 19 November 1862 Lassalle delivered the ‘What Now?’ speech in which he urged the Landtag to adopt a resolution that they would no longer meet until Bismarck restored their constitutional powers.⁶⁴

These two themes—the illusions of liberalism and the reality of constitutions as expressions of power—reveal the same realism which we have seen again and again in Bismarck. Lassalle had one advantage which Bismarck lacked. He was a charismatic mass orator, probably the first in Prussian history and, at the same time, a fully paid-up romantic, bursting with romantic metaphors, images, and, unfortunately for Germany, romantic liaisons. In the midst of the campaign of stunning public lectures, clashes with the police and dramatic arrests, he wrote to Sophie Hatzfeldt:

My sister wants to marry me off. The girl is pretty, of good family, lively and cheerful, can keep her end up in society, but I don’t know how deep her education goes … I am very taken with her. She has a lovely body. She is witty and amusing, is quite (not wildly) in love with me … What chiefly keeps me back is the money side. If, as is likely, my money from the Gas Company comes to an end, my income in 1870 will be only about 1,500 thaler or 2,500 or so if my mother dies, I can’t keep a wife or children on that without gruesome economies.⁶⁵

In May of 1863 Lassalle founded the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (the General German Workers’ Association) and spent most of 1863 in hectic travel among the branches, where he made exciting speeches to rather sceptical audiences of solid German working men. It was during this period, that Bismarck approached Lassalle and asked him to call. By 1864 Bismarck and Lassalle seem to have met regularly. On 13 January 1864 Lassalle wrote to Bismarck:

Excellency, Above all, I must accuse myself of having forgotten yesterday, to urge you to take to heart that the ability to vote must be conceded to all Germans. An immense means of power. The real ‘moral’ conquest of Germany! With respect to electoral techniques, since yesterday I have been through the history of the legislation on the French electoral system and there, to be sure, found not much useful material. I have in addition reflected further and am now in a position to be able to give your Excellency a magic recipe for preventing vote division and the crumbling of votes. I await the fixing of an evening from your Excellency. I plead strongly for an evening so that we will not be disturbed. I have much to discuss with your Excellency about election techniques and yet more on other matters and an undisturbed and exhaustive discussion is, given the urgency of the situation, an unavoidable need.⁶⁶

On Saturday, 16 January 1864, Lassalle wrote again to Bismarck:

I would not press but external events press powerfully and thus I beg you to excuse my pressing. I wrote to you on Wednesday that I had found the desired ‘magic recipe’—a ‘magic recipe’ with most comprehensive effects. Our next discussion will finally be followed by the most decisive decisions and such decisions, I believe, can no longer be delayed, I shall allow myself to call on your Excellency tomorrow (Sunday at 8 ½). Should your Excellency be prevented at that hour, I would ask you to determine another time very soon for my visit.⁶⁷

By 12 March 1864 Lassalle had begun to express these ideas in public. He had been arrested on a charge of high treason. He defended himself by citing Bismarck’s wish to impose universal suffrage:

I want not only to overthrow the constitution, but perhaps in a year or less it will be overthrown, and I shall have overthrown it … I therefore declare to you from this sacred place a year will not have passed before Herr von Bismarck will have played the role of Robert Peel and introduced universal and direct suffrage.⁶⁸

At the height of his powers and influence, Lassalle got involved with his maddest romance with a young Roman catholic girl, Helene von Rocawitza, which ended in an utterly futile duel that Lassalle had provoked by his impossible behaviour. On 5 August 1864 Lassalle wrote to a friend, ‘Only this I know. I must have Helen—Workers Association, politics, science, jail all pale in my insides at the thought to reconquer Helen again.’⁶⁹ The duel took place on 29 August 1864, and Ferdinand Lassalle died of his wounds on 31 August 1864. Marx, who treated Lassalle with a mixture of scorn and envy, as we have seen, and who called him in private correspondence ‘Baron Izzie’, wrote an informal obituary to Engels: ‘That could only have happened to Lassalle with his strange mixture of frivolity and sentimentality, Jewishness and playing the chevalier, that mixture was utterly his own.’⁷⁰

But there is more to it than that. Serious students of the workers’ movement in Germany have over the last century and a half devoted much, if heretical, thought to Lassalle as an alternative to Marx. Lassalle had qualities that Marx lacked—the charismatic skills of a mass leader—and his ideas centred on power and the state, two categories which Marx’s economic-social model almost entirely ignores. The state and its actors are simply elements of the superstructure. Marx makes that clear in the introduction to the 1867 edition of Das Kapital:

To avoid possible misunderstandings a word. I do not draw the figures of the capitalist or the landlord in a rosy light. But the issue only concerns persons insofar as they personify economic categories as bearers of particular class relations and interests. My standpoint, much less than any other, does not make individuals responsible for conditions of which they are social products, however much they imagine themselves to be above them, since my analysis conceives the formation of the economic structures of society as a natural historical process.⁷¹

This theoretical position had disastrous consequences for the German labour movement and for the history of humanity. It led the great German Social Democratic Party to view history as determined by economic forces over which neither they nor anybody else had control. They preached revolution because Marx’s laws showed that capitalism must destroy itself as a result of its ‘inner contradictions’. The Sozialdemokratische partei Deutschlands, the largest party in Bismarck’s empire by 1912, had no strategy for what Lassalle had seen clearly in his 1862 lectures—that political institutions matter, that constitutions rest on power relationships, and that human will can change things.

Lassalle played a unique role in Bismarck’s own life. He remained the only figure in Bismarck’s career whom he respected to the very end. In 1878, as Bismarck planned legislation to suppress the SPD, Lassalle’s ghost came back to haunt him. In July of 1878 the Berliner Freie Presse published every day for two weeks letters from Bucher to Lassalle, which very probably Sophie Countess Hatzfeldt had given to Leopold Schapira, the editor of the newspaper, to embarrass Bismarck and block the anti-Socialist Law which Bismarck intended to introduce. In the Reichstag, August Bebel, the leader of the parliamentary fraction of the SPD, challenged Bismarck on his dark past as a crypto-socialist and got an astonishing reply from the Reich Chancellor. Bismarck acknowledged quite openly that he had engaged in secret negotiations with Lassalle, and then added unprompted these words—unique to my knowledge in Bismarck’s remarks on his contemporaries:⁷²

What he had was something that attracted me extraordinarily as a private person. He was one of the cleverest and most charming men whom I have known. He was ambitious in grand style … Lassalle was an energetic and witty man with whom it was very instructive to talk. Our conversations lasted for hours and I always regretted when they were over …⁷³

This affectionate and unusual tribute to Lassalle calls into question the depth of Bismarck’s anti-Semitism. From his respect for Lassalle, his friendship with Ludwig Bamberger, and his admiration for Eduard Simon, we can deduce that, as in every other aspect of Bismarck’s hates and loves, no general statement can do justice to his mercurial likes and dislikes. Certainly he had the conventional anti-Semitism of his class and age, but as with Catholics or Socialists, his attitude to Jews reflected how interesting he found them or how useful. He hated Lasker and Windthorst less because one was Jewish and the other Catholic but because they opposed him successfully and became enemies.

There was another legacy of Bismarck’s relations with Lassalle that was almost as astonishing as Lassalle’s secret meetings. Lothar Bucher, journalist, socialist theoretician, and revolutionary, switched sides. On 15 August 1864, two weeks before Lassalle’s fatal duel, Bucher wrote to him with the following news:

Though I could hope for a favourable outcome, I had decided for reasons that are rather complicated and which should not be set out on paper, to seek another position and in fact, as quickly as possible … In eight days the whole thing was settled.⁷⁴

Lothar Bucher had been employed since 1 January 1863 in the Wolff Telegraph Agency, where he was underpaid and unsatisfied. Christoph Studt offers various versions of how Bucher came to work for Bismarck. One came from Robert von Keudell who claimed the credit. According to Keudell, Bismarck said of the possibility that Bucher might work for him:

We all cook with water and most of what happens or will happen gets into the press. Take the case that he comes to us as a fanatical democrat, like a worm to bore its way into the state structure and to blow it up, he would soon see that he alone would be destroyed in the attempt. Let that possibility be. Such perfidy I cannot believe of him. Talk to him without asking for his confession of faith. What interests me is whether he will come or not.⁷⁵

Arthur von Brauer (Carl Ludwig Wilhelm Arthur von Brauer (1845–1926), a Baden diplomat and politician, who also worked under Bismarck)⁷⁶ denied that Keudell could have thought of it. The startling idea of the appointment of a former revolutionary in a conservative ministry, Brauer thought, ‘looks much more like what Bismarck might do than a Keudell’. The final variant involves a friend of Bucher’s approaching Count Eulenburg to ask if there were a chance for a convicted revolutionary to get a lawyer’s licence again and Eulenburg asked Bismarck, who replied ‘he is completely out of practice in the law, maybe there’s some way of using him in the Foreign Ministry’.⁷⁷ Bismarck kept the appointment secret for a while and many, including the King, were deeply shocked. Bucher wrote to Bismarck; ‘Excellency knows my national standpoint which I would never deny. Bismarck: I know your national standpoint only too well but I need it for the conclusion of my policy and I will only give you work to carry out which moves in the spirit of your national efforts.’⁷⁸

Bucher became a fixture in Bismarck’s staff from 1864 to his death. Holstein recalled working in the same office with Bucher during the Franco-Prussian war:

Bismarck regarded Bucher’s low status at Court as an advantage, because he knew that Bucher understood that it was Bismarck alone who kept him on. Because of this Prince Bismarck regarded him as his tool, and used him to carry out all kinds of strictly confidential and personal business … He only found fault with Bucher or criticized him to other people when he considered Bucher had not done a job properly. Bismarck never made Bucher’s personality and idiosyncrasies the subject of general merriment, as he so often did with Abeken … With his stunted body, his abnormally ugly face and unhealthy complexion, he had that partly timid, partly embittered, reserve of people, who have lost heart because they are social failures. This was combined with a strong interest in the opposite sex, which must have cost him many hours of misery … It so happened that during our last weeks in Versailles, in the big office in the Villa Jessé, I sat between Bucher and Wagener; the man who refused to pay taxes and the founder of the Kreuzzeitung, addressed each other in monosyllables. Bucher confided to me that that when he was obliged to flee in the winter of 1848, it was Wagener who signed the order for his arrest to be sent out over the telegraph. Bucher’s escape was entirely due to the fact that the telegraph system was not working that day.⁷⁹

Late in August 1863 the King and Bismarck decided to confront the liberals again by calling yet another ‘conflict election’ and on 2 September 1863, the Landtag was dissolved. The Crown Prince opposed both the elections and the policy of repression. He wrote to Bismarck to say so in early September and the two met for an audience, which Bismarck described in his memoirs:

I asked him why he held so aloof from the government; in a few years he would be its master; and if his principles were not ours, he should rather endeavour to effect a gradual transition than throw himself into opposition. That suggestion he decisively rejected, apparently suspecting me of a desire to pave the way for my transfer into his service. The refusal was accompanied by a hostile expression of Olympian disdain, which after all these years I have not forgotten; today I still see before me the averted head, the flushed face, and the glance cast over the left shoulder. I suppressed my own rising choler, thought of Carlos and Alva (Act 2, sc. 5), and answered that my words had been prompted by an access of dynastic sentiment, in the hope of restoring him to closer relations with his father … I hoped he would dismiss the idea that I aimed at some day becoming his minister; that I would never be. His wrath fell as suddenly as it had risen, and he concluded the conversation in a friendly tone.⁸⁰

The crackdown on the civil service now extended to the armed forces, to which the King issued a directive that the ‘further participation of the army and fleet in elections contradicts the spirit and intentions of the constitution. I consider it therefore as inappropriate.’⁸¹ On 7 October Bismarck issued another order to civil servants to limit their participation. The text of the edict was issued in The Provincial Correspondence, an official government paper which had just been founded:

According to the legal provisions, all military and civil servants, in addition to the general obligations of subjects owed to the King, are bound to special loyalty and obedience, in addition to the special services involved in the office. How can it be compatible with this special loyalty and obedience if they take part in party political activity which is manifestly directed at belittling, limiting or overthrowing the government installed by the King and acting in his name? The simplest intelligence must see that such manifest betrayal of duty is completely incompatible with an ordered tenure of office.⁸²

On 20 and 28 October the Landtag elections first and second rounds took place: Wagener and Blanckenburg were elected in Belgard, Pomerania, Kleist’s old district. The Provincial Correspondence rejoiced:

The little band of eleven Conservatives, who were in the previous house, has been strengthened by four times, and among the new Conservative deputies can be found several of the finest, battle-hardened leaders of those loyal to the King.⁸³

The actual results could hardly be called a triumph for the Bismarck Ministry. The shift to the left continued as in the election of 1862. The Progressives won 141 seats as opposed to 135 in the previous legislature. The other liberals went up from 96 to 106 and the ‘Constitutionals’, the largest fraction in 1858, the New Era liberals, disappeared completely. There were now 35 conservatives instead of 11.⁸⁴

On 6 November Hans von Kleist-Retzow sent his friend an encouraging passage from the Bible. As he wrote:

I read yesterday in Revelations, Ch 2, Verse 27 ‘And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.’

Bismarck wrote on the margin, ‘O Hans, always wrathful with God’s thunderbolt’.⁸⁵

On 9 November 1863 William I opened the Landtag with an intransigent Speech from the Throne. The King made clear that he would only give ‘My agreement to the necessary household bill which will guarantee and secure the maintenance of the existing structure of the army.’⁸⁶ The First Chamber, the House of Lords, welcomed the King’s speech. By a vote of 72 to 8 the Lords approved an Address to the King, drafted by Hans von Kleist, which stated explicitly:

Your Majesty’s Government has met those undoubted obligations imparted to it and through maintenance of Royal Power as the foundation stone of our Constitution and without any kind of violation of the Constitution or the existing legal system, even without the state budget, it has happily dispelled the danger namely by holding firm to the army reorganization which without committing treason cannot be reversed.⁸⁷

As a sign of the readiness to concede something to the liberals, the government lifted the press edict which both houses welcomed but in lifting the edict the government repeated its ‘unaltered conviction that the edict of 1 June to maintain public security and to master an unusual emergency situation was urgently necessary and at the same time absolutely constitutional.’⁸⁸ The deadlock continued.

It was to be broken ultimately by events outside Prussia. On 15 November 1863 Frederick VII, King of Denmark, died without an heir, and the crisis of the Danish succession gave Bismarck the chance he needed to outflank domestic opposition by success abroad. On 18 November the new Danish King, King Christian IX, signed the text of a constitution which incorporated Schleswig into the Kingdom of Denmark. Here at last was the foreign crisis that Bismarck wanted. At the end of 1862 he wrote a lengthy letter about the Danish question to an unnamed correspondent:

It is certain that the Danish business can only be solved in a way which we would wish by a war. One can find a pretext for such a war any time … We cannot get out of the disadvantage of having signed the London Protocol with Austria unless we repudiate it as a result of a break caused by war … [Prussia has] no interest in fighting a war … in Schleswig-Holstein to install a new Grand Duke, who will vote against us at the Bund because he fears our lust for annexation and whose government will become a willing object of Austrian intrigues, forgetful of any gratitude which he owes Prussia for his elevation.⁸⁹

His first move involved securing an agreement with the Austrians to defend the previous agreements about the succession and the status of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. On 28 November 1863 Prussia and Austria sent a joint note to the Danish government which rejected the Danish moves and cited the treaties of 1851 and 1852 as the legal basis for their intervention.⁹⁰

The Schleswig-Holstein question has the reputation of being incomprehensible. Lord Palmerston is supposed to have remarked that ‘only three people have ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein question. One is dead, one has gone mad and I have forgotten.’ That is a typically Palmerstonian exaggeration. The positions are really quite clear. Denmark had a monarchy which rested on a tradition of royal absolutism and the line of inheritance in that monarchy could pass down the female line. The two historic duchies of Schlweswig and Holstein observed the Salic Law under which only a male heir could inherit. In addition the duchies had historically been joined at the hip in the phrase ‘Up ewig ungedeelt’ (forever undivided), though in practice Holstein had been part of the Germanic Confederation, whereas Schleswig had not and hence the King of Denmark in his capacity as Duke of Holstein was a member of the German Bund. When the revolution of 1848 introduced constitutionalism to Denmark, King Frederick VII announced that the duchies would be incorporated into the new kingdom. The revolutionary German parliament in Frankfurt rushed to defend the German national territory and a war, largely fought by Prussian troops, broke out which Prussia, once it recovered its nerve, unilaterally abandoned. The reappearance of the Danish question suited Bismarck perfectly, because, as Christopher Clark writes,

modern and pre-modern themes were interwoven. On the one hand, it was an old-fashioned dynastic crisis, triggered, like so many seventeenth and eighteenth-century crises, by the death of a king without male issue. In this sense, we might call the conflict of 1864 ‘the War of the Danish Succession’. On the other hand, Schleswig-Holstein became the flash-point of a major war only because of the role played by nationalism as a mass movement.⁹¹

The Schleswig-Holstein crisis had just that combination of complex elements that gave Bismarck room to play with a large number of sets of alternatives: Danish versus German nationalism, dynastic versus popular politics, Prussia versus Austria, Prussia versus the German Bund, royal government versus parliament, and, finally, an international dimension because of the role of the great powers. In 1852 an international congress in London had established that both Austria and Prussia would recognize the ‘integrity’ of the Danish kingdom and Denmark in turn agreed never to incorporate the duchies or take any steps toward that end.⁹² The great powers recognized that, if Frederick VII of Denmark died without issue, the succession to the Kingdom of Denmark andto the Duchies would pass to the heir, Christian of Glücksberg, who would thus inherit both Schleswig and Holstein. The Duke of Augustenburg, the heir to the Duchies by Salic Law, signed the agreements but never renounced his rights in perpetuity.⁹³ Hence when Frederick VII in March of 1863 announced a new constitutional arrangement, the crisis threatened to erupt anew but this time the Danes hoped for a better outcome. European diplomats had their attention directed to the Polish Crisis and the Danish cabinet thought it could get enough support to revoke the London Treaties. Frederick’s sudden death made the issue acute.

In early December 1863, the King of Prussia called a Crown Council, that is, a cabinet meeting presided over by the King and attended by the Crown Prince. According to his memoirs, Bismarck made clear that the aim of Prussian policy ought to be the acquisition of the Duchies by Prussia. ‘While I was speaking, the Crown Prince raised his hands to heaven as if he doubted my sanity. My colleagues remained silent.’⁹⁴ The King struggled with the concept, and repeated, ‘I have no right to Holstein’. Bismarck observed bitterly that ‘the King’s way of looking at things was impregnated by a vagabond liberalism through the influence of his consort and the pushing of the Bethmann Hollweg clique.’⁹⁵ This was a very wayward description of the King’s entirely conservative and legitimist position. He had correctly stated the position. He had no dynastic right nor claim to the Duchies and hence no legitimate way to annex them to his kingdom. Bismarck ran into the King’s opposition and immediately blamed the woman who embodied all the malign forces in the royal household, Queen Augusta.

Bismarck, as always, had a second strategy in mind. After the failure of the Frankfurt Congress of the Princes, Baron Rechberg, who had become Austrian Foreign Minister on 17 May 1859, decided in exasperation to work with, not against, Prussia, ‘with the remark that an understanding with Prussia was easier for Austria than for the middle states’.⁹⁶ Bismarck had clashed bitterly with Rechberg in Frankfurt and the two had been about to go to the woods for a duel at one point. Rechberg had a reputation for temper and was widely known as a Kratzbürste (scratch brush), that is, snappish and quick-tempered, but Bismarck got used to him. ‘On the whole Rechberg was not bad, at least personally honest, if too violent and quick to explode, one of those overheated red blondes.’⁹⁷ Rechberg had a low opinion of his opponent. When it looked like the New Era cabinet would fall, Rechberg said, ‘if there is a change of ministry, the horrible Bismarck will be next in line, a man who is capable of taking off his jacket and climbing on the barricades.’⁹⁸ Whatever their relationship, Rechberg served Bismarck’s purposes perfectly because he had been schooled under Metternich and that meant conventional, conservative diplomacy. Since Rechberg now favoured a dual Austro-Prussian directory for Germany, he naturally agreed to Bismarck’s suggestion that the two powers as signatories of the London Treaties must insist that Denmark be held strictly to the letter of the treaties. If King William would not now countenance a policy of naked aggression followed by annexation, Bismarck needed to make sure that no German solution took place by which the small states would ride a wave of national enthusiasm for the young Augustenburg duke. When on 7 December the Bundestag by a one-vote majority voted for the federal ‘execution’ to force Denmark to abide by the London Treaties of 1852, that suited Bismarck admirably. There were three options in principle: best—annexation of both Duchies by Prussia; tolerable—the status quo with the Duchies in personal union with Denmark because he knew he could always stir up trouble in that situation; worst—a victory for the Bund and the small states in favour of the Duke of Augustenburg which would add another impossible middlesized state always ready to vote against Prussia. That by the autumn of 1866 Bismarck had achieved the first and much more than that, he called his ‘proudest achievement’. At the close of the war in 1864, he reflected ‘this trade teaches that one can be as shrewd as the shrewdest in this world and still at any moment go like a child into the dark.’⁹⁹

Bismarck’s tactics in this, his greatest achievement, resemble those we have seen before, constantly shuffling sets of alternatives and playing off one against the other. Rechberg and Karolyi needed a firm guarantee that Bismarck would stay loyally by the London Treaties but Bismarck could genuinely explain that his King under the evil influence of the Queen and the liberals of the court entourage had thrown his emotional support to the young Augustenburg pretender. What could a poor foreign minister do?

The Bund had ordered Saxon and Hanoverian troops to enter Holstein and as a consequence Prussian and Austria troops also crossed the frontier. This period placed a great strain on Bismarck’s nerves. He could not control the army nor the vagaries of its commanders. On 12 January Bismarck wrote to Roon to ask about certain military movements, very nervously. He was worried that the Austrians might reach the Eider before the Prussians. ‘That would be disagreeable to his Majesty. Or have the orders already been issued? If so, then I have said nothing to you and I can recall the ink already used.’¹⁰⁰

Bismarck found himself in a double bind. He had a domestic crisis to overcome before he could carry out his Danish policy and he had an international crisis in which he had to prevent British, French, and Russian intervention in his little war, an intervention to which, as signatories of the Treaties of London, they had a perfect right. That Bismarck saw this period as his masterpiece arises from the sheer complexity of the challenges facing him. Let us see if we can sort them by category. In domestic affairs, he had a deadlock with parliament which made it unlikely, if not impossible, that money for the war would be allocated in a legal way. On 15 January Bismarck told the Landtag that he wanted to use legally appropriated funds for the Danish venture, ‘but if these were refused, then he would take them wherever he could find them.’¹⁰¹ In foreign affairs he had to keep Austria under control. On the next day, 16 January 1864, Bismarck and Graf Karolyi signed a protocol that extended the joint military operation of the Austro-Prussian force into Schleswig. Bismarck clearly intended to get involved in a shooting war, if possible, as Roon explained to Perthes on 17 January 1864: ‘The first shot from a canon tears up all treaties without our having to break them explicitly. The peace arrangement after a victorious war brings new relationships.’¹⁰²

The King, the court, the royal family and its many relations, and the appeal of the young Duke of Augustenburg, a handsome 34-year-old prince, generated an almost insuperable obstacle to Bismarck’s schemes. On 19 November 1863, in response to Christian IX’s proclamation about Schleswig, the young Augustenburg proclaimed himself Frederick VIII of Schleswig-Holstein and was widely supported in German public opinion. To make things worse, his wife, Princess Adelheid zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1835–1900) was a niece of Queen Victoria and thus a cousin of Crown Princess Victoria. Bismarck had also to cope with generals whom he could not control and who treated him as the civilian interloper he undoubtedly was.

Abroad, Bismarck had to make sure that the Great Powers let him carry out his plan. Napoleon III tried to extort a concession for his support, such as the Prussian territories on the Left Bank of the Rhine, which he had to reject without pushing the Emperor into alliance with Britain. A Liberal government in London, of course, sympathized with little Denmark and deeply distrusted the Prussian reactionary, author of the press edict. The British Foreign Secretary was the grandest of grand Whigs, Lord John Russell, as John Prest describes him in the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as ‘the thinking person’s politician’.¹⁰³ Lord John served under a very different Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, a strong and noisy activist. When the Danish crisis blew up, the British cabinet could not agree on a policy. ‘Palmerston had encouraged the Danes to believe that they would not stand alone, but the cabinet refused to sanction military intervention.’¹⁰⁴ The French Foreign Secretary would not have been surprised. He told the British ambassador in late 1863 that ‘the question of Poland had shown that Great Britain could not be relied upon when war was in the distance.’¹⁰⁵

On 16 January 1864 the governments of Austria and Prussia presented a joint note to the Danish Foreign Minister, von Quaade, which made clear their determination not to accept the constitution of 18 November 1863. By promulgating the constitution,

the Danish government has unequivocally broken the obligations which it undertook in 1852 … The above named two Powers owe it to themselves and to the Federal Diet, in consequence of the part they played in those proceedings … not to allow this situation to continue … Should the Danish government not comply with this summons, the two above named Powers will find themselves compelled to make use of the means at their disposal for the restoration of the status quo.¹⁰⁶

As Michael Embree writes, ‘the Danes had thus precipitated a crisis, for which they were unprepared and the consequences of which they completely misjudged.’ On 20 January Field Marshall Wrangel assumed command of the Allied Army and entered Holstein on a march to the river Eider. The Danes had played into Bismarck’s hands ‘blinded by pure nationalism’.¹⁰⁷

Bismarck still could not be certain that his policy had worked and on 21 January 1864 he wrote to Roon just before a Crown Council to express his anxiety that the King would give in to family pressure and back the young Augustenburg:

The King has ordered me to come to him before the meeting to consider what is to be said. I will not have much to say. In the first place I hardly slept at all last night and feel wretched and then really do not know what one should say … after it has become more or less clear that His Majesty at the risk of breaking with Europe and experiencing a more terrible Olmütz, wants to yield to democracy and the Würzburger in order to establish Augustenburg and create yet another middle state.¹⁰⁸

On 25 January the King dissolved the Landtag when it refused to pass the 1864 Budget and also rejected a 12 million thaler loan to finance a Schleswig-Holstein action. At least that much Bismarck had achieved.

The next difficulty Bismarck faced involved the generals. Bismarck rested his case against the Western powers on strict adherence to the Treaties of London and a commitment to advance in lockstep with the Austrians. That in turn meant that Prussian generals had to move more slowly than they might have wished. The most intransigent of these was General Field Marshall Count von Wrangel, the Berliner’s ‘Papa Wrangel’. In January 1864, Wrangel was three months short of his 80th birthday but had command of the Prussian forces in Schleswig. Age had not mellowed the old hothead. Bismarck’s needs for restraint passed on through the King’s orders infuriated Wrangel and he let loose on Bismarck, as Bismarck describes it in his memoirs:

My old friend Field-Marshal Wrangel sent the King telegrams, not in cipher, containing the coarsest insults against me, in which remarks were made, referring to me, [and] about diplomatists fit for the gallows. I succeeded, however, at that time in inducing the King not to move a hair’s breath in advance of Austria, especially not to give the impression that Austria was being dragged along by us against her will.¹⁰⁹

One tiny incident shows how weak Bismarck’s actual position was on the eve of his first triumph. Bismarck needed, quite rightly, a diplomat to represent him at the HQ of Field Marshall Wrangel and had appointed Ambassador Emil von Wagner. Holstein, whom Bismarck sent to serve as secretary to Wagner, recalls in his memoirs that

when he went to report to the Field Marshall, he came back in very low spirits. This is how he described the scene: the Field Marshall had received him surrounded by royal princes and the whole of his vast military staff. When Wagner presented himself the Field Marshall replied: ‘Tomorrow we transfer our headquarters to Hadersleben but you are to stay here—you diplomats are out of place in military headquarters. But you can write to me, my boy.’ With that Wagner was dismissed.

Bismarck persuaded the King to overrule Wrangel, who then ordered Wagner to HQ. ‘He came back radiant. ‘The Field Marshall is a charming man. I didn’t see this side of him the first time. He came straight up to me and said, “Well, my boy, and where have you been all this time? I shan’t let you run away again!” The royal reproof had worked.’¹¹⁰ It worked but it cost Bismarck extra strain and nervous tension. Here again we can grasp the remarkable way Bismarck succeeded in imposing his will on Prussian conduct without being able to issue an order to the people who had to fight the war.

Luckily for Bismarck the Minister of War, Albrecht von Roon, never wavered in his support of his friend. In turn Bismarck trusted Roon enough to send him military suggestions, though often with the appropriate apology for ‘these reflections from a major’.¹¹¹This relationship of mutual trust between Roon and Bismarck must have been the only calculable element in Bismarck’s unstable situation of complex and contrasting forces. Bismarck needed Roon, because, as a civilian, he had no power over the course of events once fighting began. Roon could do what Bismarck could not. As a senior officer and Minister of War, Roon was the only member of the State Ministry not bound by the Cabinet Order of 8 September 1852, and could ask for an audience of the King at any time. Roon’s Immediatstellung, that is, the right to see his Commanding Officer, the King, on request, represented Bismarck’s only means to intervene in matters of command. At this stage, he had not yet become the great Bismarck and was not even ‘a major’ in more than name. Roon’s unswerving loyalty and constant access to the King constituted the invisible basis on which Bismarck had to operate.

Fighting began on 1 February 1864 when Prussian forces crossed the border into Schleswig. Field Marshall Wrangel issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of the Duchy of Schleswig, to say ‘We come to protect your rights. These rights are violated by the common Constitution for Denmark and Schleswig.’¹¹² At this point, the Prussians had a stroke of luck. The morning of 4 February brought very cold weather which froze the waters of the Schlei and the surrounding marshes which meant that the fortified line of the Dannevirke could be assaulted from the frozen flanks. The Prussians and Austrians assaulted the Dannevirke in early February and forced the Danes to evacuate the line over night and in a snowstorm. The Danes retreated across the water to Jutland and to the fortifications and trenches at Düppel in eastern Schleswig. The Danish retreat without a serious fight was a national disgrace but it was not a substantial victory for the Austro-Prussian expeditionary force either which had nearly twice the number of troops. On 18 February Prussian troops—probably by mistake—crossed the border in Schleswig into Denmark proper and took the town of Kolding. Bismarck hoped to use the incursion to raise the military stakes in the war but the Austrians remained on the Schleswig–Danish border. In effect, the Prussian and Austrian armies had occupied most of Schleswig without serious fighting but what now? Both Roon and Moltke told the King how important a victory of arms would be in political terms.

‘In this campaign your Majesty must win some sort of substantial success, in order not only not to lose the respect gained abroad and at home but also raise it to such an extent that we shall be lifted above many difficulties.’ Moltke added: ‘In the present state of the war there is no more important objective than the glory of the Prussian army.’¹¹³

After a week the Austrians and Prussian agreed to push the war into Denmark proper and on 11 March 1864 announced that the Treaties of 1852 no longer bound the two powers. This was a tense period because the invasion of Denmark widened the war and invited the intervention of the Great Powers. The British cabinet discussed an intervention but hesitated to take the step. With France Bismarck took a strong line. If the French intervened, Prussia would halt the Jutland operations completely and make commoncause with Austria against France. ‘From the moment that you show us faccia feroce, we must put ourselves on good terms with Austria.’¹¹⁴

The British government had called a conference in London of the signatories of the Treaties of 1851 and 1852 for 20 April 1864. This increased the pressure on Bismarck and ravaged his nerves. Unless the Prussian army could win some sort of military victory, the Prussian delegation at the conference would have no leverage to achieve a favourable decision from the Great Powers. Luckily, all the Prussian Generals agreed that the army needed a victory. On 18 April 46 companies of Prussian infantry stormed the fortified line at Düppel and after six hours of fierce fighting took the main Danish defence in Schleswig.¹¹⁵ On 24 April 1864, the London Conference began. With the victory at Düppel, the Prussian soldiers had created facts on the ground. Bismarck could now begin to dismantle the restrictions on Prussian freedom in order to move toward annexation. The Austrian and Prussian delegations informed the conference that they no longer considered themselves bound by the London Treaties and suggested a new constitutional arrangement by which the Duchies might be bound to the Danish crown by personal union only. The Danes stubbornly rejected the compromise to the dismay of the Austrians. Meanwhile, on 12 May 1864 a formal armistice began; all troops were to remain in the positions held that day.

The authentic Bismarckian attitude comes out in a private letter to his former boss in Aachen, Adolf Heinrich Graf von Arnim-Boitzenburg, in which he tells Arnim that he intends to use national popular sentiment against the Danes:

The present situation is so constituted that it seems to suit our purpose at the conference to let loose against the Danes all the dogs that want to howl (forgive this hunting metaphor); the whole howling pack together has the effect of making it impossible for the foreigners to place the Duchies again under Denmark. The Duchies have up to now played the role of the birthday boy in the German family and have got used to the idea, that we are willing to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of their particularist interests … The address will work against that swindle … for me annexation by Prussia is not the highest and most necessary aim but it would be the most agreeable result.¹¹⁶

In the midst of the most difficult period of his entire ministry, Bismarck found time to write to Motley in English on 23 May 1864,

Jack, my dear,

Where the devil are you and what do you do that you never write a line to me? … Do not forget old friends, neither their wives, as mine wishes nearly as ardently as myself to see you or at least to see as quickly as possible a word in your handwriting. Sei gut und komm oder schreibe! Dein, v. Bismarck.¹¹⁷

Motley was startled that his friend had written in the midst of an international crisis and answered four days later:

My dear old Bismarck, It was a very great pleasure to hear from you again. It is from modesty alone that I haven’t written. I thought your time was so taken up with Schleswig-Holstein, and such trifles, that you wouldn’t be able to find a moment to read a line from me.¹¹⁸

Motley’s reluctance to disturb his old friend in the middle of war makes perfect sense but why did Bismarck write to him? Why did Bismarck need to have his friend’s support and reassurance? There is something mysterious and moving at work here. Bismarck really loved Motley and in this first moment of his world-historical significance, he reached out to him.

Another tiny episode tells us something important about Bismarck’s role in Prussian affairs. He was a royal servant and even in the midst of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis he remained subject to the King’s whims. On the same day he wrote to Motley he wrote to his cousin Count Theodor von Bismarck-Bohlen to ask for help to carry out a job that the King had dumped on him. The King wanted to mark Field Marshall von Wrangel’s retirement from active duty at the age of 80 by buying for him with royal funds the estate Wrangelsburg in the administrative district of Stralsund, County Greifswald. Since the King, always frugal, wanted to pay a reasonable price, Bismarck, in some embarrassment, asked Theodor, who lived in the district, to make discreet enquiries about the market price of the estate and to act as the go-between if a bid were to be made. As Bismarck explained, ‘forgive me for bothering you with such matters in All-Highest service, but there is no other way to do it.’¹¹⁹ Otto von Bismarck, facing his first really great test, caught between conflicting demands of the great powers, intent on dismantling the Bund and establishing Prussian hegemony in Germany, trying to fend off or at least contain nationalist emotions, uncertain about whether the armistice would hold, has to interrupt these serious considerations to shop for a gift for Wrangel. Nor was Bismarck slack in such matters. No matter how irksome he found it, he conducted the King’s business, great and small, with exemplary efficiency.

In a letter which Roon wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg on 24 May 1864, he summed up how the situation looked to the second-best informed man in the Kingdom:

Whether I can do something to settle my old nerves this summer depends upon Lord Pam [Palmerston—JS], Louis Napoleon and a few other highly placed rogues. If we strike again, I can hardly go away … it all depends whether Vienna prefers to grant us the Duchies rather than the Augustenburger, for separation from Denmark is no longer in doubt.¹²⁰

Rechberg faced exactly that dilemma. The Danes had stubbornly refused the Austro-Prussian proposal for ‘personal union’ of the two Duchies under the Danish crown. Rechberg thus confronted the choice Roon outlined ‘to grant us [the Prussians] the Duchies rather than the Augustenburger’. On 28 May Rechberg suddenly decided to opt for the Augustenburger and the Austrian and Prussian representatives announced at the London Conference their support for ‘the complete separation’ of the Duchies from Denmark ‘and their union in a single state’ under the Duke of Augustenburg who ‘in the eyes of Germany’ had the greatest right to the succession.¹²¹

This was, as we have seen, Bismarck’s least desirable option but he had already considered the Prussian position with the King and the Crown Prince, who—with all due consideration for the claims of young Duke Frederick and ties of family—remained Prussian soldiers and princes. After an exchange of letters between King William and Duke Frederick, the Crown Prince on 26 February 1864 drafted a set of demands which Prussia must put to the Hereditary Duke in a peace settlement:

Rendsburg to be a federal fortress, Kiel to be a Prussian marine station, accession to the Customs Union, the construction of a canal between the two seas and a military and naval convention with Prussia.¹²²

Under such conditions Frederick VIII would have been ruler in name only of what would become a Prussian military district. The Crown Prince believed that he would in the end accept them. To test that hypothesis Bismarck invited the Duke to Berlin for a conference.

While Bismarck prepared to deal with the young Duke, the military clock had begun to tick and on 29 May 1864 Roon with apologies wrote to Bismarck to remind him that ‘he had to do with his truest friend, whose task it is, precisely because of this characteristic, to bring disagreements and conflicts into the open.’¹²³ Roon attached a report in which he complained that the army had become restless about the lengthening armistice and the consequent loss of the gains made by force:

If a government rests chiefly on the armed portion of the public—and this is our case—so must the opinion of the army about the acts and omissions of that government certainly not be regarded as inconsequential. Thus if both Duchies are not annexed, the annexation of one is essential. If neither is achieved, it will be an inglorious end of the present government in Prussia.¹²⁴

31 May 1864 Duke Frederick arrived in Berlin for the conference with Bismarck and Roon wrote to von Blanckenburg to express his worries that Bismarck had given too much ground in London:

unfortunately, I fear that Otto made too many concession in London and has placed himself on another ground. I think that he had no need to do that because I do not believe in the spectre of a general European war.¹²⁵

Bismarck received the Hereditary Duke of Schleswig-Holstein at nine in the evening of 1 June 1864 and the meeting went on for three hours. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘The expectation of his Royal Highness that the Hereditary Prince would be ready to agree, I did not find justified.’¹²⁶ Bismarck clearly made the case as strongly as he could and by midnight the Duke realized that whether he accepted or refused the terms would make little difference because Prussia had decided at the very least to turn Schleswig into a Prussian possession in fact, if not in name, and there was little he could do to stop it. In addition to the Crown Prince’s conditions, Bismarck added a few of his own (interestingly not included in his memoirs), that Prussia would require ‘guarantees of a conservative system of government’.¹²⁷ That in turn would turn the Ducal estates against their Prince and lose him the support of the German liberals and nationalists. He thought he had to refuse such terms and did.¹²⁸ Bismarck had now eliminated the second option.

As he boasted a year later to Freiherr von Beust, Prime Minister of Saxony, he had ‘hitched’ the Augustenburg ox to the plough. ‘As soon as the plough was in motion, I unhitched the ox.’¹²⁹ In fact, he had done nothing of the sort. The Austrians put the Augustenburg solution into the game, and Duke Frederick played into Bismarck’s hands. Had he accepted the Prussian terms, he could have declared whatever he liked once he had assumed power and played German nationalism and liberal parliamentarianism against the most hated man in Germany. Instead, the Prince lamely said, as he took leave of Bismarck at midnight, ‘We shall see each other again, I suppose … I never saw the Hereditary Prince again until the day after the Battle of Sedan …’¹³⁰ Bismarck played his hand perfectly and in a characteristic way. The sudden Austrian decision to choose the Augustenburg option would have rattled a less skilful gamester. Bismarck accepted the move in order to keep the Austrians in step, assuring himself that the King, Crown Prince, and generals wanted the fruits of their victories and even the dreaded Augusta could not block that. Next he needed to box the Duke into a situation in which he would have to refuse the Prussian offer. What options he would have seen if the Duke had been sly enough to accept the conditions with the intention of double-crossing the Prussians we cannot know but Bismarck would have found them. The Duke’s territories had a large Prussian army on them. Civil servants had begun to introduce Prussian laws, currency, etc. The Duke’s refusal saved Bismarck a lot of bother.

The elimination of the Augustenburg ox from the field left the third and Bismarck’s preferred option: annexation of the Duchies. By now he had come close to achieving that, since Rechberg had played his last card. The stubborn Hereditary Prince meant that there would be no Augustenburg solution and when the truce expired on 26 June 1864, fighting began again. The British government, having promised to support Denmark, did nothing. Disraeli, speaking for the opposition, skewered the Liberals with his scorn:

The most we can do is to tell the noble lord what is not our policy. We will not threaten and then refuse to act. We will not lure our allies with expectations we do not fulfil … to announce to the country that we have no allies and then declare that England can never act alone.¹³¹

The resumption of fighting caused a new domestic crisis. On 12 June a full Crown Council met to discuss Danish War finances. Karl Freiherr von Bodelschwingh (1800–73) served as Bismarck’s finance minister in the ‘conflict cabinet’ from 1862 to 1870 and in a collection of ministers that he despised, Bismarck absolutely hated Bodelschwingh. As Helma Brunck puts it, Bodelschwingh ‘was always restricted in his scrupulous attitude by constitutional, legal reservations’.¹³² Roon put it more concretely in a letter to Moritz von Blanckenburg, ‘Bismarck’s neurotic impatience and Bodelschwingh’s bureaucratic niceties and worries have made sure that not all discords have disappeared.’¹³³ And Bismarck was desperately impatient. The game had reached a moment of the greatest delicacy and at the Crown Council of 12 June 1864, Bodelschwingh reported that to the end May 1864 17 million thaler had been spent, covered by the 1863 surplus of 5,300,000 and the State Treasury reserves of 16 million. More money would be needed but little remained in the treasury. Bismarck demanded that loans be raised without approval of the Chambers but Bodelschwingh and other ministers saw it as a violation of the Constitution of 1850 and the State Debt Law of Frederick William III of 1820. As they declared, ‘As long as the ministers of His Majesty must consider themselves bound by their oaths to maintain the Constitution, it cannot be compatible with the oath to accept a state loan without prior authorization of the Diet.’¹³⁴ Roon argued fiercely that ‘in the case of an urgent need and in order to continue the war, according to articles 63 and 103 of the Constitution a state loan even without the approval of the Landtag can for provisional use be issued constitutionally with the force of law.’¹³⁵ Even if that were accepted, it was far from clear whether investors could be found to purchase the obligations of the Prussian Kingdom issued on a doubtful reading of the Constitution. No action could be taken and on 17 July 1864, the King closed the Landtag which had not authorized an additional pfennig of expenditure.

The summer, as usual, saw Europe’s royalty depart their capitals for their annual visits to take the waters at the spas. For Bismarck, it meant a wandering existence while he waited on the edge of royal familial holidays for the moments of business. The season opened when on 19 June 1864 the King and Bismarck arrived in Carlsbad for a summit with Franz Josef and Rechberg which ended on 24 June 1864. The next day the London Conference adjourned without a decision on the future of the Duchies. The British had done nothing to help their Danish allies, as the French Ambassador contemptuously remarked, ‘they recoiled with vigour’.¹³⁶ On 27 June Bismarck wrote to his sister that ‘politically things are going so well that it makes me nervous, “pourvu que cela dure”. According to the news today, England will stay peaceful.’¹³⁷ He had, in fact, pulled off a tremendous coup and knew it.

And the pieces continued to fall into the right holes. On 8 July the new Danish government gave up the struggle and sued for peace. A week later, von Roon warned Bismarck that, if a trade were to be made to return the occupied Danish islands, it had to be compensated by ‘a complete cession of the Duchies to the Allies to be acceptable’.¹³⁸ The peace negotiations would take place in Vienna and on the day Bismarck left for the conference, ‘he [the King], very moved, thanked me as I left and credited me with the whole success that God’s support had blessed Prussia. Touch wood!’¹³⁹ Bismarck arrived in Vienna early in order to consult Rechberg before the Danish peace delegation arrived.¹⁴⁰ He had time to visit Motley and his family on the second evening after he arrived. Mary Motley wrote at length in a letter to her daughter about the memorable evening:

Your father got a hug from him on the stairs, and then he came into the blue room where we were with the Bowditchs’ and gave me three hearty shakes of the hand. I felt in three minutes as I had known him all my life and formed a deep attachment for him on the spot which has not diminished on further acquaintance. He looks like the photograph your father has of him and like some of the caricatures, is very tall and stoutish but not the least heavy, a well made man with very handsome hands. He is possessed of a wonderful physical and mental organization, eats and drinks and works without feeling it, like a young man of five-and-twenty instead of one of fifty or nearly so. He said, of course, he should come to see us whenever he had time to do so and begged your father to let him come to dinner entirely en famille so that they might be able to talk over old times together at their ease. Accordingly the following Tuesday, the next day but one, at 5 o’clock was appointed. … It would have done your heart good as it did mine, to witness Bismarck’s affectionate demonstration to your father.¹⁴¹

I quote the letter at length because it testifies to the extraordinary magnetism Bismarck exercised on his contemporaries. They, in effect, fell in love with him, dazzled by his charm, brilliance, and, yes, warmth. In spite of Holstein’s portrait of the cold, joyless Bismarck, the warm, funny, affectionate side existed too and his career cannot be comprehended without getting us close to the mystery of his remarkable personality as this ecstatic letter has done.

At the same time Bismarck was negotiating with Rechberg in Vienna, Disraeli took a long walk with his friend, the Russian ambassador Brunnow, and they talked of Bismarck’s successes.

Brunnow thought there was no person whom circumstances had ever so favoured. France, holding back because she was offended with England, English government in a state of impuissance; Russia distracted with conflicting interests; Austria for the first time sincere in wanting to act with Prussia; then, the weak chivalric character of the king, the enthusiasm of Germany.

‘Bismarck has a made a good book,’ I said. ‘He has made a good book but, what is most strange, he backed the worst horse of the lot. For Prussia is a country without any bottom and in my opinion could not maintain a real war for six months.’¹⁴²

The negotiations in Schönbrunn Palace at the end of August 1864 have left conflicting trails of evidence and they remind me a little of those family games of Monopoly when players confront each other with deals. What will you give me to get Trafalgar Square? Rechberg knew perfectly well that Bismarck wanted both Duchies and Bismarck let him think that Milan might be the property to be swapped. On the morning of 24 August Rechberg presented the assembled monarchs and retinues with the draft of just such a swap filled out, as Pflanze puts it, ‘with uncomfortable exactness’. Franz Joseph thereupon asked William bluntly if he intended to annex the Duchies and after some hesitation William, embarrassed by the direct question, replied that ‘he had no right to the Duchies and hence could lay no claim to them,’¹⁴³ exactly the same response he had given to Bismarck’s annoyance at the Crown Council earlier in the year.

On 7 September 1864 Gerson Bleichröder wrote to Baron James de Rothschild to report what Bismarck had told him about Austro-Prussian relations. It seems to have been understood between Bismarck and Bleichröder that the Rothschilds would inform the French accordingly:

The great intimacy with Austria has reached its term and a chill will follow. Schleswig’s future is still deeply veiled. My good source still thinks that we must reach an understanding with the French and keep Schleswig-Holstein for Prussia. Russia would not object, and Austria and England would remain silent, however, unhappy they might be. For the time being this ideal is frustrated by the will of the Monarch, who, because of the Crown Princess, is inclined towards the Duke of Augustenburg.¹⁴⁴

In the summer of 1864 France opened negotiations to create a free trade zone between the Empire and the Prussian-dominated German customs union, the Zollverein. At this point, Rechberg suggested again that a central European customs union would be a natural extension of the existing Prussian-dominated common market. The Prussian Landtag, the Prussian State Ministry, and the smaller German states opted for the French treaty which undermined Rechberg’s entire policy of cooperation with Prussia.

Bismarck was furious. He wrote a letter to Roon on 22 September 1864 from Reinfeld, his wife’s family estate:

A privy councillorish rheumatism has afflicted the Ministry of Trade and the Ministry of Finance for which the correct mustard plaster has yet to be found. The gentlemen understand perfectly that they make difficulties for the present government when they worsen our relations with Austria and Bavaria through unnecessary discourtesies, from which we gain not the least advantage.¹⁴⁵

In spite of Bismarck’s anxiety, shortly thereafter the Peace of Vienna was signed, the main clause of which, Article 3, stated that

His Majesty the King of Denmark renounces His rights over the Duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenberg to their Majesties the Emperor of Austria and King of Prussia.¹⁴⁶

The situation played again into Bismarck’s hands. Prussia had in effect now annexed Schleswig and Austria had an army of occupation in Holstein hundreds of kilometres from her borders in a territory utterly useless to her. In the meantime Rechberg had fallen from power in Vienna, and the Emperor appointed Count Alexander von Mensdorff-Pouilly (1813–71), a dashing and much decorated cavalry general, to succeed him. Rechberg, who for all his faults had been apprenticed to Metternich, knew the diplomatic trade. Mensdorff, a very wealthy man, had the highest connections to the English royal family through his mother, Sophie Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, but had absolutely no qualifications for the post of Foreign Minister. In addition, on taking office, he seemed to lose all his dash, and became ‘the picture of a man who wavered with every tendency in court circles’.¹⁴⁷ And this incompetent, charming but supine figure had to play on centre court against the greatest gamester in the history of diplomacy. The record of Austrian incompetence in the nineteenth century hardly has a dimmer chapter than this appointment.

Bismarck took advantage of Mensdorff’s inexperience to stir up trouble in the Duchies. There were still the Saxon and Hanoverian army units, which the Bund had sent north to fight Denmark; Bismarck decided to expel them and demanded that they exit Schleswig at very short notice. This humiliation of the German Confederation put Austria into difficulty. They needed to strengthen the Bund, not weaken it. Bismarck managed to enlist Mensdorff in the enterprise and the two powers issued a joint note on 14 November 1864 which demanded that the allied troops withdraw, which in due course they did.¹⁴⁸ On 7 December Prussian troops, who had fought in the Danish War, enjoyed a triumphal march into Berlin, the first public celebration of success that Bismarck could claim.¹⁴⁹

The early weeks of 1865 brought tension between Austria and Prussia closer to the breaking point. Mensdorff kept pressing Bismarck to state Prussia’s intentions and in February Bismarck issued the so-called ‘February Conditions’: the army and navy of the Duchies were to be absorbed by Prussia; servicemen were to swear an oath to the King of Prussia; Prussia was to be granted coastal forts and the right to construct a canal across the territories; Prussian garrisons were to remain; and the Duchies were to join the Zollverein, which still excluded the Habsburg Empire. The Austrians were appalled. The Emperor called them ‘quite unacceptable’.¹⁵⁰

Between February and the summer, the two powers made moves and counter-moves. The Prussian commissioner began to turn Schleswig into a Prussian province, to which the Austrian responded by getting Bavaria to introduce a motion in the Bund that Holstein be turned over to the Duke of Augustenburg which passed by 9 votes to 6.¹⁵¹ In secret during early March 1865, Bleichröder opened negotiations with the Austrian Jewish banker Moritz Ritter von Goldschmidt (1803–88) on a scheme for Prussia to buy out Austria in Schleswig and Holstein. On 8 March Goldschmidt wrote to Bleichröder: ‘it would have to be a fat sum to overcome the immense reluctance against a cash settlement, which would not be very honourable.’¹⁵²

This particular period between the February Conditions and the signing of a new Austro-Prussian convention in August at Bad Gastein has been the subject of more historical debate than any other in Bismarck’s long career. How are we to account for the apparent vacillations in Bismarck’s policy between the ‘Schönbrunn System’ (solidarity between Austria and Prussia in joint control of Germany) and the declaration made by Bismarck to Disraeli, Brunnow, and Vitzthum and repeated over and over in many venues that Prussia could only flourish if it destroyed Austrian hegemony by an inevitable Austro-Prussian war. The most famous German historians could not agree. For some the peerless Bismarck always knew—as a genius—what the next step had to be and he only appeared to waver. He changed tactics but not strategy. Others argued that Bismarck really wanted peace but it eluded him. The international conjuncture favoured aggressive moves against Austria. Great Britain had shown itself unwilling or unable under the Liberals to intervene in defence of Denmark. Napoleon III had got involved in an absurd attempt to found an empire in Mexico, and Tsarist Russia had to cope with the social upheaval caused by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The engagement of these powers in a German civil war must have been improbable. And yet Bismarck seemed to hesitate.

The King had begun to resent the behaviour of the Austrians. On 25 April he wrote to Roon that Bismarck had shown him the Austrian note about a compromise over Kiel which would involve a reduction of the Prussian garrison. ‘I cannot bring myself to do that, since every concession to Austria is met by a new ingratitude and pretensions.’¹⁵³ Manteuffel had also been alarmed by the ministerial activities and in early May wrote to the King:

Who rules and decides in Prussia, the King or the ministers? … Your Majesty’s ministers are loyal and devoted but they live now only in the atmosphere of the Chamber. If I may express an opinion, it is this, your Majesty should hold no council but should write to Minister Bismarck and say, ‘Now that I have read the proposal, I have decided that the government will not agree to it’.¹⁵⁴

The King rejected this advice and held a Crown Council on 29 May 1865 at which he declared for the first time that annexation of the Duchies was ‘almost unanimously’ demanded by the ‘nation’. ‘Only the Democracy which does not want Prussia to become great under the present government stands against this demand.’¹⁵⁵ After the King had declared his determination to annex the territories, Bismarck outlined his expectations about relations with Austria. Sooner or later a war would come; at the moment the international situation was favourable. Nevertheless, the wisest course was to eliminate from the February conditions the two points which had met the greatest objection: the oath of allegiance and the ‘amalgamation’ of the Prussian and Ducal forces.¹⁵⁶ After the meeting Manteuffel, genuinely alarmed by what he had heard, wrote to Roon:

I beg your Excellency most earnestly to keep your eye on Bismarck and stay in touch with him. I fear this hot-headed approach. That must not be. I beg your Excellency again to follow things closely. This is a game for high stakes and the state is the main thing.¹⁵⁷

It must have been a stimulating session if the proverbial ‘hothead’ himself had been alarmed by Bismarck. But what had Bismarck actually said that was rash? He had modified the February Conditions to make them more palatable. He offered various courses of action and seemed not to opt for any.

The trouble was money. The Landtag session had begun in January and, while the obvious and unexpected success in the Danish War had softened the hostility of the liberals towards Bismarck, the lower house still had not yet surrendered its demand to approve state expenditure. On 19 June another Crown Council discussed what strategy to adopt in the deadlock. The minutes reveal that Bismarck said:

for a long time it had been his conviction that with the existing constitution Prussia could not be governed for any length of time … [he referred] to the opportunities which a complication of the foreign situation could yield and noted that it might be advisable by proper financial operations to weaken the present inclination of the money market toward an Austrian loan.¹⁵⁸

There were several possible sources of funds. The government could issue a public loan without authorization by the Landtag. Bismarck wrote to Fritz Eulenburg, the Minister of the Interior on 5 July 1865 to say that the King had become as convinced of ‘the necessity of a money operation as I am. He feels himself free of constitutional reservations. He said to me today his duty to preserve the Monarchy is more binding than his duty to the constitution.’¹⁵⁹ On the same day the State Ministry published its budget in the official state newsletter which contained an item for the fleet approved by the King but not the legislature, which came close to royal rule by decree.¹⁶⁰ A loan by decree could follow that example but might not recommend itself to the bond market. As a result the rate of interest could be punitively high or the sale fall short.

Exasperated by the ‘quibbles’ and lack of initiative of his Finance Minister von Bodelschwingh, Bismarck turned informally and quite irregularly to August von der Heydt (1801–74) to explore other ways to raise money. Von der Heydt had exactly the qualities that Bodelschwingh lacked: real experience in private banking as a partner in Heydt, Kersten und Söhne, the family firm; long tenure as Trade Minister under Count Brandenburg and then in the Manteuffel cabinet; though a liberal, he had excellent relations with the royal family; and ‘as a result of his personal initiative he had insured the development of state-owned railways. By 1860 half of all Prussian railways belonged to the state.’¹⁶¹ On 22 June von der Heydt wrote to Bismarck to explain his scheme to raise money.

If it is a question of making liquid considerable sums of money without actual state loans as a floating debt or through their sale, there will be no lack of immediately realizable assets. I draw your attention to the substantial holdings of railroad shares, namely the state participation in the Cologne-Minden, the Bavarian-Märkish, the Upper Silesian, the Stargard-Posen railroads, and then there are the holdings in the Guaranty Fund of the Cologne-Minden line, which in a case of need could be used for sale or for mortgage, then there are the tax credits, perhaps, those of the Saarbrücken Mines or the Upper Silesian pits.¹⁶²

Von der Heydt reckoned that the use of these state assets would finance the government’s needs without recourse to unpopular increases in taxation. These were ideas that Bismarck wanted to hear, and it is hardly a surprise that after the victory over Austria in 1866, when he could rid himself of the ‘conflict ministry’ and the tedious Bodelschwingh, August von der Heydt became Finance Minister. Bismarck called him ‘the Gold Uncle’, in this case, a term of endearment.

The Protestant banker had come up with a scheme that would work. Bismarck’s Jewish bankers, Bleichröder and his Rothschild and Sal. Oppenheim connections had ideas of their own. They too had hit upon a fire sale of Cologne-Minden shares but they had their eyes on the Preussische Seehandlung, which by an irony of history Bismarck, as reporteur of the Finance Committee of the Landtag in 1851, had helped to become ‘the bank house of the state’.¹⁶³ The Preussische Seehandlung had been founded under Frederick the Great but in 1820 it became an independent institute directly under the Crown.¹⁶⁴ In an era when the joint stock company still required an individual permit from the government, the state bank became a very important agent in financial transactions. The Bleichröder/Rothschild group constructed various schemes to exploit the Seehandlung: floating it on the market; taking out a loan against the reparations to be expected from the Danish government as a result of the Peace of Vienna; selling some of its assets, raising money by selling bank shares or arranging a bond issue.

Bismarck set out the options in a letter to Roon from Carlsbad on 3 July 1865. The money operation had, it seemed, a peaceful side. ‘Our task remains by means of our own money operations to block those planned by Austria and thus to assure the maintenance of peace.’ He asks why the Seehandlung should not simply accept the demand of the state for credit with an agreement to pay it when and as needed, and if at the same time they raised interest on deposits they would open the gate to a flow of liquid capital to cover the obligation. And there was still the option of the Cologne-Minden railway which Count Itzenplitz had been investigating. ‘If neither of the two operations goes forward, there remains only the direct loan available in spite of the constitution.’¹⁶⁵

Bismarck’s intentions cannot easily be deduced from the evidence above but thanks to a piece of luck, we can get a little further towards clarity. In the late 1960s Professor John Röhl, the biographer of Kaiser Wilhelm II, came upon three folders of letters to Fritz Eulenburg in Haus Hertefeld, a home belonging to an Eulenburg descendant. One of them contained 62 hitherto unknown handwritten letters from Bismarck, of which eleven belong to the period between 27 June and 18 August 1865, precisely the period in which Bismarck’s intentions have been most contested.¹⁶⁶ The letters show that Bismarck had possibilities to raise the money to finance an Austria war from several sources, and a loan against assets in the Seehandlung had almost been agreed. They make his intentions no clearer but that may be because Bismarck always kept many options open.

When Bismarck arrived in Carlsbad and met the Austrians, he found ‘the welcome as cool here as the weather’ and on 4 July he wrote to Eulenburg that ‘things with Austria stand badly. All the military reports from Holstein tell the King that the situation of troops has become impossible in the face of the press and social chicanery.’¹⁶⁷ While tension mounted between Prussia and Austria, Bleichröder had arranged with the Paris Rothschilds a deal in which the Rothschilds would form a consortium to lend the Seehandlung the money needed to finance the war with security provided by Seehandlung bonds at 1 per cent under the interest payable on Prussian state obligations. As Bismarck wrote to Eulenburg,

At the moment we could get 4½% at par, the moment war threatens, we would lucky to get 90, therefore we cannot expect a better moment … Bleichröder tells me that Rothschild will take the issue in its entirety and in 10 days the silver would be in the state treasury.¹⁶⁸

In fact negotiations hit a snag. Carl Meyer von Rothschild offered Otto von Camphausen (1812–1896), President of the Seehandlung,¹⁶⁹ to purchase 9 million thaler of unissued bonds at 98 or 99 but Camphausen insisted on par, that is, 100 per cent of the face value.¹⁷⁰ The margin may seem small but a 1 or 2 per cent ‘turn’ on a large sum of bonds makes a difference to the profitability of the transaction. Bismarck regretted very much that ‘we had not got the money much earlier … Now we lose a lot if the break comes before the money.’¹⁷¹ Here again we see that Bismarck contemplated the possibility of ‘the break … before the money’, in other words, he knew that he could make his move if it seemed opportune.

In the end, more than enough money came from an unexpected source. The Cöln-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, founded in 1842, had received money from the Prussian finance ministry in exchange for shares and an agreement that the railway would revert to the government after thirty years. The directors of the line had tried in vain to buy out the government and been refused on several occasion. The summer of 1865 gave them their chance. The directors wanted the state holding back and Bismarck’s government needed money urgently. Dagobert Freiherr von Oppenheim (1809–89), a member of the famous Cologne private banking family, had become President of the railway¹⁷² and he approached the government in the summer of 1865. On behalf of the directors, he offered the government 10 million thaler for the shares and suggested that he might be interested in a buy-back of all state claims. The Finance Ministry eventually squeezed the company for 13 million for the shares and another 15 million for the claims. The total sum exchanged amounted to 28,828,500 thaler and the agreement signed on 18 July, notarized on 10 August, was approved by the company on 28 August and the Crown on 13 September. As James M. Brophy explains, ‘on three occasions in 1865 officials in the finance ministry demonstrated the illegality of signing a deal that involved the sale of equities in the Guarantee Fund without the legislature’s approval, but these legal considerations were overlooked. Bismarck now knew—but not exactly when—that there would be cash in the bank for his war; for the company it meant ‘nothing less than salvation’.¹⁷³

On 27 July the Austrian delegation led by Count Blome arrived at Bad Gastein to negotiate a new settlement for the Duchies. Gustav Lehngraf von Blome (1829–1906) had been born Protestant in Hanover but became a Catholic in 1853. He ‘seriously underestimated’ Bismarck, writes his biographer,¹⁷⁴ and Bismarck thought him an idiot with his ‘outmoded Byzantine-Jesuitical method of negotiating, full of tricks and dodges’.¹⁷⁵ Bismarck played cards with him at night, as he told his secretary Tiedemann years later, to scare him by the violence of his play.¹⁷⁶ Bismarck wrote himself to Moritz von Blanckenburg to report that the Austrians were leaning toward peace and the King would probably meet the Kaiser in Salzburg. ‘Until then I have to tack and weave. From here on we cannot be crude’ but to Eulenburg he wrote more openly:

As long as the King is here, and as long as we have not carried out our money operations, I have to be glad to let things hang tolerably in mid-air, because the moment we move in Schleswig-Holstein, the ball starts to roll and the stock market sinks.¹⁷⁷

By this time Bismarck knew that there would be money for a war if he needed it but the arrangements had not been finalized. A letter from Roon to Moritz von Blanckenburg on 1 August confirms that reading of Bismarck’s intentions:

There is money there, enough to give us a free hand in foreign policy, enough if necessary to mobilize the entire army and to pay for an entire campaign. … Where is the money to come from? Without violating the constitution, chiefly through an arrangement with Cologne-Minden railway, which Bodelschwingh and I think is very advantageous.¹⁷⁸

Blome who had gone to Vienna to get new instructions returned on 1 August with a new proposal which in fact Bismarck had suggested to him—that the dual powers should divide the Duchies: Prussia to assume sovereignty over Schleswig and Austria over Holstein. The Austrians disliked the word ‘sovereignty’ and reduced it to ‘administration’. Lauenburg was to be sold to Prussia outright. Bismarck agreed and Blome returned to Vienna for final consultations. On 10 August Bismarck wrote to Eulenburg that he had to stall as long as possible. ‘We will need time to make money and secure France … [we have] a stopgap tolerable for us … with which for the time being we can live honourably without the war running away with us …’ He asked Eulenburg to tell Bleichröder ‘that if any part of my account with him is still invested in securities, which I don’t know here, he should by no means unload these because of some premature fear of war.’¹⁷⁹ In the meantime, an Austrian diplomat in Berlin had found out about the money operations and wrote to Mensdorff in Vienna:

These financial operations … can be justified only by an urgent political necessity, not from an economic point of view and [it is doubtful] that the Diet will approve them … [Prussia had acquired] such an important supply of money as one usually keeps in readiness only in anticipation of a war.¹⁸⁰

On 14 August Bismarck and Blome initialled an agreement which was signed formally in the Episcopal Palace at Salzburg.¹⁸¹ A few days before the formalities Bismarck with his usual casual attitude to matters of secrecy told Eulenburg the gist of the agreement:

In Schleswig therefore from 1 September we rule alone and as sovereign. Nobody will be able to get us out again and it begins to look as if Austria might be willing to sell us Holstein. That we shall get it one way or the other, I no longer have any doubt.¹⁸²

In the end the Austrians had no choice but to seek peace. The political situation in Austria had worsened and on 20 September 1865 Emperor Franz Joseph revoked the constitution, a move which made it much more difficult to find a way to cover a budget deficit of 80,000,000 gulden. During the summer and autumn of 1865 Austrian diplomats in Paris and London had desperately tried to entice the Rothschilds to float a loan to cover the yawning budget deficit. They found the Rothschilds very unwilling to form the syndicate and eventually by the intervention of Napoleon III himself a consortium of big French banks brought a 90,000,000 gulden loan to the Paris bourse on 27 November 1865. The loan sold out on the first day, because it carried a 9 per cent rate of interest, a sign of the fragility of Austrian credit. The loan worth 90,000,000 gulden to Vienna would need 157,000,000 to repay and while the investors bought it at 69, the Austrians only received 61¼. The banks made 28,500,000 gulden.¹⁸³ The Austrian Empire’s bonds might be called ‘sub-prime’.

Meanwhile, the Middle States watched these developments with alarm mixed with complacency. In the summer of 1865, the Budissiner Nachrichten warned the Saxons that they should beware of getting involved in ‘Great Powerdom’:

We have a constitutional life, the like of which neither Prussia nor Austria enjoys. As a result, concord reigns between King and people. We have prosperity, low taxes and healthy finances … Higher political and cultural goals are not neglected here.¹⁸⁴

The Saxons should mind their own business, the paper urged, and stay out of an Austro-Prussian war. They also had to be careful about the mounting enthusiasm for the creation of a German national state, a possibility which would reduce the Middle States, even those which were kingdoms, to mere provinces in a German Reich.

Schleswig could not enjoy such peaceful complacency. The agreement between Prussia and Austria gave the Prussians sovereignty in their duchy. The acquisition of Schleswig meant that a governor of the territory had to be appointed and Bismarck suggested General Edwin von Manteuffel. The King appointed him on 24 August 1865. It was a happy solution to a perennial problem. The influential general would be in Kiel and not in the King’s antechamber and his ego would be gratified by his new vice-regal status. Stosch could not understand the choice as he wrote to a friend, ‘I cannot understand how they can send Manteuffel to Schleswig. He will always take orders from the King alone and never from the Ministry …’¹⁸⁵ Bismarck hardly minded that, as long as the King took orders from him and so far he had. On 16 September 1865 the King elevated Bismarck to the rank of count.¹⁸⁶

While Bismarck negotiated with the Austrians, Moltke had begun to draw lessons from the Danish War, not all of them happy ones. The Prussians had done less well than the official propaganda suggested. The Danes had very effectively used trenches and fortified works and by concentrating their fire had inflicted heavy casualties on the Prussians and Austrians. ‘Now that a cannon could hurl a shell seven kilometers and an infantry rifle could bring a man down at 1,000 paces, it would be difficult to redirect a regiment from an enemy’s center to his flank in the heat of battle.’¹⁸⁷ Moltke also became convinced that the size of the modern army meant that traditional Napoleonic doctrines of concentrated forces must lead to disaster, a kind of military traffic jam. During the 1850s the General Staff and the railways cooperated more and more closely so that in time of war the army could count on good transport arrangements.¹⁸⁸ The gradual extension of military control of railroads meant that Moltke could work on a very different mobilization timetable and hence a different deployment of troops. The slogan getrennt marschieren, gemeinsam schlagen (march separately, strike together) came to be associated with Moltke’s bold innovation—to have his armies deploy separately but come together to fight. Great enveloping movements became possible and one of them led to the greatest victory of 1866. The King, who understood military matters, gave Moltke the same ability to experiment that he gave Bismarck, and it is a remarkable fact that the greatest diplomat and the greatest strategist of the nineteenth century served the same monarch and the same state. In addition, the two generals without whom Bismarck could not have unified Germany, Roon and Moltke, came from untypical Prussian backgrounds, Moltke from Denmark and Roon more distantly from Holland. Neither had personal wealth and neither owned estates.

In late September the annual royal manoeuvres took place. Major Stosch wrote to his friend that the King had been very pleased with the efficiency of the army’s deployment. He recorded, as closely as he could reconstruct it, a conversation between Bismarck and the Crown Prince about prospects for Schleswig-Holstein:

CROWN PRINCE: ‘do you want to annex them?’

BISMARCK: ‘If possible, yes, but I do not want to start a European war over them.’

CROWN PRINCE: ‘And if one threatens?’

BISMARCK: ‘Well, then I confine myself to the February demands.’

CROWN PRINCE: ‘And if these are not accepted?’

BISMARCK: ‘Prussia needs to fear no war over these; the February demands are our ultimatum.’

CROWN PRINCE: ‘And what is happening about Duke Frederick?

BISMARCK: ‘That depends on how the cards fall.’

STOSCH CONTINUED: ‘At the end the conversation took on a very violent character … Bismarck’s ruthlessness makes him many enemies in the aristocracy and increases the ranks of the opposition.’¹⁸⁹

Shortly after the manoeuvres Bismarck left for a holiday in Biarritz with his family. On 4 and 11 October 1865 Bismarck met Napoleon III in Biarritz, though what they actually discussed has never been clearly established. Bismarck would certainly have kept his French options open and would have hinted at the unstable character of the Gastein Convention. Wawro and Eyck argue that Bismarck actually offered Napoleon Luxembourg as compensation for his eventual neutrality in an Austro-Prussian War. Pflanze regards that as unlikely. Whether he promised the Emperor more or less than that we do not know.¹⁹⁰

Early in the new year, 1866, Bismarck had a visit from Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, one of his early patrons, which Gerlach recorded in his diary. It was to be a disturbing occasion. This painful meeting showed Gerlach that Bismarck had abandoned any semblance of the rigorous Christian morality which the two brothers Gerlach and many others thought they had discerned in the young Bismarck.¹⁹¹ Perthes too had concluded that he was cynical and believed in nothing, a cold, calculating rationalist. The next ten years in which Bismarck unleashed two wars, trampled on the sovereignties of the German princes, invoked the ‘revolution’ in the form of universal suffrage, declared war on the Roman Catholic Church, and introduced secular marriage, divorce, and school inspection into the very heartlands of Junker piety might suggest that he had indeed no religious scruples but—as always—Bismarck defies simple categories. He kept religious and devotional literature by his bedside and strongly denied that he had no faith. His colossal achievements often seemed to him to have been God’s work. His abandonment of Gerlach’s Protestant Neo-Pietism could not, however, be denied.

On 19 February 1866 the new British Ambassador Lord Loftus presented his credentials to King William I. Lord Augustus William Frederick Spencer Loftus (1817–1904), according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘was an adequate rather than an able diplomatist, promoted a little beyond his level’ but neither ‘absurd’ nor ‘mischievous’, as Disraeli described him.¹⁹² He got along well with Bismarck and brought to his new post considerable experience at other German courts. He gained Bismarck’s confidence and later in the year witnessed several dramatic moments. There is a passage in his memoirs which is worth quoting at some length because it describes the Prussian court in terms that most commentators have not:

There is no Court more brilliantly maintained, and no Court where more courtesy and hospitality are shown to strangers than the Prussian. Every member of a royal house in Europe, on arriving at Berlin, is lodged at the Schloss, and royal carriages and servants are placed at his disposal during his stay. All the expenses of the Court—the appanages of the Royal Family, and the maintenance of the numerous palaces and residences in all parts of the kingdom, always ready for occupation—are kept up by the Sovereign, and are defrayed out of the Crown estates (termed Kronfideicommis) which are considerable. These revenues are entirely under the administration of the Sovereign, and are independent of Parliament. All the members of the Royal Family receive the dotationsappointed to them by the King from the Crown estates without being subjected to any vote or approval of Parliament.¹⁹³

Loftus arrived as the tensions between Austria and Prussia had begun to increase. The King held a Crown Council on 28 February 1866. Everybody who mattered at the apex of the military, political, and diplomatic branches attended and Manteuffel came as Governor of Schleswig.¹⁹⁴ The official Provincial Correspondence reported on the event and subsequent meetings between the King and Chief of the General Staff but the paper denied rumours that aggressive intentions lay behind the meeting. It noted that ‘the old jealousies on the part of the Austrians had gained ground in Vienna and that the Prussian government would in future be forced to give consideration to its own interests in its deliberations.’¹⁹⁵ At the council Bismarck had made it clear that ‘a forceful appearance abroad and a war undertaken for Prussia’s honor would have a beneficial effect on the solution of the internal conflict.’¹⁹⁶ Moltke reported Austrian troop movements into Bohemia but he emphasized that Austrian units in Venice ‘were not yet in the stage of war readiness … and he emphasized that there had been no signs of horse purchases.’ In 1866 120,000 horses were mobilized, so that early mobilization began with large purchases of horses. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, 250,000 horses were mobilized by Prussia and more than 300,000 by France. Hence in early 1866 Moltke could safely reckon that the Austrians had not started to mobilize.¹⁹⁷

On 7 March 1866 Lord Clarendon, British Foreign Secretary, wrote in great distress to Loftus,

In the name of all that is rational, decent and humane, what can be the justification of war on the part of Prussia? She cannot possibly plead her desire for territorial aggrandizement, and she cannot with truth say that the administration of Holstein by the Austrian authorities has been of a kind to constitute a casus belli, although Bernstorff has just told me that the license allowed in Holstein by General Gablentz and the hostile articles of newspapers under the inspiration of Austria have produced a state of things intolerable to Prussia …¹⁹⁸

Even Bismarck at this stage recognized that no ground for war had yet been found. Again it would take stupefying ineptness by Count Mensdorff, Austrian Foreign Minister, to give Prussia even a shred of justification but he had done nothing yet. Mensdorff’s well-informed sister-in-law, Countess Gabriele Hatzfeldt, wrote mockingly of Bismarck as a mere subaltern in a Prussian guards regiment and added,

There is unanimity here that Bismarck is simply mad and has so jammed himself up in domestic and foreign affairs that he has lost his head and wants war à tout prix, to get himself out of the affair and maintain his position.¹⁹⁹

Even Bismarck’s friend Roon had begun to worry about his mental and physical health. On 26 March 1866 he wrote a gloomy letter to Moritz von Blanckenburg:

Things are not good here. Our friend Otto Bismarck in Herculean day and night efforts has worn down his nerves … The day before yesterday he suffered such hefty stomach cramps and was a result yesterday so depressed, so irritable and annoyed—apparently by little things—that I am today not without anxiety, because I know what’s at stake. … Complete freedom of thought does not combine well with a bad stomach and irritated nerves.²⁰⁰

These symptoms, which varied over time, mark the beginning of a pattern that made Bismarck unique in another way: no statesman of the nineteenth or twentieth century fell ill so frequently, so publicly, and so dramatically as Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck trumpeted his suffering and all his symptoms to everybody. He complained loudly and without discretion from the 1860s to his retirement that the vexations of office had ruined his health and disposition, and in a sense they had. His colossal will to power combined with his fury at anybody—friend or foe—who blocked him literally made him sick and he knew it. Yet the very situation in which he operated gave him no choice. The enemies at court, especially the Queen, the Crown Prince, and Crown Princess, worked against him and did everything to undermine and undo his hold on the King. Rage combined with impotence at the ‘high persons’ whom he could neither convert nor remove ate away at his peace of mind and physical health. He hated them with the intensity of a man in physical and mental pain but he could only escape the agony by surrendering power. That he could never do. Roon saw, as all those close to him confirm, the increasing irrationality, irritability, and intolerance and many like von Below, his old friend, realized that the sickness lay primarily in the mind not in the body.

As the joke has it, ‘just because you are paranoid does not mean that you are not being followed’. Bismarck suspected—and he was correct in this—that a conspiracy against him had began to take more formal shape in the mid-1860s. Queen Augusta now received regular foreign and domestic policy reports from Franz Freiherr von Roggenbach (1825–1907), former Prime Minister of Baden. Roggenbach, handsome and distinguished, had enjoyed a brilliant career, becoming Prime Minster of the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1861 at the age of 36. He loathed Bismarck even before he had become a serious threat. In May of 1865 Roggenbach suddenly announced his resignation in protest at Bismarck’s policy in Schleswig-Holstein. Major Albrecht von Stosch, who became in time a member of the Queen’s private ‘shadow administration’, wrote to his friend Otto von Holtzendorff to express his regret at the resignation:

Your news from Baden interested me very much. Roggenbach was like a shooting star among statesmen. It makes me very sad that he gave up his bold project before he had completed it.²⁰¹

From the summer of 1865 on Roggenbach began to supply Queen Augusta with lengthy memoranda prepared with the expertise and authority of an experienced German diplomat and minister. The published collected correspondence of Roggenbach with the Queen and von Stosch which began after his resignation amounts to 453 pages.²⁰² In Bismarck’s memoirs Roggenbach appears always as a source of intrigues and they were that. Other moderate Liberal constitutionalists had close ties to the courts of the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, the Grand Duke of Baden, and to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg.²⁰³ General von Stosch belonged to the circle, the rare liberal Prussian general. Bismarck had good ground to be suspicious.

The Prussian King and his ministers had opted for war with Austria and a Crown Council meeting took place on Monday 27 March 1866 at which the King agreed to order a partial mobilization and a call-up of reserves. Roon worried that ‘Bismarck’s neurotic impatience’ would cause a disaster.²⁰⁴ The next day, like clockwork, Bismarck wrote impatiently to Roon that ‘it is very much to be wished that tomorrow the King issues definitive orders. Maundy Thursday he will not be in the mood for such things. You see him tomorrow. Couldn’t you arrange that we see him together?’ Roon did arrange that and on 29 March, the Wednesday before Easter 1866, the orders were actually signed.²⁰⁵ Moltke calmly went into action. He knew his mobilization plans had been greatly improved in the last two years and reassured Roon on 5 April:

That the Austrians—if one gives them enough time—will have as many troops in the field as we can summon is nothing new. I have made that clear at all our conferences. It is not a question of the absolute numbers of troop strength but essentially of the time in which both sides can bring them to efficient deployment. Especially for this reason the tables at the end of my report showed clearly and visibly the evident advantage in which we will find ourselves for three whole weeks, if we take the initiative or at least mobilize at the same time as the Austrians.²⁰⁶

On 14 April Moltke reported to the king on the next step. His strategy rested on the intelligent use of railroad lines. ‘Prussia’s three armies were now positioned—on paper—exactly astride the three main and six secondary railway lines. The Elbe army moved on the Berlin-Dresden-Friedland railroad, the First Army on the Frankfurt-Goerlitz-Liegnitz line and the Second Army on the Stettin-Breslau-Lamgaschutz-Rechenbach-Frankenstein and Brieg-Neisse railroads … In short 75 days before it was fought, Moltke envisioned the whole war scenario virtually as it later came out.’²⁰⁷

The Crown Prince was horrified and wrote to General von Schweinitz:

The King wants no war but for months now Bismarck has twisted things so that the old Gentleman has become more and more irritable and finally Bismarck will have ridden him so far that he will not be able to do anything but commit us to war, which will stir up Europe. Bismarck’s talent to manipulate things for the King is great and worthy of admiration. As an expression of his bottomless frivolity and piratical policies some sort of Reich reform idea will be dumped on the carpet, probably with proposals for a Reich parliament and that in the light of our domestic parliamentary conflict! That is a rich irony and bears its failure on its forehead. With such a man everything is possible.²⁰⁸

The Austrians would certainly have agreed with that. They were getting nervous about the German question, as on 7 April Count Blome, Bismarck’s counterpart at Bad Gastein, now Austrian ambassador to Bavaria, wrote to State Secretary Hofrat Ludwig von Biegeleben in Vienna:

Whoever feels the pulse of public opinion will agree with me that the phrase ‘reform of the Bund’ has caught fire and pushed the interest for Augustenburg and the independence of Holstein into the background. The fearful and anxious cling to Bund reform; the Bavarian conservatives cling to it since it will make Bavaria a great power. Bund reform attracts the entire ‘democracy’, which means by it a parliament.²⁰⁹

The Crown Prince had guessed right about Bismarck’s intentions, and Blome had assessed the aims of the ‘democracy’ correctly. Neither saw that the two were connected. On 8 April the Prussian–Italian Treaty was signed, which Eyck called a ‘breach of the constitution of Germany’.²¹⁰ According to its terms the kingdom of Italy was obliged to go to war against the Austrian Empire if war broke out within ninety days, and Bismarck clearly intended that to happen. The next day brought an even bigger shock. On 9 April 1866 the Prussian ambassador submitted a motion to the Bund which changed the entire history of Germany. Of all Bismarck’s many dazzling moves in a long career this one must be one of the most important. The official announcement, published on 11 April 1866, read as follows:

The Prussian government has just taken a step of the greatest importance in the Federal Diet. It has introduced a motion that the Federal Assembly be minded to decide to call an assembly which will be chosen by direct and universal right to vote and at a date to be determined in due course to assemble in order to receive and consider the proposals of the German governments for a reform of the Federal Constitution and in the meantime until the meeting of the said assembly to establish such suggestions by agreement of the governments among themselves.²¹¹

The Crown Prince had guessed correctly. Bismarck had indeed ‘dumped proposals for a Reich parliament on the carpet’ but even the Crown Prince had not foreseen the democratically elected parliament. Bismarck had called forth the power of democracy to outflank the Austrians and the German Federal States in the knowledge that the Habsburgs with their eleven national groups and the rising threat of nationalism could never compete on that ground. In 1866 Bismarck brandished democracy at the Habsburgs like a cross in front of a vampire, a not inappropriate image, since Dracula was a Romanian prince, and his castle was in Hungarian-ruled Romania, a territory without universal suffrage.

German opinion was stunned by Bismarck’s move. The Liberal Kölnische Zeitung commented: ‘If Mephistopheles climbed up in the pulpit and read the Gospel, could anyone be inspired by this prayer?’²¹² The Austrian Ambassador to Saxony reported on the Saxon Prime Minister Beust’s view:

According to his investigations here up to now the reaction in Dresden is that the Prussian motion for a German parliament has caused laughter because they see it as ludicrous to accept such a move from the hand of a Count Bismarck. Whether given the fatuous Germanism of a portion of the Saxon population, this cheerful reaction may not turn to something more reasonable, nobody can offer any guarantee.²¹³

The shock was greatest among Bismarck’s former patrons and supporters, the faithful Christian conservatives and readers of the Kreuzzeitung, his neighbours, friends, and relations. Count Adolf von Kleist was simply incredulous. In a letter to Ludwig von Gerlach he expressed his horror:

What do you think of the latest twist by Bismarck? Summon up popular sovereignty, forming a constitutional convention!! And more than that the complete embarrassment. Austria is in the right, comes with the old suggestions of 1863 and garners universal applause. For God’s sake come to Berlin. You are the only one who still has some influence over him or at least to whom he listens. Our allies are now the revolution in all its nuances. We are absolutely stunned. I am in despair.²¹⁴

A few days later, on 14 April 1866, Prince Albert of Prussia (1809–72), the youngest brother of Frederick William IV, also wrote to Gerlach but more hesitantly.

What Bismarck’s object is with the project, I cannot grasp. In the first place he rejects the entire previous system. A grand slogan of the type of the Congress of Princes does not seem to be the purpose, is it in order to provoke Austria even more? … Not understanding, however, does not make me doubt Bismarck and I wait. But what do you think?²¹⁵

‘Little Hans’ still stuck by his old friend and wrote to Gerlach on 16 April, from his estate, Kieckow:

I thank you that you defended Bismarck against Adolf’s hasty condemnation. There can be no talk of a constituent assembly. There still remains: universal suffrage, but what else? … In order to judge him, one has to know the entire situation and instead of all us complaining and criticizing, just take it on trust. … May God permit poor Bismarck to get better, illuminate him and preserve us in peace and, if it cannot be preserved, may God purify his conscience by his attempt to have achieved everything through an honourable peace.²¹⁶

The members of the Kreuzzeitung party could not accept the resigned piety that Hans von Kleist urged on Gerlach: trust in God and trust in Otto. Many had had enough. On 2 May Privy Councillor J. Bindewald, one of Ludwig Gerlach’s former pupils and now a senior civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs (the Kultusministerium), wrote to Ludwig von Gerlach who, as the acknowledged intellectual leader of the extreme Right, had yet to take a public position:

I cannot keep still any longer and after consultation with President von Kleist and Beuttner, I beg you to intervene in the Kreuzzeitung so that from our point of view the objections and dangers in the federal reform project are noted and at least the principles are preserved which are more important than a diplomatic move with the purpose of embarrassing the opponent. The proposed parliament and its system of election upsets me less than the modus, the how and the place from which the thing has been staged. Without a parliamentary apparatus these days no statesman can operate and the parliament need not and should not be a constituting body. To treat the chambers at home with a riding crop and because of the complications with them to be standing on the verge of a coup d’état and then to hurl the parliament idea into Germany!²¹⁷

Two days later, 4 May, Prince Albert wrote to Ludwig von Gerlach again to tell him that as a general officer he had been informed of the partial mobilization. As to politics, he wrote,

I have not been able to see or speak to Count Bismarck. He is still unwell and has only been out once or twice … The leading articles about federal reform have not entirely reconciled my feelings with it. There is much very doubtful about it but I have such boundless confidence in Bismarck that I suspect that it forms part of his long-term, well-thought out plan and is neither a momentary inspiration nor a political chess move.²¹⁸

It is interesting that a royal prince of the older generation should have assessed Bismarck so accurately. Attentive readers may recall the strong language that Bismarck used to the late General Leopold von Gerlach in the famous exchange of letters of 1857 about Napoleon III. Bismarck had seen that democracy and conservatism could be compatible and he intended to use universal suffrage as he used everything and everybody to achieve his end. That was all too much for Ludwig von Gerlach, who on 5 May published an article entitled ‘War and Federal Reform’ in the Kreuzzeitung:

Let us take care not to fall into the dreadful false belief that God’s commandments stop at the field of politics. Justitia fundamentum regnorum … The justified calling on Prussia to expand its power in Germany matches the equally justified Austrian claim to maintain its power in Germany. Germany is no longer Germany if Prussia is not there or when Austria is not there … In the midst of the clanging of weapons Prussia introduces at the Bund a demand for universal suffrage. Universal suffrage means political bankruptcy—in place of living relations of law and political thought, instead of concrete personalities, we get numbers and exercises in addition.²¹⁹

Bismarck never forgave Ludwig von Gerlach for daring to criticize him in public. But it bothered him. In later years he would come back to Gerlach in conversation and mock him. Gerlach, a man of principle, continued to criticize Bismarck, the unforgivable sin of sins, so he had to be dismissed as a crank. In 1873 he explained to Lucius von Ballhausen that

Gerlach has become entirely negative and criticizes everything. Frederick II was not ‘great’ and his regime was a series of failures and mistakes. He admires 1806 because nobody else does.²²⁰

An Austrian diplomat commented bitterly on Bismarck’s tactics:

We appeal to the noble sentiments: patriotism, honour, principles of law, energy, courage, decision, sense of independence, etc. He reckons on the lower motivations of human nature: avarice, cowardice, confusion, indolence, indecision and narrow-mindedness.²²¹

That list of lower motivations described perfectly the behaviour of the German states. They hesitated. They plotted. They combined and dissolved. In the end on 9 May the Federal Assembly voted by 9 to 5 on a Saxon motion to demand that Prussia explain the grounds for mobilization.

The High Assembly of the Bund agrees without delay to approach the Royal Prussian Government to request that through an appropriate declaration with due recognition of Art. XI of the Federal Act (according to which members of the Bund may not wage war upon each other but should bring conflicts to the Federal Assembly for resolution) full reassurance will be received.²²²

The Austrians had been outflanked on the Italian front by Bismarck’s alliance with Italy and in Germany by his alliance with the people. To the west Napoleon III could not make up his mind nor assure unity among his advisers about what to do: to join Prussia and Italy? To extract German territory on the Rhine from the Prussians as compensation for neutrality? To back Austria to maintain the balance of power? Bismarck played him like a big fish on a line, hauling him in, letting him out. Yes, he would surrender territory, but the King? That was the difficulty, and so on. In the end, on 24 May 1866, Napoleon III—caught between greed and fear—called a conference in the name of France, Britain, and Russia to meet in Paris to mediate between the two German Powers. On 26 May 1866 Albrecht von Stosch, as 2nd Quartermaster General of the II Army under the Crown Prince, attended the Grand War Council with the King, Moltke, Roon, Bismarck, and all the senior commanders and their chiefs of staff. In a letter to his wife he described how the King, tearful and upset, remained committed to maintenance of the peace:

Bismarck gave hints that the war must decisively achieve the rounding off of Prussian territory. That caused the Crown Prince to ask the question whether there was an intention to annex territory. He had not heard that. The King answered angrily, that there is no question of war yet and still less of deposing German princes. He wants peace … Bismarck was by far the clearest and sharpest. I became convinced that he had brought about the whole situation in order to encourage the King to be more warlike … The meeting went on for three hours, and as we came out, the Crown Prince said, ‘we know no more than we did before. The King will not; Bismarck will.’²²³

On 30 May Bismarck wrote to Robert von der Goltz, his ambassador in Paris:

I regard the whole uproar and opposition in the country as entirely on the surface, stirred up by the upper stratum of the bourgeoisie and nourished in the popular masses by unrealistic promises. In the decisive moment the masses stand by the Monarchy, without distinction whether it has a liberal or conservative direction at that moment.²²⁴

The Prussian government had accepted the invitation to Napoleon’s conference in Paris, because Bismarck dared not annoy the Emperor. Stosch told his wife that Bismarck would soon set off ‘to the conference in Paris. People see that as decisive because by his absence he loses his power over the King and his opponents, whose number grows each day, gain ground.’²²⁵ At this point Mensdorff made the first of two serious mistakes. Unlike the flexible Bismarck, Mensdorff refused to attend the conference in Paris because the status of Venetia might be discussed and Austrian territories in Italy were non-negotiable. The conference option fell through.

On 2 June 1866, King William I made one of his most important decisions. He decreed that the General Staff Chief Helmuth von Moltke be officially put in command of the Prussian army with the right to issue orders in the name of the King. This broke the tradition of Frederick the Great that the King had to command his army in the field and gave to Moltke control of the entire operational leadership in war and its preparation in peace.²²⁶ The years of preparation and attention to small things would pay off. The General Staff had moved over to the 24-hour clock for its operations and every commander had orders to keep a war diary from day 1 of mobilization.²²⁷ By 5 and 6 June the Prussian deployment—approximately 330,000 men—on the borders had been completed.²²⁸ But there was still no war nor the crucial pretext for one.

At this point, obligingly, Count Mensdorff made his second serious mistake. The Austrians asked the Federal Assembly to intervene in the conflict and placed the decision in its hands. It also ordered its Governor General in Holstein to call the estates of the Duchy into session. By so doing, it had unilaterally revoked the Bad Gastein Convention and gave Bismarck the chance to declare through the official press that

by the declarations made to the Bund and through the convocation in the near future of the Holstein estates, Austria has called into question and endangered the sovereign rights of the King of Prussia as co-regent of Schleswig-Holstein … Our Government will respond to the treaty violation with its full energy in defence of its rights.²²⁹

Prussia and Austria now moved toward war. On 9 June Bismarck wrote to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha that only ‘an act of violence’ would solve the German question.²³⁰ On the 10th he presented the text to the German states for a new federal constitution, which would exclude Austria, and had a lower house based on universal suffrage. Bavaria and Prussia would share the military command of the new German state²³¹ and on the 11th he engaged Heinrich von Treitschke to draft a manifesto for the King to use to address the nation on the eve of war.²³² Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96) had become a kind of popular idol among German professors. He filled every hall in the university. He addressed crowds on public occasions. He wrote plays, poetry, and literary criticism and lectured on recent German history. His sister compared him to an academic Martin Luther. In 1863 he published a pamphlet called ‘Federal State and Unitary State’ which took the Bismarckian line. The little states were all fraudulent creations and the justifications of them by the use of the word ‘organic’ meant nothing. ‘We know that the word “organic” appears in politics as soon as thought ends … Every German federal reform will be an empty phrase as long as Germany’s unnatural ties to Austria continue.’²³³ He belonged to the small group of German liberals whom Bismarck had converted. As he put it:

I find it terrible that the most important foreign minister whom Prussia has had for decades should at the same time be the most hated man in Germany. I find it sadder still that the most promising ideas for reforming the Confederation that were ever proposed by a Prussian government should have been met by the nation with such humiliating coldness.²³⁴

Yet when Treitschke actually met Bismarck, he was shocked. After the audience he remarked: ‘Of the moral powers in the world he has not the slightest notion.’²³⁵

The Middle States, as they were called, would not surrender their independence easily. A French traveller in the mid-1860s visited Dresden while it still housed the royal reisdence of a ruling dynasty and wondered at the display of monarchical self-confidence:

Twenty different signs recall at any moment the proximity of the palace … There are the officers who pass by, with their sabres tucked under their arms, … Then the troops of men in livery who come and go, invariably wearing … the royal crown, which image soon ends up encrusted in your retina unless you take good care.²³⁶

The three dynasties of Hanover, Saxony, and Württemberg had lineages no less impressive than the Hohenzollern and took care to parade them. Bismarck—in one of his very few real miscalculations—overestimated the power of these monarchies and the loyalty of their subjects. Had he known how easily the princes would surrender their sovereignty (Hanover was a stubborn exception), he would never have introduced universal suffrage. The people were not called up because Bismarck had some sort of ‘white revolution’ in mind or because he had bonapartist urges, as many historians assert, but only to balance the princes in order to preserve the absolute power of the Prussian King. By the end of the 1880s Bismarck planned to repeal universal suffrage because the people turned out to be Catholics and Social Democrats, not obsequious peasants. Bismarck fell victim to Burke’s observation that ‘very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions’.

The first act of war took place on 10 June 1866. Since Austria had unilaterally violated the Convention of Bad Gastein, Prussia now had a right to joint sovereignty of Holstein and Schleswig and Lieutenant General von Manteuffel issued a proclamation to the Holsteiners ‘that to protect the threatened rights of His Majesty the King I am obliged to take in hand the supreme authority in the Duchy of Holstein’.²³⁷ Prussian troops heavily outnumbered the Austrians brigades and the Austrian Vice-Regent of Holstein Lieutenant General Ludwig Freiherr von Gablenz (1814–74) issued an order for his troops to withdraw. General Manteuffel allowed them to march out with full honours, drums rolling and flags flying. Bismarck went into one of his notorious rages but he could not issue an order to a Prussian private, let alone a senior and flamboyant character like General Edwin von Manteuffel. He complained to Manteuffel in strong terms and Manteuffel replied equally strongly. Erich Eyck describes what Bismarck then did:

You say that a violent act would embarrass the mind. I answer you with the words of Deveroux, ‘Freund, jetzt ist’s Zeit zu lärmen’ [now is time to make a din—JS]. Excuse the hasty style of this letter, but your telegram this morning paralysed my nerves, and this is now the reaction. In haste but in old friendship, yours, Bismarck.’ While his pen flew over the paper, he thought of some lines from Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein’s Death’ which expressed his feelings better still. He ordered a copy to be brought to him. He found the lines at the decisive moment when only open rebellion is left to him, and he wrote under his signature:

Ich tat’s mit Widerstreben,

Da es in meine Wahl noch war gegeben,

Notwendigkeit ist da, der Zweifel flieht,

Jetzt fechte ich für mein Haupt und für mein Leben.

(Er geht ab, die anderen folgen) Schiller, Wallenstein, Act III, Scene 10 [Lingering irresolute, with fitful fears

I drew the sword—’twas with an inward strife,

While yet the choice was mine. The murderous knife is lifted for my heart!

Doubt disappears! I fight now for my head and for my life.]²³⁸

(He goes off, the others follow)

Even the critical reader cannot help feeling overwhelmed by this letter. No other statesman would have been able to write a letter of this scope at so critical a time.²³⁹

I suspect that Churchill could easily have done something similar, though it is impressive. What Eyck in spite of his stupendous erudition ignores is how weak Bismarck’s position was in the situation. He could not order Manteuffel to do a thing, only cajole him, persuade him, seduce him with his favourite playwright. Imagine it: the great Bismarck at the single most desperate moment of his career so powerless that his only ally was Schiller. No doubt, as always with Bismarck, there is self-dramatization at work in the episode, but the fact remains that Manteuffel obeyed the King, not Bismarck.

On 14 June the Prussian delegate in Frankfurt declared that the Constitution of the Bund had been broken and on the next day the Prussian Ministers in Hanover, Dresden, and Hesse-Cassel presented ultimatums to the governments to which they were accredited which demanded a reply by midnight and a complete acceptance of the Prussian proposals.²⁴⁰ Sentiment in Germany was overwhelmingly anti-Prussian. Baron Kübeck wrote to Mensdorff to report that, as Austrian troops left Frankfurt, the citizenry shouted, ‘“Three cheers for Austria! Victory for the Austrian army!” Whereas the Prussian contingent left without ceremony in the morning.’²⁴¹

At midnight on the night of 15 June Lord Loftus found himself at a scene of high drama.

I was with Prince Bismarck on the night of June 15th. We had been walking and sitting in his garden till a later hour, when, to my astonishment, it struck midnight. Bismarck took out his watch and said, ‘At this moment our troops are marching into Hanover, Saxony and the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel. The struggle will be severe. Prussia may lose, but she will, at all events, have fought bravely and honourably. If we are beaten’ Count Bismarck said, I shall not return here. I shall fall in the last charge. One can only die once and, if beaten, it is better to die.’²⁴²

That may seem false and theatrical but Bismarck had reason to be nervous. Informed military opinion then expected Austria to win and several distinguished military historians can show convincingly that they ought to have done so. In spite of Moltke’s calm certainties, he too had reason to worry. He had to divide his forces with an army in the West which would have to deal with the Hanoverian and Hessian forces, three armies toward the East, one of which would need to subdue the Saxons and the other two had moved into Austrian territory to carry out the encircling movement on which his plans for victory rested. His armies had commanders of varying degrees of quality and equally varying amounts of esteem from the King. Fortunately two of the royal commanders, Prince Frederick Charles, the King’s nephew, and the Crown Prince Frederick proved to be outstanding field commanders. The Austrians had similar problems but with unfortunately reversed consequences. The commander-in-chief of the Austrian ‘North Army’ in Bohemia, Feldzeugmeister Ludwig von Benedek (1804–81), ‘the lion of Solferino’, had gained a reputation for boldness as one of the few Austrian commanders to come out of the 1859 war with credit. ‘The mere name Benedek means that he will come quickly, dealing blows left and right,’ Moltke said.²⁴³ Had he done so and caught the Prussian columns one by one, the outcome would have been different, but Benedek, who had done so well as corps commander, proved unable to control an entire army and hesitated at several crucial points. Whereas Moltke had to let the mediocre Eduard Vogel von Fackenstein command the West army because the King liked him, he had good commanders in Bohemia. Franz Joseph chose an obscure, near-sighted Archduke, the Archduke Albrecht, to command the Austrian ‘South Army’, who proved to be an outstanding and versatile commander. Aided by an accomplished chief of staff, a competent bourgeois officer, Franz John, the Archduke Albrecht achieved victory over the Italians.²⁴⁴

Moltke faced another threat which he could not control: the problem of communications. The railroads made it possible to move large numbers of men and the telegraph made control of such movements significantly easier. In effect strategic mobility had greatly improved but once away from the railhead and especially in battle commanders had no way to contact each other. Moltke frequently had no idea where his troops were and no way of finding out. The age of the mobile telephone has so spoiled us that we tend to forget how impossible communications were for most of the nineteenth century.

‘Weaponry was the basic evil’, claims Frank Zimmer. The Prussian ‘needle gun’ was much superior to the Austria ‘Lorenz’ gun.

That the Austrian Army set its hopes on an obsolete model must rank as one of the most disastrous miscalculations in the history of the armaments industry … The Prussian model was simply the best. Oddly enough its very virtues made it suspect in Austrian eyes and a reason not to adopt it. Kaiser Franz Joseph and many officers thought that its rapid fire power would mislead the ordinary soldier into wasting ammunition.²⁴⁵

Gordon Craig adds: ‘the Zündnagelgewehr … [was] a breech-loading rifle that was capable of firing five rounds a minute with 43 percent accuracy at seven hundred paces’ and quotes ‘the plaintive cry in the letter of an Austria Landser, “Dear Peppi, I guess I won’t see you anymore for the Prussians are shooting everyone dead”.’²⁴⁶ In the main engagement the Austrians lost three times as many men on average as the Prussians. The Austrian tactics of bayonet charge simply made certain that, as General von Blumenthal, Chief of Staff of the Prussian I Army, put it, ‘we just shoot the poor sods dead.’²⁴⁷

Both Bismarck and Moltke had become desperate. Their generals moved in a relaxed manner to their tasks. In exasperation Bismarck asked Roon on 17 June, ‘Is Manteuffel in Harburg nailed down by any sort of military order? I hoped, he would fly.’²⁴⁸ Vogel von Falckenstein was worse. He had settled into the comfortable Hotel Zur Krone in Göttingen and seemed to be taking his time in dispatching the small and ill-organized Hanoverian army. He had a reputation for eccentricity and had once court-martialled a soldier for presenting him a glass of water without the serving tray.²⁴⁹ Moltke saw that his plan made the Prussian forces terribly vulnerable, deployed in relatively small contingents across hundred of kilometres, as one critic put it, ‘like beads on a string’.²⁵⁰

After the war Stosch complained that many commanders had been too old and lacked inventiveness but the General Staff was

fresh, active and, what was best of all, did not stick to formalities but to substance. General von Moltke is one of the most talented and sharp-thinking of generals and has the inclination to grand operations … There is a story that during the difficult hours at Königgrätz somebody asked Moltke what he had decided about retreat to which Moltke answered, ‘here it is a question of the entire future of Prussia, here there will be no retreat.’²⁵¹

If Benedek, who enjoyed the advantage of compactness, had launched an attack on the First Army alone before it combined with the two columns of the Elbe and Second Armies, the whole plan would have collapsed. If the Hanoverians or Saxons had fought more tenaciously then the West Army under Vogel and the Elbe Army under Karl Herwarth von Bittenfeld, who, as Wawro writes, ‘vied with Falckenstein for the distinction of most mediocre general in the Prussian army’, would not have arrived in time to join the other two columns.²⁵² On 28 June General Vogel von Falckenstein and the Prussian Army of the Main defeated the Hanoverian army at Langensalza and Hanover capitulated. The first defeat prompted Franz Joseph to change his ministers. On 30 June a new government, the ‘Three Counts’ government—Belcredi, Esterhazy, and Mendsdorff—was formed in Vienna, which promised to be more resolute.

On 30 June the King moved the Great Headquarters to Jicin in Bohemia, where Moltke discovered to his dismay that all three Army groups had lost complete contact with Benedek’s North Army and had no idea where it was. Time was running out because a French envoy was expected to arrive at headquarters with a demand that the hostilities be halted. The long marches and rain had exhausted the advancing Prussian troops and eroded discipline. The great battle on 3 July 1866 was fought at the village of Sadowa, north-west of the Bohemian town of Königgrätz (now Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic) on the upper Elbe River. It began with an attack by the Prussian Elbe and First Armies.²⁵³ The Crown Prince’s Second Army had not yet arrived to close the encirclement. At 11.30 in the morning Benedek received intelligence that along the Elbe strong Prussian forces had been spotted (the Crown Prince’s Second Army). The provisional commander of the Austrian IV Corps, Feldmarschall Lieutnant Anton Freiherr von Mollinary, demanded permission to attack to the Prussian left flank while it lay exposed. ‘There I was, standing before the extreme left wing of the Prussian army. A determined attack would have snapped off the enemy’s left wing and put us on the road to victory.’²⁵⁴ Zimmer believes that Benedek intended to attack but only in a conventional frontal assault. The moment passed and by the early afternoon the Crown Prince’s II Army ‘within a short time broke the Austrian flank, aided by difficult terrain and fog and by exploiting the needle gun and artillery … It all went so quickly that Benedek at first would not believe the report and replied to the officer who brought it, “Nonsense, don’t babble such stupid stuff”. It was 3 pm on the afternoon of 3 July, 1866.’²⁵⁵

Later that afternoon Prince Friedrich Karl, Commander of the First Army, suddenly to his surprise met the Austrian Field Marshall Lieutenant von Gablenz, who had come to ask for terms of armistice. ‘But why are you asking for an armistice? Does your army need one?’ Gablenz: ‘My Emperor has no army left; it is as good as destroyed.’ Friedrich Karl wrote in his diary: ‘Through meeting Gablenz it was clear to me for the first time the scale of the defeat and the breadth of the victory.’²⁵⁶ Prince Frederick Charles, whose First Army had borne the main burden of the battle, reflected afterwards what had given Prussia the victory and concluded that it was a certain reliable ordinariness:

It is our well-trained, well-oiled mechanism in which each knows his place, a place which even mediocrity is entirely ready to fulfil its tasks (for it is calculated on mediocrity) which has taught us how to win victories. The reorganization of the army has certainly not alone contributed to this outcome, but it was in its time a necessary perfecting of the mechanism. Geniuses in the proper sense of the word have not shown themselves.²⁵⁷

In other words, on balance the Prussians had a more modern, bureaucratic attitude to war than the Austrians. The years of war games, theory, and repeated practice had paid off—but just. Had Benedek let Mollinary attack the Prussian left at 11.30 in the morning and thrown his ample reserves against them from the oblique position his own corps had gained, the Prussians, discipline, bureaucracy and all the rest, would have crumbled as rapidly as the Austrians did in the afternoon and the whole history of Europe would have been other than it became.

Bismarck’s own reaction does him credit:

He felt that he was playing a game of cards with a million-dollar stake that he did not really possess. Now that the wager had been won, he felt depressed rather than elated. And as he rode through fields with dead and wounded, he wondered what his feelings would be if his eldest son were lying there.²⁵⁸

Stosch, now a general officer²⁵⁹ and first Quartermaster General to the Second Army, recorded the arrival of Field Marshall Lieutenant von Gablenz to ask for terms of armistice, to which Bismarck demanded the exclusion of Austria from Germany and the unification of the largely Protestant North German states as a first stage to the full unity. Except for the King of Saxony no sovereign should be deposed. Hessen and Hanover must be reduced to assure the necessary links between the eastern and western provinces of Prussia. The Crown Prince invited Bismarck to dine with the staff of the II Army and Stosch recorded his impressions:

It was the first time I saw Bismarck personally at a social occasion and I confess gladly that the impression that I got from him nearly overwhelmed me. The clarity and grandeur of his views gave me the highest pleasure; he was secure and fresh in every direction and unfolded in each thought a whole world.²⁶⁰

By a fortunate coincidence, the Prussian voters went to the polls on the very day of the battle of Königgrätz-Sadowa and, as the official Provincial Correspondence reported with glee: ‘The domination of the Progressive Party has been broken. The Party has surrendered a large number of seats in the House of Deputies to more moderate, partly to conservative and partly liberal, deputies but of decisively patriotic temper.’ The Progressive fraction fell from 143 members to 83, Conservatives grew from 38 to 123, and centrist Liberals fell from 110 to 65.²⁶¹ As Rudolf Bamberger observed to his brother Ludwig, ‘It’s interesting to observe what effect success has. Ten days ago with the exception of a few thinking people, there were no friends of Prussia; today it’s different.’²⁶²Bismarck had won on both fronts—foreign and domestic—and in exactly the way he outlined to Disraeli. A victory abroad had destroyed the opposition at home. In a matter of twenty-four hours Bismarck had become ‘Bismarck’, the genius-statesman.

His next step shows that he deserved the title ‘genius-statesman’. He made peace with Austria without annexations and without a victory parade in Vienna. It was his greatest moment in human and diplomatic terms. As he wrote to his wife, six days after the victory:

If we do not exaggerate our claims and do not believe that we have conquered the world, we can arrive at a peace worth the effort. But we are as quickly intoxicated as we become down-hearted and I have the thankless task of pouring cold water into the bubbling cauldron and reminding people that we do not live alone in Europe but with three neighbours.²⁶³

When Stosch went to see him as representative of the Crown Prince, Bismarck told him exactly the same things, as he reported to Karl von Normann (1827–88) the influential private secretary to the Crown Prince:

First of all he explained that it was a question of Austria’s exclusion from Germany, further damage or surrender of territory and the like should not take place, because later we shall want Austria’s force for ourselves … he could assure me how wonderful he found it that brilliant military victories make the best basis for diplomatic arts. Everything went as if oiled.²⁶⁴

Moltke agreed absolutely, as wrote to his wife, that he was ‘very much in favour that we do not place the achievements we have made at risk again, if we can avoid that. That I hope can be done, if we do not seek revenge but fix our eyes on our own advantage.’²⁶⁵ General Leonhard Count von Blumenthal, chief of staff of the Second Army, thought exactly the same thing:

The peace negotiations are going well and the peace would have been signed if the King had not made difficulties. He insists that Austria surrender territory to us, which they are only prepared to do as part of reparations for war damage. It looks as if this point of honour is the stumbling block.²⁶⁶

In 1877 Bismarck gave an account of the events leading to the peace settlement with Austria that gives a very different picture of the attitude of the generals. He told it to Lucius von Ballhausen, who recorded it in his diary and he repeated this account in his memoirs in the 1890s:

I was the only person among the 300 or so who had to rely entirely on his own judgement without being able to ask anybody. In the war council, all with the king at the head, wanted to continue the war. I stated, fighting a war in Hungary in the heat, with the drought and the spreading cholera was extremely dangerous, and what was the objective? After all the generals had voted against me, I declared, ‘as a general I have been outvoted, but as minister I must submit my resignation if my judgement were not accepted.’ The deliberations took place in my room, because I was ill. After my declaration I left, shut and locked the door and went to my sleeping quarters and threw myself, sobbing and broken, onto the bed. The others deliberated in whispers for a while and then slipped away.

The following day I had a stormy encounter with the King … he called my peace conditions ‘shameful’. He demanded Bohemia, Austrian Silesia, Ansbach-Bayreuth, East Friesland, a slice of Saxony etc. I tried to make clear to him that one could hardly fatally wound those with whom later one would want and indeed have to live. He rejected that idea and threw himself weeping onto the sofa. ‘My first minister will be a deserter in the face of the enemy and imposes this shameful peace on me.’

I left him, firm in my decision, and had just slammed the door to my room and laid down my sabre when the Crown Prince walked in and volunteered to go to his father. He wanted peace and could understand and approve my motives. I had made the war and must now bring it to a conclusion. After a few hours he brought me a letter from his father which I have kept. The expression ‘shameful’ appears twice in it. ‘Since I leave him in the lurch, and regardless of the brilliant success of the army, so he agrees to submit to the shameful conditions.’ These shameful conditions became the Peace of Prague.²⁶⁷

Engelberg writes that Bismarck’s memoirs are deeply misleading.

Why Bismarck misled generations of readers of ‘Reminiscences and Reflections’ with a legend about a fronde by the generals against his peace efforts can be explained politically by the period in which they were written. He knew that among the forces which had brought about his fall were leading military men. Thus his false portrayal of the relationship to the generals was an act of political revenge against the Prussian-German General Staff of the 1890s.²⁶⁸

That cannot explain the fact that, when Bismarck told Lucius the story in 1877, he had not fallen from power and Lucius had no reason to doubt it. His relationship with the military in 1866 changed during the Franco-Prussian War when he waged an exhausting and bitter struggle against the General Staff officers, whom he called ‘the demi-gods’, about strategy and politics and it may be that he conflated the two experiences. We have other sources that confirm the King’s emotional reaction to the victory and the hysterical behaviour of both King and his chief Minister had by 1866 become part of their relationship. Still it typifies Bismarck’s constant tendency, even the stories he repeated at dinner, to rewrite the past. I suppose that more of us do that than we know. Our tales of life never receive the pedantically thorough examination that Bismarck’s have had.

On 26 July 1866, Prussia and Austria signed a preliminary peace agreement at Nikolsburg which established the following agreement:

1.   Austria is to withdraw entirely from the association of German states;

2.   Austria recognizes the formation of a federation of the North German states under Prussian leadership;

3.   The relationship between the south German states among themselves and with the North German Federation remains to be decided by freely agreed arrangements.

4.   Austria recognizes the alterations of possessions to be carried out in North Germany.

5.   Austria to pay a reparation of 40 million thaler for war damage.²⁶⁹

The ‘alteration of possessions’, according to Pflanze, constituted ‘Bismarck’s most revolutionary act in 1866’.²⁷⁰ With a stroke of the pen, the historic Kingdom of Hanover lost its independence and King George, a cousin of Queen Victoria, lost his throne. The Duchy of Nassau and the part of Hesse-Kassel north of the Main and the city of Frankfurt were simply swallowed up. If Bismarck’s moderation at Nikolsburg shows his best side, his treatment of the Free City of Frankfurt shows his worst. It reveals in miniature the brutal behaviour of the Prussian army in the intoxication of victory. On 16 July 1866 General Vogel von Falckenstein occupied Frankfurt am Main and took command of the city. Three days later the Prussian army seized and transported to Berlin 155 pounds of silver. Manteuffel, who had replaced Vogel von Falckenstein as city commandant then demanded 25 million gulden within 24 hours which was reduced to 19 million when the authorities explained that they had already contributed. The order came directly from Bismarck. Bürgermaster Fellner asked for more time to consult the legislative assembly and, when asked, the assembly refused to pay.²⁷¹ The Prussians demanded a list of those who voted against the contribution to punish them; Fellner refused to give them the names. On 23 July Bürgermaster Fellner commited suicide. General Maximilian Count von Roedern (1816–98), who had now replaced Manteuffel as military governor, ordered that Fellner be buried at 5 a.m. but two senators who escaped from the occupied city got the story of Prussian ‘atrocities’ into the papers. Appelationsgerichtsrat Dr Kügler, Senator Fellner’s brother-in-law, presented the rope to General von Röder. ‘The general told him in the gruffest voice, “that the contribution had to be paid regardless” and continued smoking his cigar.’²⁷² Irritated by the opposition of the city in which he had spent nine pleasant years, on 25 July 1866, the day before the signature of the preliminary peace at Nikolsburg, Bismarck added Frankfurt to the list of states to be annexed, though it had not been on the ‘maximum demands list’ before.²⁷³ The citizens of Frankfurt learned what many more were to learn—that Bismarck tolerated no opposition. This little piece of gratuitous brutality reminds us that the victorious Prussian army under the grandsons and great grandsons of the von Röders and von Manteuffels became notorious for atrocities on much grander scale between 1939 and 1945.

The scale of Bismarck’s triumph cannot be exaggerated. He alone had brought about a compete transformation of the European international order. He had told those who would listen what he intended to do, how he intended to do it, and he did it. He achieved this incredible feat without commanding an army, and without the ability to give an order to the humblest common soldier, without control of a large party, without public support, indeed, in the face of almost universal hostility, without a majority in parliament, without control of his cabinet and without a loyal following in the bureaucracy. He no longer had the support of the powerful conservative interest groups who had helped him to achieve power. The most senior diplomats in the foreign service like Robert von der Goltz and Albrecht Bernstorff were sworn enemies and he knew it. The Queen and the Royal Family hated him and the King, emotional and unreliable, would soon have his 70th birthday. Beyond Roon and Moritz von Blankenburg, I cannot think of any reliable friends to whom he could tell the truth about his policies. Indeed without Roon’s quiet advocacy and complete loyalty he would not have survived politically and physically. With perfect justice, in August 1866, he pounded his fist on his desk and cried, ‘I have beaten them all! All!’²⁷⁴