Even greater events happened in 1870. On 8 December 1869 the Vatican Council began its sessions. In Session IV of 18 July 1870, the First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ was promulgated. Chapter 4 was called ‘On the infallible teaching authority of the Roman pontiff’ and stated:
We teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when,
1. in the exercise of His office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians,
2. in virtue of His supreme Apostolic Authority,
3. He defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, He possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.60
The reaction to the new doctrine was violent both within and without the Roman Church. Many Catholics were simply unable to accept Infallibility as a binding article of faith. They split from Rome and founded the Old Catholic Movement.
On 8 July 1868 the first Württemberg election with universal manhood suffrage brought the Democratic People’s Party and Greater German Club, both of which opposed membership in the North German Federation, an overwhelming victory.61 As the development toward unity stalled, dissatisfaction mounted about Bismarck’s tactics. Roggenbach reported to Queen Augusta from Berlin in the summer of 1869 where he had gone to attend the Zollparlament that ‘it is an open secret that Count Bismarck has not only fallen ill physically again under the pressure of all the embarrassments, but in fact no longer knows how to redirect the confusion that emerges from the chaos of the institutions.’62
‘Chaos of the institutions’ described the situation in the Prussian State Ministry very well. For months Bismarck had pressed his colleague Eulenburg to complete the rearrangement of the county structure for the new, expanded Prussia, and nothing had happened. Bismarck blamed Eulenburg because his frequent illnesses had held up the work—a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In a letter of 19 January 1869 he complained to Eulenburg,
I am not annoyed with you … I am annoyed with your colleagues in the Ministry … For four weeks nothing whatever has happened, and had I not intervened by today again nothing would have happened … You have at the top an absolute zero, and in my view it is your duty to take care that when you are ill or on leave the state does not suffer under your substitutes.63
Exasperation with subordinates coincided with a row with the King over the personnel of the Prussian State Ministry which Bismarck could neither name nor dismiss without the King’s agreement. They were, after all, the King’s ministers not Bismarck’s. There had also been a battle over the reparations to be paid by the city of Frankfurt. Bismarck insisted on 3 million marks, which the Queen thought much too high and William had agreed with her: 2 million would be quite enough. Finally the Usedoms had reappeared in Bismarck’s sleepless nights. Usedom had been sent as Prussian ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy and Bismarck wanted him dismissed.64
Bismarck sent in his letter of resignation on 22 February 1869 because an ambassador in Italy had been slack, because the county reorganization plan had been moving too slowly, and because the King and Queen had wished to extract a smaller reparation from the city of Frankfurt. The man who had changed the history of Europe submitted his resignation over absurd, trifling, and insignificant issues. How can one explain this or the fact that over the next eleven years this comedy repeated itself, often over matters even more trifling? The King entirely properly replied:
I repeat there is but one single difference, that concerning Frankfurt-on-the-Main. The Usedomiana I discussed exclusively yesterday in writing, according to your wish; the House affair will adjust itself; we were agreed on the filling of appointments, but the individuals are not willing! What reason is there then for going to the extreme?65
On the date he submitted his resignation Bismarck told Roon that ‘I am at the end of my capacities and cannot hold out spiritually in the battles against the King.’66 But what battles? The King expressed his respect and affection in effusive terms:
How can you imagine that I could even think of acceding to your idea! It is my greatest happiness (underline twice in the original) to live with you and to thoroughly agree with you! How can you be so hypochondriac as to allow one single difference to mislead you into taking the extreme step! You wrote me from Varzin at the time of the difference in the matter of making up the deficit, that you were indeed of another opinion than I, but that when you entered your post you regarded it as your duty when you had, as in duty bound, expressed your opinion, always to conform to my decisions. What, then, has so utterly changed the opinions you so nobly expressed 3 months ago? Your name stands higher in Prussian history that that of any other Prussian statesman. And I am to let that man go? Never. Quiet and prayer (twice underlined in the original) will adjust everything. Your most faithful friend (underlined three times) W.67
Roon too wrote to Bismarck to plead with him not to send the resignation letter:
Since I left you yesterday evening, my honoured friend, I have been continually occupied about you and your resolution. It leaves me no rest; I must once more appeal to you to word your letter in such a manner that a reconciliation may be possible. Perhaps you have not yet sent it and can still alter it. Just reflect that the almost tender note received yesterday lays claim to veracity, even if not fully justified. It is so written and claims not to be regarded as false coin, but as genuine and of full value … in view of the rank of the writer, perhaps even he cannot confess: ‘I, I have done very wrong and will amend.’68
What did Bismarck want the King to do that he had not done? Is it farfetched or absurd to suggest that he wanted the King to express his love and affection and then, like an unhappy child, the hurt could be ‘kissed away’? The King’s letter goes well beyond what Roon calls ‘the almost tender note’. It says that it is the King’s ‘greatest happiness to live with you and to thoroughly agree with you! How can you be so hypochondriac as to allow one single difference to mislead you …’ It is not quite certain what William I meant by ‘hypochondriac’ in the next phrase but it would not be incorrect to call Bismarck’s difficulties, both personally and politically, utterly imaginary, hence hypochondriac. It made little difference whether the county reorganization bill came out of the ministry a month late or whether Frankfurt paid two million or three or whether Usedom stayed in Italy or not. This is the Bismarck who had transformed the map of Europe and the history of Germany in four years and who in 1870 would engineer the destruction of the Napoleonic Empire. This giant could not sleep because the King refused to sack Guido von Usedom.
General von Stosch picked up the inside information, as he revealed in a letter to Gustav Freytag, about the dismissal of Usedom and the resignation crisis:
Usedom wrote to the King to say that at his last audience the King had been so gracious to him that he could not believe that he had been recalled. The King, furious that Bismarck dismissed an ambassador without consulting him, ordered him to stay and Bismarck got a black eye. Naturally Bismarck turned this adroitly to his advantage and clouted Usedom with it. New outrage and Bismarck submits his resignation. Thereafter Usedom fell anyway but without telling Bismarck the King gave him a decoration and offered him Olfers post.
The Stosch correspondence reveals an important truth about Bismarck. Stosch had himself been badly treated and humiliated by Bismarck. He opposed many of his policies. He became a favourite of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. Bismarck considered him an ‘enemy’. In spite of the damning evidence, which Bismarck assiduously collected on him, Stosch never wavered in his support for Bismarck. The letter just quoted ends with this sentence: ‘Without Bismarck, we cannot make progress to a Reich.’69
And progress was being made. Delbrück’s office churned out bills to unify and liberalize the new state. On 21 June 1869, the Reichstag passed a new law on freedom of trades and crafts, a
very contentious issue, because it broke the historic guild restrictions on the practice of a trade, an evil which Adam Smith had condemned in The Wealth of Nations. On 3 July 1869 the North German Confederation granted full emancipation to the Jews: ‘All existing restrictions on civil and national rights which arise from the diversity of religious confessions are hereby lifted.’70 On 11 July 1869 a new Public Company’s Act removed the requirement to get permission from the government to issue shares; in effect the new law made it possible to found and float new limited liability corporations. That the government of a notorious reactionary had introduced these liberal measures astonished public opinion.
By August 1869 Bismarck had reached such a state of rage and hypochondria that he again threatened to resign, as he wrote to von Roon on 29 August 1869:
I am sick to death and have gall bladder problems … I have not slept for 36 hours and spent the entire night throwing up. My head feels like a glowing oven in spite of cold compresses. I fear that I am about to lose my mind. Forgive my agitation. … If the cart on which we ride should be smashed up, at least I shall have held myself apart from a share of the guilt. Fortunately it is a Sunday, because I fear otherwise that I would have done myself some bodily harm to let out my fury. We may have both become too angry to be able to row the galley any further.71
This insane outburst arose because the Cabinet refused to appoint Bismarck’s choice as new North German postal director, a Hanoverian called Helding, a man so obscure that his name appears in neither of the two great German dictionaries of national biography. Ministers objected to the fact that he had not served the necessary three years in Prussian service. By contrast Bismarck wanted to create a Reich civil service open to all without petty restrictions, and was right to be annoyed, but in the disproportion between cause and consequence, there is something seriously deranged. How Bismarck survived these bouts of near madness remains a puzzle; how contemporaries who suffered under them did so is no less remarkable.
His behaviour distressed Albrecht von Roon and Moritz von Blanckenburg. On 16 January 1870 Roon wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that
Bismarck treats business, even the Prussian, more or less as he did years ago. He is in cabinet meetings lively, speaks almost all the time and falls into the old error that through intellectual liveliness and personal charm he can overcome all the difficulties in the way. He will flirt with the National Liberals and ignore old friends and political comrades. He believes that he can win everybody over by diplomatic dialectic and human cleverness and to be able to lead them by spreading bait. He talks conservative to the conservatives and liberal to the liberals and reveals in this either so sovereign a contempt for his entourage or such incredible illusions that it makes me shudder. He wants to remain in office at any cost, for the present and the future, because he feels that the structure he has begun will collapse, making him a laughing stock to the world, as soon as he takes his hand away. That is not entirely incorrect but the means to that end! Are they sanctified for his sake?72
Moritz replied five days later:
What you write about B does not surprise me. That he will not make good the mistakes he has made in his treatment of the conservatives, I know well since [my visit to] Varzin, that he is of the opinion that the progressive unification of Germany requires that we become ever more liberal—that he says right out—admittedly he also maintains that every liberal who by holding office comes nearer to the king, also become eo ipso a more conservative person.73
Bismarck had annoyed the only two really close friends he had left in the political world. He had already broken with ‘little Hans’, Ludwig von Gerlach, Alexander von Below, and most of his close associates in the Junker establishment. From now on, in addition to the recurring bouts of illness, rage, sleeplessness, and indigestion, he would suffer from an almost intolerable loneliness.
While Bismarck made himself sick about the appointment of a postmaster general, an important event occurred in Spain that gave him a chance to transform European history again: the crisis over the ‘Hohenzollern Candidature’, as it is known. In September 1868, a junta of generals in Spain overthrew the monarchy of Queen Isabella II, herself the beneficiary of a similar pronunciamiento by an equally determined clique of generals in 1843. On 27 March 1869 the Earl of Clarendon, British Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador in Paris, ‘The chaotic state of that Country renders it contemptible at present … there has been evidence already that Bismarck has an eye on Spain as an auxiliary.’74 Clarendon, who had been British minister during the Carlist War of 1831 to 1837, spoke good Spanish and knew the country well. He was right about Bismarck but could not have known at that stage how right. As early as 3 October 1868 Bismarck issued instructions to the German Foreign Office, ‘It is in our interest if the Spanish question remains open … and a solution agreeable to Napoleon is unlikely to be useful for us.’75 The most important of the Generals was ‘the powerful, ambitious and imperturbable President of the Council, Marshall Juan Prim’.76 In October 1868 Prim convinced his colleagues in the Council that they needed to find a suitable prince to replace the Queen and for the next year agents of the Spanish government approached a variety of French, Portuguese, and Italian royal princes without success. In the spring of 1869 the Generals settled on Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a member of the Catholic, south German branch of the Prussian royal family and on his mother’s side a relative of the Bonaparte dynasty.
In December 1868 Bismarck sent the Prince of Putbus and Colonel von Strantz as envoys to Madrid to assess the political situation and in May 1869 he dispatched the well-known military journalist and commentator, Theodor von Bernhardi, as well.77 On 8 May Count Vincent Benedetti approached Bismarck to ask if the rumours of such a candidacy were correct and three days later Bismarck confirmed that they were correct but that Prince Karl Anton, head of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen branch, had refused the project.78 Karl Anton, who had been Prime Minister of the New Era Government of 1858, quite rightly worried, as he wrote to Bismarck, that ‘a Hohenzoller in Spain would give rise to a wild outcry in anti-Prussian Europe and either precipitate or defer the solution of many pending questions.’79 That was precisely its attraction for Bismarck. He knew he needed a crisis with France and possibly even a war to overcome the resistance of the southern German states to a final unification under Prussian leadership.
Whether Bismarck wanted war from the beginning of the episode became a matter of high politics from 1870 onward. After 1918 the question of the ‘guilt’ of Imperial Germany for the First World War became itself the justification for the harsh peace imposed on Germany in 1919–20, and, as a result, the details of Bismarck’s machinations in 1870 became a secret of the highest order. On 1 December 1921 Gustav Stresemann, the most important advocate of the politics of cooperation with the Allied Powers in spite of Versailles, cited Bismarck in his address to the right-wing German People’s Party at their party conference:
I ask you to go back in German history, to consider the greatest statesman the world had in the nineteenth century, Bismarck. Were his politics anything other than the politics of compromise?80
Bismarck had to be protected from the charge of reckless belligerence and put into the service of post-1919 politics by both Left and Right. After 1945 West German historiography defended the monarchy against all comers, but the complete defeat of Germany in May 1945 had allowed compromising documents to fall into the hands of the Allies. That made conservative historians in Germany even more defensive. In 1973 S. William Halperin, an American, surveyed the literature and the debate over Bismarck’s ‘war guilt’ and concluded that ‘complications with France were precisely what he was looking for’81 but that did not mean that he planned to use the outcry, which Prince Karl Anton rightly predicted, as a pretext to go to war. Bismarck never closed off any option in advance.
In February 1870 Bismarck briefed Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Count von Waldersee (1832–1904) on his appointment as mi
litary attaché at the German Embassy in Paris. Waldersee, from a distinguished Anhalt military family, grew up in Prussian service. His father had been a general and Minister of War. Waldersee stood out, along with his contemporary Albrecht von Stosch, as ferociously ambitious and political. He also like Stosch kept a diary and collected his correspondence. By 1866 he had become an adjutant to the King and had excellent connections. In the interview, according to Waldersee’s diary, Bismarck warned him to avoid legitimist circles and ‘too hasty judgements … The political situation is one of an idyllic peace. Nobody can know how long that will last. The French have so much to do domestically that they have no time to think about foreign affairs.’82 At this stage, 6 February 1870, Bismarck assumed that peace would continue for a while, as did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, who had written to the British Ambassador in Madrid in the same vein a few months earlier:
Happily, there is no longer question, as in former times, of attempts on the part of Foreign Powers to turn to their own advantage the variations of Spanish politics. There is no desire on the part of any of them to disturb the Balance of Power in Europe by seeking to acquire dynastic influence in Spain or to aggrandize their dominion at her expense.83
The Hohenzollern candidature became a casus belli not least because Marshall Prim refused to take no for an answer and dismissed the likely response of Paris. On 17 February 1870 Prim wrote to Bismarck to say that that he ‘deemed it more seemly and more expedient at the beginning to make an entirely confidential approach’.84 A week later, Eusebio de Salazar arrived at Karl Anton’s residence in Düsseldorf with formal letters for Prince Leopold, King William, and Bismarck in which an offer of the Crown of Spain was at last made, subject, of course, to approval by the Cortes. Karl Anton, although momentarily dazzled by the prospect that his son would found ‘a dynasty such as that has not been known to history since Charles V’, recognized that his son required formal permission from the head of the dynasty, King William I, and the support of Bismarck before he could give his own consent.85 The King opposed the idea but Bismarck had got round such opposition before. On 12 March 1870 the Crown Princess wrote to Queen Victoria, ‘General Prim has sent a Spaniard here with several autograph letters from himself to Leopold Hohenzollern, urging him most urgently to accept Spain … Neither the King, nor Prince Hohenzollern, nor Antoinette [Princess Leopold—JS], nor Leopold, nor Fritz are in favour of the idea …’86
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