Bismarck had explained to Leopold von Gerlach that one could not play chess if 16 out of the 64 squares were blocked in advance. Politics as the art of the possible required flexibility. Yet Bismarck’s own achievements made that flexibility harder to attain. Bismarck saw that clearly in the Peace of Prague in 1866. By rejecting the King’s wish for a victory parade in Vienna and by refusing to take Habsburg territory, Bismarck quite explicitly left the door open for an eventual reconciliation with the Habsburg Monarchy. In 1879 that reconciliation became an alliance. He equally explicitly, as we have seen, rejected a soft peace with France. He insisted as part of the peace on the annexation of the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Here even the Crown Princess, his enemy on most matters, backed the decision, as she wrote to Queen Victoria in December 1870:
About Alsace and Lorraine there is but one voice all over Germany, that if we do not keep them (or part of them), we shall be doing a wrong thing, as we shall be exposing ourselves to the same calamity as threatened us in July—being attacked and overrun by the French whenever it suits them, as our frontiers are too weak to keep them out.2
Whatever the motives that made Bismarck agree to the annexation of the two French territories, he could no longer play chess with all the squares open. Sixteen of the sixty-four had been blocked permanently: France would never ally with Germany as long the territories remained in German hands. France had one foreign policy—revenge—and one goal—the ‘lost’ territories. If Germany—so new, so fragile in Bismarck’s eyes—were to be protected from its enemies, it would need allies but which? England? Unlikely. The traditional English distrust of continental Europe, still present today in Euro-sceptic attitudes to the European Union, would make it at best a temporary collaborator but never a reliable ally. It followed that the only defence against French revenge must lie in the recreation of the Metternich coalition of conservative powers, a league of the Three Emperors—the Tsar, the Habsburg Emperor, and the new Hohenzollern Emperor—against democracy and revolution. In the 1870s he used his matchless skills to do that.
The second stage of Bismarck’s career differs from the first eight and a half years. Peace replaces war in international affairs. Liberalism takes the place of conservatism in domestic matters. Both in diplomacy and in domestic policies the plot thickens as the details of treaties and bureaucratic administration multiply and blur the clear narrative lines of the story. The traditional sources for study of Bismarck’s career reflect this division. The editors of the ‘New Friedrichsruh Edition’ of the collected works, which began publication in 2004, point out that in the nineteen volumes of the original Collected Works, published between 1924 and 1934, five volumes (2,860 pages) cover the eight years of the foundation of the Reich, while only one volume (449 pages) covers domestic policy during the two decades of his career after 1870. The editors of the original Collected Works declared in 1924 that they wished to build ‘a monument that Germany erects to the Founder of the Reich in the moment of its deepest humiliation’.3 Hence the omission of documents which showed Bismarck in unfavourable postures or acts.
The years 1871 to 1890 mark the decline of Bismarck’s political position. Not even he could run a modern state by himself and he would allow nobody to share it with him. Even his ‘combinations’ in international affairs could not hold back tides of nationalism and popular pressure on governments. The gigantic figure at war with all the forces of his age makes an arresting image but the actual stages remain complicated and not all developments move in the same way or direction. The narrative that this biography follows tries to highlight the contours of the years 1871 to 1890 by looking at the nineteen years in stages. The first period, the Liberal era leads to the struggle against the Roman Catholic Church and the final break between Bismarck and his Protestant conservative friends. In those years the ‘Great Depression’ begins in 1873 and worsens toward the end of the decade. That leads to a ‘great turn’ in 1878–9 when Bismarck drops his liberal allies, makes peace with Roman Catholic Church, attacks Socialism, and introduces welfare and social security. This chapter takes the story to the historic break in the late 1870s.
One of the forces he could not control was the voter. The very first elections to the Reichstag took place on 3 March 1871, when 51 per cent of the adult males eligible to vote went to the polls. 18.6 per cent of them voted for the Centre Party which with its 63 seats became at a stroke the second strongest party in the chamber. By 1874 it would grow to ninety plus representatives, a solid, anti-Bismarckian block. Of the 382 deputies, 202 could be called Liberal, though there were several Liberal parties. The National Liberal Party with 100 seats and 30.2 per cent of the vote became the largest party. The Conservatives divided 23 per cent of the vote between the old Kreuzzeitung Party with 14.1 per cent and the smaller pro-Bismarckian German Reich Party with 8.9 per cent.4 Among the 37 Reich Party members were Robert Lucius von Ballhausen, elected as a Reich Party Conservative for Erfurt, and Bismarck’s staff member Robert von Keudell elected for Königsberg-Neumark, who on election also joined the Reich Party. On hearing the news of his election Bismarck told Keudell: ‘I do not care which fraction you go into; I know that when you can you will vote for me.’5 At the height of his power and fame, Bismarck’s endorsement only garnered 8.9 per cent of the vote. In all the elections between 1871 and 1890 the Bismarckian party only once managed to achieve double figures and that in the panic election of 1878 when the it won 13.6 per cent of the vote and gained 56 seats. Thereafter it declined steadily and in the election of February 1890, a month before Bismarck fell from power, it only won 20 seats or 6.6 per cent of the vote. Not exactly a monument to the Reich’s founder from the German voter.
The other crisis in this phase of Bismarck’s career had begun even before the Franco-Prussian war finished. The Prussian victory at Sedan not only destroyed the Empire of Napoleon III but allowed the Kingdom of Italy to seize Rome on 22 September 1870. The new French Republic had withdrawn the French garrison stationed there since 1849 and maintained by Napoleon III as a gesture to his own Catholic supporters. Bismarck’s third war indirectly ended the sovereignty of the Roman pontiff over the eternal city, a sovereignty which had lasted from the fall of Rome. The loss of temporal power coincided with the greatest ever public extension of papal spiritual power in the declaration of Infallibility promulgated in July 1870 at the first Vatican Council. The Crown Prince had noted the connection in his war diary on 22 September 1870:
The most important news I heard today was that the troops of the King of Italy have occupied Rome. So at last the Roman Question is done with … The miserable regime of priestly domination is at an end and once more the triumph of German arms has done the Italians a good service … The occupation of Rome within a few weeks of the publication of the dogma of Infallibility is a strange irony of Fate.6
The connection made it certain that the Vatican and the new Prussian, Protestant Reich would collide. Even before the election of the first Reichstag, on 18 February 1871, the Centre Party in the Prussian lower house sent a message to the Emperor asking for his support in the restoration of the ‘temporal power’, as Papal sovereignty in Rome was called. The Emperor replied indirectly in the Speech from the Throne when he declared that the German state would not intervene in the affairs of others, a sentiment reinforced by the Address in Reply adopted by the Landtag. Only the Centre voted against it.7 During a vigorous debate in the new Reichstag in early April 1871, the majority rejected by 223 to 59 a Centre motion to enshrine in the new Reich constitution six articles from the Prussian constitution on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, of assembly, of religious belief, of science, and the autonomy of religious institutions.8 The majority Liberals allowed anti-Catholicism to trump their liberal principles, though there was something odd about the party of the Church militant in its most assertive phase asking for freedoms in Germany not accorded by the Vatican to faithful Catholics and actually condemned in the Syllabus of Errors.
Bismarck re
acted very strongly. In a confidential dispatch to Georg Freiherr von Werthern (1816–95), Prussian minister in Munich, he wrote that the debate showed ‘a hostile tendency to the Reich government … which will be forced for its part to act with aggression against the Party’.9 Margaret Lavinia Anderson comments on Bismarck’s violent reaction that ‘for Bismarck with his nervous sense of the fragility of his new creation, the Zentrum was by definition subversive … too powerful to be left autonomous … Bismarck struck at what for him was the root of its power, the Catholic Church, launching what Heinrich Bornkamm has aptly called “a domestic preventive war for ensuring the empire”.’10 Thus began what came to be called the ‘War over Culture’ or Kulturkampf.
Bismarck’s aggression against the Centre had the effect of strengthening it. Margaret Lavinia Anderson has analysed the voting patterns in those districts from which Centre deputies came and found that of the 397 seats in the Reichstag 104 were Stammsitze (trunk or solid seats, i.e. safe) and seldom changed hands. The Centre voters concentrated in certain areas of the 104 such districts and thus 73 of the Centre’s deputies represented safe seats. Hence the core of the party never changed over the rest of Bismarck’s period in office. Between 1874 and 1890 76 per cent of the party’s seats were solidly safe. This made sure that the aristocratic founders continued to hold sway and there was no influx of new elements. The grand gentlemen of the party tended to be less obedient to the parish priests and bishops than the lesser flock. If Bismarck had been more subtle, he might have gradually pried the party apart from the hierarchy. His aggression solidified those bands. Unless he abolished universal suffrage or revoked the constitution, he could not win the battle against the Catholic Centre Party and the Roman Catholic population in the new, much more Catholic, unified Germany.
The new Italian Kingdom had expropriated cloisters and church property and seized papal palaces on the Quirinale. The Pope was once again a prisoner as in 1809 Pius VII had been. The temporal power was abolished and Pope Pius IX went into inner exile. The great gates of the Vatican closed in mourning. The new Italian parliament in 1871 passed the Law of Guarantees as a gesture of good will and offered a large monetary compensation for the loss of the Vatican’s property. Pius IX’s reaction was an encyclical UBI NOS (On Pontifical States) promulgated on 15 May 1871. In it, the Pope rejected all relations with the godless Italian state and the struggle intensified in the 1870s. Crown Prince Frederick was wrong. The Roman Question was not over; it had just become much, much worse. The dissidio (dispute) on the Roman question poisoned church–state relations in Italy for fifty years. In 1874 the Pope declared it non-expedit (not desirable) for devout Catholics to take any part in the government of the Kingdom of Italy. In 1877 the decree was strengthened to non-licet; it was now not allowed for a Catholic to serve the blasphemous kingdom in any capacity, even to vote in its elections.
The Liberal State rejected everything that Pius IX represented. It proclaimed its commitment to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, separation of church and state, tolerance of all religious beliefs and none, freedom of scientific inquiry, Darwinian evolutionary theory (Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and was an instant best-seller), secular education, civil marriage, and civil divorce. During the 1870s, in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Austria, the state defended these values against the Roman Catholic Church and its priests. It was the holy war of liberalism against the Black International of Catholicism. Bishops and priests were arrested or expelled from countries, even in democratic Switzerland.
Bismarck, as usual, followed two policies, one an aggressive and punishing reaction to the Catholic Centre Party, and the other caution and moderation in dealing with the Vatican. On 1 May 1871 he wrote to Joseph Count von Brassier de Saint Simon, the German ambassador in Florence (where the interim Royal Italian capital still was before the final move to Rome), to ask him to warn the Italian government that its acts would affect
not only its own parties and its own parliament in its own land but it must reckon with the Catholic Church outside its own borders and for those Powers who are friendly to it. Clever and tactful behaviour especially with respect to a magnanimous consideration of the person of the Pope, will make it possible to preserve the existing friendly relations without offending the feeling of their Catholic subjects.11
Bismarck showed here that subtle and tactful side of his diplomacy, as he tried to insert a wedge between the German Catholic political party and the faithful by being harsh to the former and considerate to the latter, the Holy See. The Kulturkampf arose everywhere as a problem of international relations, national solidarity, and domestic policy. In any country with a substantial Catholic population, what sort of schools, what sort of hospitals (nurses or nuns?), what sort of poor relief, what marriage ceremony and divorce provisions, what charitable status for churches and convents, in short, the whole apparatus of daily life for the Catholic faithful became the subject of intense debate. The Roman Church and all its traditional pastoral and ecclesiastical activities challenged the growing power, competence, and intrusiveness of the modern state. The Kulturkampf represented the most serious challenge to Bismarck’s authority during the rest of his career, and it is a rich irony that the reconciliation between Bismarck and Windthorst in March 1890 led to his dismissal.
During June of 1871 Bismarck’s irritation with the Centre Party hardened and he became particularly annoyed at Adalbert von Krätzig (1819–87), head of the Catholic section of the Prussian Kultusministerium (its full title was the Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs). He told Hohenlohe on 19 June that he intended ‘to expel the Krätzig clique’ from the government because they protected too strongly Polish interests.12 A few days later in Upper Silesian Königshütte, a Polish riot occurred which gave Bismarck what he needed to blame Krätzig. On 8 July 1871 the Catholic Section was dissolved and Krätzig assigned to minor duties.
In the meantime the press campaign—undoubtedly orchestrated by Bismarck—began in earnest when on 22 June 1871 a Kreuzzeitung article called ‘Centre Party’ attacked it as unpatriotic and declared that a new chapter in the struggle of ‘Germanism’ against ‘Romanism’ had begun.13 Father Karl Jentsch (1833–1917), a priest and social activist,14 wrote about life under the Kulturkampf:
Every day the Catholic had to read in Käseblattchen [low level newspapers] as well as in the great newspapers that he was an enemy of the Fatherland, a little papist, a block-head and that his clergy were the scum of humanity. So he founded his own newspapers which at least did not insult him every day.15
Bismarck bombarded his envoy in Rome, Karl Count von Tauffkirchen-Guttenberg, (1826–95) the Bavarian minister to the Holy See, who acted for the Prussians, with letters in which the Pope and Cardinal Antonelli were reminded that the collaboration of the ‘black’ and ‘red’ parties stirred up the population in many districts. Such agitation called into question the Pope’s opposition to radicalism or his professions of good will to the German Reich. On 30 June 1871 he warned Tauffkirchen that
We see in the behaviour of this party a danger for the Church and the Pope … The aggressive tendencies of the party which controls the Church forces us to resist, in which case we shall seek our defence … If the Vatican decides to break with this party so hostile to the government and to prevent its attacks on us, that would be welcome. If it cannot or will not do that, we reject all responsibility for the consequences.16
Bismarck now had to deal with one of the survivors of the ‘Conflict Ministry’, his Kultusminister, Heinrich von Mühler, a strict, orthodox, Lutheran, conservative. Bismarck, who normally avoided face-to-face confrontation with his subordinates, finally went to see von Mühler in the summer of 1871 and we have von Mühler’s notes on what he said:
He revealed to me without ambiguity his entire game and his system, which he could no longer conceal from me. His goals were: battle with the ultramontane party, in particular in the Polish territories West Prussia, Posen
and Upper Silesia—Separation of church and state, separation of church and school completely. Transfer of school inspection to lay inspectors. Removal of religious instruction from the schools, not only from gymnasia but also from the primary school. … ‘I know how the Kaiser stands on these matters but if you don’t stir him up, I shall lead him nevertheless where I want’. Bismarck described the clash between us—outwardly once more in a calmer tone—quite rightly with the words. ‘You deal with things from the religious perspective, I on the other hand from the political’.17
Bismarck: A Life Page 43