The battle between Queen and Minister-President had begun. In this case, unlike the poor stenographers in the Reichstag, the Queen’s hatred was not a figment of Bismarck’s disordered imagination. She really was his enemy and did everything possible to get rid of him.
On 24 September 1862 Bleichröder wrote to Baron James de Rothschild:
We are in the middle of a ministerial crisis. Herr von Bismarck-Schönhausen as Minister-President is occupied with the formation of a new cabinet. Roon, the war minister, remains, and this is proof enough that the conflict between Chamber and Crown will not be solved by the change of ministry … it appears as if we were to get an entirely reactionary ministry.123
That prospect made even Bismarck’s friends uneasy, but for different reasons. The news that Bismarck had been summoned to Berlin spread quickly. On 20 September, even before Bismarck’s audience, Ludwig von Gerlach wrote to Kleist-Retzow:
However great my reservations are about Bismarck, not only in respect to Austria or France but in respect of God’s commandments, I would not even dare to work against him—because I know no possible person who would be better. If he fails too, we fall into God’s hands. Will you not summon Moritz to Berlin as Roon’s political soul? Also for Bismarck’s sake?124
Hans von Kleist replied on 22 September that he had seen his friend: ‘Bismarck is fresh and in good humour. I think we do him an injustice if we mean that he doubts the truth of the Cathecism.’125
Bismarck, now in office, had to arrange his affairs. He wrote to Wentzel in Frankfurt to find out if his former cook in Frankfurt, Riepe, would be willing to come to Berlin and asked Wentzel to sound him out. First things first, in Bismarck’s mind. Then he told Wentzel that Count Bernstorff would be leaving for the Prussian Embassy in London sometime between 7 and 10 October, and that he, Bismarck, would then take over the Foreign Ministry.126
On the same day, Major Stosch wrote to his friend, Otto von Holtzendorff, a liberal judge in Coburg, that the crisis had really now become acute:
The rumours about the resignation of the King become more and more lively, and who knows if that would not be a politically correct step. If the King gives in and the Progressives win, we shall be plunged into the whirlpool of theoretical revolution, hair-splitting dogmatism, and impractical ambitious democracy. The Crown Prince has done everything to change his father’s mind. My General [Heinrich von Brandt—JS] says, nothing can happen in the army question, because the society of elderly gentlemen whom they use as advisers will take care not to say anything that those in highest circles will not want to hear. Manteuffel is the man who summons the puppets and gives them their roles.127
Stosch had yet to reckon with the impact of the new Minister-President, Otto von Bismarck; it was not Manteuffel who ‘summoned the puppets’, but Bismarck. In the meantime Bismarck had to confront the Landtag in its rebellious frame of mind. On the 29th he withdrew the budget altogether, the first of many provocations. Next he prepared to make his first public appearance as Minister-President in a speech which he intended to make to the Budget Committee of the Landtag, the very lion’s den of the opposition. It became the most famous speech he ever made, his first parliamentary appearance as Minister-President, and here is the most famous passage:
Prussia must build up and preserve her strength for the advantageous moment, which has already come and gone many times. Her borders under the treaties of Vienna are not favourable for the healthy existence of the state. The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.128
The attentive reader—and I hope there are a few—will not find that text surprising. Over many years Bismarck had said more or less the same thing to all sorts and conditions of listeners. In May 1862 he had advanced exactly the same argument to Foreign Minister von Schleinitz and had even used almost the same phrase, ferro et igni, iron and fire, rather than ‘iron and blood’. Admittedly, Latin is not German and a private letter not public testimony before a committee of a lower house of parliament. What had changed was not Bismarck, nor his ideas, but the atmosphere. For once Bismarck underestimated his own importance.
I have no doubt that he had decided to use that tactic in the relatively restricted forum of a committee hearing. He had—a rare slip—underestimated his ‘old reputation for irresponsible violence’. Liberals in the lower house and in the country believed that the King had appointed Bismarck to provoke the Landtag into ever greater folly at which point Bismarck’s puppet master, von Manteuffel, would get the King to declare martial law and suspend the parliament. The army would occupy Berlin and install a royal military dictatorship. Napoleon III had done exactly that on 2 December 1851, and got away with it, and France had a much greater tradition of revolution and disorder than Prussia. In the overheated imagination of people like Twesten only that could explain the appointment of so notorious, implacable, and unreconstructed a reactionary as Otto von Bismarck. The historically minded could also compare Bismarck’s appointment by the King of Prussia in 1862 to the Bourbon King of France’s appointment in 1829 of Prince Jules Polignac, the most intransigent ultra then available. Charles X used the appointment to signal the end of constitutional monarchy in France and the Revolution of 1830 followed hard on that move. Why not the same scenario in Prussia?
Bismarck’s ‘iron and blood’ speech, his first as Minister-President, could easily have been his last and nearly was. Informed opinion in the country was shocked and outraged. The right-wing liberal, and famous historian, Heinrich von Treitschke wrote to his brother-in-law:
You know how passionately I love Prussia, but when I hear so shallow a country-squire as this Bismarck bragging about the ‘iron and blood’ with which he intends to subdue Germany, the meanness of it seems to be exceeded only by the absurdity.129
Much the most important reaction has left no trace but must have happened over the breakfast table or in the royal bedroom, if we assume that the old couple still shared a common bed, at the spa in Baden-Baden, where King William had repaired after his strenuous weeks in Berlin. In any case, no married person will find it hard to understand the impact of Queen Augusta’s ‘I told you so!’ which must have been repeated from every angle. Had she not warned her Lord and Sovereign not to trust Bismarck? Had not the Grand Duke of Baden and the King of Saxony and many other dear relatives not warned the King? etc., etc. And it worked. The King in order to have a little peace and quiet gave in. Yes, he would go to Berlin and have it out with Bismarck and, well, yes, get rid of him.
While we have no record of the conversations in the royal household, we have a fine piece of Bismarck the novelist in his account of what happened next. He was, as always, very careful not to admit fault, let alone that the speech had been a blunder. Bismarck knew he had to see the King urgently so he took the unusual and desperate step of halting the train before it got to Berlin. This account needs to be read with scepticism:
I had some difficulty in discovering from the curt answers of the officials the carriage in the ordinary train, in which the King was seated by himself in an ordinary first-class compartment. The after-effect of his intercourse with his wife was an obvious depression, and when I begged for permission to narrate the events which had occurred during his absence, he interrupted me with the words: ‘I can perfectly well see where all this will end. Over there, in front of the Opera House, under my windows, they will cut off your head, and mine a little while afterwards.’ I guessed, and it was afterwards confirmed by witnesses, that during his week’s stay at Baden his mind had been worked upon with variations on the theme of Polignac, Strafford, and Lewis XVI. When he was silent, I answered with the short remark, ‘Et après, Sire?’ ‘Après, indeed; we shall be dead,’ answered the King. ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘then we shall be dead; but we must all die sooner or later, and can we perish more honourably? I, fighting for my King’s cause, and your Majesty sealing with your own blood your rights as Ki
ng by the grace of God; … Your Majesty is bound to fight, you can not capitulate; you must, even at the risk of bodily danger, go forth to meet any attempt at coercion.’
As I continued to speak in this sense, the King grew more and more animated, and began to assume the part of an officer fighting for kingdom and fatherland.130
The crisis passed and Bismarck stayed in office—just. Two days later, Kurd von Schlözer, Bismarck’s former first secretary in St Petersburg, went to see him. Von Schlözer had clashed with Bismarck in St Petersburg but managed to arrive at a decent understanding with him by the end. Schlözer understood Bismarck’s nature from the start, as he wrote to a friend: ‘He lives politics. Everything bubbles in him, and strains for recognition and status.’131 The two went out to dinner and the evening became very convivial, as Schlözer recorded:
We drank a lot of champagne, which loosened even more his naturally loose tongue. He exulted about pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. Partly by himself and partly by others, he is seeking to get the king to concede the two-year service period. In the House of Lords he paints the reaction he plans in colours so black that, as he puts it, the lords are becoming anxious about the conditions he says he will bring about if need be. Before the gentlemen of the second chamber he appears at one moment very unbending but in the next hints at his desire to mediate. Finally, he intends to make the German cabinets believe that the king is hard put to restrain the Cavourism of his new minister. There is no denying that until now people are impressed by his spirit and brilliance. C’est un homme!132
The Bismarck who appears in Schlözer’s account played the game of a consummate confidence man, acting a part which varied from scene to scene; yet he needed another audience—the Schlözers, the Disraelis, and other witty and cynical people—to whom he could tell the truth, how he fooled this one or that one. Falsehood and honesty, kindness and vengeance, gargantuan energies and hypochondriac frailty, charm and cold remoteness, frankness and deceit, Bismarck was all those contradictions but one attribute never changed. Anybody who said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing in Bismarck’s opinion would finish in outer darkness. Witty and charming Kurd von Schlözer made one comment about the ‘Pasha’ too many and found himself transferred out of Berlin to be legation secretary in Rome (admittedly not Siberia) before he could pack. As Schlözer ruefully put it, ‘Tannhäuser, end of Act II. Otto sings: “To Rome, thou sinner.”’133
7
‘I have beaten them all! All!’
In June 1862 Otto von Bismarck explained to Benjamin Disraeli, Baron Brunnow, the Russia ambassador, and the Austrian envoy, Vitztuhm, at the Russian ambassador’s residence in London what he intended to do when he took power. Nine years later—almost to the day, Freifrau Hildegard Hugo von Spitzemberg, wife of the Württemberg minister, watched the victory parade pass through Berlin. Otto von Bismarck had accomplished much more than in 1862 he had impudently promised his astonished listeners in the ambassador’s parlour in London.
These nine years, and this ‘revolution’, constitute the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries, for Bismarck accomplished all this without commanding a single soldier, without dominating a vast parliamentary majority, without the support of a mass movement, without any previous experience of government, and in the face of national revulsion at his name and his reputation. This achievement, the work of a political genius of a very unusual kind, rested on several sets of conflicting characteristics among which brutal, disarming honesty mingled with the wiles and deceits of a confidence man. He played his parts with perfect self-confidence yet mixed them with rage, anxiety, illness, hypochondria, and irrationality.
He created a system of rule that expressed his power over others—his capacity to manipulate King William I, to neutralize the royal family by inserting himself between father and son, between husband and wife, between father-in-law and daughter-in-law with what Russell quite rightly called ‘demonic’ power. He outmanoeuvred all the generals except Moltke, with whom he eventually arrived at a truce of mutual respect. He undermined and destroyed the power of the sovereign princes of the German states and simply abolished several German states, including a venerable kingdom, when it suited him. He managed to keep all the ‘flanking’ powers—the Tsarist Empire, Napoleon’s France, and Great Britain—out of the German civil war until they had to accept the achievements of his mastery or face destruction as Napoleon III foolishly chose. He used democracy when it suited him, negotiated with revolutionaries and the dangerous Lassalle, the socialist who might have contested his authority. He utterly dominated his cabinet ministers with a sovereign contempt and blackened their reputations as soon as he no longer needed them. He outwitted the parliamentary parties, even the strongest of them, and betrayed all those of the Kreuzzeitungspartei who had put him into power. By 1870 even his closest friends, Roon, Moritz von Blanckenburg, and Hans von Kleist, realized that they had helped a demonic figure seize power.
As early as 1864, Clemens Theodor Perthes wrote to Roon to warn him that Bismarck had no principles. Perthes objected strongly to the way the Kreuzzeitung and the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
have buried under a mound of mockery, contempt and ridicule the Princes and all those who—truly not without justification—regard them as their legal sovereigns. Where the Kreuzzeitung like a revolutionary of the purest kind disregards all justice, because the persons with legitimate entitlement do not please it, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in a series of articles with an unmistakable semi-official stamp which began on 16 April, proclaims the essential principle of the Revolution suffrage universel.1
Roon knew what he had done and took the risk to preserve the Prussian crown from the rise of popular sovereignty. On 27 July, he replied to his friend in a letter which I quoted in the Chapter 1 but deserves to be read here:
B. is an extraordinary man, whom I can certainly help, whom I can support and here and there correct, but never replace. Yes, he would not be in the place he now has without me, that is an historical fact, but even with all that he is himself … To construct the parallelogram of forces correctly and from the diagonal, that is to say, that which has already happened, then assess the nature and weight of the effective forces, which one cannot know precisely, that is the work of the historic genius who confirms that by combining it all.2
Bismarck’s first gambit—one he had mentioned to Roon on several occasions and to von Schlözer over champagne—was ‘to get the king to concede the two-year service period’.3 Once the deadlock had been removed by a deal of this kind, he could move swiftly to the rest of his plan. From the purely military side, there had never been a need for the three-year service requirement and a commission of fifteen generals (including Moltke) had conceded in April 1862 that it could accept two-and-a half years or even two years.4 On 10 October Roon presented a compromise proposal which would have allowed those with means to purchase release from the obligation to serve a third year. The money thus raised would help to attract volunteers. The plan also set the size of the future army at 1 per cent of the population and established a fixed sum per soldier to defray costs.5 The bill would, in effect, divide liberals on the issue of equity among conscripts but also limit the power of parliament by establishing in future the fixed number of soldiers and the fixed sum for their support.
On 9 November 1862 Adolf Count von Kleist (1793–1866) wrote to Hans von Kleist-Retzow, Bismarck’s friend, in some alarm:
Strange rumours have been circulating for the last four days that mediation and concessions to the Chamber of Deputies are being considered. One wants to promise that three-year service will be allowed to lapse in five years in exchange for approval for the rest of the military reorganization. Heydt is supposed to plan mediation. … you are the only one who can work beneficially on Otto. You must [in the original] be here to prevent careless measures beforehand, afterwards it will be too late.6
Count August had no reason to worry. T
he plan failed. William I disliked it because it violated the principle of universal service and Manteuffel, who as always had the last military word through his proximity to the King, rejected it because it limited the Crown’s command prerogatives. As Mantueffel put it to Roon, ‘the game must be played to the end.’7 Even the Landtag voted against it by 150 to 17. Bismarck, who had no scruples about means, realized that he had to outflank Manteuffel by being more intransigent than the general. He withdrew all compromise proposals and prepared to rule by the iron fist.8 He began with an attack on the civil service, a category much wider than in the English-speaking world: judges, assessors, referendars, university professors, grammar school teachers, and all the provincial government employees plus employees in state monopolies belonged to the civil service as well as those who worked in central state agencies. Here was a substantial, often liberal, constituency which Bismarck could crush, as he wrote to Prince Henry VII of Reuss on 23 November:
In domestic affairs we are going to carry out a sharp raid on the civil servants of all types … I am for going easy on the Chambers but am intent on bringing the civil service back into discipline at any price.9
On 10 December 1862 Count Fritz Eulenburg, Minister of Interior, issued the relevant order to all members of the Prussian civil service
to be supporters of the constitutional rights of the Crown. In the administration unity of spirit and will, decisiveness and energy will be evident … and the distinction which your position lends you is not to be misused to promote political movements which run counter to the views and the will of the government of the state.10
The office which Bismarck assumed on 23 September 1862 was that of Minister-President. It had emerged in March 1849 from the confusions of the revolution of 1848 and the sudden need to have a cabinet able to cope with a legislature.11 Helma Brunck in her study of the Prussian State Ministry shows that even as late as the year 1862 no very clear constitutional basis for the rights and duties of ministers or, indeed, for the cabinet as a whole had been established. No such office had been foreseen in the Constitution of 1850. The one irrefutable power that Bismarck’s predecessor, Otto von Manteuffel, had forced through was the Cabinet Order of 8 September 1852, which gave the Minister-President primacy among the ministers. Ernst Huber, author of a multi-volume constitutional history, argues that the order which forbade ministers to go to the King directly and without notice to the Minister-President made the office something like that of an English prime minister.12 On the other hand, all the ministers remained servants of the King and the Cabinet Order could not prevent the King from consulting ministers. The Emperor William II in 1890 exercised that right and forced Bismarck to resign, even though Bismarck insisted that the Cabinet Order of 1852 forbade royal interference. On 24 September 1862 Bismarck simply showed up, took the chair, and explained the circumstances of his appointment, as the minutes show:
Bismarck: A Life Page 25