In the Ministry, Bismarck had drafted a press edict which limited the freedom of the Prussian press but had not found a formula which would work. Although Article 27 of the constitution forbade censorship and guaranteed freedom of expression, there was an escape clause: ‘every other restriction upon freedom of the press shall be made only by way of legislation’ and there was a Press Law of 1851 which gave the government power to license and control all media of printed expression. On 1 June 1863 the King signed a press edict to silence the opposition press by bureaucratic order and to eliminate any recourse to the courts. Henceforth the only appeal would be to the cabinet.34
The Crown Prince Frederick William had for some time been aware of the way Bismarck went about perverting the constitutional structures of the kingdom. The press edict was the final straw. He had an engagement in Danzig and had determined to express his disquiet at the violation of the constitution. The host introduced him and said that he regretted that the visit could not be an occasion for complete joy, to which the Prince replied,
I also lament that I should have come here at a time when a variance has occurred between the government and the people which has occasioned me no small degree of surprise. Of the proceedings which have brought it about I knew nothing. I was absent. I have had no part in the deliberations which have produced this result. But we all, and I especially, I who best know the noble and fatherly intentions and magnanimous sentiments of his Majesty the King, we all, I say, are confident that, under the scepter of his Majesty the King, Prussia will continue to make sure progress towards the future which Providence has marked out for her.35
The King flew into a rage, no doubt increased by his own uneasy feeling that by agreeing to Bismarck’s press edict, he had indeed violated the constitution. He announced his intention to arrest the Crown Prince on a charge of treason and could only be slowly talked out of that by a nervous Bismarck who saw his whole edifice wobble in the battle between father and son.
The Crown Princess wrote a few days later to her mother, Queen Victoria and expressed her own fury:
I told you on the 5th that Fritz had written twice to the King, once, warning him of the consequences that would ensue if the constitution was falsely interpreted in order to take away the liberty of the press. The King did it all the same and answered Fritz with a very angry letter. Fritz then sent his protest to Bismarck on the 4th, saying he wished to have an answer immediately. Bismarck has not answered … The way in which the government behave, and the way they have treated Fritz, rouse my every feeling of independence. Thank God I was born in England where people are not slaves, and too good to allow themselves to be treated as such.36
Had Fritz continued his battle, he might have won and the King might have abdicated. That, however, was rather a lot to ask of a Prussian prince who, in spite of his wife’s pressure, mainly shared the assumptions of his father about kingship.
The King had already shown signs of agitation about the long-planned meeting with the Austrian Emperor in Bad Gastein. As Bismarck told Roon in a letter from Carlsbad in early July 1863, he wanted to get away on holiday, ‘but the King absolutely refused to hear hints that I might go away and I don’t want to upset him. He wants me here when the Emperor arrives any day now but he fears that contact with me will upset the western powers and affront the liberals.’37 On the way Bismarck wrote to his wife to say how ‘tedious it was to be stared at like a Japanese … [and to be] the object of general ill-will.’38 Even Bismarck found his national unpopularity uncomfortable. On 24 July he settled into his hotel at Bad Gastein, where on 2 August the Emperor Franz Joseph arrived with an unpleasant surprise. The Austrian ‘success’ in facing down the Russians over Poland encouraged Anton Schmerling (Anton Ritter von Schmerling (1805–1893)), the ex-revolutionary of 1848 now ‘State Minister’ of the Habsburgs, to propose a reform of the Bund as a preparatory stage to the voluntary unification of Germany under Austrian auspices. On 3 August 1863, while King William took the waters at Baden-Baden, the Emperor Franz Joseph summoned the German princes to a Congress of Princes to be held in a fortnight in Frankfurt am Main, capital of the German Confederation, the Bund.39 This posed by far the most serious challenge to Bismarck’s plans. The King, a loyal vassal, had received a summons from his liege lord, the Emperor Franz Joseph; all the other German kings had agreed to attend. How could William not do so? This marks the first absolutely unavoidable clash of personalities between the King and Bismarck. Here is his version of the crisis:
At Gastein, on August 2, 1863, I was sitting under the fir-trees in the Schwarzenberg gardens by the deep gorge of the Ache. Above me was a nest of titmice, and watch in hand I counted the number of times in the minute the bird brought her nestlings a caterpillar or other insect. … Queen Elizabeth [widow of Frederick William IV—JS], whom we met at Wildbad on our journey from Gastein to Baden, was urgent with me to go to Frankfort. I replied: ‘If the King does not otherwise decide I will go and perform his business there, but I will not return as minister to Berlin.’ The prospect seemed to disturb the Queen, and she ceased to contest my view. It was not an easy task to decide the King to stay away from Frankfort. I exerted myself for that purpose during our drive from Wildbad to Baden, when, on account of the servants on the box, we discussed the German question in the small open carriage in French. By the time we reached Baden I thought I had convinced my master. But there we found the King of Saxony, who was commissioned by all the princes to renew the invitation to Frankfort (August 19). My master did not find it easy to resist that move. He reflected over and over again: ‘Thirty reigning princes and a King to take their messages!’ Besides, he loved and honoured the King of Saxony, who moreover of all the princes had personally most vocation for such a mission. Not until midnight did I succeed in obtaining the King’s signature to a refusal to the King of Saxony. When I left my master, both he and I were ill and exhausted by the nervous tension of the situation; and my subsequent verbal communication with the Saxon minister, von Beust, bore the stamp of this agitation. But the crisis was overcome.40
This struggle for the King’s soul in August 1863 made Bismarck’s subsequent career possible. He ‘persuaded’ or ‘forced’ the King of Prussia to refuse an invitation which every fibre in his long, royal frame told him to accept. The intense emotions which both experienced during the confrontation and tears and exhaustion afterwards suggest that a profound struggle, not unlike that between a father and son, took place between the King and Bismarck over the Frankfurt Princes’ Congress. Bismarck prevailed because the King must have felt in the depth of his soul that this impossible Bismarck mattered to him. He could not do without him. It has occurred to me that in some way Bismarck might have played the role of the ‘good son’ which the Crown Prince Frederick William under the influence of the English princess less and less resembled. A kind of love triangle of two sons for the approval of the father may explain this triumph of Bismarck’s will over the desires of the King of Prussia in August 1863, the most important achievement of Bismarck’s entire career. If he had failed then, as he explained to the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, he could not have remained as minister. In this crucial confrontation, the ultimate fate of Germany rested on the mysterious power of Bismarck’s ‘sovereign self’ and on no other, not office, not command of armies, not prestige. The ‘shallow Junker’ of Treitschke exerted the force of that self on the King and it worked in August 1863 and continued to work until the day twenty-five years later that William I, by then German Emperor and King of Prussia, died. My explanation of how it worked may not convince the reader; that some mysterious personal power worked on the King cannot be denied. Had Bismarck resigned then because the King felt a duty to attend the Congress of Princes, the history of Germany and the world would have run a different course; that too cannot be denied.
On 29 August 1863 he wrote to Johanna that the King was besieged by ‘intrigue’ and added that
I wish that some sort of intrigue or other would install another mi
nistry, so that I could with honour turn my back on this uninterrupted stream of ink and withdraw to the quiet of the country. This restless life is unbearable. For ten weeks I have been doing nothing but secretarial service in a coaching inn.41
This too forms part of the emotional pattern. After the spiritual exertions to get the ‘old gentleman’ to bend to his will, he would feel irritable, exhausted, and depressed. The regularity of the pattern—emotional crisis with the King, terrible struggle, success followed by despair, resignation threats, or dreams of peace in the countryside—suggests that some deep psychic behaviour pattern had become established between the two men, one which was also to last until the King died in March 1888. The odd thing is that on each occasion the King really believed that Bismarck would retire and ‘leave’ him.
The Princes at Frankfurt had insisted on a reply from Prussia and on 1 September 1863 twenty-four kings and princes wrote to William I to ask him to join them in their project to reform the German Confederation. The King very correctly passed it to the State Ministry, which replied on 15 September 1863 with a list of conditions, of which the most insistent concerned reform of the system of representation. There must be
a true national assembly which emerges from direct participation of the entire nation. Only such a representative system will grant Prussia the security that it has nothing to sacrifice which will not benefit the whole of Germany. No artificially conceived organism for the Federal departments can exclude the move and counter-move of dynastic and particular interests, which must find a counterweight and corrective in a national assembly.42
The threat of universal suffrage for the German people finished the Austrian project. If the nation spoke, it would put an end to the power of the small states in the Bund and, in addition, universal suffrage in the Habsburg lands would empower the subject nationalities in their struggles for representation and autonomy. No Austrian government could accept universal suffrage in the nineteenth century and none did. Here again we see Bismarck’s tactical adroitness. By playing off people against princes, nationalities against the Habsburg monarchy, he put Prussia—that is, Bismarck—at the perfect point of leverage. If the princes cooperated, the people would threaten them less, if not, more.
He also used this technique in his sudden interest in the new working-class movement under the leadership of the charismatic and flamboyant Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64). The liberal bourgeoisie, the owners of capital and disciples of Adam Smith and believers in what the Germans called ‘Manchestertum’, caused Bismarck difficulties in the Prussian parliament. If the ‘nation’ could disarm the German princes, the organized working class could outflank the Liberal middle classes, a classic Bismarckian strategy of alternatives. Lassalle suited Bismarck because he had a flair for publicity and dramatic gestures like nobody else in Prussia. Herman Oncken in his biography of Lassalle sees the logic of the Bismarck–Lassalle alliance in the common enemy—the Progressive Party—with its doctrinaire commitment to free trade and Manchestertum. ‘What could be for Bismarck more desirable than if the Progressives lost mass support for the party especially in the lower strata of society … So the government found the movement [Lassalle’s socialists] not unwelcome on tactical grounds and even in principle was by no means opposed to all its points.’43
On 11 May 1863 Bismarck wrote to Lassalle, ‘In connection with current deliberations on working-class conditions and problems, I wish to obtain considered opinions from independent quarters. I would therefore be glad to have your views on these issues.’ The message was brought by an intermediary of Bismarck, Konrad Zitelmann, the writer (1814–89), who had instructions to arrange the meeting. Lassalle accepted and the first meeting took place within forty-eight hours.44 The next day a flattered Lassalle had been converted to Bismarck, as he wrote to a colleague: ‘Workers who allow themselves to be led astray by abuse and slanders of Bismarck, are not worth much. Such workers must be pretty dumb.’45 The new partnership between the Junker reactionary and the flamboyant Jewish agitator brought two of the most dramatic figures of the nineteenth-century together.
The story of Lassalle defies the imaginative powers of a common-or-garden historian to capture. George Meredith, the now forgotten novelist, as popular in his day as Trollope and Dickens, devoted one of his most successful novels to Lassalle’s story, The Tragic Commedians: A Study in a Well Known Story,46 but only concentrated on the mad love affair which ended in a fatal duel. According to Neil Roberts, ‘apart from one article on Lassalle, Meredith appears to have done no research on the subject.’47 Instead he used the memoir of the woman about whom the duel was fought, Helene von Racowitza, entitled Meine Beziehungen zu Ferdinand Lassalle. The novel contains, on the other hand, several speeches which appear verbatim in the respectable biographies of Lassalle, so Meredith may have concealed the extent of his use of historical sources.
The real story is much madder than Meredith’s Victorian comic temper imagined. Meredith concentrates on Lassalle’s infatuation with Helene, called Clotilde von Rüdiger, a 17-year-old coquette, and builds in the true story of Lassalle’s liaison with Sophie Countess von Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg (1805–81), mother of Bismarck’s ambassador Paul, and a woman twenty years older than Lassalle. The Lassalle character Alvan declares to Clothilde that his relationship with Sophie was not an affair. ‘As far as matters of the heart, we are poles apart.’48 Sophie, a Princess von Hatzfeldt-Trachtenburg by birth, had been forced to marry a descendant of the ‘count’ line of Hatzfeldts, Edmund Count von Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg, who abused and mistreated her.49 Out of the depths of his romantic soul the 23-year-old Ferdinand Lassalle absolutely quixotically decided to defend the honour of Countess Hatzfeldt, when he saw how her sadistic husband had imprisoned her. On 11 August 1848 Lassalle was charged at the Assize Court in Cologne with complicity in the theft from Count Hatzfeldt of a cash box. The theft gave Lassalle the pretext he needed to ‘try’ Count Hatzfeldt before the bar of public opinion. In this case and in thirty-six (!) subsequent trials and in his later career Lassalle used the defendant’s bench as an actor uses the stage to present his romantic personality and spread his ideas. He defended the honour of Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt before the court with romantic flair:
The family was silent, but we know that when men hold their peace, the stones will cry out. When every human right is outraged, when even the ties of kinship are silent and a helpless being is abandoned by its natural protectors, then the first and last relation of such a being has the right to rise in the person of another member of the human race.50
Lassalle then challenged Count Edmund to a duel, who ignored ‘this silly Jewish boy’.51 Lassalle went to jail, of course, which was part of the plot, but he won a moral victory when in 1854 the Count settled a very large sum on the Countess. Since Lassalle had paid the Countess’s expenses from his parental allowance, she in turn agreed by written consent to contract to pay him 4,000 thaler a year if he won.52 The two remained together as an odd couple. Lassalle had endless affairs which he discussed with Sophie and got her approval. Lassalle’s liaison with a grand German aristocrat had made him famous when in 1862 he and Lothar Bucher made a pilgrimage to London to see Marx. Marx wrote to Engels about it and explained that ‘to maintain a certain elegance, my wife had to take everything not nailed or welded down to the pawn shop … And so it was established that he [Lassalle—JS] is not only the greatest scholar, the deepest thinker, the most brilliant researcher etc but also Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu.’53 Does one catch the whiff of jealousy in Marx’s attitude to Lassalle?
Lassalle’s family, a modest bourgeois Jewish, commercial family, lost control of him as a teenager. He decided at the age of 14 that he had a great future:
I believe myself to be one of the best Jews in existence. Like the Jew in Bulwer’s Leila I could risk my life to rip the Jews out of their present depressing situation. I would not shun the scaffold, could I make them again a respected people. When I cling to my childish dreams, s
o my favourite idea is to place myself at their head and with weapon in hand to make the Jews independent.54
Instead of saving the Jews, he converted to Hegel and went to Berlin to study, where he wrote with characteristic megalomania, ‘here is no new phase for me. I have reached the highest level of the contemporary spirit and can develop within this framework only quantitatively.’55 Hegel had revealed all truth and had given him ‘everything: clarity, self-consciousness about content, the absolute powers of the human spirit, the objective substances of human morality’.56 He must have been an astonishing student if Alexander von Humboldt could call him a Wunderkind (wonder child).57
After a series of dramatic escapades during Italian unification and a close friendship with Garibaldi, Lassalle returned to Berlin in January 1862. There he met the socialist revolutionary Lothar Bucher (1817–1892) to discuss whether Germany could be transformed in a Garibaldian way. Bucher denied it:
All the measures you suggest are again only political and legal, one can say they stand on the old basis, and simply create more bourgeois. And these new relations of property, new through a change of persons, not, to use a metaphor, through a change in the chemical properties of property, can only be maintained through a ceaseless war, a terrorism of a tiny minority.58
Bismarck: A Life Page 27