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BISMARCK
In 1871 it was clear that an alliance with the National
Liberals was essential, not merely because they were the
strongest party, but because they were the one party ready
to work with Bismarck in making the formal unity of the
new Empire a working and living reality. The ability,
knowledge, and enthusiasm of the serried ranks that
followed Bennigsen made their co-operation indispensable.
From 1871 to 1878 Bismarck therefore worked through the
National Liberals, aided by one-half of the Conservatives
--the Free Conservatives, who supported the government
on principle--and the varying support of the Prussian and
South German Radical parties. By this coalition the
Chancellor had a good working majority with which the
Centre, the. Poles, the Guelphs, and other odds and ends
could be decisively beaten. But the alliance was from
the first a precarious mariage de convenanee. Bismarck was
not, and never desired to be, a National Liberal. But so
long as the National Liberal crew were content to man the
ship of State and to work at improving the engines, while
the Chancellor stood on the bridge and directed the navi-
gation, it was the most effective way for steering through
the uncharted home waters.
The progress was rapid, allowing for the complexity of
the difficulties. A common imperial currency was estab-
lished (1871); an Imperial Bank was set up (1873), and
the Banking Law revised and placed on a common statu-
tory basis for the whole Empire; the organisation of the
Imperial Post Office was reformed and extended by
Stephan with great success; an Imperial Railway Office to
co-ordinate the working of the railways (1873) was set up;
an elaborate code of Trade Law (Gnoerbeordnung) was
enacted in 1870, as was also a new code of civil and criminal
procedure; the criminal law was codified (1877), and a
supreme Court of Appeal for the whole Empire established
at Leipzig; a civil code (Burgerliches Gesetzbuch) was taken
in hand, and when it finally came into force in 1900 was
a monument of scientific jurisprudence of which its
authors had every reason to be proud. In 1874 the system
of military jurisprudence and of procedure in the military
courts was also codified.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
The driving force in these measures was National Liberal-
ism, though their success was partly due to the zeal and
efficiency of the civil service. The result was to give
Germany, what she had never had even in the palmiest days
of the mediaeval Empire and the mighty Hohenstaufen,
a uniform system of law, currency, communications, and
military defence, crowned by a single imperial ruler, con-
trolling a highly educated and organised civil service, and
governing a nation represented by universal manhood
suffrage in a unitary Reichstag. The cumulative effect of
the devoted toil, mainly in the Committees of the Reichs-
tag, on the conception and manifestation of the State as
Power cannot be exaggerated, and can be traced in the
debates, and in the speculative treatment of political
philosophy by the universities and the professoriate. The
theory of the State laid down in such works as Treitschke's
Politik is simply an exposition in a philosophical form of
the facts that Treitschke had lived through and saw
developing fresh activities all round him--an exposition
erected into a system of thought by deducing from the
facts principles held to be inherent in the successive mani-
festations of spirit through the realities of Germany's
political life. Treitschke and his school did not anticipate
Bismarck and Bismarckianism. They harmonised the
practical policy of the Chancellor with a philosophical
explanation drawn from that policy and fitted together to
justify and rationalise the experience of the 'average
sensual German '--and from the acts of Bismarck and the
Bismarckian State they built up a creed, treated as a series
of principles of an universal validity.
The formative influence of this unifying organisation of
a common purpose and a nation's power--intellectual,
moral, economic--on Bismarck's conception of Central
Europe and a system of international State relations for
the Continent, can be traced in many directions in his
foreign policy. The whole conception of centralism,
based on Berlin, acquired a new content and outlook with
the increasing organisation of German Power. If any
man had reason to be grateful to the National Liberals
that man was Bismarck, for the result of their efforts was
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BISMARCK
to place in the Chancellor's hands a unity of authority and
force, over which the Reichstag had little or no control.
Without the National Liberals the Empire could neither
have been made nor developed, nor could Prussian Parti-
cularism, the Centre, and Social Democracy have been
kept in check.
In the alliance of the National Liberals with the govern-
ment there were frequently difficulties and hitches.
Bismarck's scheme for acquiring all the railways for the
Imperial State was decisively defeated. The establish-
ment of the Supreme Court at Leipzig, and not in the
capital, was against his wishes, and was a deliberate step to
remove the highest judicial authority from the pressure of
the government. It is one of the few clear instances when
the Federal Council defeated the Chancellor. The pro-
posal in 1874 permanently to establish the strength of the
army and to remove from supervision the annual financial
votes was defeated in the Reichstag on the ground that it
seriously diminished the right of the legislature annually
to determine the Budget. The Emperor could not under-
stand why the army should not be made as independent
of the Parliament as the judiciary, but the Reichstag
saw that if it surrendered its power to determine the
number of men required and the cost of maintaining them,
it might as well take a permanent holiday. It looked as if
the constitutional conflict of 1862 was to be revived, and
that in the middle of the Kulturkampf--for the General
Staff with Moltke at their head were furious at the rebuff
and very insistent. Bennigsen and the National Liberals
saved the situation by a compromise, which granted the
government's demands for seven years, when the system
would come up for a fresh revision. Thus originated the
'Septennates. ' As a matter of fact, the government won.
The septennial revisions provided full-dress debates and
much criticism from the Left. But to all intents the
Reichstag might have agreed in 1874 to a permanent
establishment. The relics of right reserved in the com-
promise adopted only revealed more tellingly the naked
impotence of the Reichstag to bring either the strength,
or the cost, or the character of the army under national
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
control. Gneist, who had been one of the constitutional
opposition in 1862, now calmly admitted that 'annual
revision of the Army Budget was incompatible with the
principles of conscription. ' But had Bennigsen and his
colleagues fought the issue to the bitter end Germany
would have had a more violent constitutional controversy
than Prussia had faced in 1862, one which might in 1874
have shattered the fabric of imperial unity. It was the
votes of National Liberalism that defeated the Centre, the
Progressives, and the Radicals. The party that in 1862
had fought the Crown and failed, now aided the Crown
and disarmed itself.
The National Liberals were in more ways than one
steadily building the tomb of their once powerful party.
The strength they thrust into Bismarck's hands was before
long to be used to destroy them. Bismarck chafed under
the alliance; but the Conservatives raged. The military
chiefs who looked to E. von Manteuffel, the Court Liberals
who clustered round the Crown Prince, and regarded
General von Stosch as a substitute for Bismarck, derided the
Chancellor's failures to coerce the Reichstag. The powerful
agrarians from the centre and east of Prussia, to whom the
Empire was only useful if it meant a Prussianised Empire
with themselves in command, regarded Bismarck as a rene-
gade who betrayed the interest of the governing class by
truckling to middle-class Liberals. Roon had a hard time
between his devotion to the old friend, his own dislike of
this 'truckling to' parliamentarism, and the anger of the
Conservative party with which he sympathised. When the
Prussian government so far forgot itself as to introduce into
the system of local government in Prussia the principles of
representation, and to lay profane hands on the sacred
right of Junkertum to govern the country districts, the
Upper Chamber of the Landtag threw the measure out.
The Crown accepted the challenge. Opposition from the
Conservatives to the will of the sovereign was an intoler-
able defiance, and the creation of peers to ensure the passing
of the measure brought the ' rebels' to heel. The Em-
peror was very angry and spoke plainly. But the ' rebels,'
unable to touch the sovereign, and smarting under the
b. u
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BISMARCK
prerogative that they professed to regard a< the one sound
institution of the State, turned on the Chancellor. The
Kulturkampf gave them their chance, and a solemn pro-
nunciamento--the Declaranten as they called themselves--
signed by names such as Gerlach, Senfft-Pilsach, Kleist-
Retzow and Blanckenburg, the men and the friends with
whom Bismarck had grown up at SchSnhausen, Kniephof,
and Varzin, declared their public reprobation of the Chan-
cellor's policy, and publicly withdrew their support from the
government of which he was the chief. The quarrel was
embittered by Lasker's exposure of corruption in railway
concessions in which blue-blooded Junkers were involved,
and which led to the resignation of Graf Itzenplitz, the
Minister of Commerce. The 'Arnim process' was also
provoking a violent controversy in the press. The Conser-
vative party split up, and the press of the Reichsglocke and
the Kreuzzeitung rang with the recriminations of the old
Conservatives, the 'monarchical-national' party, 'the
Free' Conservatives, and 'the German' Conservatives.
Bismarck himself hit out freely in debate, and his henchmen
replied with scurrility to scurrility under his inspiration.
The unsavoury episode, however, only emphasised the
Chancellor's unique position. The Emperor had further
signalised his appreciation of unique services by the gift in
1871 to the new Prince of a princely estate--Friedrichsruhe
--in the duchy of Lauenburg, near Hamburg; and the
development of this noble demesne, together with the
management of Varzin, was a fresh interest to the Chan-
cellor worn out by the labours of the nine preceding years.
The only peace that he loved, the peace of a vast country-
side, studded with oak and beech, and fretted with clear
streams, by whose pastures the cattle browsed, and where
the smoke, din, and pettiness of the crowded dirty town,
the hollow shams and splendour of courts and princes, and
the prison-house of parliament and politicians, could be
forgotten--that peace he found at Varzin and at Friedrichs-
ruhe. 'When my political acts have long been forgotten,'
he said, pointing to an avenue he had planted,' these trees
will be here to tell the world that I once existed. '
Nature was not cursed with ingratitude or jealousy: she
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 307
was lavish of her bounty to all who would toil with her--
and she was free. No devilish diplomatists could wash
the blue from the sky, falsify the inspiration of the dawn,
or rob the night of its stars. Bismarck went back and slept
in the room at SchOnhausen where he had slept as a boy
and dreamed of his life to come. SchSnhausen--Kniephof
--Varzin--Friedrichsruhe, to what an avenue of acts
planted by himself and now attaining their maturity and
splendour in the passage of the relentless years, did not
these homes of Bismarck bear witness. Varzin, in parti-
cular, was associated with his wife; they had made it
together in the period that preceded and followed the
triumphs of the Franco-German War. It says much to
those who would penetrate the depths and weaknesses in
that passionately human but lonely heart, that dearly as
he loved Varzin, the Iron Chancellor could not face its
memories and its desolate hearth after the Princess's death
in 1894. It was at Varzin that his wife was buried--until
she was brought to share his grave at Friedrichsruhe.
Rest was essential. In 1871 and 1872 the Chancellor
was repeatedly absent from Berlin; in 1873 he resigned the
Minister-Presidency of Prussia to Roon and retired to
Varzin for ten months. But the experiment was not a
success. Roon, in his fierce old age, could not convert him-
self into a supple parliamentary hand, and Bismarck dis-
covered the truth of his own prediction that separation of
the Chancellorship and the Minister-Presidency in Prussia
sterilised his power. At the end of 1873 Roon resigned
the Ministry of War and abandoned political life. Bis-
marck sorely missed the loyal friend with whom 'he had
fought shoulder to shoulder from 1862' against all the
beasts of Ephesus. The vacant chair in the Council
Chamber where Roon had sat reminded him ' that I once
had a comrade. ' He resumed his dual office, but in 1876--
embittered by the Conservative split--he sent in his resig-
nation, to which the Emperor replied on the margin with
a single word, ' Never! ' In the autumn of 1876 Bismarck
took long 1 leave,' and retired to Varzin for more than a year.
Men said that he was failing--the Clericals that Lucifer
had fallen, never to rise again. He had broken Count
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? 3o8
BISMARCK
Arnim for insubordination at Paris;1 there had been a
serious quarrel with General von Stosch, the head of the
German Admiralty, in which the Emperor had refused to let
Stosch resign. In Bismarck's eyes the Court was a centre
of 'petticoat plots,' and he continually denounced the
interference of the Empress Augusta, the Crown Princess,
and the Liberal circle gathered round the Crown Prince--
'the royal women' who intrigued, the Chancellor alleged,
for Germany's enemies against Germany's interests. In
reality, Bismarck at Varzin was reflecting profoundly on the
whole internal political situation. The Chancery Office
had hitherto been largely organised under Delbriick, but
in 1876 Delbriick, the ablest of Bismarck's coadjutors, his
'Gneisenau,' as he called him, resigned for 'reasons of
health. ' His resignation was an indication that a change of
policy was at hand in which he could not concur, and he
1 Count Harry Arnim had been sent as German Ambassador to Paris in
1871. His political activities there greatly displeased Bismarck, who charged
him repeatedly with disobeying his instructions and with embarking on lines of
policy opposed to those of the Chancellor. Arnim appealed to the Emperor.
In March 1874 he was transferred from Paris to Constantinople. State-
ments in the Viennese paper Die Presse, based on confidential diplomatic
documents, were traced to Arnim's inspiration, and before he went to Con-
stantinople he was placed on the retired list. He was then charged with retain-
ing important documents belonging to the archives of the Paris Embassy, found
guilty, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment. The trial caused great
excitement in Germany owing to the high position of the accused, the nature
of the revelations, and the plain proof of a bitter quarrel between Arnim and
Bismarck. Arnim appealed to the Court of Appeal (1875), which increased
the sentence from three to nine months. A further inquiry in 1876 by the
Imperial Disciplinary Chamber resulted in his dismissal from State service.
Arnim published an anonymous pamphlet Pro Nihilo, for the publication of
which he was again (April 1876) accused and sentenced, as he failed to appear,
to five years' penal servitude in contumaciam, on the ground that he had revealed
State secrets detrimental to the Empire. He subsequently published two other
pamphlets, Der Nuntius Kommt and Siuid Faciamus Not, and died in exile at Nice,
April 19, 1881. The 'Arnim process' formed part of the bitter controversies
that rent Germany during the Kulturkampf and the Chancellor's struggle with
the Junker Conservatives. Arnim's friends maintained that Bismarck hunted
him down because he was regarded as a strong competitor for the Chancellor-
ship. Bismarck asserted at the time, and repeated it in the Memoirs, that had
Arnim been content with being placed on the retired list the matter would have
gone no further; but that his pamphlets, in which he made use of confidential
State documents, were subversive of all discipline and a grave violation of all
the laws binding public officers of the State. It is certain that Amim was
guilty of very serious indiscretions. How far Bismarck was responsible for the
prolonged judicial examinations, and was actuated by personal vindictiveness, is
a difficult question, the answer to which will vary with the view taken of
Bismarck's character.
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
was too loyal at once to join an opposition. Bismarck was
not failing. On the contrary, he was about to give remark-
able proof of an astonishing versatility and vitality. The
year of retirement had renewed the lust of battle within
him. His return to Berlin in the spring of 1878 was not
caused wholly by the failure of the policy of the Kultur-
kampf, nor by the crisis that had developed in the Eastern
Question. He returned to close the first phase of his
Imperial Chancellorship and to open the second and last.
? 2. The Kulturkampf, 1871-1878
From 1871 onwards Germany, and above all Prussia,
was involved in the'Kulturkampj\ a name given by the
ardent Radical and eminent pathologist, Virchow, to the
struggle between the Papacy and the Civil State in Ger-
many. It conveniently summed up the deeper issues
involved between two antagonistic conceptions of culture
or civilisation, and between two theories of the basis and
competence of authority in a politically organised com-
munity and society. The abolition of the Temporal Power
and the Declaration of the Infallibility of the Papacy were
the climax to a great and well-marked chapter in the history
of the Roman Pontificate. When the powerful movement
of Conciliar Reform failed, in the first half of the fifteenth
century, to heal the Great Schism and cure the evils of the
Church of the Latin West, the modern Papacy began.
Under Nicholas v. commenced a development which in the
Council of Trent and the Tridentine Decrees not merely
formulated the reply of the Counter-Reformation to the
Reformation, but gave to the Pontificate a position, an
organisation, and a title that distinguish the Papacy of
the Renaissance and the sixteenth century from the
mediaeval Popes of the undivided Latin Church. The
entry of the Italian troops into Rome on September 20,
1870, ended the political system on which the Papacy
of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation rested.
The nineteenth-century Papacy and the Roman Church
throughout the world had now to readjust their title,
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? BISMARCK
organisation, and future--their claim to spiritual supremacy
and to unlimited jurisdiction, and unquestioning obedi-
ence within the Roman Communion--not merely to a new
Italy, but to a new Europe and a new world of international
relations and intellectual and moral ideas. It was not acci-
dental, but an essential feature of the processes that had
made that new world, that the Vatican Council coincided
with the world events of 1870. The first and most rever-
berating assertion that the new age had arrived was the
Vatican Decrees. They were a challenge, a programme,
and a publication of title-deeds in one.
The immediate origins of the embittered conflict that
broke out in Germany, the first and severest phase of which
broadly ended in 1878, had, as has been previously in-
dicated, its roots in the evolution of thought and political
action two generations prior to the establishment of the
Empire. For obvious reasons the struggle centred in
Germany, but the issues were raised in all the European
States. Prussia had had a foretaste of the struggle in the
newly acquired Rhenish provinces after 1815, which had
ended in a compromise that did not settle any of the
cardinal points at issue. Since 1848 the controversy had
been concentrated in Bavaria; but it had also broken out
sharply in Baden, where the control of the schools and of
the training of the clergy raised the central principles in
dispute.
The 'war '--for it was nothing less--was transferred
from Bavaria and Baden to Prussia and the Empire in 1871.
The concurrent promulgation of the Vatican Decrees and
the establishment of the German Empire fused the poli-
tical, ecclesiastical, and intellectual elements in the
controversy into a single but complex whole.
The Declaration of Papal Infallibility of July 18, 1870,
brought the matter to a head within the Roman Church,
and the refusal of the Roman Catholic Professor Dollinger,
'as a Christian, as a theologian, as a historian, as a citizen,'
to accept the Decrees at once raised the question: Would
the State accept the determination of the Papacy to im-
pose obedience on members of its own communion, priests,
and laymen, or would it support those who refused in their
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
3"
right to exercise spiritual functions and jurisdiction, under
State protection? When the Archbishop of Munich pub-
lished the Vatican Decrees without first obtaining the
Regium Placitum required by Bavarian law, and when the
Bavarian government turned to the Imperial government
for assistance in the conflict, the answer was given by an
addition to the Penal Code--the famous Pulpit Paragraph
--forbidding priests in their official capacity to deal with
political matters.
The Imperial government was thereby committed to a
struggle with Ultramontanism. The claim of the In-
fallible Papacy challenged the nature, competence, and
limits of the sovereignty claimed by the secular State over
all persons and over all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil,
throughout its dominions supreme.
Dollinger stated the theoretical issue very clearly :--
'The ultramontane view can be summarised in a single, concise,
and luminous proposition, but out of this proposition are evolved
a doctrine and a view that embrace not merely religion and the
Church, but science, the State, politics, morals, and the social
order--in a word, the whole intellectual and moral life of men and
nations. The proposition runs: The Pope is the supreme, the in-
fallible, and consequently the sole authority in all that concerns
religion, the Church, and morality; and each of his utterances on
these topics demands unconditional submission, internal no less
than external. '
The Decrees involved the concentration of all eccle-
siastical powers in the person of the Pope, whose utter-
ances ex cathedra were declared by the Vatican Council
to be infallible, and repudiation of which involved excom-
munication. They also enforced the claim that on the
secular State was laid the duty of carrying out the decisions
of the infallible spiritual authority, and that the definition
and decision of what constituted a question of religion or
morals lay in the ultimate resort with the Church, speak-
ing through the person and office of the supreme and
infallible Pontiff, by reason of the intrinsic, inalienable,
and inherent superiority of spiritual to secular authority.
Bismarck and Germany had now to decide whether the
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? BISMARCK
Empire would accept the doctrine and consequences in-
volved in the Vatican Decrees. One example will suffice
to illustrate the problem. When the Archbishop of
Cologne excommunicated four 'old Catholic' professors
of the State University of Bonn for refusal to subscribe to
the Vatican Decrees, was the Prussian State to acquiesce in
this jurisdiction over officers of the university who held
their chairs under the authority of the State? The
Prussian Constitution (Art. 12) guaranteed' the enjoyment
of civil and political rights independently of religious
belief '; it stated (Art. 20) that' science and its doctrines
are free '; it laid down (Art. 22) that 'proofs of moral,
scientific and technical capacity . . . to give public in-
struction' concerned 'the State authorities,' and that
(Art. 23) 'public teachers had the rights and duties of
State servants. ' The action of the Archbishop implied
that the Prussian State was to suspend or deprive its public
servants of a right conferred on them under legal guarantees
at the bidding of an authority, in itself only exercising
jurisdiction defined by, and drawing emoluments under
the protection of, the State. It followed that the Roman
Pontiffs would, if the State assented unconditionallyj deter-
mine what kind of teaching and by whom would be
given in every university and school throughout Germany,
and under what conditions teachers in State universities
and schools, paid for and controlled by the State, would
hold office or be liable to suspension, dismissal, or depri-
vation of their rights.
To Bismarck the problem at the outset was primarily
political. The Second Empire and Napoleon in. had
been the main supporters of the temporal power of the
Papacy. Bismarck had "refused to intervene prior to
or during the Vatican Council. There is considerable
evidence that the dominant party at the Vatican had con-
templated completing the Decrees of Infallibility by a
declaration that the retention of the temporal power by
the Papacy should be regarded as a revealed article of faith,
not a revealed dogma, but a truth guaranteed by the doc-
trinal body of the Holy Church. But if so, the course of
political events quashed the intention. The immediate
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 313
problem in the autumn of 1870 was whether Bismarck
would take steps to restore the temporal power. True to
his methods, the Chancellor first negotiated with Arch-
bishops Ledochowski and Bonnechose: The support of
the French Church, aided by the Papacy, in securing the
Seace with France that he desired might be worth buying,
ut Bismarck convinced himself in the negotiation that
the Papacy lacked either the power or the goodwill or
both to carry out a suitable bargain, and the general de-
velopment of the international situation very soon proved
that the restoration of the temporal power by Prussian
diplomacy or arms would imperil the peace with France,
the new Empire, and the completion of unification. All
the Nationalist and Liberal forces in Germany would have
allied themselves with public opinion in Great Britain and
the Nationalist forces in Italy to repudiate and oppose
such a policy.
There remained, therefore, the issues raised by the
Vatican Decrees, separable from the question of the
Temporal Power. The establishment of the Empire
made a struggle inevitable. It could only have been
avoided had Bismarck accepted the Decrees as binding
on the Roman Catholic subjects of the Empire, and ac-
quiesced in their enforcement by the active co-operation
of the civil powers in the Empire and in Prussia. If that
was impossible, as it clearly was, what was the Civil State
to do to protect its authority, and how was it to treat
ecclesiastical and spiritual persons who repudiated that
authority or resisted the execution of its will? Diplomacy
between Berlin and the Curia could not effect a compro-
mise in 1871. Those who controlled the policy of the
Vatican were confronted by serious opposition within their
own communion to the Decrees; if they failed to enforce
obedience, the Ultramontane interpretation of Papal
power and ecclesiastical unity would be shattered. - The
Vatican Council of 1870 was a deliberate step in the policy
of Ultramontanism: once the Roman Curia had pinned
its flag to the Decrees the enforcement of obedience within
its own communion and spiritual jurisdiction was a
question of life and death. It was no less impossible for
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? 3H
BISMARCK
the Prussian Civil Power to place its secular authority un-
reservedly at the disposal of the Vatican and to acquiesce
in the claim of the Roman Church to determine how far
it would obey, and how far it would set aside as invalid,
the law of the land defined by the Civil Power. The
position in 1871 for Papacy and Empire was not that in
1878 or 1888; the validity of the Decrees was impugned
by Catholics of the eminence of Dellinger, Rheinkens, and
others, and in 1871 it was an open question whether the
Vatican would succeed in enforcing its authority within
the Roman communion.
Political and intellectual Liberalism prior to 1871, and
notably since the promulgation of the Syllabus of 1864,
combined in proclaiming the full sovereignty of the civil
power; it could reckon on the strength of the Protestant
of the Clerical party to German unification, and its denial
of the unlimited sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament,
strengthened the determination of the Protestant parties
in the broadest sense to impose the acceptance of that
sovereignty. To the Liberal leaders, 'the intellectuals,'
--such as Virchow and Bluntschli--the Vatican Decrees
were illuminated by the Syllabus of 1864, which not only
condemned without qualification the intellectual basis
of modern society, but imperilled the free, critical, and
scientific pursuit of truth; and in the case of the German
universities, which had made so notable a contribution to
German civilisation, the policy of Pio Nono and Antonelli
was, they held, a demand for the endowment and pro-
tection of obscurantism by the Prussian State. Because
Dollinger refused to accept the Decrees he was to be
hounded from the university chair that he adorned to die
excommunicate, like a tainted wether of the flock. The
Freilehrheit and Freilehrnheit of the German universities
were challenged by such action.
The Liberal theory of State sovereignty was reinforced
by the party which regarded the State as Power. If
Prussia and the Empire could not be master in their own
house, what was the meaning and value of Prussian power?
In Bismarck the Papal claims stirred the same feeling as in
The opposition
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 315
our Henry vn1. : 'Use not such language to me, I like it
less than any man. ' And Andrassy in 1873 has related how
when Bismarck spoke to him of the Kulturkampf, 'his
eyes flashed, his words poured out, he spoke of the Pope
as a public danger, a revolutionary, an anarchist. ' Bis-
marck deliberately told the Reichstag in 1874 that the
war of 1870 ' was declared in agreement with Rome which
securely reckoned on the victory of the French, and that
the decision of Napoleon for peace was shaken and undone
by the influence of none but the Jesuits. ' After 1871
Bismarck rightly or wrongly feared an Ultramontane
coalition against the Empire.
Qn the other hand, the Roman Catholics numbered a
third of the German population, and the formation under
Windthorst of the Centre party, of sixty votes, a party
founded on a confessional basis, was a formidable reality,
'the most monstrous phenomenon in politics,' Bismarck
said. The Centre denied the validity of the treaties on
which the Empire was based, and demanded along with
a more truly federal State and greater liberty for the
federated States, the complete freedom and independence
of the Roman Church within the Empire.
After an address to the Emperor, requesting the res-
toration of the temporal power, they opposed a resolute
resistance to the unifying legislation and administrative
action of the imperial sovereignty. Bismarck decided,
with the enthusiastic support of the National Liberals,
the Progressives and Radicals, to crush the Clerical oppo-
sition. Herr von Falk became Minister of Education in
1872, and between that date and 1876 a series of measures
generally known as' The May Laws' (from the date of the
first important batch of May 15, 1873) was passed in the
Prussian Landtag. The Jesuits were expelled; civil
marriage was made compulsory; the Catholic Bureau in
the Ministry of Education was suppressed; the inspection
of schools was withdrawn from the Roman priesthood and
placed under the control of State inspectors; priests were
forbidden to abuse ecclesiastical punishments, e. g. ex-
communication: all ecclesiastical seminaries were placed
under State control; every priest before being permitted
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? 316
BISMARCK
to exercise office in the church was required to be educated
in a German university and to pass an examination in
German history, philosophy, literature, and classics; all
exercise of spiritual office by unauthorised persons was
punishable by loss of civic rights, and the State was
empowered to withhold from recalcitrant bishops the
payment of the State endowment.
These legislative powers were enforced by drastic
executive action. Cardinal Ledochowski, Archbishop of
Posen, was fined, imprisoned, and then dismissed from his
bishopric. The Archbishop of Cologne and the Bishops
of Trier and Paderborn were imprisoned, and by 1876
more than one thousand three hundred parishes had ho
recognised and 'loyal' Roman Catholic priest. Thousands
of Roman Catholics had been fined or imprisoned, while
the Roman Catholics throughout the Empire refused to
recognise the validity of the penal legislation, and were in
open revolt. Germany, in fact, was rent into two bitterly
opposed camps. The ferocity of the contending parties
can only be appreciated by a prolonged study of the con-
temporary literature, the pamphlets, and the caricatures
that flooded Germany from the Baltic to the Alps. 'Do
not fear,' Bismarck had exclaimed (May 14,1872),' we will
not go to Canossa either in body or in spirit. ' The declara-
tion, with its reference to the Investiture Contest with
Gregory vn. , rang through Germany. And in thousands
of German homes, even to-day, portraits of the Chancellor,
with these words as their motto, can be seen in a place
of honour. 'I am,' Bismarck proudly claimed, 'from the
Garonne to the Vistula, from the Baltic to the Tiber, the
best-hated man in all Europe. ' At Kissingen in 1874
Kullmann, a half-witted journeyman, who belonged to the
Catholic society of Salzwedel, attempted to assassinate the
Chancellor on the ground that he had insulted his party,
the Centre. 'You may push away the man from you as
you like,' Bismarck said to the Centre in the Reichstag,
'but he himself clings tightly to your coat-tails'; and
the uproar that followed the taunt was a miniature of the
internal situation in Germany.
Bismarck's decision to crush the Clerical Centre was
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 317
momentous. 1 After 1878 he argued that he was not
responsible for the policy of the Kulturkampf, nor for the
May Laws and their execution. The argument will not
stand the test of facts nor of probability. In 1872, 1873,
and 1875 ne spoke repeatedly both in the Reichstag and
the Prussian Landtag in defence of the coercive legislation
and of the general policy of Prussia and the Empire in the
controversy. He complained bitterly in private letters
to Roon of the desertion of the Conservative party in
the 'Catholic controversy'; he was responsible for the
appointment of Falk, and supported him until 1878 against
the attacks in Court circles. It is, in the absence of all
corroborative evidence to the contrary, impossible to
believe that Bismarck as Chancellor and Minister-President
would have allowed a subordinate colleague to embark
Prussia and the Empire by legislation and administrative
action in a life-and-death struggle, which involved the most
delicate and fundamental issues of high policy at home and
abroad, without his complete concurrence. It is demon-
strable that the correspondence between the Emperor and
the Pope, which stated very tersely the Prussian attitude,
was on the Emperor's side drafted by Bismarck; the with-
drawal of the German mission from the Curia--the rupture,
in fact, of diplomatic relations--was Bismarck's act, and in
the negotiations after 1878 Bismarck assumed that the
May Laws would not be withdrawn unless the Vatican
made substantial concessions. The later assertion (in 1878
and repeated in his Memoirs) that he regarded the struggle
as mainly a recrudescence of the chronic problem of
Poland was an afterthought, and the blame subsequently
laid on Falk, as the author of the mischief and the failure,
was a characteristic trait of ingratitude. A scapegoat had
to be found, and Falk, the hero of the National Liberals
and Radicals, served the convenient purpose of exculpating
the Chancellor and affronting the parties with which
Bismarck broke between 1878 and 1879.
In 1874 Bismarck told the Reichstag that since 1862 his
1 Under-Secretary von Thile told Lord Odo Russell in 1872 'that Bismarck's
determination to raise the storm and fight the Church was so sudden that he
and Bismarck's private secretaries could mark the day and hour of 4the change
that came over him like an inspiration. '
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? BISMARCK
previsions and forecasts in all the great issues had been
wonderfully accurate. The remark had a side reference
to the KulturkampJ. But in 1871 Bismarck plainly mis-1
calculated. The diplomacy with which he had hitherto
crossed swords successfully had not had the traditions,
skill, fertility in resource, and pertinacity of the Vatican.
The Roman Curia could and did pull many wires through-
out Europe, and it could afford to wait. It had no capital
that could be stormed, leaving the defence impotent. Its
capital was everywhere, planted in the consciences of
millions of its communion. Heads can be cut off, but the
obedience of heart and will cannot be enforced by prison
or the guillotine. Bullets or wristcuffs cannot kill ideas.
The extermination of the faithful is not the same thing as
the extirpation of a faith. Indeed, the seven years from
1871 to 1878 were an instructive object-lesson in the limits
of power even when exercised by a State with the executive
strength of Prussia. In the constitutional conflict in 1862
Bismarck had rightly assumed that the Liberals would not
raise barricades, defy the laws, or refuse to pay taxes, and
that, if they did, the whiff of grapeshot would settle the
first outbreak. In 1872 he apparently calculated that the
Catholics would either not resist, or, if they did, would soon
surrender to a rigorous coercion. He was completely
mistaken. When Cardinal Archbishops, with the applause
of their congregations, defied the law and went to prison,
the State as Power could only, as Windthorst remarked,
bring in the guillotine--if it dared. For when a State by
its own action converts law-breakers into martyrs for con-
science it loses the sympathy of the law-abiding. The
average German began to think as Pepys did when he saw
oppressed Dissenters going to prison under the Clarendon
code: 'I would to God they would conform or not be so
well catch'd. ' Universal suffrage proved a terrible weapon
in the hands of the Centre party. At the general election
of 1874 the National Liberals increased their numbers to
over one hundred and fifty, but the Clericals polled
a million and a half votes and returned not sixty but
ninety-one members. Bismarck therefore had to face a
National Liberal party stronger than ever and more
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 319
indispensable to the government, and a Centre opposi-
tion enormously encouraged by its success.
It was in the nature of things that on both sides the
struggle should extend far beyond the limits foreseen in
1871: and the simple original issue, whether the Vatican
should or should not constrain opponents of the Decrees
to obedience, was by 1876 converted into an illimitable
controversy on the functions, basis, character, and ends of
civil government and its relation to ecclesiastical authority;
it threatened to divide Germany into two great con-
fessional camps, Protestant and Catholic, and to throw
back the newly born Empire of 1871 into the maelstrom
of Charles v. and the epoch of the Reformation, with the
passions of mediaeval Guelph and Ghibelline, and of Empire
and Papacy superimposed. In the welter of conflict the
secession and formation of the 'Old Catholics,' a tiny hand-
ful of the combatants, became a neglected by-issue. The
fiery support of religious and political Protestantism, and
of die powerful secularist intellectuals who desired to see a
complete separation of Church and State in every German
State, and the extirpation of denominational endowment
and teaching, was fatal to Liberal Catholicism. The issues
raised by Vaticanism became an assault in many quarters
on the Roman Catholic Church: and the cry of ' Los von
Rom ' and the establishment of a German national Catholic
Church on Febronian lines, independent of the Papacy,
aided the Papal effort to represent 'the May Laws' as a
Diocletian persecution, led by Bismarck into whom Satan
had entered.
To the Papacy, indeed, the Kulturkampf proved to
be an unqualified blessing. In 1871 and 1872 the anti-
infallibility movement within the Roman Communion was
a grave danger. But with an unerring eye the directors of
Vatican policy seized the weapon of their adversaries and
turned it against them. They closed the Roman Catholic
ranks as far as possible, and shifted the issue from the
narrower field of ' the May Laws' to a trial of strength
between the Roman Church as a whole and its opponents
spiritual or secular. The more eagerly did those oppo-
nents mass for attacks on a broad front, the broader the
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? 320
BISMARCK
front on which the Vatican deployed its counter-attacks.
Windthorst proved himself a consummate tactician and a
polished debater. He placed large issues in sonorous
phrases before the electorate in the programmes of the
Clerical Centre--freedom of conscience, the independence
of religion, the liberty of the individual German to worship
as reason led him, an Empire based on justice (Justitia funda-
mentum regnorum), taken from the mediaeval law books--and
by provocative taunts he understood how to seduce Con-
servatives, Liberals, Radicals, and Progressives into violent
indiscretions. It required courage to stand up to Bismarck,
but Windthorst smilingly removed the gloves and took and
gave telling punishment with a finished equanimity.
The results by 1878 were disquieting. Lord Odo
Russell's dispatches from 1873-77 indicate Bismarck's de-
pression, irritation, and anxiety. The Clericals had built
up a powerful and extraordinarily well-organised party;
they had ample funds, an influential press, and a network of
local machinery. It was the Kulturkampf which enabled
the Centre to become in Bismarck's lifetime the best
drilled, most obedient, and strongest single party in
Germany. They drew their strength from every class--
from cardinals and Polish magnates to the industrial
democracy in the old ecclesiastical principalities. The
stronger the executive action against them, the stronger
they reacted against it. The disciplining of Germany for
two generations told immensely in their favour. The
Clericals, and later the Social Democrats, had in the
German voter a man who had been drilled in a great mili-
tary machine, to whom obedience to command was life.
Given an organiser, a party with a real cause had organis-
able material ready to hand in the German electorate.
The Roman Church was an organisation already made.
Windthorst enjoyed its matchless and unlimited support.
The decadence of National Liberalism after 1878 is largely
accounted for by the absence of an intelligible cause, the
halting and contradictory language of its spokesmen, and
its dependence on a reservoir in a single social stratum, the
middle class. The Clerical party had none of these patent
defects.
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