The revolutionary years thus gave Prussian conservatism a new ideological direction and that in turn gave Bismarck a platform on which to build his political career. Stahl may have preached ‘vulgar constitutionalism’ but constitutionalism would happen no matter what he preached. By another ‘world historical irony’ the arch-conservative Otto von Bismarck needed constitutions and parliaments to show his brilliance. Moritz von Blanckenburg was delighted with Bismarck’s speeches on the Jewish question and told Ludwig von Gerlach that since as recently as 4 October 1846 at Trieglaff Bismarck had defended a strict separation of church and state, now his conversion to the ideal of the Christian state was wonderful.39 Lothar Gall takes this sudden change with a large grain of salt:
For the spirit of Christian self-righteousness which he met in Pomerania and frequently in his own circle of political friends, he had far too sharp an eye to allow him to fall for such ideas … Bismarck was never entirely comfortable as he entered the thin air of such abstractions … 40
For Gall and for Marcks the question remained how seriously could either take Bismarck’s speech on the Christian State and both devote several pages to casuistical attempts to reconcile the speech with Bismarck’s scepticism about the more enthusiastic and doctrinaire aspects of religion and the known peculiarities of his faith. There can be no doubt that Bismarck was religious in his idiosyncratic way, but in this case neither Marcks nor Gall draw the obvious conclusion that the speech on the Jews was pure cynical opportunism. It gave him an opportunity to spread his colourful feathers and enhance his already formidable reputation. Pflanze has, I think, the sharpest view of Bismarck’s religion:
His need to dominate and direct did not spring from a sense of divine mission, but from an earlier, more elemental force in his personality. Conversion did not fundamentally alter his attitude toward his fellowman. His cynical view of minds and motives, his hatred and malevolence to those who opposed him, his willingness to exploit and use others show that the Christian doctrine of love and charity had little influence upon him. His faith provided the reinforcement, not the foundation of his sense of responsibility … Religion gave him a sense of security, a feeling of belonging to a coherent, meaningful and controlled world—the kind of environment that his parents did not provide. The God he worshipped was powerful (in contrast to his father) and loving, supportive and omnipresent (in contrast to his mother).41
When King Frederick William IV prorogued the United Diet, Bismarck had completed the first seven weeks of his long career as a public figure and from his point of view they had been successful weeks. He had emerged as the young star of the extreme right and had made a reputation which could not harm his career among the King’s entourage. The royal Princes, Frederick, Albert, and the Crown Prince himself wrote enthusiastic letters and Herr von Puttkamer, who had also been a deputy, wrote to Johanna that Bismarck was ‘the spoiled darling of the princes’.42 As important was his discovery of the fascination of parliamentary politics, the influence, threats, and blandishments, the management of men and affairs, the excitement of the duel in the chamber, and his brilliance as a debater and speaker. The end of the United Diet left him flat but not unoccupied. He tried to organize a new conservative newspaper. He busied himself with the next stages of legal reform and other projects, but the stage lights had gone dark for a while.
And, of course, at some point he had to get married. On 28 July 1847 the wedding took place in Reinfeld on the Puttkamer estate. The best man was ‘little Hans’ von Kleist-Retzow, who in his toast ‘hoped and prophesied that the groom would be a new Otto the Saxon’, the legendary medieval duke, Otto the Great.43 The couple travelled first in Prussia visiting relatives and then on 11 August 1847 set out for Prague via Dresden (where Johanna, the quiet country girl, saw her first play), and from Dresden on to the great city of Vienna, then upriver to Linz and Salzburg. Only a few of Johanna’s letters survive but they testify to an extremely happy life with Otto. On 25 August she wrote to her parents that ‘the world gets ever more beautiful with every passing day [and] Otto with all his warmth is heartily good and loving.’44 On 1 September in Meran they met a Bismarck cousin Count Fritz von Bismarck-Bohlen, and Albrecht von Roon, who was travelling as tutor to the young Prussian Prince Friedrich Karl, later a distinguished army commander in 1866 and 1870. On 8 September 1847 von Roon wrote to his wife Anna that he and Prince Friedrich Karl ‘had the pleasure of seeing Otto Bismarck and his young wife. They promised to visit you in Bonn.’45 The Bismarcks decided to join Roon, the Prince, and Cousin Fritz on their trip to Venice where on 6 September they found King Frederick William IV and his entourage. On the same night, the Bismarcks went to the theatre in Venice. Bismarck described what happened in his memoirs:
The King, who had recognised me in the theatre, commanded me on the following day to an audience and to dinner; and so unexpected was this to me that my light travelling luggage and the incapacity of the local tailor did not admit of my appearing in correct costume. My reception was so kindly, and the conversation, even on political subjects, of such a nature as to enable me to infer that my attitude in the Diet met with his encouraging approval. The King commanded me to call upon him in the course of the winter, and I did so. Both on this occasion and at smaller dinners at the palace I became persuaded that I stood high in the favour of both the King and the Queen, and that the former, in avoiding speaking to me in public, at the time of the session of the Diet, did not mean to criticize my political conduct, but at the time did not want to let others see his approval of me.46
The two essential elements in Bismarck’s career had fallen into place: the certainty that he could master political bodies and the favour of the King. From September 1847 to March 1890 he always had both. When he lost the latter, he lost power. He never had any other foundation for his achievements. No crowds followed him and no party acknowledged him as leader. Even his closest Junker allies, the Gerlach brothers, little Hans, and the others were never ‘his’ party, and owed him nothing for their position in society. Gradually they realized that he shared less of their values than they had thought. The other element to note is the presence of Albrecht von Roon in the story. Bismarck had intended to head for home because the constant rain in Austria had begun to depress him. Did Roon convince him to go to Venice in the hope that he would meet the King? If so, as in 1858 and 1862, he did his friend an incalculable service.
The Bismarcks returned to Schönhausen in late September 1847 and settled in to married life. On 24 October, he wrote letters to his sister and to his brother. To his sister, he wrote that marriage suited him and that he was free ‘of the bottomless boredom and depression that plagued me as soon as I found myself within my four walls’.47 In the letter to Bernhard he complained about his mother-in-law’s ‘great natural melancholy … She sees a black future.’ He then wrote that the honeymoon had cost 750 thaler for 57 days, or 13 thaler per day and he was forced to use Joanna’s wedding money, which she had wanted to spend on silver. For his part he was quite happy to go on using his father’s old silver plate. As he wrote, tea in Wedgwood ‘tastes just as good’.48 On 11 January 1848, the King kept his promise and invited Bismarck to dine at the palace. He sat next to Ludwig von Gerlach and seems not to have taken Johanna.49
As Bismarck made his way home that night, the streets of Palermo in Sicily were buzzing with rumours. The next day a revolt against the King of Naples broke out and the revolutionary year of 1848 had begun. In France on 23 February 1848, full-scale revolution broke out. Within hours, Louis Philippe fled and the Second French Republic had been declared with its fiery Jacobin language and memories of the Terror. As the news from Paris spread across Europe cities from Copenhagen to Naples began to stir. Meetings were held and crowds gathered. On 27 February 1848 in Mannheim a mass meeting demanded press freedom, jury trials, a militia army, and the immediate creation of a German parliament. Revolts and mass meetings took place in all German cities. Peasants rioted and attacked manor houses. In Vienn
a on 13 March 1848 a rising began and Prince Metternich fled the city. The symbol of repression of the old regime had scurried out of his capital like a fugitive. In Milan on 17 March the news of Metternich’s fall arrived and revolt broke out there as well.
The big garrisons in all European cities in March 1848 had no tactics to cope with Parisian style street-fighting: barricades across narrow, winding streets in old urban centres, boiling water and emptied chamber pots poured from upper floors, and the constant danger of fraternization between troops and citizens undermined the army’s morale. In northern Italy Marshall Radetzky had overwhelming force, more than 10,000 armed men, and he had garrisons in all the fortresses around Milan but he still lost control of the city. Within a day of the reports that Metternich and the Viennese government had fallen, Milan had become a maze of improvised barricades and fortifications.50
In Berlin, the excitement had begun as soon as the news from Paris arrived. Very good weather helped to keep the crowd on the streets. As Christopher Clark writes,
Alarmed at the growing ‘determination and insolence’ of the crowds circulating in the streets, the President of Police, Julius von Minutoli, ordered new troops into the city on 13 March. That night several civilians were killed in clashes round the palace precinct. The crowd and the soldiery were now collective antagonists for control of the city’s space.51
For the next few days King Frederick William IV hesitated, pulled between doves, those advocating concessions, and hawks led by General Karl Ludwig von Prittwitz (1790–1871) the commanding officer of the brigade of Guards Infantry regiments in Berlin, who argued for force. On 17 March the King, shaken by news of the flight of Metternich, finally gave in and agreed to lift press censorship and introduce a constitution for Prussia. Apparently in spite of his bombastic speech from the throne eleven months earlier, he had discovered there was a ‘power on earth that [could] transform the natural relationship between prince and people … into a conventional constitutional relationship’—fear. The next morning, as a crowd gathered in the Palace Square to celebrate, a series of clashes occurred between the army and the demonstrators. Barricades went up all over Berlin. The army could not control the city. Just before midnight on 18 March 1848, General von Prittwitz, whom his biographer describes as ‘a serious, reserved and closed personality’,52 arrived at the palace to ask the King for permission to order the city to be evacuated and then to bombard the rebels until they surrendered. David Barclay describes the scene:
The non-committal monarch listened, thanked Prittwitz and returned to his desk. Prittwitz noted ‘the comfortable way in which His Majesty sat down at his desk pulling a furry foot-muff over his feet after taking off his boots and stockings, in order, as it seemed, to begin writing another lengthy document’. The document he was drafting was perhaps the most famous of his whole reign: his celebrated address ‘To My Dear Berliners’ (an Meine lieben Berliner).53
By dawn the document had been posted all over Berlin. In it he declared that the army would be withdrawn:
Return to peace, clear the barricades that still stand … and I give you my Royal Word that all streets and squares will be cleared of troops, and the military occupation reduced to a few necessary buildings.
The order to pull the troops out of the city was given on the next day shortly before noon. The king had placed himself in the hands of the revolution.54
For most of the soldiers and indeed for Prince William, the King’s brother, and the Crown Prince, Frederick William was a coward who had surrendered to the mob. Roon, stationed in Potsdam, considered emigration. Bismarck instinctively reached for his sword. Two days later, on 20 March, a delegation from Tangermünde arrived in Schönhausen and demanded that the black-red-gold flag of the German Republic be raised on the church tower. Bismarck ‘asked the peasants whether they wanted to defend themselves. They answered with a unanimous and vigorous Ja and I recommended to them to drive the city-dwellers out which with the enthusiastic help of the women they rapidly did.’55 On 21 March Bismarck hurried to Potsdam to see if it made sense to march on Berlin with armed peasants. Bismarck described what happened in his memoirs and the main outlines square with the accounts given by Gall, Engelberg, and Pflanze:
I dismounted at the residence of my friend Roon, who, as governor to Prince Frederick Charles, occupied some rooms in the castle; and visited in the Deutsches Haus General von Möllendorf, whom I found still stiff from the treatment he had suffered when negotiating with the insurgents, and General von Prittwitz, who had been in command in Berlin. I described to them the present temper of the country people; they in return gave me some particulars as to what had happened up to the morning of the 19th. What they had to relate, and the later information which came from Berlin, could only strengthen my belief that the King was not free. Prittwitz, who was older than I, and judged more calmly, said: ‘Send us none of your peasants, we don’t want them. We have quite enough soldiers … What can we do after the King has commanded us to play the part of the vanquished? I cannot attack without orders’.56
Gall argues that from this moment on, Bismarck determined to ‘take part in all efforts to save the traditional monarchical-aristocratic order even if against the present wearer of the crown’.57 In one sense, Bismarck had no choice but to do that. Since September when the King invited him to the palace, Bismarck had seen a career through the court as his way to power. With the King in the hands of the revolution, that would not happen. Bismarck could not have imagined that the arrival of constitutional government would offer him the perfect balance between the remains of royal absolutism and the need for parliamentary adroitness. The conflict between King and Chamber would give Bismarck his platform, but not yet.
According to the later Queen Augusta, Bismarck came to her on 23 March of 1848 on behalf of her brother-in-law, Prince Carl Alexander of Prussia, a younger brother of King Frederick William IV and of her husband, Prince William, Prince of Prussia, to ask for her authority ‘to use the name of her husband and of her young son for a counter-revolution through which the measures granted by the King would not be recognized and his right to make them and his capacity to act rationally would be contested.’58 She wrote to the Crown Prince who had fled to England:
I confined myself to talking to Herr von Bismarck-Schönhausen, to whom I said that you had given an example of the truest devotion and obedience and that any measure against decisions of the King would contradict your views. I let him give me his word of honour that neither your name nor that of our son would be compromised by such a reactionary attempt.59
Bismarck’s version has a very different character:
In this condition of affairs I hit upon the idea of obtaining from another quarter a command to act, which could not be expected from the King, who was not free, and tried to get at the Prince of Prussia. Referred to the Princess, whose consent thereto was necessary, I called upon her in order to discover the whereabouts of her consort, who, as I subsequently discovered, was on the Pfaueninsel. She received me in a servant’s room on the entresol, sitting on a wooden chair. She refused the information I asked for, and declared, in a state of violent excitement, that it was her duty to guard the rights of her son.60
The reader can choose which version to accept but needs to bear in mind that Bismarck always covered up his mistakes, and this headstrong act of folly led to deep hostility between the future Queen and her future Minister-President. In addition, one must reflect that Bismarck wrote the passage after his fall from power and after forty years of his neurotic hatred of her.
The situation then worsened. On 25 March Frederick William arrived in Potsdam and addressed the army commanders and officers:
I have come to Potsdam in order to bring peace to my dear Potsdamers and to show them that I am in every respect a free King, and to show the Berliners that they need fear no reaction and that all the disquieting rumours to that effect are completely unfounded. I have never been freer and more secure than I am under the protection o
f my citizens. …61
Bismarck watched this moment and recorded later in his memoirs his bitterness at what he heard:
At the words ‘I have never been freer or more secure than when under the protection of my citizens,’ there arose a murmuring and the clash of sabres in their sheaths, such as no King of Prussia in the midst of his officers had ever heard before, and, I hope, will ever hear again.62
Bismarck had no other choice but to return to Schönhausen and confer with his Junker allies. Three days later he wrote in a much calmer frame of mind to his brother Bernhard and commented on the news from Paris:
As long as the present government in Paris can hold on, I do not believe there will be war, doubt that there’s any urge to it. If it is undermined or even overthrown by socialist movements, which is entirely foreseeable, it will have or its successor no money and nobody will lend it any, so that a state bankruptcy or something similar must occur. The motives of 1792, the guillotine and the republican fanaticism, which might take the place of money, are not present.63
In this shrewd and absolutely accurate assessment of the French Second Republic, we hear for the first time the cool tones of Bismarck, the diplomat and statesman. From his remote outpost in Brandenburg, he saw what Tocqueville in the streets of Paris had also noted—that the French Revolution of 1848 was an imitation of 1792 or, in Tocqueville’s memorable phrase, ‘the whole thing seemed to me to be a bad tragedy played by actors from the provinces.’64
On 29 March 1848 the King appointed Ludolf Camphausen (1803–90), a grain and commodity trader, banker, and investor from the Prussian Rhine provinces, as his new Prime Minister and summoned the United Diet to a session on 2 April. Camphausen had the distinction of being the first representative of the new capitalism to hold office under a Prussian king. These changes affected Bismarck, who was a deputy in the United Diet and he therefore left Schönhausen for Berlin. On 2 April he wrote to Johanna from Berlin that ‘I am much calmer than I was.’65
Bismarck: A Life Page 12