He mastered his anger. Moltke assured him that Prussia was strong enough to resist the French should they attempt to march on the Rhine; but Bismarck would run no unnecessary risks as he prepared to harvest the bloody fruits of Sadowa. The Prussians telegraphed their acceptance of French mediation.
Bismarck was nevertheless determined to outwit the French. He ordered his deputy, Baron Robert von der Goltz, the Prussian Ambassador at Paris, to repair to Saint-Cloud and extort Louis-Napoleon’s assent to Prussia’s terms. Goltz enjoyed the confidence of the French, with whom he was at home; he was the son of a Prussian diplomat and had been born in the Prussian Embassy in Paris. He conducted his mission with notable skill. He pointed out to Louis-Napoleon that the terms Prussia sought were more moderate than might have been expected given the overwhelming character of the Prussian victory. Goltz further observed that King Wilhelm favored a more far-reaching settlement, and that only with difficulty could Bismarck restrain his sovereign from making more extensive demands. If France did not approve the proposed terms quickly, there was a danger that Bismarck would lose control of the King.
Louis-Napoleon took the words to heart. He, too, needed an armistice. The longer the war continued, the more the prestige of the mediator suffered. He accepted Bismarck’s terms.
An obstacle fell away; but Bismarck’s work was by no means finished. He had now to stare down his own sovereign. For Baron Goltz was not altogether bluffing when he threatened Louis-Napoleon with the rage of Wilhelm. Victory had gone to the King’s head. He was intoxicated by the prospect which opened up after Sadowa. Like Alexander gazing on the Punjab, he yearned to carry his conquering arms still farther. He would march into Vienna. He would strip the Habsburgs of their fairest possessions.
Bismarck mocked the King and the more adventurous generals. Why not “go on to Constantinople,” he asked, “establish a new Byzantium, and leave Prussia to its fate?” To his wife he spoke of the difficulty of overcoming the romantic temptation. We are “carried away as easily as we fall into despair,” he wrote, “and I have the thankless task of pouring water into the sparkling wine and trying to make it plain that we are not alone in Europe but have to live with three other powers who hate us and envy us.” Bismarck was a man of proportion as well as of will; extravagant claims would, he knew, bring reaction. The other powers would not stand by indefinitely while Prussia remodeled vast swaths of Europe.
But the King was obstinate. The Austrians must, he said, be punished for their evil deeds. Bismarck replied that it was no business of theirs to sit in judgment over the moral character of the Habsburgs; their task was to unite Germany under Prussia. The wounding of Austria would only leave her thirsting for revenge, and might drive her into the arms of France: it would contribute nothing to the interest or security of their own Kingdom. Such arguments were, however, lost on the King, and Bismarck was haunted by the suspicion that all that he had gained would be snatched away as a result of his master’s intransigence.
His nerves gave way. He begged to be relieved of his duties in the Cabinet and allowed to join his regiment. He quitted the council chamber and, going to his bedroom, fell into a fit of weeping. He wondered whether it would not be best for him to fall out the window. (His room, he noted, was on the fourth story.) At this dark moment, he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Crown Prince Friedrich. He told Bismarck that, though he had opposed his policy towards Austria, he was prepared to go to the King and support his plan for peace.
Half an hour later the Crown Prince returned. It was a nasty business, he said; but Pater had relented.
The terms dictated by Bismarck were embodied in the armistice concluded at Nikolsburg (Mikulov). The result was a revolution. Austria, though she was not required to part with any of her territory,26 was banished from Germany, and Prussia’s suzerainty over the German-speaking peoples was henceforth assured. The King of Hanover and the Elector of Hesse were stripped of their ancient patrimonies, and their subjects were constrained to obey the dictates of Berlin. Nassau, Holstein, Lauenburg, a slice of Hesse-Darmstadt, a sliver of Bavaria, and the greatest part of Schleswig were annexed to the Prussian state. Hundreds of square miles were added to the territory controlled from Berlin, and more than four million Germans became subjects of the King of Prussia. Saxony was suffered to retain a precarious independence; but it was otherwise with Frankfurt, which was forced to surrender her old municipal freedom. The submission of the city was ratified by plunder, and the despondent Burgomaster hanged himself in order to escape the depredations of the Prussians. Louis-Napoleon asked Baron Goltz whether it was true that thirty million florins had been extorted from the city. “Surely that is too harsh,” the French Emperor said. “Oh dear no,” replied the Baron with a smile, “Your Majesty forgets that Frankfurt is the city of the Rothschilds.” Frankfurt would henceforth form part of Prussia.
With the stroke of a pen the schism of northern Germany was repaired. The resulting state was called the North German Confederation. In fact, it was a Prussian superstate, with Bismarck as its Chancellor. The last remnant of old Prince Metternich’s vision of Germany perished. The Bund which that statesman had prophesied would be the salvation of Europe had expired in fecklessness. The security of the German people, Metternich believed, lay in the existence of two strong German powers.27 Bismarck thought differently, and Germany was recast. “In 1866,” Wilhelm Roepke wrote, “Germany ceased to exist.” Prussian Germany took its place.
There was shock in France when it was learned that Prussian supremacy north of the Main involved the outright annexation of immense tracts of land. Louis-Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and tried to dismiss the question as “a matter of detail”—as though the compulsory naturalization of millions was a diplomatic rounding error. But he agreed to ask Bismarck for a reward for his (not altogether benign) neutrality. Just as the armistice was about to be signed, Louis-Napoleon’s emissary, Count Benedetti, a slight, bald-headed Corsican, came begging for scraps from the Prussian table. Bismarck was angered by his intrusion. “Louis shall pay for it,” he is said to have exclaimed. But the crafty Junker instantly recovered his self-command. He feigned sympathy for the French claims. Of course, he was ready to do justice to France. Only he was loathe, just now, to take any steps that might jeopardize the armistice. There would time enough in the future to address such matters. Deceived by these plausible words, the French acquiesced. The armistice was signed, and the siege of Vienna was raised.
A little more than a year after the American Civil War ended, the German civil war was completed, and Bismarck concluded the first phase of his revolution. The war between the American states ended after four years of fighting; the war between the German states was finished in six weeks. In each case the result was momentous; in the crucible of war, two revolutionary statesmen gave a new inflection to the world crisis, and forged powers that were destined to play a memorable part on the stage of history. Undoubtedly, what is most interesting in the German revolution is the way in which its architect, having unleashed the philosophy of blood and iron, refused to push it to its limit. Bismarck did not repeat the mistake of the conquerors of the past. The purest type of romantic conquistador—Alexander, Caesar, Bonaparte—does not know when to stop. Bismarck was different. He never forgot the faintly perceptible line that separates victory from hubris.
Paris, Berlin, and Vichy, July-September 1866
THE SHADOWS LENGTHENED as the French Emperor, strolling with his Empress amid the shrubberies of Saint-Cloud, found himself face to face with an image of death. He saw it rise before him in the summer evening, luminous and inexorable—the epitaph of his Empire, written by Bismarck in the blood and dust of Sadowa. The fault, he knew, was his own. To Eugénie he admitted that he had made a mistake. It could not now be undone. The “hour of fate had passed by.” Louis-Napoleon lapsed into silence. He “seemed so utterly crushed,” the Empress said, “that I trembled for our future.” Unable to “get a single word out of him,” she began to sob.
“My soul was on the rack. . . . From this moment we were on the slope leading to the abyss, the slope up which there is no return.”
Before the revolution: Abraham Lincoln in the spring of 1860.
Library of Congress
Before the revolution: Otto von Bismarck in the summer of 1862.
Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz
In the midst of a revolution: Tsar Alexander II. Corbis
Prince Alexis Fyodorovich Orlov, front row, third from right, in Paris in 1856. Corbis
Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the Prussian General Staff. Corbis
William Henry Seward, the American Secretary of State.
Library of Congress
James and Mary Chesnut. Granger Collection
Leo Tolstoy. Collection of the author
Richard Wagner at the piano, playing a selection from Parsifal. Vincente de Paredes
Empress Mary of Russia, by Winterhalter. Collection of the author
Mary Todd Lincoln. Library of Congress
Johanna von Bismarck. Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz
George McClellan and his wife, Ellen. Library of Congress
Robert E. Lee. Library of Congress
The western wing of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. Tsar Alexander’s private apartments were situated in the middle of the wing, above the carriageway known as the Saltykov Entrance. Library of Congress
Prince Peter Kropotkin in 1864. Collection of the author
President Lincoln and General McClellan confer at Antietam, October 1862. Library of Congress
Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Walt Whitman. Library of Congress
Friedrich Nietzsche in 1864, when he volunteered in a Prussian cavalry regiment. Corbis
Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Library of Congress
The Empress Eugénie. Library of Congress
Ekaterina “Katya” Dolgorukaya. Collection of the author
John Bell Hood. Corbis
Kate Chase. Library of Congress
A Union soldier disemboweled by a shell at Gettysburg, July 1863. Library of Congress
Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia in 1864. Library of Congress
Lincoln reads his Second Inaugural Address, March 1865. Library of Congress
The cost of revolution: the ruins of Richmond, April 1865. Library of Congress
The burden of revolution: Lincoln in April 1865. Library of Congress
The cost of revolution: damaged buildings in the Rue de Lille, Paris, after the Prussian bombardment. Corbis
The burden of revolution: German troops parade in the Champs-Elysées in Paris, March 1871. Corbis
Bismarck leaves Berlin after his fall from power. Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz
The assassination of the Tsar. From periodicals of the time
Public opinion turned violently against her husband. The Emperor was scorned as a “painted Jove.” Newspapers spoke of the shame of the Empire, and politicians lamented the plight of a nation that confronted, on its eastern frontier, an immense new supremacy, controlled by a country which the Emperor’s own uncle said had been “hatched from a cannon ball,” a kingdom in which war had long been the national industry. Why, they asked, had Louis-Napoleon abandoned the policy, pursued by French statesmen since the days of Richelieu, of dividing Germany against herself? Why had he helped to foster the union of the Teutons under “ces maudits Prussiens”?
In a morose frame of mind, the Emperor retired to Vichy. His health had taken a turn for the worse. The “moral shock he had undergone,” Eugénie said, “reacted violently on his physical condition.” He could neither walk nor sleep and could hardly eat.
Perhaps there was still time. It might be that he could yet redeem himself, in the eyes of his people, by obtaining a slice of Germany for France. At Vichy, he and Drouyn drafted instructions for Benedetti. The sad-eyed Corsican went once more to Bismarck. Some territory on the Rhine, perhaps the fortress at Mainz, would be most helpful to his master.
While Benedetti attempted to bargain with Bismarck, Louis-Napoleon was forced to interrupt his cure and drag himself back to Paris. Archduchess Charlotte, the consort of Maximilian—she was now known as Carlotta, Empress of Mexico—had arrived in the city and taken rooms in the Grand Hotel, a new establishment on the Rue Scribe. She begged to be received at Saint-Cloud. Louis-Napoleon sent a state carriage and a squadron of Cuirassiers to fetch her. He and Eugénie greeted her at the door of the château and conducted her, past busts of Roman emperors and paintings of the Olympian Gods, to the private apartments of the Empress. Here, amid furniture that had once belonged to Marie-Antoinette, Carlotta painted in dark colors the position of her husband, the blond Prince who reigned on the heights of Chapultepec. In the summer palace of the Spanish viceroys, Maximilian presided over a disintegrating Empire. Carlotta implored Louis-Napoleon to reconsider his decision to withdraw the French expeditionary force in Mexico. But the French Emperor, preoccupied with the demise of his own imperial adventure, could only counsel her to surrender her dreams and urge her husband to come home. A glass of orangeade was brought to the suppliant Empress; she looked at the glass queerly. She screamed; the world was against her; her enemies were trying to poison her. Carlotta fled to Rome in the hope of securing the protection of the Pope; and the word “hysteria” began to be whispered in the princely and diplomatic drawing rooms of Europe.
The news from Mexico was bad, but that from Berlin was worse. The solicitations of Count Benedetti were in vain. Now that the armistice was signed, Bismarck would not part with an inch of German soil to nourish the Empire of a competitor. It would have been different, he said, if France had actively aided Prussia in the subjugation of Austria; but the Emperor had scarcely acted as a friend when he imposed mediation on the belligerents. Bismarck then resolved on the public humiliation of Louis-Napoleon. He published both Benedetti’s demand for territorial compensation and his own refusal in the French newspaper Le Siècle.
The decision reflected motives of policy as well as of revenge; for when the peoples of southern Germany learned of Louis-Napoleon’s interest in their territory, they ceased to have any desire to revive their historic alliances with France. The German states of the south instead concluded defensive treaties with Bismarck.
This, however, was not quite the end of the matter. The revelation of Louis-Napoleon’s impotence provoked the rage of France. Benedetti went again to see Bismarck. His master needed something, anything, to shore up his drooping prestige. The two men considered the possibilities. If Germany was out of the question, what about. . . Belgium? Bismarck appeared to be receptive; there was no reason, he said, why the French Empire should not extend wherever French was the language of the people. Prussia, he intimated, might be willing to co-operate with Louis-Napoleon in such a project. Would the Count be good enough to draft an agreement? Only it was a sensitive question; the Count really must be careful. One could never trust subordinates. He ought to write out the draft in his own hand. Blood and—irony. Benedetti obliged, and took out his pen. Bismarck soon had the paper in his hands. The Count went away, expecting to receive a telegram informing him when the document was to be signed. It never came. Bismarck, however, carefully retained the draft in the poor Count’s handwriting.
It might prove useful one day.
Yasnaya Polyana, January 1867
“BISMARCK THINKS he has outwitted all Europe,” Tolstoy wrote to a friend. But the Prussian statesman was only one of a thousand other causes which, he maintained, made “the blood-letting of Germany necessary in 1866.” Bismarck, Tolstoy said, was another of the “old jades” walking the “tread-wheel” of politics. Statesmanship was a swindle. Tossing aside the newspapers, he returned to dirty diapers and the pages of War and Peace. Could he have foreseen the remoter consequences of the world crisis—could he have known that in seventy-five years a German army would carry the philosophy of blood and iron to Yasnaya Po
lyana itself (the manor house would serve as the headquarters of a German general), he might have spoken differently.
Berlin, September 1866
AT THE END of the summer the victorious Prussian armies returned in triumph to the capital. The helmets of the Great Elector’s Life Guard Cuirassiers, the oldest of the Prussian cavalry regiments, flashed in the September sunlight, and breastplates gleamed.28 The 3rd Neumarkt Dragoons trotted past. Riding with them was Jeb Stuart’s former aide-decamp, Lieutenant von Borcke, who wore the Order of the Red Eagle, a tribute to his gallantry in the (largely ineffective) cavalry charge at Sadowa. Bismarck and Moltke rode with the other commanders in the first rank of the procession, just ahead of the King. The Minister-President wore the spiked helmet and white uniform of a major general of the 7th Heavy Landwehr Regiment of Horse, of which he had recently been named chief; across his chest was draped the orange sash of the Exalted Order of the Black Eagle.
The crowd hailed the architect of the German revolution with a passionate enthusiasm as he went down the alley of the Linden, past the captured guns and standards of the Austrians. At the Brandenburg Gate, he was showered with rose petals. Astride his horse, the man of iron appeared a tower of strength, but in reality he was unwell, and only with difficulty did he maintain himself erect in the saddle.
“But I have beaten them all!” he exclaimed. “All!” In the aftermath of Sadowa the free-state opposition to his authority collapsed. A puny band of liberals continued to resist the Minister-President, but the rest acquiesced in his régime, and voted to indemnify or pardon him for whatever unconstitutional actions he might have taken in the past. The dream of ministerial responsibility and parliamentary control of the army died away. Bismarck accepted the submission of his adversaries; he did not, like the old-fashioned reactionaries, seek to destroy the Parliament altogether. A relic, he concluded, was more useful than a ruin. The legislature lapsed into impotence, and the light of liberty, which had flashed for a time in the hearts of the opponents of the government, was put out.
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