In Prussia, of course, things were quite different. Flush with success from her victory over Austria in 1866, Prussia had become the indisputable power in north and central Germany. As a result of her annexations in that war, she comprised four-fifths of the bulk of the population north of the river Main. The decisiveness with which her victory had been achieved opened up the possibility of greatly expanding her power base by absorbing the southern states—Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt—themselves magnets that for centuries attracted the attention of hostile powers. If Austria sought to turn the tables and to avenge her defeat—and it was not obvious at first that she would not seek to do so—these states might prove useful allies, and for France they served as a shield against further Prussian expansion. As to internal matters, here, too, matters were less complex. Prussia had a king and a minister-president neither of whom was responsible to parliament. There were also, of course, ministries of the king: of finance, of the interior, of war. In the personal incumbencies of these offices there reigned—again in contrast to the situation in France—a great stability. Of the two predominant figures, one, King William I, had ruled since 1858, first as regent then (after 1861) as king; the second, the minister president, Otto von Bismarck, had been in office since 1862. William would reign until his death in 1888; Bismarck, until he was dismissed from office in 1890. Each of these men needed the other. Each cut fundamentally a Prussian, rather than a German, figure. When he came to the throne at the age of sixty-three, William was set in his ways, and his mind was dominated by one overriding passion: the army. The liberal politician, Ludwig Bamberger, put it succinctly when he observed that for William “the state consisted of soldiers and soldiers were kings.” He spoke truly. William loved the army with a passion for which, save perhaps for his ancestor Frederick I, it is impossible to find a parallel in the history of modern Germany. William never envisaged the army as the agent through which Prussia would achieve mastery of Germany, but the plans for the army that he had in mind could never be launched (let alone realized) without a political crisis as wrenching as that through which England had passed in the 1640s and whose outcome was every bit as decisive for the future character of the state. To do its job, the army had to be reformed from top to bottom and, for a long time, first as prince of Prussia, then as king, William had been thinking of little else. The problem for the king was that the lower house of parliament did not, to put it mildly, share his enthusiasm for reform. Particularly repellent to it was the plan of Roon, the minister of war, to abolish a militia called the Landwehr. The Landwehr was middle class, not aristocratic. It had its own officers, most of them not drawn from the nobility. Moreover, it was a symbol of democratic nationalism. And its members were also voters. Roon despised it. He proposed to increase the number of years spent by recruits in the regular service from two to three years and to whittle the Landwehr to almost nothing. With these proposals, William could not agree more. The liberals in the Prussian parliament, on the other hand, wished to reduce the number of years spent in the regular service to two and to make the Landwehr the core of the Prussian army. A rousing constitutional conflict (beginning in 1860) ensued and got only worse as the years dragged on. By September 1862 matters had reached a crisis. The assembly refused all further money for the army. William threatened to abdicate. Civil war loomed. On Roon’s advice, William summoned his ambassador to Paris, the ruthlessly unorthodox Otto von Bismarck, and on 23 September appointed him prime minister of Prussia. Within fifteen months of taking office, Bismarck had involved Prussia in a war with Denmark; two years later, he entered her into a struggle with Austria for the mastery of Germany. With these two wars all the unity and fervor of the opposition began to melt away, and the constitutional conflict was decisively resolved in favor of the king on 3 July 1866 at the battle of Königgrätz. On 20 October 1867 Roon could write jubilantly to William that the struggle was over at last. And so it was. Not only had the army been remodeled along the lines William had fashioned, the forces of the North German Confederation (whose creation the victories of the armies had made possible) were put under the control of Berlin as well. By July 1870 the entire Prussian government, from the king on down, could take comfort in knowing that it had under its hands one of the greatest engines of war the world had ever known. William I was, of course, not alone responsible for this. Quite the contrary; this achievement belonged to his minister-president, Otto von Bismarck. The personality of Bismarck and his role in Prussian life at this time are so well known that one hesitates to expand upon them, but there are certain features of his personality that are particularly relevant to the subject at hand. Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815 at Schönhausen, in the Old Mark of Brandenburg, just east of the Elbe—in appearance a typical estate of the Prussian landowners, the Junkers. The district was largely inhabited by Protestants. The son of a dull and unprepossessing father from whom he inherited his massive physical frame and a clever quick-witted mother who sprang from a long line of civil servants, Bismarck’s advocacy of reform had earned him a reputation for Jacobinism. His mother was different creature from her plodding husband, she was nervous and quick tempered and always ill at ease. Bismarck inherited her brains. Bismarck himself was unmistakably North German in appearance and outlook. Compared to his contemporaries—to Napoleon III with his appreciation of the forces of modern Europe and his understanding of the career of his great uncle, Napoleon I, and even to Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria, who despite being a wooden headed character had in him all the traditions of the Habsburgs—Bismarck was pretty small beer. He belonged to what we would call the modest gentry. He had a humble upbringing, living on a farm, doing plenty of the farm work himself; he did not have a particularly distinguished career at the university. There was another extraordinary thing about him: until he became prime minister of Prussia he had never held domestic office. He held important diplomatic offices, and from these Bismarck got his vision of the world. Marriage brought lasting and secure happiness to Bismarck. His wife, Johanna von Puttkamer, was a selfless woman—the opposite of his mother—simple, devoted, and ready to endure anything. Under his tough exterior Bismarck was deeply emotional, a man not of the Enlightenment but of the Romantic Movement. He had lived out his youth in the days when the Byronic legend dominated the continent. He was a contemporary of Heine and Wagner, whom he both disliked. He was much given to tears at any public or private crisis. He wept openly after his first public speech and again after the battle of Königgrätz. He broke down sobbing when he took office and even more when he was dismissed. William I and Bismarck often sobbed together, though Bismarck always got his way. Music affected him deeply, the more so because he was musically illiterate. He could not read or play a score. He seconded his wife’s version of Anton Rubinstein, the greatest pianist of the age: “The playing was masterly both in control and attack and in everything like you and yet the heart, the heart, remains homeless.” Johanna gave him a home for his heart and it was very homely indeed. Though he played high drama on the high stage, his private setting resembled a Victorian boarding house. Contemporaries often commented on the banality of Bismarck’s surroundings. When the year 1866 opened Bismarck was certainly at the center of European diplomacy. The speed of Prussia’s victory over Denmark upset the calculations of both Russia and France. The Prussian victory meant that in the event of war between Prussia and Austria, France and Russia could be expected to intervene to prevent the victory of either belligerent. The high probability of a Franco-Russian intervention that would deny Prussia the fruits of any victory she might achieve was a compelling reason for Bismarck to be genuinely eager to achieve his aims without war and tells against the widely held theory that he had steered his course from the beginning in the direction of a confrontation. It was nevertheless his policy to prepare for such a collision, and for this purpose he concentrated his diplomacy on ensuring the isolation of Austria and persuading the French and Russian governments that they would never have cause to intervene against Prussia because Prussia would never pose a threat to their interests. The real turning point for all Europe was that France did not intervene, but even the dramatic nature of this has been much exaggerated owing to the fact that history has been written by those who opposed or regretted the decision, while Napoleon III, the man who made it, remained silent. He had made up his mind all along; he was on the side of “the revolution.” There was no real crisis of decision in Paris between 4 and 10 July 1866. It was simply that Napoleon III, having deceived his ministers from the first, now decided to override them. There is a simple defense of Bismarck’s policy on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War. He did not provoke war at all except of exploding it at the last moment. Later on, when the war became a national legend, Bismarck tried to take credit for it, but the credit was unearned. Of course the Hohenzollern candidacy for the throne of Spain was of Bismarck’s devising—though his enthusiasm for it, during the first two years the throne was vacant, waxed and waned; it was never consistent. But the object of the Hohenzollern candidacy was to act as a check on France, not to provoke her into war. His encouragement of or indifference toward the Spanish affair varied inversely with the Franco-Russian entente. When France and Russia were on good terms, this gave Prussia security, both against Austria-Hungary and against being involved in an eastern war; whenever they fell out, he tried to find some means of distracting French attention from the Rhine. He took up the Hohenzollern candidature in February 1869 when France and Russia were in dispute over Crete. He dropped it once the tension simmered down, and he kept his hands off it when it appeared that it might be renewed. He revived it once more in the spring of 1870 when Franco-Russian relations turned sour. Yet the main question to be asked about 1870 is why Bismarck went to war with France at all. For the more we look at the background of the conflict the more we wonder, as does Norman Rich, why he did not do all he could to avoid it. The position of Prussia in Germany after 1866 could hardly have been more favorable. No observer in 1870 surveying from a distance of four years could have failed to be impressed not only by the inordinate increase in the power of Prussia but also by the extensive decline in the rival powers that confronted her across her eastern and western borders. Not only had Austria been expelled from Germany, the states south of the river Main—all allies of Austria in the war just ended—were allied to Prussia by treaties and under the firm control of Berlin. The international situation had been unsettled as long as Prussia and Austria were rivals in central Europe; now that rivalry had been decisively resolved by the Prussian victory at Königgrätz. So many hurdles had been surmounted, so many difficulties overcome, that war against France seemed completely unnecessary to accomplish that ambition. There was, to be sure, a great deal of opposition to the extension of Prussian domination over south Germany on the part of the particularists, ultramontanes and rulers jealous of preserving their sovereignty. Elections to the German customs parliament in 1868 had resulted in a disconcertingly large number of victories for the anti-national candidates, and the Bavarian elections of 1869 demonstrated further the strength of the particularist tradition. Outside Prussia, but especially in south Germany, there was hostility to the introduction of the Prussian military system, including the conscription and taxation in the absence of which it would be fundamentally weakened. So deep was the resistance to Prussian rule in south Germany that some historians maintain Bismarck’s policy in terms of the stagnation of the unification movement. According to this theory, Bismarck provoked war with France to create the German empire in the heat of the popular enthusiasm that a war with a common foe would arouse. The thesis is convincing and may indeed have stood at the forefront of his calculations. Yet between 1868 and 1870 he had times without number declared himself satisfied with the progress of the unification movement, and on numerous occasions he found it necessary to rein in the zeal of the German nationalists—military men, parliamentarians, and journalists—who denounced the failure on the part of Prussia to impose her will on the states of south Germany in 1866. Bismarck’s replies to such arguments are famous. And they are convincing because they corresponded precisely to the requirements of Prussian self-interest at the time. Consider as one example a letter he wrote to Karl Werthern, his minister in Munich, who had become critical of his policy and who was expressing the view that the cause of unity would be lost unless there was an abrupt reversal of policy. The letter has come down as one of his greatest acts of statesmanship. Space does not permit a summary of it here, which is a pity, because his entire outlook of policy in that agitated winter was reflected in it. Concise, pithy, beautifully organized, an invaluable analysis not only of recent political developments in Bavaria and France but also of the military and religious trends that supplied the backdrop for them, the letter is also replete with interesting and penetrating observations on individual matters, and it may stand in its entirety as one of the most eloquent and compelling pleas for recognition of the folly of modern war and for international peace not just in Europe but everywhere else in the civilized world ever penned. Bismarck argued, first of all, that he was unconvinced that war with France was really inevitable. But he could not be brought to concede that even if at some point it should appear inevitable, this would mean that one should initiate it at any particular juncture—even one that appeared favorable from a military standpoint. The course that appeared most favorable from a military standpoint was not always, indeed hardly ever, the most favorable from the political standpoint. Beyond this, Bismarck was not willing to concede that even a war against France that could be expected to end successfully in the military sense was necessarily desirable. What would Germany’s objectives be in such a war? The conquest of new territory? But the Germans wanted no French territory. The destruction of the French armed forces? But the destruction of them was not possible. Nor would such destruction be permanent, for the military humiliation of France would only rouse the Powers of Europe to intervention and produce new opponents to join the one Germany had to her east, down the Danube. This was a plain description of fact. Though neither Great Britain nor Russia was on good terms with France at this time, neither was likely to relish the prospect of a general upheaval that would be unchained by the creation of a national Germany—and nor would Denmark, still in the throes of recovery from the defeat she sustained at the hands of Prussia six years before. Never surely was the issue more clearly drawn than here between the duty of the statesman to avoid, if possible, the horrors of war in the modern industrial age and the perennial tendency of military leaders to see as inevitable any war for which they are asked to plan and prepare and which they wish to begin at the time and under circumstances most favorable to their side. Bismarck ended by a brilliant word picture of the principles by which his statecraft was guided and, despite its length, the passage is too striking not to be quoted in full:
