8

The Unification of Germany, 1866–1870

Bismarck’s great triumph left him in a new situation. He had become a national hero. The Austrian reparation of 40 million thaler had transformed the government’s financial situation and he had a completely new structure to construct for Germany. The old Bund had been swept away and Austria expelled from all German affairs to find its new identity as an ‘eastern’ power. Even before the preliminary peace at Nikolsburg had been signed, the official press announced that elections would be held and that a draft electoral law would be presented to the Prussian parliament. In addition to Prussia and those territories newly included under Prussia (Hanover, Nassau, part of Hesse-Kassel and Frankfurt), invitations to participate would go out to Sachsen-Altenburg, Sachsen-Coburg, Sachsen-Weimar, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Reuß younger Line (Gera), Reuss elder Line, Waldeck, Lippe-Detmold, Schaumburg-Lippe, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Anhalt, Oldenburg, Braunschweig, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. The Prussian Law of 12 April 1849 would be the basis of the new electoral system according to which every electoral district should have 100,000 voters. The census of the enlarged Prussian state showed that Prussia would now have 19,255,139 inhabitants. Prussia and Posen would, therefore, have 193 deputies.¹ The new federation would as a result be unevenly constructed with Prussia constituting more than four-fifths of the population and land area.

Another outstanding matter had to be settled—the nearly four years in which the Bismarck government had ruled without parliamentary approval of its budget. Bismarck had already convinced the King to make a conciliatory gesture to the liberal opposition over the budget deadlock. Again even before the text of the Nikolsburg agreement had been agreed, Bismarck moved to get the Landtag into session. This time he used his wife to act as agent. He wrote to her on 18 July to tell her that the negotiations in Nikolsburg had begun and asked her, ‘why were our chambers not summoned? Ask Eulenburg about it and say to him that it is vital that the parliamentary corps be allowed to intervene before the peace negotiations have been seriously discussed.’² Bismarck intended to use the liberal and nationalist forces as a political factor to strengthen his hand in negotiating in the name of the nation but he also let his cabinet colleagues know that the Landtag would be called into session as soon as His Majesty had returned to Berlin to discuss the settlement of the outstanding dispute over the budget. The King had agreed—to the horror of the ‘conflict ministers’—to request indemnity for the unconstitutional past.

Even before the King’s return to Berlin, the fronts in Prussian politics had begun to shift. On 28 July a new conservative party emerged, dedicated to support Bismarck, which called itself the Free Conservative Union. On the same day Treitschke wrote to his wife, ‘the revolution in which we stand comes from above.’³ Many liberals now admitted the error of their ways. Rudolf Ihering (1818–92), a Göttingen Professor of Law and an expert in property rights,⁴ who had called the war an act of ‘frightful frivolity’, now submitted to the ‘genius of Bismarck’.⁵ Liberals and nationalists could reconcile their new positions with their former opposition because, as Christopher Clark argues, Bismarck had defeated neo-absolutist and Catholic Austria and hence won a great victory against the forces of reactionary Catholicism. Bismarck’s politics and the victory of a Protestant Kingdom, in the eyes of many Liberal Prussian Protestants, must be providential and progressive.⁶ For these were the 1860s in which under Pius IX any hint of liberalism had been condemned. Bismarck’s wars had put him on the side of the Roman Catholic Church’s enemies through his alliance with the ‘godless’ Kingdom of Italy that had usurped papal territories during its unification struggle and under Prime Minister Count Cavour had dedicated the new Kingdom of Italy to the proposition of ‘una libera chiesa nello stato liberale’—a free church in the free state. It was logical too that the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli on hearing the news of the Austrian defeat at Königgrätz-Sadowa cried out in anguish ‘Casca il mondo! (the world is falling).⁷

Not everybody welcomed Bismarck’s new policy of reconciliation. The text of the Speech from the Throne had been leaked and on 1 August 1866, Hans von Kleist wrote a lengthy memorandum to Bismarck against the indemnity proposal:

How is it remotely conceivable, all old Prussian institutions, all elements of its power, are to be surrendered through this one declaration in the Speech from the Throne and that through it—its finances, its army, its House of Lords, the Monarchy, Prussia itself—is to be given over to the temporary majority of a second chamber which will emerge from its new provisions? It would in the short or long run hopelessly go under in an unfathomable whirlpool. Prussia without the spirit which made it is as good as dead … without an independent Monarchy.⁸

Bismarck, who got word of the leak in Prague where he had gone for the final peace negotiations with the Austrians, dismissed his old friend with contempt. He wrote to his wife on 3 August that there was a

huge feud over the Speech from the Throne. Lippe spreads the great word in conservative sense against me and Hans Kleist has written me an excited letter. These little fellows have not got enough to do, cannot see as far as the ends of their noses and practise their swimming on the stormy waves of phrases. I can deal with my enemies but the friends! They all wear blinkers and only see a patch of the world.⁹

While the Kreuzzeitung conservatives drew back with horror from Bismarck, who had been their friend, his former enemies among German liberals drew near to him. As Karl Frenzel wrote in the journal Deutsches Museum:

Through its past the government has made an enemy of liberalism, through the war which it fought, the annexations which it prepares, an enemy of feudalism. The success which it achieved in domestic affairs rests in the weakening of both parties and in the creation of a government party which will grow stronger and stronger.¹⁰

The White Hall of the Palace was crowded with deputies on 5 August 1866 as the King delivered the Speech from the Throne. In it the King admitted that the

government had run the state budget for many years without a legal basis … I cherish the confidence that the recent events will contribute to the necessary understanding to the extent that an indemnity will be willingly granted to my Government in respect to the administration carried on without a budget law and thus the previous conflict will be brought to an end for all time.¹¹

During the Speech from the Throne,

Hans von Kleist avoided greeting Bismarck but stood at a place in the White Chamber so Bismarck could not fail to see him. Both waited until the ceremony was over and the White Chamber had emptied. Bismarck approached von Kleist and asked ‘Say, old boy, where did you get the Speech from the Throne?’ ‘I will not tell you.’ ‘In this matter I don’t like jokes. I shall have to get the state prosecutor on to you if you don’t.’ ‘Yes, you can lock me up but you still won’t find out.’ They parted without a word. As Kleist was changing at home, the Minister President sent a message by his factotum Engel and asked Kleist to come to him. There he found Robert von der Goltz and Karl Friedrich von Savigny. The Minister-President had got his balance back, went to the new arrival in a friendly way and shook his hand. ‘It’s all forgotten.’ An indiscrete minister has confessed at the State Council. ‘I suppose, it must have been Wagener.’ Then he explained to Goltz and Savigny that he had made peace with the Crown Prince over the word ‘indemnity’.¹²

In spite of the apology, the friendship between Bismarck and Kleist never recovered.

Bismarck had now moved into the odd position that he needed Liberals in order to complete his plans for the new German state. The Liberals became his allies from 1866 until he dumped them unceremoniously in the late 1870s. An even odder feature of the new political arena emerges from the paradox that the Bismarck after 1866 rapidly achieved personally a ‘cult’ status but his Free Conservative Party never had a real following. Three main parties dominated Bismarck’s new Germany: Liberals (divided into pro- and anti-Bismarck wings), Conservatives (increasingly anti-Bismarck), and Catholics (anti-Bismarck). At no stage could he rely on any of these three as his party. Thus the new period opens with the paradox that the most powerful figure of the nineteenth century had no real parliamentary support and still depended on the person, the emotions, and the attitudes of a very old monarch. Waves of nationalism swept Germany but Bismarck was no nationalist. Liberals saw unity and liberty but Bismarck was no liberal, and, as Hans von Kleist and Ludwig Gerlach now knew, he was no conservative either. Bismarck changed colour like certain deep pools of water which refract the light in various hues.

On 14 August, August von der Heydt, the new Finance Minister, Bismarck’s ‘Gold Uncle’, presented the indemnity bill to the Budget Committee of the House and stated that the indemnity and the request for new lines of credit had to be considered together, ‘because the Government feels itself under no pressure whatever; on the contrary its financial position is entirely positive and hence the Government has no inclination to make concessions.’ The Committee voted by 25 to 8 in favour of the double bill, because ‘it seems illogical to grant the Government credit and refuse it the indemnity.’ The two houses passed the bill and the King signed it on 14 September 1866.¹³

A sign of the changing times took place in another part of Berlin. On 5 September 1866 the new synagogue in the Moorish style on the Oranienburger Strasse was dedicated. With its 3,000 seats it was the largest and most ornate synagogue in Germany. As Emil Breslaur reported the event in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums,

At 11.30 in the morning the magnificent building was dedicated. Flowers and wreaths, valuable potted plants in artistic arrangements decorated the entrance and the lobby. The sanctuary was filled partly with the Jewish community and partly with the invited guests of honour. Among the latter we noticed Count Bismarck, Minister v.d. Heydt, Field Marshall Wrangel, Police President von Bernuth, in addition to magistrates and members of the City Council, many members of the Prussian House of Deputies among whom were President Forckenbek (sic!), Dr Kosch, Johann Jacoby. A prelude composed for the occasion by Organist Schwantzer opened the ceremony. After that the choir under the direction of the Royal Director of Music Lewandowski, accompanied by organ and brass choir intoned the boruch habboh and the ma tauvu as the ornamented Torah scrolls entered the sanctuary.

Bismarck and the other guests watched the scrolls proceed down the main aisle where to fanfare and the singing of the Schema they were placed in the Ark. Rabbi Aub then preached a sermon on Verse 9, Chapter 2 of the Prophet Haggai: ‘The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the LORD of hosts.’¹⁴ No doubt the Rabbi’s text applied at least as much to the ‘glory’ of the new North German Federation as to the great sanctuary of the Jewish community.

The Konfliktzeit had ended and Bismarck wanted to rid himself of the ‘Conflict’ cabinet. Bodelschwingh had gone at the end of May 1866 but the King hated new faces As a result Bismarck only rid himself of Selchow and Itzenplitz in 1873, and Mühler in 1872. The Justice Minister, Count Lippe, he did manage to sack in 1867. As Helma Brunck puts it, ‘Bismarck saw himself as the real victor of Düppel and Königgrätz … and the collegial structure of the State Ministry was very soon a thorn in his side.’¹⁵ As always in Bismarck’s career the power lay in other hands. These cabinet ministers served the King not the Minister-President and because Bismarck rejected parliamentary government, he deprived himself of that power over a cabinet which the typical Prime Minister of any European country now takes for granted. He could not simply reshuffle his cabinet. Bismarck’s dictatorial urges collide with the reality of royal power. He also made the dismissed ministers his permanent enemies but he knew it, as he explained to Gustav von Diest: ‘I never underestimated how dangerous Bodelschwingh was. Do you know what he is? He’s the fox that you think you have shot, throw over your shoulder to take home and which then bites you in the arse.’¹⁶

On 21 September 1866 the Prussian army staged its victory parade complete with a solemn Te Deum in front of the royal palace. Gustav Mevissen (1815–99), one of the leading Catholic industrialists and bankers of period,¹⁷ stood in the crowd as the troops marched by and recorded his feelings:

I cannot shake off the impression of this hour. I am no devotee of Mars … but the trophies of war exercise a magic charm on the child of peace. One’s eyes are involuntarily riveted on, and one’s spirit goes along with, the unending rows of men who acclaim the god of the moment: success.¹⁸

In February 1867 the Revue moderne published Ludwig Bamberger’s Monsieur de Bismarck. The essay was a great success and it was reprinted in book form in June 1867. Bamberger, a Jewish revolutionary turned successful banker, became one of Bismarck’s most intimate advisers. He was certainly among the first to see how radical Bismarck was:

Now Germany has never made a revolution on its own. It has the glory of having founded Protestantism and developed philosophic liberty but with respect to political enfranchisement it has produced nothing original, spontaneous or durable. It cannot compare itself in that respect with England, nor the United States, nor France, nor Switzerland, nor Holland, nor Belgium. It is the last arrival among the nations and the year 1866 marks the first time it has witnessed a grand organic change without an impulse from abroad … One cannot doubt for a moment that Bismarck is a born revolutionary. Revolutionaries are born—as are legitimists—by some structure in the brain; whereas chance decides whether that same human being will turn into a red or a white one.¹⁹

By the 1860s the German popular press had begun to develop and it too turned Bismarck into what we would call a media personality. The weekly Gartenlaube (the Garden Arbour) founded in 1853 as a new popular middle-class magazine, began in 1867 to publish a column called ‘Photographs from the Reichstag’. In its April number it brought a reverent portrait of Bismarck:

On the raised bench reserved for the Federal Councillors sits the man whom not only Prussia and Germany but the whole of Europe follows with rapt attention and lively interest. Like the biblical King Saul he towers over his contemporaries by a full head in height, an imposing, aristocratic figure in an elegant cuirassier’s uniform, a person who combines the energy of the soldier with the elasticity and flexibility of the statesman.²⁰

Pictures and busts of Bismarck were sold by thousands. He had become a symbol.

The King awarded him a ‘dotation’ from the royal fund on 7 June 1867. With it Bismarck purchased an estate in Pomerania, which contained the village of Varzin. After he had purchased it, in a typical example of Bismarckian parsimony, he offered to sell Kniephof to his brother or to his cousin Philipp, ‘but not cheaper than I would get for it on the open market.’²¹ The founder of states, the world-historical figure, Otto von Bismarck, retained to the end the tight-fisted pettiness of the impoverished country squire. On the other hand, as we have seen, he also retained the natural and unaffected hospitality that he had learned as a young man. He urged his friend Motley to visit him on his new estate. As he explained to Motley in 1869, though it was far from Berlin, the railroad had changed everything. ‘Leaving Berlin at 9 o’clock you are here for dinner.’²² When Motley finally visited Varzin, he described how the Bismarcks lived there in a letter to his wife Mary:

The way of life is very simple at Varzin, but the irregularity of hours is great. I usually came down stairs, as well as Lily, [Motley’s daughter—JS] between nine and ten. Madame de B, Marie, and the sons came in promiscuously and had breakfast with us. Bismarck came down about eleven. His breakfast is very light—egg and a cup of coffee—and then he has a meerschaum pipe. While he is sitting there and talking to all of us, his secretary hands him the pile of letters with which he is goaded in his retirement, and with a lead pencil about a foot long he makes memoranda as to the answers and other dispositions to be made. Meanwhile the boys are playing billiards in another part of the same room and a big black dog, called ‘Sultan’ is rampaging generally through the apartment and joining in everybody’s conversation … On the courtyard side the house consists of a main building two stories high, with two long wings projecting from the house, in which are servants’ rooms and offices, making three sides of an open quadrangle. On the lawn or wood side there is a long veranda running in front of the main house. Inside is a square hall with a wide staircase leading to a large hall above, out of which are four spacious bedrooms. On each side of the hall below is a suite of one or two rooms, which are the family and reception rooms, besides his library and the private rooms of the ladies. The estate is about 30,000 morgens, equal to 20,000 acres. A great part—certainly two thirds—forest, pine, oak, beech. Of the rest a small farm, some 200 or 300 acres, is in his own hands. The rest is let in large farms of 800 or 900 acres. The river Wipper, which runs through the property, is a valuable water power. He has built two or three mills upon it, one of which is already let and in operation.²³

Varzin became an essential part of his psychic economy; he needed the woods, the quiet, the long walks and the sense of being on his own land. He returned to that identity as a Junker squire with which he had grown up. It was his retreat.

For much of 1867 he could not get away from Berlin; there was simply too much to do. He had to construct two governments: to rearrange the Prussian State Ministry and to create the new Federal Government of the North German Federation. Bismarck intended to run both but could not at once see how. If the new Prussian-dominated Federation to a large extent recreated the old Bund but without Austria, it might simply carry over the institutions of Frankfurt. It would have a committee of ambassadors as its governing body and a secretary or chancellor of the new federation to execute its collective decisions. The Federal Chancellor might be a civil servant, who would take orders from the Prussian Minister-President, that is, from Bismarck. The votes of Prussia plus those of the swallowed-up German states would give Prussia a blocking veto in any case and the ministates would never dare oppose Prussia. A statesman who could abolish the venerable Kingdom of Hanover would have Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen for breakfast. On the other hand, as Bismarck’s new national Liberal friends desired, the new Federation could be a real state with its own national cabinet, its own laws, weights and measures and national politics. The uneasy and uncertain creation of the hybrid German federal structure would have been difficult in any case but Bismarck’s now insatiable ambition made it almost insoluble.

Tidying up had to take place in addition in the formal relations with the South German states which had fought with Austria and now confronted in the North German Federation a victorious, enlarged, and much more threatening Prussia. On 13, 17, and 22 August Prussia concluded peace treaties and identical treaties of alliance with Württemberg, Baden, and Bavaria. On 23 September 1866 Hanover was annexed and became a province of Prussia.

Queen Augusta watched these treaties and transformations with mounting anxiety. She belonged, as a Princess of the Duchy of Weimar, to the ‘Ernestine’ branch of the royal family of Saxony. She liked to lapse into Saxon dialect and never entirely settled into Prussian ways. She felt sympathy for the middle states and was the mother of the Grand Duchess of Baden. She wrote marginal comments on the long reports from Freiherr von Roggenbach about the political transformation in the four still independent states in southern Germany and she drafted passages of letters to her husband, the King. On 11 October she wrote to King William attaching the Roggenbach memorandum:

I beg you most earnestly, to do everything possible to seize the hand of friendship which Baden extends to you. I would be neglecting my maternal duty if I did not convey to you the seriousness of the situation described above and not urge you in God’s name that you act in good time to protect those dear to us to the advantage of that beautiful country.²⁴

The Queen and Roggenbach continued during the autumn of 1866 to exchange lengthy letters which for security they sent by trusted agents. They considered problems of sovereignty and the relationship between Prussia, the new Federation, and the existing states both inside and outside the new federation. The Queen’s energy, clarity, and tenacity made her a formidable opponent of Bismarck but an unnecessary one. Had Bismarck offered her the same attentions that Roggenbach did, he might have won her over. Nothing in the letters suggests that in 1866 she rejected the King’s or Bismarck’s policies as such. She worried, entirely reasonably, about the interactions in what had become a complex, layered, and evolving structure of imperfect sovereignties. In a letter of early January 1867 she wrote with regret that

Since I have no personal contact with the leading personalities and the director of affairs in the cases when I meet him, is unresponsive, I can say, alas, nothing about his view, whether in the meantime it has been refined … Nor unfortunately can I send you a copy of the Federal Constitution, because I have not been able to obtain one myself.²⁵

Had Bismarck been a little less suspicious and misogynist, he would have found this remarkable lady, if not an ally, at least a willing listener, but then that would have involved listening seriously to a woman he could not control or ignore. His policy of grotesque small insults—the Queen had not been sent a copy of the new constitution—reveals that persistent petty vindictiveness with which he treated his enemies.

Bismarck in the meantime had collapsed physically. The strain of the recent months had taken their toll. Thus began a pattern which became more and more common over the years. Bismarcks’s frequent illnesses led to longer and longer absences from Berlin. Pflanze calculates that between 14 May 1875 and November 1878, of 1,275 days, Bismarck spent 772 of them, that is 60 per cent, either at his estates or at spas.²⁶ Bismarck’s illness worried senior diplomats. General von Schweinitz tried to find out how he was and recorded the following entry in his diary:

Count von der Goltz has arrived, he was in Varzin. When I asked whether Bismarck was really ill, he answered with his very peculiar laugh, which people in Paris describe as ‘la joie fait peur’. ‘What? That man ill? Bismarck is never ill, I am ill.’ Goltz told me a lot but not enough.²⁷

In 1866 Bismarck withdrew to convalesce at Putbus on the Baltic. Legend has it that Bismarck and his faithful amanuensis, the former socialist Lothar Bucher, drafted the constitution in two days; in fact, as Pflanze shows, Bismarck had drafted much himself earlier and had received help but it was his constitution, designed by him to suit himself and to maintain the peculiar structures of absolutism on which his power rested.

The constitution, like the later constitution of the German Empire, rested on a compact among the Princes who created it. The people played no role and the word only appears once in connection with the Reichstag which represents ‘the people’. The sections dealing with the Federal Council and the Federal Presidium are the most characteristic. Article 6 states that the Bundesrat or Federal Council consists of the former members of the old Bundesrat in Frankfurt, ‘the voting rights of whom are governed by the regulations for the Plenum of the former German Bund, so that Prussia with the votes formerly held by Hanover, Electoral Hessen, Nassau and Frankfurt, has 17 votes’. According to Article 7 decisions are made by ‘simple majority’. Since Prussia had 17 of 43 total votes, any small group of states joined to Prussia could block a measure. The head of the Federation (Article 11) is ‘the Presidium which belongs to the King of Prussia’. The Presidium (Article 12) can summon, adjourn, or dissolve the Federal Council and Reichstag and Article 15 states that the chair of the Federal Council and direction of affairs belongs to the Bundeskanzler or Federal Chancellor, whom the Presidium names. The office which Bismarck designed for himself depends directly on the King of Prussia as Presidium and on no one else. No cabinet or other officers exist formally. The other important article was Article 20 which states that the Reichstag is elected in general and direct elections with secret ballot.²⁸ Bismarck had given his word in 1866 and kept it.

The North German Federation had a democratic lower house, comparable with the most democratic in the world at that time. Yet the rights of the democracy had limits. Army strength rested on 1 per cent of the size of the population (Article 60) and the sum of 225 thaler per soldier was settled by Article 62. Thus the Reichstag had no say in fixing expenditure for the army. Bismarck had eliminated from the start any new conflict. The whole draft had the defects that one would expect in a text by Bismarck: no bill of rights, no separate judiciary, no power to collect direct taxes, no immunities and rights for deputies outside the chambers. The edifice—complicated and unwieldy—rested on one fulcrum—the common sovereignty of the King of Prussia and the Presidium of the Bund and the one common officer: the Minister-President of Prussia and the Bundeskanzler or Federal Chancellor. In other words Bismarck designed it for Bismarck. The Constitution of the North German Federation became more or less verbatim the Imperial Constitution of 1871 for the new German Empire. It thus transmitted to the united Germany after 1871 all the defects of Prussian kingship. Article 63 gives command of all the armed forces to the King of Prussia and his command remains unlimited. Hence court entourages, military and naval cabinets, and camarillas continue to exist under the new arrangements as before. If the Presidium wishes to dismiss the Chancellor, he can. Bismarck built this fragile structure not only to suit himself but also to suit an arrangement in which a strong Chancellor bullies a weak king. As he discovered in 1890 that guarantee could not protect him against a different sort of sovereign.

He made the final corrections after he returned to Berlin on 1 December and presented it on 9 December to the King, Crown Prince, and the Prussian ministers and to a council of ministers representing the states on 15 December 1866. The negotiations with the princes proved to be uncomfortable but Bismarck, as always, had his alternative ready. The new Reichstag would be elected on 12 February 1867. If the King of Saxony or the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin made trouble, Bismarck would have to turn to the democratic forces likely to be elected. He secretly gave orders to the Prussian bureaucracy not to help conservatives as usual but to help radicals here and there in order to exert ‘sufficient pressure against recalcitrant governments’.²⁹

The results could not have been better. The constituent Reichstag had 297 members, of whom Conservatives gained 63 and the German Reich Party (Bismarckians) 40, National Liberals 80, other Liberals 40, and the Progressives only 19.³⁰ The Jewish radical Eduard Lasker defeated Albrecht von Roon for a Berlin electoral district by 4,781 to 1,765 votes.³¹ Almost half the members were aristocrats, including one royal prince, 4 non-royal princes, 2 dukes, 27 counts, and 21 barons. From now on Bismarck would play the sovereign German princes off against the people as he wrote to the government of Saxony, ‘there are always these alternatives: either to count completely and forever upon the governments now temporarily allied with us or to face the necessity of seeking our centre of gravity in parliament.’³² A close-fought battle took place for two months until, on 16 April, the Constitution as amended in various small ways was adopted by 230 to 53, and on 31 May 1867 the Prussian Landtag approved it. Bismarck had won again: there was no bill of rights, no independent judiciary, no responsible cabinet, and no remuneration of deputies. This victory, though less celebrated than Königgrätz, meant as much to Bismarck. He had unified millions of Germans in a new state and their elected representatives had sacrificed liberal rights taken for granted elsewhere without a serious fight. The new Germany retained all the worst features of Prussian semi-absolutism and placed them in the hands of Otto von Bismarck.

Bismarck faced another problem in 1867 which complicated his daily life and which still plagues the hapless biographer who has to sketch the course of his activity. Bismarck had become by design the only administrative authority in a new state of 29,572,511 people,³³ who needed thousands of items of legislation, administrative reforms, and changes. The railroads, postal systems, legal structures and codes, roads and canals, banks and currencies, factory inspections, schools, financial systems, universities, and technical colleges had to be made compatible with each other. He had made no provision for a federal cabinet and had no very clear idea how the office of Chancellor would work now that he had decided to combine it with the Presidency of the Prussian State Ministry. From 1867 to his fall from power in 1890 Bismarck’s life became an impossible struggle to control and direct everything that happened in his name. Stosch explained to his wife how Bismarck decided everything by himself in negotiating an armistice with the French after the Franco-Prussian war and this typical behaviour can be seen, multiplied dozens of times, in the diaries of all those who served under him:

I had the opportunity to see Bismarck in action [in the peace negotiations—JS] and must say that I admire the energy of his views and actions. Very odd on the other hand was how he anxiously dismissed everybody from his side for the decisive negotiations except for those like myself whom he needed for technical questions. He sat alone opposite his opponent and roughed him up. The advantage is that the process goes quickly, the disadvantage that the agreement remains open to different interpretations. Then force must decide between them.³⁴

The most rapidly growing modern state in Europe could not be ruled by one genius-statesman but Bismarck refused to let anybody else try.

In addition he had the problem of the identity and function of the Bundesrat or Federal Council. What was it? Was it a Senate, a sort of upper house of his new state? Or was it simply a talking shop for the smaller German states? On 21 July of 1867 he wrote a letter to his deputy in the Foreign Office, Hermann von Thile, which shows how the question of precedence between Prussia and the Bund had to be settled:

I think it neither necessary nor desirable that the King should formally open the Bundesrat’s first session. It would give our colleagues in the Federation the impression that their state representatives were in the same category as a Prussian parliamentary body. In reality only the federal budget and the customs treaty should come before the Bundesrat, both already known realities, which need no All-Highest decisions.³⁵

The Bundesrat must not get ideas above its station and interfere with his policies.

But the problem of the burden of office remained and on 10 August 1867 Bismarck proposed to the Reichstag the establishment of a Bundeskanzleramt (Office of the Federal Chancellor), ‘an organ in which the different administrative branches come together and find their focal point … [the office was] to prepare with the cooperation of the departments concerned those matters that are to be brought before the Bundesrat and the Reichstag by Prussia as leader and member of the North German Confederation.’³⁶ At last Bismarck now had a Chancellor’s office with its own staff. He chose Rudolf Delbrück (1817–1903) to head the Office of the Federal Chancellor. Delbrück suited Bismarck because he had never been a minister and hence had no following in parliament. He had made a career as senior civil servant in the Ministry of Trade as an expert on customs union affairs. He described his expectations before Bismarck elevated him in these words:

My relationship to the King and to Count Bismarck was of the sort that I could reckon on the possibility that after a few years I would become the successor to Count Itzenplitz in the Ministry of Trade. As Prussian Minister of Trade I would end my career. But it all turned out differently.³⁷

An office, that of Vice-Chancellor, had been created for him and approved by the new Reichstag on 12 August 1867. The Vice-Chancellor presided over the new Bundeskanzleramt, and represented the Chancellor as presiding officer of the Bundesrat in the Chancellor’s absence, which with the passing of time became more and more regular. The new Vice-Chancellor settled in at once and like an administrative dynamo began to regulate all the aspects of the new state. A steady stream of decrees issued from the new office—Bismarck called it ‘decree diarrhoea’.³⁸ Delbrück understood in a way that nobody else ever did how to combine absolute bureaucratic efficiency with complete subservience to Bismarck’s will. Bismarck told the Grand Duke of Baden in 1870 that

Delbrück is the one man of whom I can say that he is completely orientated in every aspect of his office and has an unusual ability to manage affairs and carry them out.³⁹

Delbrück soon became known as the ‘Vice-Bismarck’ but he was in fact completely unlike Bismarck which explains why he remained so long in the service of an autocrat. He worked without the need for personal recognition, refused a title, and served under Bismarck’s despotic personality smoothly. Between 1867 and 1870 Delbrück introduced the legislation to create a unified currency, a unified metric system, a unified system of free access to trades and crafts (Gewerbefreiheit), freedom of movement and settlement.⁴⁰ Bismarck’s old friend and rival, Karl Friedrich von Savigny said that ‘the strength of Delbrück’s position is that he is only interested in the things Bismarck finds boring.’⁴¹

The relationship between the ‘Vice-Bismarck’ and other officers was never easy. In February 1873 Stosch, though a General, was now head of the new Imperial Navy. He clashed with Bismarck and Delbück, as he wrote to the Crown Prince:

I have had the misfortune to countersign an imperial order which was the Imperial Chancellor’s business. On the other hand, the Chancellor has interfered in my department through his deputy [Delbrück]. The conflict stemming from that led yesterday to a very stormy scene, when the State Ministry met for a so-called private session at the Imperial Chancellor’s. Before the beginning of the session Prince Bismarck invited me to his room, told me that I lacked every ministerial qualification and had to subordinate myself to him unconditionally no matter whom he employed as his representative. I replied with spirit and we both had flushed faces when we entered the session. Today I asked H.M. to make me the deputy of the Chancellor in naval matters, instead of Delbrück, or dismiss me.⁴²

Delbrück irritated Bismarck by consulting members of the State Ministry who happened to be Jews, as Lucius recorded:

Yesterday noon the Princess had me fetched from a session. The Prince had had a conversation with Delbrück which left him excited and so annoyed that he could not sleep the entire night. I found him in bed but better and more vigorous than on the last occasion. ‘He lies here and cannot do anything and feels that neither in the ministry nor in the Bundesrat has he adequate representation. Delbrück always confers with Friedberg, Friedenthal, Lasker, Wolffson, Bamberger, always with Jews which makes the legislative work worse’.⁴³

Circumstances forced Bismarck to work with the Liberal parties and that meant dealing with the Friedenthals, Friedbergs, Laskers, Bambergers, and Simons. He attacked them as Jews but they really annoyed him as opponents. Stosch noticed that tendency and on 18 August 1867 he wrote to Gustav Freytag, the novelist, to sum up his view of Bismarck’s position:

The more Bismarck grows in stature the more uncomfortable for him are people who think and act for themselves. And the more nervous he becomes the more he fears abrasive personal contacts … Common personal weakness and little people irritate the great statesman often beyond the limit of the normal.⁴⁴

A ‘little person’ who gave Bismarck more trouble than anybody else, Ludwig Windthorst (1812–91), made his debut in national politics in the same month that Stosch wrote to Freytag. On 31 August 1867 the first election to the North German Reichstag took place and Ludwig Windthorst, a Hanoverian lawyer, was elected from the District Meppen-Lingen-Bentheim which he served for the next twenty-four years until his death. Margaret Lavinia Anderson declares that

Ludwig Windthorst was Imperial Germany’s greatest parliamentarian. Considering his terms in the diet of the Kingdom of Hanover, he served thirty-five years in the various legislatures of his country. According to the reckoning of one deputy, he spoke 2,209 times in the Reichstag alone, more than any other member. His skill in debate was equaled by no other deputy; his tactical genius, only by Bismarck.⁴⁵

Central casting could not have found a person more different from Bismarck. Windthorst, a nearly blind, Hanoverian, Roman Catholic dwarf opposed the giant Protestant, Prussian Otto von Bismarck, with nothing but his quick wit. The Catholic politician Peter Reichensperger (1810–92), who served for more than thirty years in the Prussian Landtag and was elected with Windthorst to the North German Reichstag in 1867, served with him in the Reichstag until his death.⁴⁶ Reichensperger wrote of him:

Windthorst must be described as a parliamentary miracle. He alone was equal to Bismarck. With the finest antennae for all things political, he understood how to manoeuvre with a wonderful artistry.⁴⁷

His tiny gnome-like form, his ludicrous mouth, the great bottle-green spectacles shading the sightless eyes would in any case have made him conspicuous … his acerbic wit coupled with idiosyncratic views made him notorious. You never knew whether Windthorst was looking at you from over, under, or around his spectacles.⁴⁸

Windthorst had served in Hanoverian cabinets and in 1867 became the lawyer of the deposed King George V of Hanover (1819–78), for whom he negotiated a settlement with Prussia on Hanoverian royal assets. In the settlement the King received income from his capital of 16 million thaler in exchange for returning state funds he had sent to England during the war.⁴⁹ Bismarck seized the royal assets and created the secret ‘Guelph Fund’, which he used for any purpose he chose. King George, a difficult and rigid man, refused to accept that he had been deposed and posed an awkward problem for his first cousin, Queen Victoria. On 17 August 1866 she wrote in German to Augusta, the Duchess of Cambridge, that she had ‘to consider her duty as an English woman, what I am first of all. I can only express my German sentiments by privately asking for possible indulgence and consideration for the Hanoverian royal family and their crown lands.’⁵⁰ King George set up a court in exile in Hietzing outside Vienna and did what he could to annoy Bismarck. He created a Hanoverian Legion to fight for restoration and gave his blessing to the formation of a Hanoverian political party which between 1867 and 1914 sent a group of Hanoverian separatists to the Reichstag. Their numbers fluctuated between 4 in the elections of the 1870s and 10 or 11 in the 1880s.⁵¹

Windthorst, though a Hanoverian, never joined the Guelph Party. Indeed at first he belonged to no party.⁵² In 1871 Deputy Braun of Waldenburg described Windthorst’s impact in his first years as a member of the Reichstag before he joined the Catholic Centre Party:

There was once a fraction that consisted of only one member. It was the Meppen Fraction. [Laughter.] And this fraction made itself so felt, so often took the floor, and exercised such influence—to be sure, because of its high capacities—it was treated with such attention and politeness from all sides of the House, that it gave brilliant proof that minorities are respected here. [Laughter.] Deputy Windthorst then made a bow to the speaker which was returned by the latter. ‘I must say, if only because of this living example of our respect for minorities, that I regret most sincerely that this fraction has dissolved itself. [Great laughter.]⁵³

From the beginning, with his exquisite political sensibility, Windthorst foresaw what he would face. In a letter of 2 November 1867 to Matthias Deyman, he explained that he had decided to enter parliament where ‘the situation of the Holy Father might very easily come up for discussion’ but he rejected the option of Catholic withdrawal because ‘whichever way the locomotive goes, I ride with it in order—with time and opportunity—to halt it or else throw out the engineer and drive it myself.’⁵⁴ In December 1867 the Liberal Deputy Falk described this remarkable figure at a royal reception for the newly elected North German Reichstag:

As I entered the room where the guests were assembling, I noticed a little man in a black frock coat walking to and fro. He wore a star and from his neck hung a ribbon of an order unknown to me. I thought he might be a canon as his decorations seemed to indicate. His head was extremely large, his face quite ugly, while his whole appearance was striking.⁵⁵

Windthorst dominated the Reichstag and the Catholic Centre Party for twenty-four years without ever holding an office or aspiring to one. He held sway by the pure strength of his personality and in that he resembled Bismarck with the difference that he had principles and Bismarck had none. No better example of the ‘law of unintended consequences’ can be imagined than the way Bismarck’s brilliant coup of 1866—the decision to call a German parliament based on universal, direct, secret manhood suffrage—generated a mass, democratic Catholic opposition party by 1871 of 100 deputies with a tiny genius at its head. As a further ironic twist, Bismarck’s main opponents in the 1860s and early 1870s were Hanoverians who would never have been there had Bismarck not annexed the Kingdom of Hanover. As Georg von Vincke, Bismarck’s old enemy, observed in late 1867 to the Catholic deputy, August Reichensperger (1808–95):⁵⁶

Do you want to know who are the three cleverest men with us now? They are the three annexed Hanoverians. One is Bennigsen, who is very clever; the second is Miquel who is cleverer still; the third, however, is Windthorst, who is as clever as the other two together.⁵⁷

1868 opened with Bismarck still unable to make progress on the final unification of the North German Federation with the southern states and the institutional questions unsettled. In March 1868 Stosch wrote to the novelist Gustav Freytag about the need for a Reich Cabinet:

With respect to Bismarck he will run himself into the ground in the growth of his internal power unless he is pulled back. Would you not be willing to float articles in the press in favour of a Reich cabinet? In our official battle for a Reich Minister of War Bismarck accepts that Roon is right, gives him all the powers but not the position. In the Ministry of Trade the situation is the same. A Reich minister of finance will be essential if burdens are to be fairly distributed. The burden of unity would be more easily borne.⁵⁸

Stosch was right but Bismarck never shared power if he could avoid it. His intolerance prevented Imperial Germany from having a proper cabinet and it went to its doom in the First World War with the defects that Bismarck imposed and intelligent contemporaries feared.

In Prussia the proposition to impose schools to which both Protestant and Catholic children might go aroused the opposition of the Catholic Church. On 6 February 1868 Cardinal Count von Ledochowski, Archbishop of Posen and Gnesen, issued an edict to the clergy to warn the faithful to oppose the establishment of the ‘simultaneous’ public schools (i.e. Protestant and Catholics together). Provincial President von Horn, prefect of Posen, had written to the Minister of Religion von Mühler to suggest that the government discipline the Cardinal. Bismarck intervened in this, as in everything, and forbade the Minister to comply:

I cannot agree to that … No doubt the edict contains various points in the opinion of the Protestant provincial authorities and of Oberpräsident von Horn which ought not to be ignored, but it ought also not to be forgotten that Count Ledowchowski as a Catholic archbishop can hardly speak or write in any other sense. In my most respectful opinion the best thing would be to simply pass over the whole issue in silence and to take those practical actions on the aforesaid ground and views which the authorities think necessary.⁵⁹

Bismarck’s sensible answer—in effect, to let sleeping dogs lie—could not stop the inexorable progress towards a clash between church and state. If the war against France lay in Bismarck’s hands, the war against the Roman Catholic Church did not. It started with a powerful assault. On 29 June 1868 Pius IX issued invitations for a Vatican Council. The First Vatican Council became notorious to liberals everywhere in Europe because it resulted in the Declaration of Papal Infallibility. It marked the beginning of theKulturkampf which dominated the first years of the politics of the united Germany of 1870. The so-called Kulturkampf had begun in Italy well before Bismarck took up the cudgels directly in the 1870s. The Italian Kingdom made clear its intention to have Rome as the capital of its new ‘national’ state and to impose separation of church and state when it did so. The battle of the church with the state over the ‘temporal power’ opened the first front in the Kulturkampf which led to clashes in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

Even greater events happened in 1870. On 8 December 1869 the Vatican Council began its sessions. In Session IV of 18 July 1870, the First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ was promulgated. Chapter 4 was called ‘On the infallible teaching authority of the Roman pontiff’ and stated:

We teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when,

1.   in the exercise of His office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians,

2.   in virtue of His supreme Apostolic Authority,

3.   He defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, He possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.⁶⁰

The reaction to the new doctrine was violent both within and without the Roman Church. Many Catholics were simply unable to accept Infallibility as a binding article of faith. They split from Rome and founded the Old Catholic Movement.

On 8 July 1868 the first Württemberg election with universal manhood suffrage brought the Democratic People’s Party and Greater German Club, both of which opposed membership in the North German Federation, an overwhelming victory.⁶¹ As the development toward unity stalled, dissatisfaction mounted about Bismarck’s tactics. Roggenbach reported to Queen Augusta from Berlin in the summer of 1869 where he had gone to attend the Zollparlament that ‘it is an open secret that Count Bismarck has not only fallen ill physically again under the pressure of all the embarrassments, but in fact no longer knows how to redirect the confusion that emerges from the chaos of the institutions.’⁶²

‘Chaos of the institutions’ described the situation in the Prussian State Ministry very well. For months Bismarck had pressed his colleague Eulenburg to complete the rearrangement of the county structure for the new, expanded Prussia, and nothing had happened. Bismarck blamed Eulenburg because his frequent illnesses had held up the work—a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In a letter of 19 January 1869 he complained to Eulenburg,

I am not annoyed with you … I am annoyed with your colleagues in the Ministry … For four weeks nothing whatever has happened, and had I not intervened by today again nothing would have happened … You have at the top an absolute zero, and in my view it is your duty to take care that when you are ill or on leave the state does not suffer under your substitutes.⁶³

Exasperation with subordinates coincided with a row with the King over the personnel of the Prussian State Ministry which Bismarck could neither name nor dismiss without the King’s agreement. They were, after all, the King’s ministers not Bismarck’s. There had also been a battle over the reparations to be paid by the city of Frankfurt. Bismarck insisted on 3 million marks, which the Queen thought much too high and William had agreed with her: 2 million would be quite enough. Finally the Usedoms had reappeared in Bismarck’s sleepless nights. Usedom had been sent as Prussian ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy and Bismarck wanted him dismissed.⁶⁴

Bismarck sent in his letter of resignation on 22 February 1869 because an ambassador in Italy had been slack, because the county reorganization plan had been moving too slowly, and because the King and Queen had wished to extract a smaller reparation from the city of Frankfurt. The man who had changed the history of Europe submitted his resignation over absurd, trifling, and insignificant issues. How can one explain this or the fact that over the next eleven years this comedy repeated itself, often over matters even more trifling? The King entirely properly replied:

I repeat there is but one single difference, that concerning Frankfurt-on-the-Main. The Usedomiana I discussed exclusively yesterday in writing, according to your wish; the House affair will adjust itself; we were agreed on the filling of appointments, but theindividuals are not willing! What reason is there then for going to the extreme?⁶⁵

On the date he submitted his resignation Bismarck told Roon that ‘I am at the end of my capacities and cannot hold out spiritually in the battles against the King.’⁶⁶ But what battles? The King expressed his respect and affection in effusive terms:

How can you imagine that I could even think of acceding to your idea! It is my greatest happiness (underline twice in the original) to live with you and to thoroughly agree with you! How can you be so hypochondriac as to allow one single difference to mislead you into taking the extreme step! You wrote me from Varzin at the time of the difference in the matter of making up the deficit, that you were indeed of another opinion than I, but that when you entered your post you regarded it as your duty when you had, as in duty bound, expressed your opinion, always to conform to my decisions. What, then, has so utterly changed the opinions you so nobly expressed 3 months ago? Your name stands higher in Prussian history that that of any other Prussian statesman. And I am to let that man go? Never. Quiet and prayer (twice underlined in the original) will adjust everything. Your most faithful friend (underlined three times) W.⁶⁷

Roon too wrote to Bismarck to plead with him not to send the resignation letter:

Since I left you yesterday evening, my honoured friend, I have been continually occupied about you and your resolution. It leaves me no rest; I must once more appeal to you to word your letter in such a manner that a reconciliation may be possible. Perhaps you have not yet sent it and can still alter it. Just reflect that the almost tender note received yesterday lays claim to veracity, even if not fully justified. It is so written and claims not to be regarded as false coin, but as genuine and of full value … in view of the rank of the writer, perhaps even he cannot confess: ‘I, I have done very wrong and will amend.’⁶⁸

What did Bismarck want the King to do that he had not done? Is it farfetched or absurd to suggest that he wanted the King to express his love and affection and then, like an unhappy child, the hurt could be ‘kissed away’? The King’s letter goes well beyond what Roon calls ‘the almost tender note’. It says that it is the King’s ‘greatest happiness to live with you and to thoroughly agree with you! How can you be so hypochondriac as to allow one single difference to mislead you …’ It is not quite certain what William I meant by ‘hypochondriac’ in the next phrase but it would not be incorrect to call Bismarck’s difficulties, both personally and politically, utterly imaginary, hence hypochondriac. It made little difference whether the county reorganization bill came out of the ministry a month late or whether Frankfurt paid two million or three or whether Usedom stayed in Italy or not. This is the Bismarck who had transformed the map of Europe and the history of Germany in four years and who in 1870 would engineer the destruction of the Napoleonic Empire. This giant could not sleep because the King refused to sack Guido von Usedom.

General von Stosch picked up the inside information, as he revealed in a letter to Gustav Freytag, about the dismissal of Usedom and the resignation crisis:

Usedom wrote to the King to say that at his last audience the King had been so gracious to him that he could not believe that he had been recalled. The King, furious that Bismarck dismissed an ambassador without consulting him, ordered him to stay and Bismarck got a black eye. Naturally Bismarck turned this adroitly to his advantage and clouted Usedom with it. New outrage and Bismarck submits his resignation. Thereafter Usedom fell anyway but without telling Bismarck the King gave him a decoration and offered him Olfers post.

The Stosch correspondence reveals an important truth about Bismarck. Stosch had himself been badly treated and humiliated by Bismarck. He opposed many of his policies. He became a favourite of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. Bismarck considered him an ‘enemy’. In spite of the damning evidence, which Bismarck assiduously collected on him, Stosch never wavered in his support for Bismarck. The letter just quoted ends with this sentence: ‘Without Bismarck, we cannot make progress to a Reich.’⁶⁹

And progress was being made. Delbrück’s office churned out bills to unify and liberalize the new state. On 21 June 1869, the Reichstag passed a new law on freedom of trades and crafts, a very contentious issue, because it broke the historic guild restrictions on the practice of a trade, an evil which Adam Smith had condemned in The Wealth of Nations. On 3 July 1869 the North German Confederation granted full emancipation to the Jews: ‘All existing restrictions on civil and national rights which arise from the diversity of religious confessions are hereby lifted.’⁷⁰ On 11 July 1869 a new Public Company’s Act removed the requirement to get permission from the government to issue shares; in effect the new law made it possible to found and float new limited liability corporations. That the government of a notorious reactionary had introduced these liberal measures astonished public opinion.

By August 1869 Bismarck had reached such a state of rage and hypochondria that he again threatened to resign, as he wrote to von Roon on 29 August 1869:

I am sick to death and have gall bladder problems … I have not slept for 36 hours and spent the entire night throwing up. My head feels like a glowing oven in spite of cold compresses. I fear that I am about to lose my mind. Forgive my agitation. … If the cart on which we ride should be smashed up, at least I shall have held myself apart from a share of the guilt. Fortunately it is a Sunday, because I fear otherwise that I would have done myself some bodily harm to let out my fury. We may have both become too angry to be able to row the galley any further.⁷¹

This insane outburst arose because the Cabinet refused to appoint Bismarck’s choice as new North German postal director, a Hanoverian called Helding, a man so obscure that his name appears in neither of the two great German dictionaries of national biography. Ministers objected to the fact that he had not served the necessary three years in Prussian service. By contrast Bismarck wanted to create a Reich civil service open to all without petty restrictions, and was right to be annoyed, but in the disproportion between cause and consequence, there is something seriously deranged. How Bismarck survived these bouts of near madness remains a puzzle; how contemporaries who suffered under them did so is no less remarkable.

His behaviour distressed Albrecht von Roon and Moritz von Blanckenburg. On 16 January 1870 Roon wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that

Bismarck treats business, even the Prussian, more or less as he did years ago. He is in cabinet meetings lively, speaks almost all the time and falls into the old error that through intellectual liveliness and personal charm he can overcome all the difficulties in the way. He will flirt with the National Liberals and ignore old friends and political comrades. He believes that he can win everybody over by diplomatic dialectic and human cleverness and to be able to lead them by spreading bait. He talks conservative to the conservatives and liberal to the liberals and reveals in this either so sovereign a contempt for his entourage or such incredible illusions that it makes me shudder. He wants to remain in office at any cost, for the present and the future, because he feels that the structure he has begun will collapse, making him a laughing stock to the world, as soon as he takes his hand away. That is not entirely incorrect but the means to that end! Are they sanctified for his sake?⁷²

Moritz replied five days later:

What you write about B does not surprise me. That he will not make good the mistakes he has made in his treatment of the conservatives, I know well since [my visit to] Varzin, that he is of the opinion that the progressive unification of Germany requires that we become ever more liberal—that he says right out—admittedly he also maintains that every liberal who by holding office comes nearer to the king, also become eo ipso a more conservative person.⁷³

Bismarck had annoyed the only two really close friends he had left in the political world. He had already broken with ‘little Hans’, Ludwig von Gerlach, Alexander von Below, and most of his close associates in the Junker establishment. From now on, in addition to the recurring bouts of illness, rage, sleeplessness, and indigestion, he would suffer from an almost intolerable loneliness.

While Bismarck made himself sick about the appointment of a postmaster general, an important event occurred in Spain that gave him a chance to transform European history again: the crisis over the ‘Hohenzollern Candidature’, as it is known. In September 1868, a junta of generals in Spain overthrew the monarchy of Queen Isabella II, herself the beneficiary of a similar pronunciamiento by an equally determined clique of generals in 1843. On 27 March 1869 the Earl of Clarendon, British Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador in Paris, ‘The chaotic state of that Country renders it contemptible at present … there has been evidence already that Bismarck has an eye on Spain as an auxiliary.’⁷⁴ Clarendon, who had been British minister during the Carlist War of 1831 to 1837, spoke good Spanish and knew the country well. He was right about Bismarck but could not have known at that stage how right. As early as 3 October 1868 Bismarck issued instructions to the German Foreign Office, ‘It is in our interest if the Spanish question remains open … and a solution agreeable to Napoleon is unlikely to be useful for us.’⁷⁵ The most important of the Generals was ‘the powerful, ambitious and imperturbable President of the Council, Marshall Juan Prim’.⁷⁶ In October 1868 Prim convinced his colleagues in the Council that they needed to find a suitable prince to replace the Queen and for the next year agents of the Spanish government approached a variety of French, Portuguese, and Italian royal princes without success. In the spring of 1869 the Generals settled on Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a member of the Catholic, south German branch of the Prussian royal family and on his mother’s side a relative of the Bonaparte dynasty.

In December 1868 Bismarck sent the Prince of Putbus and Colonel von Strantz as envoys to Madrid to assess the political situation and in May 1869 he dispatched the well-known military journalist and commentator, Theodor von Bernhardi, as well.⁷⁷ On 8 May Count Vincent Benedetti approached Bismarck to ask if the rumours of such a candidacy were correct and three days later Bismarck confirmed that they were correct but that Prince Karl Anton, head of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen branch, had refused the project.⁷⁸ Karl Anton, who had been Prime Minister of the New Era Government of 1858, quite rightly worried, as he wrote to Bismarck, that ‘a Hohenzoller in Spain would give rise to a wild outcry in anti-Prussian Europe and either precipitate or defer the solution of many pending questions.’⁷⁹ That was precisely its attraction for Bismarck. He knew he needed a crisis with France and possibly even a war to overcome the resistance of the southern German states to a final unification under Prussian leadership.

Whether Bismarck wanted war from the beginning of the episode became a matter of high politics from 1870 onward. After 1918 the question of the ‘guilt’ of Imperial Germany for the First World War became itself the justification for the harsh peace imposed on Germany in 1919–20, and, as a result, the details of Bismarck’s machinations in 1870 became a secret of the highest order. On 1 December 1921 Gustav Stresemann, the most important advocate of the politics of cooperation with the Allied Powers in spite of Versailles, cited Bismarck in his address to the right-wing German People’s Party at their party conference:

I ask you to go back in German history, to consider the greatest statesman the world had in the nineteenth century, Bismarck. Were his politics anything other than the politics of compromise?⁸⁰

Bismarck had to be protected from the charge of reckless belligerence and put into the service of post-1919 politics by both Left and Right. After 1945 West German historiography defended the monarchy against all comers, but the complete defeat of Germany in May 1945 had allowed compromising documents to fall into the hands of the Allies. That made conservative historians in Germany even more defensive. In 1973 S. William Halperin, an American, surveyed the literature and the debate over Bismarck’s ‘war guilt’ and concluded that ‘complications with France were precisely what he was looking for’⁸¹ but that did not mean that he planned to use the outcry, which Prince Karl Anton rightly predicted, as a pretext to go to war. Bismarck never closed off any option in advance.

In February 1870 Bismarck briefed Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Count von Waldersee (1832–1904) on his appointment as military attaché at the German Embassy in Paris. Waldersee, from a distinguished Anhalt military family, grew up in Prussian service. His father had been a general and Minister of War. Waldersee stood out, along with his contemporary Albrecht von Stosch, as ferociously ambitious and political. He also like Stosch kept a diary and collected his correspondence. By 1866 he had become an adjutant to the King and had excellent connections. In the interview, according to Waldersee’s diary, Bismarck warned him to avoid legitimist circles and ‘too hasty judgements … The political situation is one of an idyllic peace. Nobody can know how long that will last. The French have so much to do domestically that they have no time to think about foreign affairs.’⁸² At this stage, 6 February 1870, Bismarck assumed that peace would continue for a while, as did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, who had written to the British Ambassador in Madrid in the same vein a few months earlier:

Happily, there is no longer question, as in former times, of attempts on the part of Foreign Powers to turn to their own advantage the variations of Spanish politics. There is no desire on the part of any of them to disturb the Balance of Power in Europe by seeking to acquire dynastic influence in Spain or to aggrandize their dominion at her expense.⁸³

The Hohenzollern candidature became a casus belli not least because Marshall Prim refused to take no for an answer and dismissed the likely response of Paris. On 17 February 1870 Prim wrote to Bismarck to say that that he ‘deemed it more seemly and more expedient at the beginning to make an entirely confidential approach’.⁸⁴ A week later, Eusebio de Salazar arrived at Karl Anton’s residence in Düsseldorf with formal letters for Prince Leopold, King William, and Bismarck in which an offer of the Crown of Spain was at last made, subject, of course, to approval by the Cortes. Karl Anton, although momentarily dazzled by the prospect that his son would found ‘a dynasty such as that has not been known to history since Charles V’, recognized that his son required formal permission from the head of the dynasty, King William I, and the support of Bismarck before he could give his own consent.⁸⁵ The King opposed the idea but Bismarck had got round such opposition before. On 12 March 1870 the Crown Princess wrote to Queen Victoria, ‘General Prim has sent a Spaniard here with several autograph letters from himself to Leopold Hohenzollern, urging him most urgently to accept Spain … Neither the King, nor Prince Hohenzollern, nor Antoinette [Princess Leopold—JS], nor Leopold, nor Fritz are in favour of the idea …’⁸⁶

Bismarck clearly was. On 9 March 1870 he presented a memorandum to King William in which he argued that ‘it is therefore to Germany’s political interest that the House of Hohenzollern should gain an esteem and an exalted position in the world analogous to that only of the Habsburgs after Charles V. The King remained stubbornly against the proposal and wrote sceptical marginal notes against Bismarck’s arguments. After all, the throne of Spain lacked real stability and might be overthrown by a casualpronunciamiento at any time.⁸⁷ Bismarck used the occasion of a dinner in Berlin hosted by Prince Karl Anton on 15 March, which Roon and Moltke also attended, to hold an informal Crown Council, to try again to persuade the King, who maintained his ‘strong scruples’ against it.⁸⁸ Bismarck’s own account of his role exceeds in its mendacity the lies we have already recorded in this book. Here it is:

‘Politically I was tolerably indifferent to the entire question. Prince Anthony [Karl Anton—JS] was more inclined than myself to carry it peacefully to the desired goal. The memoirs of his Majesty the King of Roumania are not accurately informed as regards details of the ministerial co-operation in the question. The ministerial council in the palace which he mentions did not take place. Prince Anthony was living as the King’s guest in the palace, and had invited him and some of the ministers to dinner. I scarcely think that the Spanish question was discussed at table.⁸⁹

On 20 April Prince Karl Anton and Prince Leopold let Madrid know that they were no longer interested. On 13 May Bismarck wrote to Delbrück to express his rage and frustration:

The Spanish affair has taken a miserable turn. The undoubted reasons of state have been subordinated to princely private interests and ultramontane, feminine interests. My annoyance about all this has heavily burdened my nerves for weeks.⁹⁰

On 21 May Bismarck returned to Berlin and on the 28th told Prince Karl Anton that he had finally changed the King’s mind. On 8 June he withdrew again to Varzin to let the royal family negotiate the candidacy without him so that as usual he could shift the blame for whatever went wrong onto princely intrigues. On 19 June Prince Leopold finally sent his acceptance letter to Madrid, which was made public on 2 July. On 5 July the new British Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, paid his first visit to his new department where the long-serving and experienced Permanent Under-Secretary Edmund Hammond told him that ‘he had never during his long experience known so great a lull’.⁹¹ At 12.10 the same day the British Ambassador Layard sent a telegram in which he reported that through an indiscretion he had got news of the acceptance of the Crown of Spain by Prince Leopold.⁹² The following day, the new French Foreign Secretary, the Duc de Gramont, announced to the French Chamber of Deputies that the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne constituted a serious attempt to change the European Balance of Power to the detriment of the French Empire. The honour and interests of France had been severely injured. He hinted that France would regard it as grounds for war.⁹³ Later that day, 6 July 1870, the Prussian Ambassador in Paris, Karl Freiherr von Werther (1808–92) arrived at Bad Ems, where the royal family were taking the water of the Lahn, and met Alfred Waldersee, the military attaché in Paris, who as a royal General Adjutant had joined the King there. He told Waldersee in great excitement that

‘the devil is loose in Paris. It looks like war.’ When yesterday morning he had gone to Gramont to take leave for the holidays, he found him in a very excited mood. A telegram from Madrid said that Prince Leopold Hohenzollern was supposed to be presented to the Cortes as successor to the vacant throne. Gramont was beside himself. He had complained of lack of consideration and deceit on our part and said straight out, the thing was impossible. France could never concede that, the Ministry would be questioned in the chamber. Werther was to an extent in a difficult situation because he had not heard a word about the whole business. He could only take evasive action. Luckily for him that he had previously planned this journey to Ems. I thought he ought not to have gone. The King received him almost at once after his arrival in a long audience. It is really uncomfortable that Bismarck is in Varzin. All decisions are naturally much more complicated.⁹⁴

On the same day, the Crown Princess wrote to Queen Victoria, ‘After the Spanish crown had been decidedly refused by the Hohenzollerns and the King, the former have been applied to again, and, having changed their minds meanwhile, seem likely to accept it—much to the King and Queen’s annoyance …’⁹⁵

The next day, 7 July 1870, Waldersee complained in his diary about Bismarck’s behaviour in the crisis:

Bismarck refused to believe in any approaching danger and was determined to stay in Varzin where he was taking the waters. The sudden prospect of war with France upset the King very much and he wanted earnestly to get the affair settled. As bad luck would have it, Prince Leopold Hohenzollern was not in Sigmaringen but had gone on a trip to the Alps. Nobody knew where he was.⁹⁶

On 8 July Waldersee asked the King for permission to return to his post in view of the threat of war and the King gave him his view of the background of the previous events and then added, as Waldersee recorded:

A few months ago the Spaniards had knocked on the door again and now all of a sudden the father and son Hohenzollern have become passionately in favour of the thing to my great astonishment, whereas before they were pretty uncertain. They allowed themselves to be talked into it by Bismarck, and the Prince who had doubted that he had the guts to be King of Spain, was suddenly filled with idea that he had a mission to make Spain happy. I begged him earnestly to think it over very carefully, but when he insisted I gave him my permission as head of the family … I have Bismarck to thank for this because he took the whole matter so casually, as he has so much else. [Waldersee on the margin of the diary entry: ‘exact words’] … It was the firsttime I had ever heard the King talk about serious business. He developed his ideas with great clarity and without hesitation in his speech.⁹⁷

This testimony—spontaneously given—makes it impossible not to think that Bismarck engineered the crisis and that the French reacted exactly as he had imagined they would. His absence in Varzin merely covered his tracks in the event that things went wrong.

When Waldersee returned to Paris on 9 July, he found the French in high excitement. At the station he ran into ‘Captain Leontiev, an assistant to the Russian attaché, Prince Wittgenstein. His first words: “you have a war; believe me, you cannot stop it.”’ In the evening, Waldersee sent a ciphered telegram to Bismarck: ‘In the War and Navy Ministries elaborate preparations are under way for the conduct of a large war. Reserves have not yet been called to the colours but it looks as if troop movements will begin tomorrow. The railroads have been advised. There seems to be an inclination to strike without mobilized troops.’⁹⁸

What happened next could not happen today in the age of instant and ubiquitous communications. Because Bismarck was still in Varzin, he did not know that on 9 July 1870 Count Benedetti, the French ambassador to Prussia, who was in Bad Ems, asked the Prussian King for direct information about the situation. The King replied that the matter concerned him as Head of the Hohenzollern family not as King of Prussia. He found it hard to refuse the Catholic Sigmaringen branch in such a matter and could not intervene. In fact, on 10 July, he wrote to Prince Karl Anton a letter in which he urged the father to convince the son, Prince Leopold, to withdraw his name. Karl Anton acted at once and on 12 July made public that the Hereditary Prince Leopold had withdrawn his name. William had also sent an urgent telegram to Varzin ordering Bismarck to come at once to Bad Ems as a matter of the greatest urgency.⁹⁹

Bismarck had no idea that these developments had occurred which one can deduce from the fact that on 10 July 1870 he sent a telegram to his banker Bleichröder that it would be ‘a good idea’ to unload the railroad shares in his portfolio.¹⁰⁰ Today that would be an example of ‘insider trading’ but it certainly confirms that on 10 July Bismarck expected a war. When he got to Berlin on the 12th, he learned for the first time that Leopold had withdrawn. In the late afternoon his carriage halted in the Wilhelmstrasse and a sheaf of telegraphs was shoved into his hand. Sitting there in the street he learned for the first time of Karl Anton decision and the extent of William’s involvement in his renunciation. Other messages from Paris told of ‘vaunts and taunts’ in the Paris press. Descending to the sidewalk, he thought of resigning. Prussia, he judged, had suffered a humiliation worse than Olmütz.¹⁰¹ Bismarck called a meeting with Moltke, Roon, and Count Eulenburg. Moltke arrived red in the face, ‘because he had now made the trip [to Berlin] for nothing, and the war which he had already firmly planned seemed to recede into the distance again … Old Roon was dejected too.’ Bismarck said: ‘Until just now I thought I was standing on the eve of the greatest of historical events, and now all I will get from it is the unpleasantness of the sudden interruption of my Kur … [to Herbert] I would urge you to work hard because there is not going to be a battlefield promotion.’¹⁰²

Still Bismarck had to do something to save his face and his diplomatic situation. He went to see Gorchakov, who was briefly in Berlin on the way home from taking the waters at Wildbad. ‘Apparently he [Bismarck] spoke with Gortchakov about a diplomatic offensive which would be directed at the inflammatory speeches of Gramont. They agreed to criticize the French foreign minister indirectly by emphasizing to the European governments the restraint and moderation of the King and his ministry. In this sense Gortchakov spoke to Lord Loftus and de Launay. Loftus immediately went to see the French chargé d’affaires, Le Sourd, and urged on him that the French government should be satisfied with what they had achieved and recognize the conciliatory spirit of the Prussian King.’¹⁰³

Meanwhile in Paris, Waldersee wrote an account of what happened:

On the morning of the 12th, Baron Werther came back from Ems, very tired because of the heat. Immediately after his arrival, a man from the Foreign Office, the Chief of Gramont’s cabinet, Count Faverney, appeared and asked if Werther could not visit Gramont as soon as possible. Werther replied, he would come at once. When he came back from the meeting, Solms and I were waiting for him in the Embassy. After we had heard him, we both said that war was now unavoidable. He refused to accept this view. ‘A war between France and Prussia is an event of such huge importance, so terrible a disaster for so many people, the cause is besides so trivial that it is the duty of every man of honour to seek to prevent it by every means in his power. That has been my guiding principle and for that reason I have resolved to write to the King.’ From a general human point of view he was undeniably right; as Prussian Ambassador he should have behaved to Gramont very differently. … Bismarck’s telegram which recalled the ambassador was so crude that I could hardly believe it. As Werther went to take leave of the Duke de Gramont, I accompanied him to the Foreign Ministry. When he came back to the ante-chamber, he said to me, ‘this walk marks the end of my career.’ He did not deceive himself. Bismarck never spoke to him again.

The editor of the Waldersee diary, Hans Otto Meisner, notes that this is ‘wrong. Werther was dismissed in 1871 but recalled in 1874 and sent as Ambassador to Constantinople where he served until 1877.’¹⁰⁴ I pause here to salute Karl Freiherr von Werther for a remarkable act of civil courage, a diplomat who put his honour and his horror of war above his career and his duty to Bismarck as his chief.

If the Duc de Gramont had taken Gorchakov’s advice and been satisfied by the public and stunning victory of French diplomacy over Bismarck, again war would have been avoided but he took a further step. He ordered his ambassador who was still in Bad Ems to get a promise from the King that Prussia would take no similar action in the future. On the 13th as Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon sat together over dinner, a telegram from William I arrived from Bad Ems that reported how Ambassador Benedetti had confronted the King and insisted that the King give his solemn word that nothing of the sort would happen again. The King, offended, not only said that he could make no such promise but, when asked by Benedetti if he could have another chance to discuss the matter, refused to see the French ambassador. The King asked Bismarck ‘whether the new demand and my refusal should not be communicated to our embassies abroad and to the press’.¹⁰⁵

Bismarck now had what he needed. He took a pencil and edited what he had received from the King to make it sound more offensive. In the original text the King had written that he had ‘let the Ambassador be told through an adjutant that he had now received from the Prince confirmation which Benedetti had already received from Paris and had nothing further to say to the Ambassador.’ Bismarck altered the phrase to make it more provocative. In Bismarck’s version it read, ‘His Majesty the King had thereupon refused to receive the French Ambassador once more and let him know through an adjutant that His Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the ambassador.’¹⁰⁶ Years later Lucius von Ballhausen happened to be present when the three conspirators showed up at an evening in the Wilhelmstrasse and recalled the events of 1870:

After dinner as we sat around smoking cigars, Field Marshall Roon arrived, coughing and puffing and breathless. He suffered from an asthmatic condition … Later Count Moltke arrived … He received him very cordially and said, tapping him on the knee, ‘the last time we three sat together was on the 13 of July 1870. What a stroke of luck it was that the French went so far! How hard it would have been to find another equally favourable opportunity! We never altered Benedetti’s dispatch but condensed it in such way as to show the French pretensions in their full strength. Everything had been surrendered with respect to the Hohenzollern candidacy and had the French not insisted that we promise never to do so again, we might have given up yet more. I asked you both “are we ready?” You said “we are ready”.’¹⁰⁷

On 14 July 1870 the French ministerial council decided to declare mobilization and declared war on 19 July. Bismarck claimed afterwards that his editing of the Ems Dispatch had forced Napoleon III to go to war, though evidence suggests that France had decided to fight earlier. As in the case of the Austrian war, an ill-prepared and badly organized state and army went to war without proper mobilization.

On the Prussian side the Crown Princess was not unrepresentative of the anti-French feeling that had been stirred as a result of French arrogance. On 16 July she wrote to Queen Victoria:

We have been shamelessly forced into this war, and the feeling of indignation against such an act of such crying injustice has risen in two days here to such a pitch that you would hardly believe it; there is a universal cry ‘to arms’ to resist an enemy who wantonly insults us.¹⁰⁸

The 16th of July was the first day of mobilization of the Prussian army. Arden Bucholz writes,

By January 1870 railroad mobilization had been reduced to 20 days, 260 per cent better than 1867 with a force nearly three times as large and a mobilization and battle space area seven times larger than 1866. It delivered German forces to the French border like a factory assembly line. And allowed Moltke’s timing patterns to begin to dominate war … On the tenth day the first units disembarked on the French border, by the thirteenth day, the troops of the Second Army were assembled there, on the eighteenth the number was 300,000.¹⁰⁹

On 19 July reserve officers were mobilized. In the Reichstag Lucius von Ballhausen, a reserve officer in the Brandenburg Cuirassier Regiment, went up to the ministers’ table and asked Roon and Moltke whether he should remain in parliament or report at once. Roon smiled, ‘there’s no rush. You can stay here. There is plenty of time before the Etappen have to be set up on enemy soil and we have eight to ten days jump on the French.’¹¹⁰

The Prussian generals had absolute confidence in their General Staff and in its chief, Helmuth von Moltke. We can catch a little of the atmosphere two days after the French declaration of war on 19 July, from Waldersee’s diary:

Today early in the morning I arrived on the Paris express in good shape but tired by the heat and very dusty. On the platform I ran into Prince Friedrich Karl who greeted me in a very friendly way and told me to go right to Moltke where a meeting was underway. I did that, was admitted and found Moltke with General von Podbielski and the three department chiefs, Bronsart, Verdy and Brandenstein. Moltke conveyed his respects and then pressed me for information. Afterwards I changed as quickly as possible and went to the royal palace. Radziwill was on duty and I was admitted at once. The King was cheerful and friendly as always, gave me his hand and thanked me for the reports. After asking about French conditions, he said, ‘you will stay with me.’ So my fate was decided for the near future. I was to have the good fortune going to war as the direct companion of this marvellous chief.¹¹¹

The Prussian Army had recently fought a victorious war and in the interim had learned a variety of lessons. In 1866 it had expected a long bloody war but the opposite had occurred. They saw no reason not to repeat the exercise in 1870 and in the first stage of the war, they were right. Moltke in his short summary of the official history of the war gives a desolate picture of French preparations. The French went to war in a collective fit of insanity. ‘The regiments had been hurried away from their peace stations before the arrival of their complement of men and without waiting for their equipment. Meanwhile the called-out reservists accumulated in the depots, overflowed the railway stations and choked the traffic.’ The planned thrust through the Black Forest which the General Staff had expected never occurred. Careful negotiations on the Prussian side had integrated the southern German armies into the Prussian system and the resulting performance of Bavarian, Württemberg, and Baden units exceeded expectations. Prussian mobilization on the other hand proceeded exactly according to plan. The King declared war on 16 July 1870. Fourteen days later, 300,000 Prussian and allied soldiers had assembled at Mainz all ready to strike into France and, since the French had not used the flank to attack from Strasbourg across the Rhine, Moltke could make his front more compact. The mobilization plan foresaw the same three-part division of forces that had worked so well in enveloping the Austrians in 1866. Three armies under the command respectively of General von Steinmetz (First Army), Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia (Second Army), and Prince Frederick the Crown Prince (Third Army) which contained the Baden, Württemberg, and Bavarian Corps and the 11th Corps of units from Hesse, Nassau, and Saxe-Weimar, had assumed their initial positions by the beginning of August. The Order of Battle on 1 August 1870 makes instructive reading for the historian of Prussia. Not one corps, divisional, or brigade commander in the line units of the I and II Armies lacked the aristocratic ‘von’. The famous names of Prussian history show up in the distribution of commands: several von Kleists (3), von der Goltzes (2), Neidhart von Gneisenau, von Below (2), von der Osten, von Sennft-Pilsach, von Manteuffel, von Bülow (2), von Wedell, von Brandenburg (2), a colonel von Bismarck, von Wartensleben, von Alvensleben, etc. and a sprinkling of royal princes in staff and command posts. In the First and Second Armies, only Major-General Baumgarth, who commanded the 2nd Cavalry Brigade in the First Army, Lieutenant Colonel Lehmann in command of the 37th Brigade in the Hanoverian 10th Corps, and Major General Tauscher of the Saxon 3rd Infantry Brigade, lacked a title. None of the Corps Commanding Engineers, on the other hand, had a title and many of the Commanding Artillery Generals at Corps and divisional levels belonged to the bourgeoisie.¹¹² Old Prussia went into battle equipped with new technology, transportation, weaponry, and communications.

The spirit that led to bold and dashing acts of heroism had not—to Moltke’s intense annoyance—died out. Such bravado led to serious breaches of his careful plans. None was more guilty of disobedience than General von Steinmetz, Commander-in-Chief of the First Army. Karl Friedrich von Steinmetz posed two problems for his fellow commanders and for Moltke. He was 73 when the war broke out and many thought him too old. His biographer writes of him that ‘he had few friends in the army during his lifetime. That arose from his gruff nature and the high standards he set in the service. A serious, closed character, he was mostly misunderstood by his contemporaries.’¹¹³ Lieutenant Colonel Waldersee put it more strongly on 25 July:

That they have given old Steinmetz the I. Army I cannot understand. He was already three-quarters mad in 1866 and is now four years older. He will not lack energy in his moves but that is not enough.¹¹⁴

Steinmetz was blamed for attacking at Spichern when Moltke wanted him to wait and in September he was relieved of his command, promoted, and sent off to Posen. Other than that the command structure worked smoothly, and Moltke’s reliance on his commanders proved successful. What never worked was the relationship between Bismarck and Moltke. Bismarck showed up on 31 July in the Headquarters of the King at Mainz kitted out in the uniform of a Major General of the reserve, a spiked helmet of the heavy cavalry, and huge leather hip boots, a ridiculous and unmilitary figure.¹¹⁵ The soldiers may have laughed but the German public began to worship at the altar of the ‘German giant’ and, as Johnannes Willms shrewdly observes, his distinctive features, instantly recognizable and ideal for pictures, ornamental mugs, and busts looked particularly good in the Pickelhaube.¹¹⁶ The waspish Waldersee kept a sharp eye on Bismarck and recorded in his diary the details. On 2 August he wrote on the quarters taken up in Mainz:

The King and his entourage have been housed in the grand-ducal palace. Otherwise the rest of the headquarters is scattered across Mainz, about which many are annoyed, in particular, Bismarck, who lives very prettily with a patriotic wine merchant but pretty far out. He complains all the time.¹¹⁷

The war began badly for the French. On 4 August there was a fierce skirmish at Wissembourg; on 5 August the battle of Spichern; and on 6 August, the full-scale battle of Wörth, where for the first time 100,000 men on both sides clashed. Here it became clear that the German needle-gun could not compete with the French chassepôt and Moltke soberly records that at Wörth alone the Prussians lost 10,000 men.¹¹⁸ The victor at Wörth, the Crown Prince Frederick, recorded the event in his war diary:

I have today completely defeated Marshall MacMahon, putting his troops to utter and disorderly rout. So far as it has been possible to ascertain, his whole corps was engaged, reinforced by Failly and Canrobet as well as by troops brought from Grenoble, approximately a force of 80,000 men against me, who brought 100,000 men into the fighting line. The engagement, which, again!, cost us a very great number of officers and men deserves the title of a veritable battle, in which the greater part of my army fought. … The losses of the French must be extraordinarily heavy; the dead lay in heaps and the red cloth of their uniforms showed up wherever the eye fell. Six thousand unwounded prisoners have been reported to me, including regimental and battalion commanders and 100 other officers. Among them I came upon a Colonel in the Cuirasseurs, who must have recognized me by my star, for he instantly gave me my proper title: ‘Ah, monseigneur. Quelle défaite, quel malheur; j’ai la honte d’être prisonnier, nous avons tout perdu! I tried to comfort him by saying: ‘Vous avez tort de dire d’avoir perdu tout, car après tout vous avez battu comme des braves soldats, vous n’avez pas perdu l’honneur.’ To this he replied ‘Ah, merci vous me faites bien en me traitant de la sorte.’ I had him give me the address of those belonging to him so as to send news to the family. Later I came on a great number of other officers in like plight to whom I spoke to the same effect.¹¹⁹

There followed several other bloody confrontations and part of the defeated French army regrouped at Metz. When they tried to break out, the greatest battle of the entire war followed, the Battle of Gravelotte-St-Privat, in which the Prussians this time under the direct command of Moltke with two whole armies and over 180,000 men attacked about 112,000 French troops under Marshal François-Achille Bazaine. The attacking forces as in the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War faced withering French fire and the Prussians and southern German allies lost over 20,000, in part, as Moltke admitted through a miscalculation of his. The first fourteen days and six battles had cost the Prussians over 50,000 dead.¹²⁰ Bazaine’s troops took refuge in Metz and, though, as Moltke wrote, ‘the siege of Metz had formed no part of the original plan of campaign’, he had no choice but to invest the city.

Meanwhile Marshal McMahon in command of the other French Army very prudently planned to withdraw to Paris to confront the invaders with a strongly fortified city. Napoleon III ordered him to relieve Bazaine in Metz and the newly formed Army of Châlons with Napoleon in command set off northwards along the Belgian frontier to try to go round the Prussians. On 2 September 1870 at Sedan, Moltke caught them in one of his pincer movements and defeated McMahon’s army and took Napoleon III prisoner. Within hours of the news reaching Paris, crowds of furious citizens took to the streets and declared the revival of the Republic on 4 September 1870.

Though the war had been much more devastating than Moltke had expected, he had won it by his immaculate planning and the generally orderly operations of the three armies under his command. What happened next had not been imagined. Leon Gambetta, Jules Favre, and General Trochi formed a government of National Defence and rejected Bismarck’s relatively moderate demands for an armistice. Jules Favre on behalf of the Government of National Defence declared on 6 September that France would not yield an inch of its territory nor a stone of its fortresses.¹²¹ Gambetta became Minister of War and, as Moltke drily writes, ‘Gambetta’s rare energy and unrelenting determination availed, indeed, to induce the entire population to take up arms, but not to direct these hasty levies with unity of purpose.’¹²² In other words, the Prussian commanders faced a long, wearing and unpopular guerrilla campaign, a ‘people’s war’ which regained much of the popular support that that government of France had lost.

The next few months strained the nerves of all those involved and relations between Bismarck and the General Staff deteriorated. Lieutenant Colonel Waldersee had a choice seat on the edge of the battle for control between Bismarck and the soldiers. As a nosey gossip and intriguer, he had already decided, as his diary entry for 3 August put it, to ‘try to maintain my contacts in the General Staff and as a man with the right background I have a basis. Besides, Bronsart, Verdy and Brandenstein are my old friends and acquaintances.’¹²³ He was the same age and rank as the three lieutenant colonels who ran the three operating divisions under Moltke—Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf, Julius Verdy du Vernois, and Karl von Brandenstein, whom Bismarck bitterly called the ‘demi-gods’, the agents of God himself, General von Moltke. The three, especially Bronsart, came to hate Bismarck and did everything to prevent him from getting his way. Waldersee recorded that Bismarck also had his ‘demi-gods’:

Bismarck, who leads his own team, Abecken, Keudell, Hatzfeld, Karl Bismarck-Bohlen together with several code clerks and councillors, operates with three or four horse-drawn carriages. He himself travels in a very heavy travel carriage with four horses, which cannot keep up with the stallions of the King. For this reason they begin to intrigue against the long marches.¹²⁴

After the declaration of total war by the French Government of National Defence, military and diplomatic considerations became hopelessly entangled. Bismarck needed to get an armistice to keep the Russians, Austrians, and English out of the struggle. Now that Count Beust, the former Saxon Prime Minister, had become the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, there was a real danger that the Habsburgs might fall on the Prussians from the rear to undo the humiliations of 1866. Bismarck needed to get the war over quickly. These anxieties mingled with the wild and uncontrollable rage that seized Bismarck when anyone opposed him, and now Moltke and his ‘demigods’ did so daily.

On 9 September Waldersee recorded the first crisis between the General Staff and Bismarck. The issue was whether a particular police office was to be under Bismarck or the General Staff and Bismarck reacted as he had with the Prussian State Ministry over the Hanoverian nominated to be postal director.

Between Bismarck and the General Staff open war has broken out … One got out the file and showed the Minister President his signature. He said, not stupid, ‘I sign so many documents about which I have no idea, that this signature does matter at all. I have no knowledge of any such agreement and consider it to be false.’ Negotiations became very lively. Because he had been caught out and proven to be in the wrong, Bismarck took it very badly and this trivial issue led to a quarrel. Moltke stayed out of the business but Podbielski and the department chiefs have ruined their relationship to Bismarck.¹²⁵

On 20 September 1870 the Royal Headquarters moved to the famous villa of Baron James de Rothschild at Ferrières. Before dinner the King walked through the ground floor rooms of the château. In the hall of mirrors, he looked at the many reliefs on the walls and said: ‘I am too poor to buy myself such a thing.’¹²⁶ Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf also recorded his impressions of Ferrières: ‘The ancestors of Baron Rothschild (coats of arms, lions and eagles) are very numerous and often set in marble, bronze, oil and pastel. There wherever possible, the coat of arms has been placed. General Stuckow declared that whole interior decoration was shameless.’¹²⁷ The various staff officers joked about coats of arms with JR (James de Rothschild) in them and played with phrases like ‘Judaeorum Rex’ and ‘der Judenkönig’. When Bismarck engaged his private banker Gerson Bleichröder to negotiate off the record about French reparations, Moltke’s staff called Bleichröder ‘des Kanzlers Privatjude’ (the Chancellor’s private Jew).¹²⁸During the siege of Paris in January 1871, Bismarck said to his staff:

Bleichröder will come running and prostrate himself on behalf of the whole Rothschild family. Then we will send both to Paris and they can join the dog hunt. … Well in the first place Bleichröder should go into battle. He must get into Paris right away so that he and his co-religionists can smell each other and talk with bankers.¹²⁹

Waldersee described the accommodation in Ferrières:

Here in the château, besides the King who has been housed on the ground floor left, there are Bismarck, Moltke, Roon, and the entire entourages of the King and Bismarck. In the beautiful stable buildings, some of which have been converted to guest rooms, the General Staff and Ministry of War have been housed. Everybody else is in the village. In Lagny, Prince Karl, the Grand Duke of Weimar, Prince Luitpold [of Bavaria], the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the General Inspector of Artillery and of Engineers. Naturally great dissatisfaction all round. The second staff want to be in Ferrières and in Ferrières everybody wants to be in the château.¹³⁰

By 19 September, as Moltke writes, the VIth Corps of the III Army had marched on Versailles in two columns and the Bavarian Corps had fought its way to the Paris suburbs. By the evening, he writes, ‘the investment of Paris was complete on all sides. Six Army Corps stood in a deployment some fifty miles in circumference immediately in front of the enemy’s capital.’¹³¹ What to do next raised a problem. Moltke denied the argument of those who claimed later ‘that it would have been possible to capture one of the forts on this day by forcing an entrance with the fugitive enemy.’ The forts were formidable and could have been defended even if French troops in retreat were still entering. Moltke believed that ‘the escalade of masonry escarpments eighteen feet high can never be successful without much preparation … probable failure would have endangered the important success of the day.’¹³² The result was a stalemate which lasted for months during which Paris carried out its own revolution of 1789 against the provinces, known to history as the Commune.

On 24 September Waldersee dined with Bismarck. The Princess Karl had written to let him know that the ‘Queen had been vigorously agitating that we should take no land from the dear French. Together with her Princess Radziwill, etc. I should tell Prince Bismarck. As I did so, he said, “I know the clique and their shameful intrigues very well. The King is worked on in every letter from the Queen. I think for a while a bolt has been shoved across it. At my request the King wrote such a rude letter that she will not dare try anything for a while”.’¹³³

On 1 October 1870 the General Staff entertained Count Bismarck at their table. Lieutenant Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf recorded a conversation in his diary:

He had, as it happens, expected that immediately after the arrival of the King Baron von Rothschild would have enquired about the King’s orders and arranged for a decent reception of the entourage. That did not happen. Bismarck thereafter decided to treat him as a Jewish merchant. He wished to buy wine from the cellar. The administrator replied that in this house ‘où l’argent n’est rien’ nothing was ever sold. Bismarck insisted, ordered wine and a bill on which the price of every bottle plus 50 centimes for corkage was added.¹³⁴

What to do with the French popular rising continued to trouble the General Staff and Bismarck. On 4 October Waldersee recorded a conversation Bismarck had with the American General Philip Sheridan, who had been assigned to the Prussian Army as a military observer. Sheridan (1831–88) had become famous or infamous for his campaign in 1864 in the Shenendoah Valley during the American Civil War, when he ordered his Union troops to set fire to civilian houses and barns in the so-called ‘burning’, an example of the technique known later as ‘scorched earth’. Sheridan said to Bismarck:

‘You know how to defeat an enemy better than any army in the world, but to destroy him, you have not learned. One must see smoke from burning villages; otherwise you will never finish the French.’ And I am convinced that the man is right. Destroy great strips of territory à la Sheridan across the country, that will take the wind out of French sails and put an end to snipers.¹³⁵

Moltke refused to take the guerrilla war seriously. On 7 October he announced with his usual, calm certainty, ‘the war is over; there are just twitchings left. There can be no question of more large operations.’¹³⁶ But it was not over and went on for months.

On 5 October the entire German headquarters moved to Versailles. Holstein described the conditions in his Memoirs:

Our stay in Versailles was particularly trying to our nerves because of the high room temperature the Chancellor insisted on. One day he complained bitterly of the cold. ‘The office staff apparently does not wish me to come downstairs.’ We looked at the thermometer; it was between 16 and 17 degrees. When the Chancellor unbuttoned his military greatcoat you could see it was lined with doeskin, but he only undid it when the temperature was 18 degrees Réaumur with a huge fire burning in the grate. [18 Réaumur = 72.5 Fahrenheit or 22 Celsius]

Bismarck’s temper worsened as the General Staff debated what to do about the siege of Paris during October and November. They considered uncertainly whether to bombard the city with their powerful siege guns or to try to starve it into submission. Keudell described a characteristic clash between Bismarck and Moltke:

On 18 October Roon and Moltke went to the Chancellor. Shortly after the conference a pain in his foot began which lasted for several days. I concluded from that, Moltke’s refusal to shell Paris could not be overcome, although it was well known that Roon favoured it.¹³⁷

The issue divided the generals and had begun to appear in the press, as Waldersee recorded on 23 October:

In the press great efforts are made to stamp the bombardment of Paris as barbarous. Doubtless female intrigues are behind this and this time in a wonderful way the Queen and the Crown Princess are of the same opinion. I know with certainty that Stosch, who attaches himself gladly to the Crown Prince, is involved in this. He turns out to be the most effective ally because he can say that all the railroad trains and other means of transport are needed for victualling. Well, we certainly have to live first before we can shoot, so he alone can hold everything up. There are other conflicts, for example, Headquarters v Blumenthal; almost all officers against Roon.¹³⁸

While the Prussian victorious progress stalled amidst disagreements and unfavourable publicity, on 9 November 1870 the Russian government renounced the Black Sea Treaty of 1856, which had been imposed upon it after the defeat in the Crimean War. The flagrant gesture of defiance put the English cabinet in an awkward position. The French Empire under Napoleon III with whom Britain had fought the war had ceased to exist, and the new Republic—occupied and humiliated—had no energy to worry about the eastern Mediterranean. Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, decided to send Odo Russell to Prussian HQ to sound out Bismarck on the matter. In London the government believed that he had secretly urged the Russians to use the favourable diplomatic situation to wipe out the shame of 1856.¹³⁹ Lady Emily Russell wrote to her mother-in-law, the formidable Lady William Russell: ‘It is curious, isn’t it? that he should be going to grapple with Bismarck which is what he said he wished to do beyond everything and this before he is ambassador to Berlin.’¹⁴⁰ Odo Russell became an intimate of Bismarck in a way no other foreign diplomat did and his observations of his extraordinary friend provide one of the best insights into the Bismarck of the 1870s and early 1880s.

Odo William Leopold Russell (1829–84) belonged to the first family of English Whiggery, the Russells, who were the Dukes of Bedford and who inhabited at Woburn one of the great lordly houses of England. His father, who had been the British ambassador at Berlin (1835–41), died when Odo was 13 and his powerful and eccentric mother, Lady William, decided to educate her three boys in civilized places, not barbarous English public schools. Richard Davenport-Hines in his biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writes that ‘as a result he had nothing of the muddied English oaf about him. He seldom took exercise. He spoke French, Italian, and German with exceptional purity, though his English accent was always tinged with continental inflexions.’¹⁴¹ A flavour of Lady William’s character comes from a passage of a letter to Sir Austen Layard on the German victory over France:

I am GERMANICA to the pineal gland. Discipline against disorder, sobriety against drunkenness, education against IGNORANCE. There never was such a triumph of intellect over brutism.¹⁴²

No wonder her three sons, even as grown men, needed to gather their courage to visit Mother.

Odo Russell had spent a good deal of time in Rome and spoke equally impressive Italian. In its obituary The Times of 27 August 1884 commented on Odo Russell’s remarkable ability as a Protestant to understand Roman Catholicism, an invaluable asset during the crisis of church and state, in which he would soon have to work:

His intimacy with Cardinal Antonelli enabled him to acquire a thoroughly Italian subtlety seldom to be met with in an Englishman. A close observer by nature, he has learnt by experience how to observe still more closely: he has discovered how to weigh the characters of men, to discern their weaknesses, and to profit by their meannesses and susceptibilities.¹⁴³

On 2 December 1870 Odo Russell wrote to Edmund Hammond, permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office, about his first impressions of Bismarck and of the political situation at the Versailles Headquarters:

I am charmed with Count Bismarck, his soldier-like, straightforward frank manner, his genial conversations, are truly fascinating, and his excessive kindness to me have won my heart. His foreign office staff travel with him and form … his family. At dinner and breakfast he takes the head of the table with his under-secretaries on each side—then come the Chief Clerks—then the junior Clerks and the telegraph clerks situated at the end of the table—everybody in uniform. When I dine there I sit between the Count and the Permanent Under-Secretary [von Keudell—JS] who plays the piano divinely after dinner while we smoke. The conversation is in German and the questions of the day are discussed with perfect freedom, which makes them deeply interesting and instructive.¹⁴⁴

Again, another sophisticated observer charmed by Bismarck’s conversation and personality.

Relations between Bismarck and the General Staff had worsened in the meantime. Paul Bronsart confided to his diary a crushing judgement on the Chancellor:

Bismarck begins really to be ready for the mad house. He complained bitterly to the King that General Moltke had written to General Trochu and claimed that this as a negotiation with a foreign government belonged in his competence. When General Moltke as representative of the Supreme Command of the Army has written to the Governor of Paris, the matter has a purely military character. Since Count Bismarck claims in addition that he had declared to me that he considered the letter extremely questionable, whereas exactly the opposite is the case, I then submitted a written report to General von Moltke in which I demonstrated the falsehood of the assertion and requested in future not to be asked to carry out verbal instructions with the Count.¹⁴⁵

The pressure from public opinion began to be felt. The Crown Prince recorded in his war diary that his wife had been blamed for the delay of the bombardment and that Johanna von Bismarck and Countess Amelie von Donhöff had spread the lie.¹⁴⁶ Bronsart quoted a popular poem which had made the round in Berlin:

Guter Moltke, gehst so stumm,

Immer um das Ding herum

Bester Moltke sei nicht dumm

Mach doch endlich Bumm! Bumm! Bumm!

Herzens-Moltke, denn warum?

Deutschland will das: Bumm! Bumm! Bumm!¹⁴⁷

[Good Moltke, why so mum

As round it all you come?

Best of Moltkes don’t be dumb

Finally go boom, boom, boom

Moltke dear, why so glum?

Germany wants boom, boom, boom—JS]

On 18 December Bronsart put his career on the line to frustrate Bismarck’s intervention in military matters. As he recorded in his war diary, he had been ordered by General Podbielski to provide Bismarck with minutes of a Military Council and decided to disobey orders, a court-martial offence. The whole entry records the agony of conscience of one of the most gifted of the ‘demi-gods’, a lieutenant colonel, a Division Chief in the General Staff, ‘for me the hardest day of the entire campaign’. He had received an order from the King approved by the Chief of the General Staff, General Count Moltke, and handed to him by Lieutenant General Podbielski, Quartermaster General of the entire army. As he records the moment of his decision

if a man with the ambitious thirst for power like Count Bismarck were once to be admitted, there would be nothing more to be done … I thought about it for ten minutes; the habit of obedience got me through the address and then it failed me, and the feeling of duty, and the need to be disobedient even to the King, won the upper hand even at the sacrifice of my own person.

He reported to Podbielski that he could not carry out the order in good conscience and submitted his resignation letter at the same time. Podbielski at first flew into a rage and questioned Bronsart’s sanity. Then in the face of this act of moral courage by a senior staff officer, he consulted Moltke, who revoked the order and told the King of his decision. Bismarck never got access to the Military Council minutes.¹⁴⁸ Bronsart joins von Werther as two examples of unusual civil courage in the face of Bismarck’s increasing dictatorial attitude. As Bronsart concludes the entry:

Had I done the demanded letters, even if I had weakened it as much as possible and rendered it colourless, it would have been approved and sent. Then Count Bismarck would sit in the saddle. He knows very well how to ride, as he once said about Germany. Where this ride would have taken us is not in doubt.¹⁴⁹

Albrecht von Stosch, now Lieutenant General himself and Commissary-General in the High Command, took part in the dramas between the army and Bismarck. He reported to his wife the reaction of Bismarck to all the frustrations:

Bismarck is furious that the military delay disturbs very nastily his political combinations; the King has more than enough of conflicts and would like to take a day off. Both unload their anger or discomfort on the patient Moltke, who is never crude but gets sick from inner fury. The King fears Bismarck’s rage, Moltke wraps his anger in aristocratic silence. Roon becomes more ill every day and demands urgently the bombardment.¹⁵⁰

The next day Bismarck clashed with the General Staff again, as Bronsart recorded, ‘the civil servant in the cuirassier jacket becomes more impudent every day and General Roon functions in theses efforts as his true famulus. The only question is do we answer very clearly or not answer at all. Probably the latter will happen.’¹⁵¹ Bismarck summoned Waldersee to see him the day after Christmas. Bismarck unloaded all his grievances to this well-connected adjutant of the King:

Yesterday Bismarck sent word that he wanted to see me. I found him in his room which serves as living and bed room and was dreadfully overheated. He sat in a long dressing gown, smoked a big cigar, looked as if he were really suffering. He was visibly upset … Then he began to talk in the following way, ‘Every thing is made as difficult as possible for me. There, to begin with Grand Duke of Baden and the Duke of Coburg intrigue with the Crown Prince and are on the way to making a mess of the German question … The General Staff refuses to inform me of the most important things; events, which are of the greatest importance for me, on which I have to base my decisions, are concealed from me. I shall have to ask the King to change all that.’ He grumbled about this chapter, which I know well, with the greatest violence. His eyes grew bigger. Sweat formed on his brow. He looked seriously disturbed. I fear that he will become dangerously ill because this kind of excitability is not natural. In addition to the heavy cigars that he smokes, I saw from the bottle that he offered me that he drinks very strong wine.¹⁵²

On New Year’s Eve an extended Military Council took place in the King’s rooms to hammer out a decision: to bombard or not to bombard Paris. The Crown Prince, who opposed ‘this wretched bombardment’, found himself on the losing side and had to accept the decision. As commanding officer of the III Army he consulted his own staff about the starting date and fixed 4 January 1871 for the beginning of the bombardment. In his war diary, he then entered his despair at what Bismarck had done to Germany’s place in the world.

We are deemed capable of every wickedness and the distrust of us grows more and more pronounced. Nor is this the consequence of this War only—so far has the theory, initiated by Bismarck and for years holding the stage, of ‘Blood and Iron’ brought us! What good to us is all power, all martial glory and renown, if hatred and mistrust meet us at every turn, if every step we advance in our development is a subject for suspicion and grudging? Bismarck has made us great and powerful but he has robbed us of our friends, the sympathies of the world, and—our conscience.¹⁵³

The 4th of January arrived. The Crown Prince wrote:

The eager anticipation with which from daybreak on we watched for the first shot was frustrated by an impenetrable fog, that refused to clear even for one instant, so that there was no real daylight whatever. At the same time an icy wind was blowing that covered the whole landscape with hoar frost.¹⁵⁴

The next day ‘was lit today by bright sunshine, so at quarter after eight this morning the first shell from Battery No. 8 fell on Paris’.¹⁵⁵ The bombardment made no difference to ‘the disunity that exists in the highest regions’, as Stosch wrote,¹⁵⁶ and on 8 January the Crown Prince found Moltke ‘deeply offended at Count Bismarck’s arbitrary and despotic attitude … the Federal Chancellor is resolved to decide everything himself, without paying the slightest heed to what experts have to say.’¹⁵⁷ The next day, 9 January 1871, marked the 50th anniversary of Albrecht von Roon’s military service but, as the Crown Prince wrote, ‘his terrible asthma, which for the last fortnight has been complicated by catarrh … is so indescribably severe that every day he gets choking fits … Count Bismarck is only just recovering from nervous rheumatic pains in the feet that set up a nervous irritation in every part of his body—a doubly unwelcome state of things in such all-important days.’¹⁵⁸ The only one of the Triumvirate who made modern Germany, who continued to function normally was General Count von Moltke.

The Crown Prince took it upon himself to organize a reconciliation between Molte and Bismarck and invited them both to a private dinner in his Headquarters, where the two grand figures really had it out:

Both talked quite plainly to the other and Moltke, generally so sparing of words, speaking in tones of reproach and quite eloquently, upbraided the Federal Chancellor, brought forward all the grievances he had already confided to me on the 8^TH; the other protested in return, and I had repeatedly to interfere to bring back the conversation into smoother water … Then Bismarck attacked the General on his tenderest point, developing the theory that after Sedan we should have stayed on in Champagne to await further developments and ought never to have gone to Paris.¹⁵⁹

While the war dragged on and eroded the tempers and health of the protagonists, political changes took place with rapidity at home in Berlin and in the new Germany about to be born. All the important actors were not in Berlin and the Reichstag had a period of absentee control to counteract. Two developments took place in December. On 13 December 1870, forty-eight members of the lower house of the Prussian Landtag formed the ‘Fraction of the Centre’. The first chairman was Bismarck’s old friend Karl Friedrich von Savigny. Among the main leaders were the brothers Peter und August Reichensperger, Hermann von Mallinckrodt, Ludwig Windthorst, Friedrich Wilhelm Weber, and Philipp Ernst Maria Lieber. Though it soon came to be known as the Catholic Centre Party, none of the founders intended it to be just that as the Bavarian Deputy, Edmund Jörg (1819–1901)¹⁶⁰ explained some years later: ‘do not forget that the Zentrum has always guarded against being called the “Catholic” Party. Otherwise how would Windthorst have come along with his Hanoverians?’¹⁶¹

While the siege of Paris and progress in the war had come to a standstill, the movement to unify Germany got a powerful new impetus from the victories over France in which southern German and Saxon troops had distinguished themselves in the ‘national patriotic war’. The North German Federation had to mutate and become something grander to suit the completion of national unity. In mid-October, Captain Count Berchem, adjutant to Prince Luitpold of Bavaria, approached Robert von Keudell at headquarters to ask him confidentially if ‘in my view the situation was opportune for a proposal that the presidency of the Bund be decorated by an imperial crown. I replied that to my knowledge the Chancellor had never expressed an opinion on the question but I felt confident that such a suggestion would be highly welcome. The Chief approved the answer.’¹⁶² Ludwig II, the King of Bavaria, would take the initiative if he got certain concessions from Bismarck: money and territory. An equerry of the Bavarian king, Major Max Count von Holnstein, made two trips to headquarters in November to negotiate. Bismarck offered no territory but he paid the King a large sum of money, 300,000 marks from the secret Guelph fund that Bismarck had, in effect, stolen from the Hanoverian king. These payments to the Bavarian King continued until 1886 when the King died. The payments remained entirely secret, and were, in effect, a royal bribe. Then Bismarck gave Count von Holnstein the text of a letter which the Bavarian king would address to William I.¹⁶³ The letter duly arrived at headquarters. On 4 December ‘Prince Luitpold presented the Federal Field Marshall a letter from King Ludwig of Bavaria in which he gave expression ‘to the wish that a German Empire be re-established and also the title of Emperor’. It was known that the King had been consulted and achieved the consent of all the members of the Federation.¹⁶⁴ On the following day in Berlin, 5 December, Karl Rudolf Friedenthal (1827–90), one of the leaders of the Bismarckian Free Conservatives in the North German Reichstag,¹⁶⁵ got hold of a copy of the letter and gave it to Delbrück, who intended to proclaim it and thus astound the Reichstag. Bebel described what happened, as Delbück rose in a portentous way and announced, ‘The day before yesterday His Royal Highness Prince Luitpold of Bavaria had presented to His Majesty the King of Prussia a letter from His Majesty the King of Bavaria with the following content … Delbrück stopped. He could not recall in which pocket he had stuck the letter. In highest agitation he searched all his pockets, a spectacle which provoked enormous hilarity in the whole house. Eventually he found it but the effect had fizzled.’¹⁶⁶

On 7 December the official press published the text as well. The King of Bavaria urged upon King William the need to ‘restore the German Empire and the worth of the Imperial title’. The King of Bavaria had consulted all the other German princes to strengthen the appeal.¹⁶⁷ In the following week Bismarck complained to Johanna that the ‘princes—and even my most gracious one—plague me with their constant business with all those little difficulties which are linked to the very simple “Kaiser question” by monarchical prejudices and useless finery.’¹⁶⁸ On 14 December the Reichstag of the North German Federation addressed the King in a petition: ‘United with the Princes of Germany, the North German Reichstag draws near with the supplication that it may please Your Majesty through the acceptance of the German Imperial Crown to consecrate the work of unification.’¹⁶⁹ Hans von Kleist wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that he was disgusted that the ‘Jew Lasker’ had been chosen to prepare the draft of the motion. ‘Then you will have to take him with you and make him your speaker at Versailles.’¹⁷⁰

The separatists in the South German kingdoms tried to sabotage the new Reich and the Kings of Saxony and Württemberg dragged their feet. Bismarck engineered the next and very effective step. On the 17th the assembled Princes sent King William a petition to tell him that they had all agreed on the Imperial crown and on the next day, 18 December 1870, Dr Eduard Simson, President of the North German Reichstag led a delegation to petition the King to accept the title of Emperor. The King, much moved, read out a reply which Bismarck had composed and accepted the offer.¹⁷¹

The matter now moved to the parliaments of the south German states. In Württemberg and Baden, the measure passed easily but in Bavaria opposition grew. On 11 January the debate began. The Patriot Party denounced Prussia and its militarism. A fierce debate followed and on 21 January the motion passed with the necessary majority but by a margin of only two votes.¹⁷²

The 18th of January 1871 had been chosen as the ceremonial day for the proclamation of the new Reich. The date recalled the day in 1701 when the Hohenzollern dynasty at last became royal. The Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg became Frederick I, King in Prussia (in 1713 the important ‘of’ replaced ‘in). The coronation of 1701 was the most glorious and expensive ceremony ever celebrated in that frugal state up to that point.¹⁷³ As 18 January 1871 approached, Bismarck ran into an infuriating new difficulty. The King insisted on the title of Emperor of Germany, not German Emperor, which Bismarck had painfully secured from the Reichstag and the German princes. The King stubbornly refused to concede the traditional grandeur of Emperor of Germany for the threadbare German Emperor. The Crown Prince on 16 January found his father

excited, disturbed and anxious beyond all belief; he says himself that his inclination to look on the dark side of things has in these truly critical days notably increased … Von Schleinitz, the Minister of the Household, has arrived; nevertheless, again today nothing whatever has been settled, and I cannot yet get any inkling of what exactly is going to be done the 18th January. Nothing can be quietly thought out and arranged here, for either decisions are indefinitely postponed or else they are slurred over.¹⁷⁴

The next day matters came to a head, as the Crown Prince wrote in his diary:

In the afternoon a meeting was held at the King’s quarters, which Count Bismarck, Minister of the Household von Schleinitz and I attended. When Count Bismarck met von Schleinitz in the ante-room, he told him pretty sharply he really did not understand what the Federal Chancellor in conjunction with the Minister of the Household would have to discuss with the King. In an over-heated room the discussion dragged on for three hours over the title the Emperor was to bear, the appellation of the heir to the throne, the relation of the Royal family, the Court and Army to the Emperor, etc. With regard to the Imperial title, Count Bismarck admitted that in the discussions as to conditions, the Bavarian Deputies and Plenipotentiaries had already refused to agree to the designation ‘Emperor of Germany’, and that finally to please them, but all the same without consulting his Majesty, he had substituted that of ‘German Emperor’. This designation, with which no special idea is connected, was as little to the King’s liking as it was to mine, and we did all we possibly could to secure the ‘of Germany’ in lieu of it; however, Count Bismarck stuck to his point, that, as this title would be adopted simply to secure a combination with the Bavarians … in the greatest agitation he [the King—JS] went on to say he could not describe to us the despairing mood he was in, as tomorrow he must bid farewell to the old Prussia to which he alone clung and always would cling. At this point sobs and tears interrupted his words.¹⁷⁵

The 18th of January 1871 dawned grey and lowering but as the honour guards marched beneath the King’s window a ray of sunlight came through which lifted the King’s black mood. The ceremony took place in the Palace of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors and an overflow into the Salon de la Paix. A simple field altar had been erected on a platform in the well of the hall at which the King stood covered in all his orders and decorations. Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf observed with amusement, that ‘the improvised altar stood right next to a naked Venus, a relationship which in the Palace of Versailles cannot easily be avoided.’¹⁷⁶

Many of the officers, including the Crown Prince, could not get into gala and appeared in service boots and field dress. No rehearsal had been possible and the order to the men ‘off helmets for prayer’ had been forgotten, which the Crown Prince remembered at the last moment and gave out loud. Chaplain Rogge, pastor in Potsdam and Roon’s brother-in-law, gave ‘a rather tactless and tedious historical religious disquisition’. After the ‘Te Deum’ and a simple address by the King, William I, followed by the assembled princes, moved back to a special platform, where they stood on either side of the King:

Count Bismarck came forward, looking in the grimmest of humours, and read out in an expressionless business-like way and without any trace of warmth or feeling for the occasion, the address ‘to the German People’. At the words, ‘Enlarger of the Empire’, I noticed a quiver stir the whole assemblage, which otherwise stood there without a word. Then the Grand Duke of Baden came forward with unaffected, quiet dignity that is so peculiarly his and with uplifted hand cried in a loud voice: ‘Long live His Imperial Majesty the Emperor William!’ A thundering hurrah at least six times repeated shook the room, while the flags and standards waved over the head of the new Emperor of Germany [sic!—JS] and ‘Heil Dir im Siegerkranz’ rang out.¹⁷⁷

Thus Bismarck lived the moment of his greatest triumph, the proclamation of the German Empire, in a foul temper, clear to everybody in the Hall of Mirrors. As Lucius von Ballhausen heard from Bismarck later, ‘His Majesty took the opposition to the latter title so badly [German Emperor] that on the day of the proclamation of the Empire, he cut him completely.’¹⁷⁸ Nor were the princes assembled full of joy. Prince Otto of Bavaria, heir to the throne, said: ‘I cannot even describe to you how infinitely sad and hurt I felt during the ceremony … Everything was so cold, so proud, so glittering, so showy and swaggering and heartless and empty.’¹⁷⁹ That evening, Bismarck returned from the ceremonial dinner, as Holstein recalled years later,

I can still hear Prince Bismarck’s angry outburst on the evening of 18 July, when he spoke of the tactless sermon preached by pastor Rogge (Countess Roon’s brother). He had chosen a text which ran: ‘Come hither, ye Princes, and be chastised.’ Certainly not a happy choice. Bismarck said: ‘I’ve said to myself more than once, why can’t I get at this parson? Every speech from the throne has first to be considered word by word, yet this parson can say just what comes into his head.’ In lighter vein, by contrast, was Bismarck’s tale of how vain young Schwarzburg (nicknamed ‘Prince of Arcadia’) addressed the assembled royal personages with the words: ‘Greetings to you, fellow vassals’.¹⁸⁰

Nor was joy universal in the rest of the royal family. The row between the King and Bismarck had led to the peculiar situation that Queen Augusta had not been informed that she had been elevated to the rank of Empress, as Crown Princess Vicky wrote to Queen Victoria on 20 January:

I was going to tell you by the Empress’ (Queen’s) own desire that she knew nothing whatever of the adoption of the Imperial title on the 18th nor of the Proclamation. The Emperor is so averse to the whole thing that he did not like it spoken of beforehand and no one else took the initiative of informing us here what was going to be done. Of course this was an embarrassing and awkward position for my mother-in-law—who resented the proceedings very much. I had a deal of difficulty in calming her down. She calls me to witness her having known nothing until the day came … You say you are glad that my Mama-in-law and I get on well now together. The wretchedness of my life when we do not, you do not know. I am only too glad when she will let me be on a comfortable footing with her. … I feel a deep pity for her as nature has given her a character and temper which must tend to unhappiness and Unbefriedigung wherever she be, and she had many a sore and bitter hour to go through during her life.¹⁸¹

On 23 January Jules Favre arrived at Versailles to negotiate the final capitulation of the French Republic, which Bismarck conducted absolutely on his own, with only a few technical advisers. The capitulation was signed on 28 January and the Prussian army now had to provision the starving city. Bismarck made that more difficult by his incalculable outbursts of rage, which nobody could escape. The peacemaker, Commissary-General Albrecht von Stosch, found himself accused of using state money to provision Paris. Bismarck had demanded that he be prosecuted for criminal negligence. Two days later Bismarck asked him to carry out the provisioning of Paris, as if nothing had happened.¹⁸² The Crown Prince despaired over the situation:

Count Bismarck has won for himself the reputation of being the instigator of all the cruel reprisals we have, alas, been forced to carry out; they even say of him that he means to establish a reign of terror in Paris of quite another sort from what Gambetta’s was. Occasion is certainly given for such suppositions by the monstrous maxims and savage expressions one hears openly given utterance to here, and which his wife repeats in Berlin … so impossible is it to count on Count Bismarck and so fitful his policy that nobody can form a clear conception of his views, still less feel any confidence in his secret plans.¹⁸³

Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf had no doubt about Bismarck’s ‘secret plans’, as he wrote in his diary on 25 January 1871:

General Moltke, whom posterity will recognize as one of the greatest field commanders of all time, falls victim to the ambition of a talented but inwardly base personality who knows no rest until he, as a modern major domus, has insured that all respectable existence in his environment has been crushed.¹⁸⁴

Now that the capitulation had been signed, the vexed issue of the French reparation payment began. On 8 February the Prussian State Ministry set the French reparations at 1 billion thaler (3 billion francs), 95 per cent of which was earmarked for the army. Otto Camphausen (1812–96), former President of the Seehandlung, who had become Bismarck’s Finance Minister in 1869, after he discarded ‘the Gold Uncle’ von der Heydt,¹⁸⁵ made the claim very forcefully:

The German nation had after all suffered so many additional losses in blood and material goods which are beyond all accounting that it is entirely justifiable to assess the price of the war generously and in addition to the estimated sum to demand an appropriate surcharge for the incalculable damages. The State Ministry concurred.¹⁸⁶

Bismarck, as usual, chose his own methods to accomplish the end and sent his private banker, Gerson Bleichröder, to act as intermediary with French financial circles and the new Republic. Bronsart found the presence of this Jew absolutely repellent and recorded two entries in his War Diary to give vent to his feeling:

Now he [Bismarck] confers eagerly with the Jew Bleichröder, his banker, whom he lets come here for official discussions concerning the war indemnity to be demanded from Paris. One wonders for what purpose we have an institution like the Prussian State Bank if the Chancellor’s Privatjude and not one of its officials operates as adviser in state business … Bleichröder was at the General Staff this morning. In his buttonhole he wore an artistically arranged rosette of many colours which attested theRitterschaft of many Christian orders. Like a true Jew he bragged about the private audiences he has had with the King, about his other exclusive connections, about the credit people like him and Rothschild can command etc. About the political situation and the inclinations of Count Bismarck he was sufficiently informed; now he wanted to enlist the help of the General Staff and gain access even to Count Moltke.

On 26 February 1871 a preliminary peace between France and Germany was signed at Versailles. French reparations were set at 5 billion francs. Bleichröder wrote to the Crown Prince: ‘Count Bismarck would seem to have conducted himself during the negotiations with monstrous brusquerie and intentional rudeness, and by such behaviour to have shocked the Paris Rothschild who in the first instance addressed him in French.¹⁸⁷ On 4 March 1871 The Economist commented on the reparations:

to extract huge sums of money as the consequence of victory suggests a belief that money may be the object as well as the accidental reward of battle. A flavour of huckstering is introduced into the relations between States which degrades the character of statesmen, and is sure sooner or later to infect the character of the people.¹⁸⁸

On the last day of the Prussian stay in Versailles, the Crown Prince tried to convince Bismarck to nominate the Baden aristocrat, Freiherr von Roggenbach, Governor of Alsace. Bismarck, who undoubtedly knew through his many spies that Roggenbach had a close relationship to the Queen, naturally rejected the name. The Crown Prince, not inaccurately, concluded that Bismarck intended to appoint ‘only persons of a sort to carry out his orders directly and implicitly. I gathered the impression today more than ever that he means to play the “All-Powerful”, “the Richelieu” in these countries.’¹⁸⁹

The Emperor and the Crown Prince arrived in Potsdam on 17 March 1871 after a rapturous reception at every stop in Germany. The victory and the unification of Germany had dazzled the German people across the political spectrum. On 21 March the State Opening of the new Reichstag elected in early March took place. The occasion was unusually grand as befitting the first assembly of a united German parliament. Baroness Hildegard von Spitzemberg, as wife of the Württemberg envoy, had a good seat in the diplomatic balcony,

where in very nice company we could watch the whole scene. In contrast to usual practice, Princes, Princesses and the Empress were arranged around the throne on the left and on the right … Just before the king came Moltke with the sword, Roon with the sceptre, Peuker with the Reich orb, Redern with the crown, Wrangel flanked by Kameke and Podbielski with the flag. The Kaiser was very moved as he began the speech from the throne, which was interrupted with lively bravos by the evidently excited assembly. It also struck me that the Kaiser removed his helmet before reading the speech, whereas he normally keeps his head covered. The entire ceremony was beautiful and gripping.¹⁹⁰

On the following day, the Emperor raised Bismarck to the status of prince (Fürst) and the next evening the Bismarck family entertained a grand gathering to mark the occasion and the Spitzembergs from next door attended the party.

Carl and I in a large gathering of gentlemen at Bismarcks. On the day of the opening, the Kaiser ‘princed’ the count, which is all fine and good, but in order that it is not a gift borne by the Greeks there will have to be a corresponding endowment of which as yet not a sign. In house they consider the things quite calmly enough, the ‘Serene Highness’ seems to him as odd as it does to us.¹⁹¹

Among the odder honours that Bismarck received in 1871 as national hero was the dedication to him of a fish. In Stralsund, the trader and brewer Johann Wiechmann had established a prosperous fish cannery. In 1853 he opened a store and in the backyard his wife Karoline pickled fresh, filleted Baltic herring and sold them in wooden boxes. Herr Wiechmann wrote to Bismarck on his birthday in 1871, presented him with a barrel of his best pickled herring, and humbly asked if he could call them ‘Bismarck Herrings’. The Prince generously agreed and this unusual and lasting monument to the great man joined the paperweights, statues, and portraits.¹⁹²

On 16 April 1871 the Reichstag approved the new Constitution, and the first phase of Bismarck’s great career had been concluded. The Genius-Statesman had transformed European politics and had unified Germany in eight and a half years more. And he had done by sheer force of personality, by his brilliance, ruthlessness, and flexibility of principle. He had again, as in 1866 ‘beaten them All!’